Disclaimer: the beginning parts are taken directly from Supernatural, and some lines are similar to those written in the show, although not copied completely.

Warnings: language, brief mentions of past abuse

Chapter Fourteen

You're swathed in darkness when you wake up choking and gasping on the gust of cold air rushing down your trachea, coughing hard. You're wheezing, and you feel like you can't breathe, and your heart is pounding hard in your chest.

The first thing you realize is that you're fully clothed, and that there is no pain or heat beyond human imagination, no scent of blood and burnt flesh, and there's a weight pressing against your hip in your pocket, small and metallic-heavy, in the shape of a lighter. You fumble for it, digging it out, flick at it frantically until a small flame forms, and you're still wheezing and you still feel like you can't breathe and you still feel like your chest is about to burst open. Your gaze darts rapidly, breaths jerking with terror when you find yourself confined in a small space. Coffin. Fuck.

"Help," you croak out through your panicked wheezing, choking on fear.

"Help!" you scream, your voice hoarse and ragged from disuse and lack of air.

...

The surrounding trees are burnt and felled out, and in the center of it all, lies your untouched grave. Not freaky at all, you think, and you're wondering how you're alive and who's responsible (if it's Sam, you fucking swear to god). You glance around, the flood of light blinding your pinched eyes when you lift up your head at the world. I'm alive, you think, feeling your chest rise and fall and your heart batter slightly in your chest. I'm breathing, you think. I'm out and I don't fucking deserve to be, you think.

And then you think of Sam. You think, I get to see Sammy again.

Whatever made this happen, it's given you another chance to make things right.

…

In an empty gas station, you roll up your sleeve and break the glass of a fridge, grab a water bottle and guzzle it all down like a man in a desert.

You pick up a newspaper. The top of it tells the date as 18th March, Saturday.

"March…" You remember the last time you were here, it was November 2005.

…

When you lift up your shirt in front of the bathroom mirror, your skin is clear and untouched. All your old scars from your life are gone, and there are no scars left from your trip downstairs.

When you fold up your sleeve, there is an angry, red hand-shaped mark on your bicep.

…

You're standing at a payphone, putting a coin in and calling Bobby's number. The first number doesn't work. The second one does after a ring.

"Yeah?"

"Bobby?"

"Yeah?"

"It's me."

"Who's 'me?'"

"Dean."

Beep. Beep. Beep.

You hang up the receiver and call his number again.

"Who is this?"

"Bobby, listen to me—"

"This ain't funny. Call again, I'll kill ya."

The dial tone beeps again.

You hang up the phone, and turn around to find an old, beat-up white truck parked at the far side of the road. Your heart jumps with joy, a grin forming on your face at the sight of it.

…

The door opens, and when Bobby meets your eyes, he stills, shocked and confused and wary. You breathe deeply, your lips twitching into a smile, faint and apprehensive.

"Surprise," you say, light and gruff.

"I...I don't…" he's stammering, panting slightly as if he's having trouble taking in air.

"Yeah, me neither." You step inside, glancing around. You throw your arms open slightly, your gaze landing on him. "But here I am."

When the arm lunges out, silver shining in a blur of movement, your hand instinctively shoots out, wrapping around it. You twist his arm behind him, yelling, "Bobby!" And then there's something hard smashing into your face, takes you a second to realize it was the back of his other fist as you stumble back. "Bobby, it's me!"

"My ass!" he growls, preparing to attack again as he raises his blade, moving towards you.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait!" you yell frantically as you slide the chair between you and him, crouching protectively with one hand keeping the chair firmly in place and the other held out in placation. "Your name is Robert Steven Singer. You became a hunter after your wife got possessed, and... you're about the closest thing I have to a father." When you see his face loosen from a scowl of hostility into awe and shock, his eyes widening and mouth gaping slightly, you slowly straighten up, rasping, "Bobby. It's me."

Bobby shoves the chair aside, making your hand release its grip on it. You hold them both out in surrender, wariness warring with hope in you. He moves closer, placing a gentle hand on your shoulder, before grasping it firmly, as if trying to make sure that you're real.

