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Sam is made of a body. Because humans are made of bodies. But humans are made of human bodies, ones that haven’t been corpses, that don’t have demon blood and angel grace all tangled up inside. And sometimes his body feels more like a vessel than anything else, and he’s actually this twisted and knotted and demonic and undead thing climbing around inside of it, something so much bigger than human, but that is so so so terrifying, so actually Sam is made of numbers.
He used to love his high school and college math classes. He still loves those subjects, in a nostalgic way, but it’s different. Math used to be simple: it had rules and formulas that equaled out to comprehensible things, and nothing had any more meaning than anything else. Of course, it’s not like it’s changed, but when he thinks about it now, he thinks about the infinite sequences, the ones that are just as simple but they don’t add up to anything and they say something, they mean something, they show up in mathematics and in nature over and over. Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Ratio and Pascal’s triangle, and they spiral and fractal on and on and on. It scares him, but when he looks in the mirror and sees a vessel and thinks about all the demon blood under his skin, it is something to think about numbers instead. And sometimes he feels like he is also something infinite spiraling and fractaling on and on and on. And it might be nice, to be something simple, and to not have to add up to anything at all.
And math is colorful—every number has a color and a depth, always has. His freshman geometry teacher told him it sounded like synesthesia. Equations are very plain and mismatched, but sequences are spectrums, building off each other like stained glass, fractaling into subtler and more complex shades as they go. Body: red for blood and white for bone. Fibonacci: zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen: translucent into angelic white and then fading into pastels and then spiraling into sunsets. He prefers Fibonacci.
He’s been thinking about numbers a lot lately. Rowena’s been helping him explore witchcraft, smooth and easy. Power but safe this time. And spells are very dependent on numbers. Witchcraft is heavily based in intuition, but it is also very exact. There are rules and formulas and also infinite spiraling sequences. There is sacred geometry. When Sam first started to pray, he loved the idea of there being something sacred in the world, some light within the darkness, some higher, morally untouchable power, something safe. Now, between religion and math, he would much rather live by the latter. But he still loves the idea of something sacred. Light numbers within the dark ones. Infinite sequences that are higher and that are safe. So, numbers have been coming up lately, and it turns out there are safe ones and sacred ones and light ones, except it’s more that there are Safe ones and Sacred ones and Light ones.
And of course that means there are Bad ones and Unclean ones and Dark ones too, so sometimes he will be writing down a page number for reference or dialing Dean’s latest phone number or setting out a certain measure of mugwort, and something inside of him—something that spirals into infinity—says NO THIS IS BAD UNCLEAN DARK and he has to breathe for a minute and then force himself to write down the number or dial it or measure it or he has to breathe for a minute and then figure out something else to do. Because if he does something BAD UNCLEAN DARK then he is BAD UNCLEAN DARK and he knows he knows that he will be those things no matter what, but there’s still some tiny part of him that fights against it with every last breath.
The numbers are new, but the rest is how it used to go when he prayed, too.
“Sam, darling,” says Rowena, “if we don’t recite the incantation, we can’t set the wards.”
The Bunker’s warding system has been in need of an upgrade since, well, everything. Luckily, the Men of Letters’ comprehensive record-keeping system extends to their safehouses, and the process to call up the wards and reset them—it’s some odd magical cleanse that essentially smooths out any rough edges that they were anticipated to naturally develop over time or under heavy supernatural influence, and, well, it’s been a lot of time with a lot of supernatural influence—is simple enough that someone would barely need any magical power at all to do it. And Rowena is the most powerful witch of her time, and she insists Sam has an extraordinary amount of natural power himself—he doesn’t know how much of it would exist without the demon blood, but if she says it’s natural it is, and maybe he can let himself revel in that every once and a while.
So they called up the wards, shimmering translucent and gold in a circle around them, and then they spent a good half hour just admiring the mix of Enochian and Sumerian and Latin that mapped out the protective sigils, but there’s something wrong, and it takes Sam the whole half hour to realize what: the sigils are all based in the six-pointed Aquarian Star that makes up the society’s crest. And the wards would be so much simpler and stronger if they weren’t all formed around that magically arbitrary design, and the way the triangles are all proportionally strange is unsettling, and also six is very very very very very bad, and red and bad. In Pascal’s triangle, it’s enclosed by fours and tens and threes that keep it in a safe little cage, and ones on all sides that are white and pure and good and locked tight, but if it is not in a cage it has the chance to be evil. Except that makes it sound like it has a choice, but really it’s that it will be evil, and also it is evil even now when it’s in the cage, but when it’s out the evil can spread everywhere.
So the wards are all based around this Bad Number symbol, and Sam keeps thinking about how it’s all around him and how it’s not caged in properly and the circle of wards starts to feel very very constricting and he starts to feel very very enclosed and he’s supposed to recite the incantation to set the wards but first of all they’re Wrong and second of all if he opens his mouth the evil will get in. He is made of numbers and sequences and if they added up to anything it would be that somewhere at the center of all those spiraling infinities was a Bad Number, and if a Bad Number reaches him it will spiral all the way into that center and the cage of numbers and sequences that surrounds it will be broken and Unclean and the evil will spread out from the center and he’ll be—
Rowena is gripping his wrists, then his shoulders, then his waist, never harsh but always tightly, “Samuel, Sam, I sent the wards back, open your eyes, okay? Breathe for me, Samuel. I’m right here, aren’t I?”
He realizes he’s digging his fingernails into his palms, and it hurts and it helps, but what if it breaks the skin and draws blood (red) and the evil can get inside?
The sixes are gone, what evil, what evil, his mind says, and he thinks Mine, my evil, it is always my evil.
Anyway, he looks at Rowena—blinks the tangible world around him back into focus—and smiles at her, to show her everything’s fine, because really, truly, he’s okay right now. He’s okay. He wouldn’t be if he had opened his mouth or broken his skin or if the sixes kept trapping him, but he didn’t and they didn’t, so he is honestly okay.
“Sorry” was one of the first signs he learned when he and Eileen started keeping regular contact, so he signs it to Rowena now, and then “I’m okay. I’m okay.” He thinks, as he says it, that sorry can stand for x and I’m okay can stand for y where x=0 and y=1 so it’s zero, one, one and it gets to be the start of the Fibonacci sequence. And there’s nothing evil in the middle of him because he is made of infinite sequences and those don’t add up to anything, it’s okay.
Rowena says they can come back to the wards another time, leaves when she hears Dean and Castiel coming down the stairs because she still gets jumpy around them, for a variety of reasons—they’re hunters, Winchesters, trigger-happy, overprotective, known for killing witches, take your pick, and of course Sam is most of these things too, but Cas and Dean aren’t her closest friends and aren’t training as a witch underneath her, so.
So Rowena leaves and Dean and Cas come trundling down with all the racket of their latest grocery trip, and Sam helps Cas put the groceries away and opens his mouth to chat with him, because Cas is blue and blue is three and three is safe and gentle and sometimes a little electric in a good way: a living way. “How did the wards go?” Cas says, and Sam says, “We’re still working on them, Rowena’s gonna come by again tomorrow,” and Dean sits on a stool at the counter with his chin in his hands watching them, and Sam might have teased him about being too lazy to help with the groceries if Dean didn’t have that little smile on his face that means he’s just taking in his family with the most incredible peace. Sam has always admired that about Dean. He finds a moment and lives in it and loves in it. Sam smiles back at him whenever his grocery organization takes his gaze in the direction of the counter, of Dean.
They stay up a little late that night. Not unusually late for them, but it’s still midnight by the time they turn off the bad Western movies and shut all the lights down. Which means it’s a quarter past one—good, light, pure—when Sam finds himself back in the middle of the Bunker pulling up the wards, sitting cross-legged on the floor at the very center of the golden glowing circle. And then he takes them apart.
Enochian is easy, he knows Enochian, he can unweave it with all the intricacy it calls for; his limited studies of Sumerian allow him to unlock those portions; the Latin is easy enough to dismiss. Then he tugs on the base magic to undo the Aquarian Stars. It all has to happen kind of at once, because it’s all interlocked in strange, layered ways, but they eventually come apart with a shimmer and trail off into strands of magic and half-formed sigils.
And Enochian is easy, he knows Enochian, so he starts to weave it back together.