A smile flickers on his lips, and you try to return it back.

And then he lunges again, slashing the knife at your face. "Woah, woah!" You grab his arm, twist him around as your other arm goes under his armpit and holds him in place. "I'm not a shapeshifter!"

"Then you're a revenant!"

You pull at his grip on the knife, gritting your teeth. The weapon is snatched out of his hand, and you shove him away, arms raised.

"Alright, if I was either...could I do this—" He's watching, tense and alert. You fold your sleeves up until your biceps are visible. "—with a silver knife?"

You exhale a sigh, preparing yourself for the pain of laceration, for the brief resurfacing of memories you don't want to remember. You settle the edge of the knife against your skin and drag it across, blood welling up and flowing down your arm, and a grunt of pain escapes from your throat.

You tilt your head up to him, panting slightly, watch him as the last of his suspicions and fear fade away.

"Dean?" he almost whispers, a thousand emotions bundled up in that one name, in his voice.

You walk slowly towards him. "That's what I've been trying to tell you."

Bobby reaches out, hauls you into a desperate hug, arms squeezing in around your back, one hand on the nape of your neck, and he's breathing hard into your shoulder like he's trying not to break. You blink back your own tears, fisting the back of his shirt.

After a while, you let him go, and he steps back.

"It's...it's good to see you, boy." He smiles, and the look of genuine joy in his eyes tell you how much he means those words.

"Yeah, you too," you whisper, smiling back as your hand comes up to shake his shoulder.

"But...how did you bust out?" he asks. So Bobby knows as well, where you've gone. You wonder who figured it out first.

"I...I don't know." You look off to the side, behind you. "I just, uh...I just woke up in a pine box…" When you turn back, you're met with a splash of holy water over your face.

"...I"m not a demon either, you know."

Bobby shrugs. "Sorry. Can't be too careful."

…

"So tell me. Why the hell was I not worth a goddamn phone call telling me what you were about to do? Why'd ya do it?"

You inhale deeply, your head shaking slightly as you think of how to answer. "There just... wasn't enough time. I had to." You look up at him hesitantly, see the unreadable expression on his face. "Bobby, I...I had to make him okay. I had to give him another chance at life…" Your voice grows more and more desperate the more you talk, the need for him to understand, to not be angry for doing what you had to, overcoming you. "I had to make it up to him, okay?"

"This wasn' the way to do that," he says quietly, staring at you with disbelief and sadness in his eyes. "I mean, goin' to hell? Come on, boy. You can't really believe you deserved any of that."

You don't say anything to that. It's either saying, "well, I did," and you don't feel like arguing about it, or it's saying, "okay," and that would be a lie.

Bobby gets up from the chair, sighing heavily after a while of silence, and walks toward the fridge. When his back is facing you, it makes it a bit easier to bring it up, so you say, "I, uh... I heard some stuff. While I was down there, I mean. About Sam."

There is a pause, in which Bobby stills for a couple of seconds where he's taking a beer out of the fridge. He resumes his movements and asks a little too casually, which means he's trying to figure out how much you know, "Yeah? What kind of stuff exactly?"

"Like visions," you say, blunt and straight to the point. Bobby sits down across the table and slides you a bottle. "Powers. Something to do with Azazel wanting to make him Hell's bitch boy or whatever. Give him a part in some big apocalypse showdown." You thank your lucky stars that fucker's dead now.

He opens up the bottle and takes a swig. He stares down at the table, gathering his thoughts.

And then he begins.

"Well, uh… I'm guessin' you already know there were others like him. Other 'special' children with different powers. 'Far as I know, these powers started showin' up sometime after their twenty-second birthday. You already know why Sam'd be so late to the party. He told me they started for him just about a few hours after he woke up. Felt his head split open and saw some poor bastard dying in a freak accident. Next morning, it's in the news. Same guy. Same freak accident."

You feel kind of sick, thinking of that, of him dealing with something like that alone.

"God… Bobby, tell me you tried to help him."

"I did. When he came to tell me about you… what happened to you... I could see something was wrong, besides the grief of losing the only family he had left, I mean. He was pale, like he was in pain. Tried to make him stay, but...you know how he gets. He tried to tough it out on his own a couple of weeks, but what that kid was going through was too much for anyone to handle, so he showed up at my doorstep one day. Told me he didn't know what to do and where else to go and what was happenin'. He stayed with me most of the next two months, spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out what happened to you 'cause it didn't seem right to him, him coming back and you dying like that… and after he did, just searching for cases involving demons to interrogate and hunt."

Waking up from a six month long coma to find out that things were going to get better, only to wake up the next day and hear that your brother was dead and there was no reason for him to be. That you were having horrific dreams of people dying which were coming true, and then having visions in daylight of the same kind of things. That you were all alone in the world, your past trauma still a shadow over your life on top of it all… you can imagine why it'd be too much for the kid. You're just glad that he had Bobby with him.

"If this never happened, I doubt we'd still be in touch. The way he could barely talk to me the first few days he stayed over, couldn't even look me in the eye. Tried to leave a couple of times, kept saying he was putting too much on me. The dumb kid thought that I didn't see him the same way because of, uh...you know, everything that happened to him." It's subtle, carefully schooled away, but you think you can see the faintest trace of that look on his face, the look people wear when their heart's breaking.

"I tried to tell him that. That you...you know. That nothing changed in the way you saw him." You raise his eyebrows with a low huff, staring down at your beer bottle. "Guess you were the only one who could've really proved that to him."

"Yeah…" he says, and then takes a swig of his beer.

After a short while of silence, you ask, "Why Sam? Why those kids specifically? I mean, what do they all have in common?"

"Beats me. 'Far as I know, they don't have anything in common besides their ages and abilities. Different birthdays, genders, races… the only other thing is that they all had a fire in their home when they were six months old. Some of them lost family in that fire."

"Like me and Sam…"

"Yeah. That's about all I know on them. They're all dead now besides Sam."

"Yeah, I know." You're staring down at the table, at the wooden patterns that you're mindlessly tracing in thought, and you're thinking, I just have to know. You have to know, but it won't change anything. It won't change the way you feel about him. "They died in some kinda...fight to the death test thing. Last one standing gets out, gets to become hell's bitch or whatever. And uh...Sam. He took them all down, didn't he? 'Cause he wanted that gun?"

"Well, not really." His brows are furrowed, as if he doesn't understand where you got that from.

"He didn't?" There is hope in your voice, blooming in your chest, for that little bit of innocence, that little bit of the kid he was before all the horrible things happened, still being left intact.

"Most of em' died by something called the Acheri demon, or killed each other. He did snuff out the last one though, 'cause he tried to snuff him out first. So it's mostly that he didn't do the Sam thing and try harder to talk him out of it, spare his life, but I doubt anything would'a worked at that point anyway." The son of a bitch lied to me, you're thinking. You shouldn't be surprised. It gives you the greatest relief that the kid didn't go on some murder spree to get you out. "Sam didn't fall prey to that yellow-eyed son of a bitch's sweet-talk on gettin' to be high and mighty in Hell, but he did want to get out alive, so he could get you out."

"By opening the gates of hell."

"Ding ding. Give the boy his prize. They sure give ya a lot of intel down there, don' they?"

"Well," you say, shrugging your head. "Just to screw with me. Yeah… so why'd he leave?"

"Opening the gates of Hell didn't do him much good. Azazel said he had no power over your deal, but he did say someone else held the contract. Wouldn't tell who. Made him no use. So next step was t'find out who held the contract, where they were, and how to break it. Enter, Lilith. He's been tryin' to get as much info on her and her whereabouts ever since."

...

"Sam. Where are you right now, son?"

"Nebraska. What's going on?"

Nebraska. Where you died, and where you were buried. You can't shake off the conclusion you've reached, no matter how hard you're trying not to believe it.