The wards had been chain links before, pointed sigils that clicked into place in an even, circular row. When Sam pulls them back together, he stacks triangles into Grids of Life, he forms the Vesica Piscis over and over for equilibrium, he makes the sigils spiral along the Golden Ratio. The base is the same original sigils, but entirely Enochian this time; as he goes he adds little complexities of Higher Enochian to them, tugs and pushes at certain points to fracture them into fractals, and then climbs them into each other. The wards know him now, and he makes sure they know his brother and Castiel too, and Rowena, and he tells them to be wary of other angels and of demons and of humans. And he makes sure he knows them in turn: the farther he spirals into the magic, the more he knows of it, the more control he has over it and the better he can weave it. It spirals out into the Bunker around and above and below him, clicks itself into place when he gives it a shove, and it’s simple and doesn’t add up to anything, not really, not anything that can be let out or broken and make everything else come undone, but there is still something at the center of the white and pastel and sunset and the shimmer of gold over it all. He is at the center. Everything is Safe and Sacred and Light.
The magic locks.
The golden wards shimmer into nothing as they settle into the Bunker, and he sits and breathes and is okay. He feels like he’s a part of that higher lightness, like everything is right and nothing is impure and nothing is caged because nothing is evil. He is okay.
Dean finds him sitting there—cross-legged, awake—early the next morning, because some tiny part of him was screaming the whole time that if he moved it wouldn’t be Right anymore.
“What are you doing here?” Dean laughs, and Sam can’t open his mouth to tell him until Dean takes his hands in slight concern and presses his thumbs into Sam’s palms to ground him.
“I fixed the wards.”
“Dude,” says Dean. “Awesome! I thought they just need to be, like, reset or something, but you’re out here fixing them, good for you.”
Sam grins, because he can, because Dean’s sitting on the floor with him and he feels okay. He lets his brother pull him up, stretches his aching legs. “You know I appreciate you being supportive with the witchcraft and everything, but I think you’ve managed to invent over-supportiveness.”
“I’m just the best at it, actually.”
“I guess.” Sam shoves at him lightly, and Dean shoves back, and then Cas topples into the room and raises a hand and calls up the wards with the incantation, and they’re surrounded by them all at once—it’s nearly overwhelming, Sam has to blink away the brightness.
“I knew something felt different,” Cas says mildly, hair ruffled every which way as though the subtle shift in magical energy has reacted to him like static electricity. Dean stares at the system of wards with an open mouth.
“It’s, um. It should be stronger now.”
“Yes, I think it will be. Magic is immensely solidified when it’s self-instantiating. But I thought you and Rowena would be doing this tomorrow?”
Sam shrugs. “It just kept itching at me, I guess. Couldn’t sleep until I went back to it.”
“Wait, so you haven’t slept?” Dean pokes him in the shoulder. “Come on, go back to bed while I make breakfast. Do we have to fight our way through all the glowing shit or—” Cas waves it away again and they start down the hallway—“and what even was that pattern? It looked familiar.”
“It’s, um. It comes up in witchcraft every now and again, but it’s mostly a math thing. Fibonacci numbers—there’s this sequence where the ratio between every number gets closer and closer to the golden ratio, and…” The look on Dean’s face is not promising as far as appreciation and comprehension goes. “Well, it’s complicated, and I don’t understand everything about it myself, but it comes up in nature a lot and magic tends to lean into things like that anyway, so if you just pull it in the right direction…”
“Sure,” says Dean. “Hey, explain it to me again when you wake up three hours from now, all right? Three at least.”
Sam huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, sure. But I expect a full brunch waiting for me.”
“Whatever you say, princess.”
The door is left ajar as Dean starts back to the kitchen, calling for Cas as he goes. Sam falls into bed and sets his alarm for three (blue, alive) hours from now exactly. He thinks about his freshman geometry teacher. He thinks about how he’d stay up for hours methodically doing calculus homework when he couldn’t sleep because Dad and Dean were out hunting. He thinks about how when he used to pray, he’d repeat the words over and over until they sounded exactly right. He thinks about skin and blood and bone and bone is white and white is one and one is pure and angelic and sacred, and he is pure and angelic and sacred, and he is spiraling out into something greater than himself, something higher. He is not twisted and knotted and demonic and undead, he is made of infinite sequences and perfect ratios; and as he falls asleep he keeps himself very very still, so that nothing disturbs them, everything is Right, nothing is let out or broken or come undone.
In the morning he and Rowena call up the wards and she examines them carefully, and she beams at him and tells him this is what power looks like. This is what his power looks like. “But why,” she asks, not accusatory but curious, “this particular formation? It’s very formulaic, even for magic.”
Sam watches the way the golden sigils cast spiraling light against the floors and bookshelves and her hair. His power—that feels good, that feels Light, not Unclean like the demon blood did. It’s okay. Everything is okay. "I don't know," he says, “I guess numbers have just been on my mind."