"Think you can make a drive here?"

"Bobby, I…"

"It's important. Real important."

"Can it wait? Bobby, I think I'm about to find out something. This demon here… she knows something about Lilith. I just have to get it out of her."

"Sam...son, this is really, really important, okay?"

"Not more important than this. I'm sorry, Bobby. Maybe in a couple of days. Or I don't know. You can just tell me over the phone?"

"I...well, I think you should see it now, and see it for yourself. So I guess we'll just have to come to you then."

"We?"

"Text me the address, alright?"

"Um...sure. Yeah. Okay."

...

You have all these ideas in your head of what it's going to be like, seeing him again after forty horrible years that are only four months to him. Of your life after. Off-tune and bumpy at first, and then, hopefully, gradually, ease. The way everything used to be before it all, or something like it at least, even if it will be a long way to go.

You have all these things that you think you'll say when you see him, the same things still inside of you that you wanted to tell him back then, before that deal. So much more than what you could manage to convey in that little time at the hospital.

You're inside the motel room he gave the address of on the phone, which you've gotten access to through the help of lockpickers. Bobby's sitting on the bed on the other side of the room, waiting like you.

When the key turns in the lock, when the door opens, he is there, and suddenly you've forgotten words and lost all thought. When his eyes catch yours, you think the same happens to him too.

You didn't expect this, exactly. This onslaught of emotion, the melancholic love and nervousness rushing through your body, pounding in your chest and shrivelling your gut and closing up your throat. It's been half a lifetime, and you feel older than your body is, and there is a tiredness in your soul now that wasn't this deep before, and you still remember thirty years of what it's like to have your heart carved out of your chest.

It still makes your heart big and raw to look at him.

You swallow it all down, a tender smile touching your lips. "Hey, Sammy…"

Something jolts across his face at the old nickname.

You were expecting this though, especially when the wariness and anger (along with a tinge of grief) began to cloud his gaze, even when the rest of his face remained straight and blank. There is a split second of a rapid blurry movement, a twinkle of a silver, and in that split second, your hand shoots out and catches the arm heading your way.

"Who are you?!" he yells.

"Like you didn't do this?!" you bellow back.

"Do what?!"

There is a hard force colliding into your chest, chasing all air out of your lungs, shoving you back and tangling up your feet and making the world tilt backwards as you fall, knocking a grunt out of you as you meet the floor. There is a brief vision, the tube lights behind him making him a shadow above you as he knelt, his knife raised.

And then he's gone.

And then there's Bobby's voice, reassuring him, "It's him. It's him. I've been through this already. It's really him."

You lift your upper body off the ground on your elbows, then place your hands flat, and then flip to your knees. You pull yourself to your feet, and you glance up at them. Bobby has Sam leaning back against a wall with a hand on his chest. He's staring at Sam and Sam's staring at you, the fight wearing out of him, his snarl loosening into a face that reminds you of the child from fifteen years ago before it all, young and innocent (and you never would have been able to tell that he's the same boy who sent countless demons back in Hell during those four months, who opened the gates of Hell for you and aimed a Colt at the yellow-eyed demon's head and shot him dead).

But suddenly lost. Like he's been doing all these things to get here but now that he's here, he doesn't understand how he's supposed to react.

And then there's pain, his face crumpling briefly before schooling back into one just on the edge of crumpling, frowning dolefully, his brows furrowed and jaws clenched in a desperate attempt to hold back tears. That lifelong sorrow again and that longing of looking through a soundproof window at someone who never wanted to look back.

There is a silence of ten long years between you and him, one that you've made a habit out of, a fifty-feet thick barrier, and you feel like you're lost too, on what to say or do, because it's hard to say what you want to say and do what you want to do when there's these past fucked up years in-between.

His loose fists, at his sides, are tense with the momentum of a potential action, caught between desperation and restraint. You see them stutter slightly towards you, and then stop. He swallows, retreats them and presses them back slightly into the wall again, shifts against the cement and looks down at his shoes.

And you would have never known he was the same boy who was supposed to lead hell to Earth some day (because he isn't, you then think. And if he is, then fuck destiny and fate and all the powers that made it so because this is the one kid who represents the good people made for heaven to you).

He huffs a smile, even though his eyes and his face are stung red, and he still doesn't look at you, and he clears his throat and says in a hoarse, brittle voice, "It's, uh...it's good to see you." He says it in a way in which it seems to feel a lot more than that.

"Yeah," you almost whisper, can't get your voice to quite work. You clear your throat, smile lightly. "Yeah. You too." You say it in a way in which it definitely, definitely feels a lot more than that, because it did.

It hurts to see his startled glance at you.

And then there's nothing else to say.

Bobby steps away, seems to realize Sam's not about to try to stab you again. Glances between you and him, and says, "I'll leave ya two to talk." He pats Sam's shoulder and walks away, faint taps of boot against wood as he does, and then the click of a door opening and shutting behind you. Sam doesn't move from where he's leaning against the wall like it's the only thing keeping him on his feet. Keeps staring at the floor and you at him, looking over him. He's gained some mass, removed his dorky fringe that he used to hide behind. He looks older, more weighed down.

There is a distance and time and a silence of a decade between you and him, suffocating you from the inside. It almost feels like trying to know someone new, except there's all this history, all these feelings. You're struggling to catch straws, to find the words to begin with (because there's too much and you can't think straight), to string them together, to find a rhythm that's long been lost.

What do you say?

What do you say after all of that?

You gaze down at your hands, and you can't think of an answer.

Sam talks first.

"I'm sorry."

Your head shoots up, perplexed. You shake it as you ask, "For what?"

"You know…" he said, shrugging his shoulders against the wall. "You went to hell. To save my life."

You think about his soft and weary 'I'm sorry's as he dozed off after he told Bobby everything that he later he told you, and you think he has a really shitty habit of apologizing for things that aren't his fault.

"You say that like you made the choice yourself, Sam," you say quietly.

"It doesn't matter."

"Of course it does. I made it, not you." He goes silent at that. You continue, "And I don't regret it. I mean...obviously not somewhere I'd ever want to revisit again. Like, ever, but...I don't regret it for a second."

There's subdued guilt in his face, silently saying, you won't be feeling that way for long. But that's not what he actually says.

"You can't not regret that."

"I don't. I can't. I paid for what I did to you."

His head snaps up sharply when you say that. He's looking right at you, the first time he properly looked at you since the past couple of minutes. "You didn't deserve any of that." He says it with so conviction that you think you can almost believe it. "And what did you do to me? Certainly nothing less than what I deserved."

"Sam," you say warningly.

He turns towards you, a little less stuck to the wall, a little less slouched like whatever he's still carrying around is too heavy to hold in his body, and says it blunt and straight, "I killed your father, Dean. So paid for what? For reacting exactly as you should have? As anyone would have?" He doesn't sound angry or strong or argumentative, doesn't really sound much like anything.

"No. No." You're finding yourself stepping forward, walking closer and closer as your breaths come out heavier. Your voice is rough and hardened with underlying, controlled anger and emotion as you let it all out, "For not fucking finding out why, for not doing better. I should have been there for you, damn it! No, fuck, I never should have even let it happen to you in the first place. I never should have left you. Not when that bastard sent me away. Not when I abandoned you as soon as I turned eighteen for five fucking years. Not ever. And I certainly never..." You stop, breathing hard, swallow and inhale tremulously, blinking. "Never should have laid a hand on you."

"You're being unfair," he says, still in that low voice that you had grown so used to. But now you want him to yell, to ram his fists into your face, something, anything more than this. You want him to get fucking pissed for what you did, for what you didn't, for being one of the reasons his life got fucked up. And you realize that even if you have paid for your sins, you will still never feel clean of them. "You were angry and grieving, and I never told you, Dean. I was the only one who could have, and I didn't. So you couldn't have known, okay? It wasn't your fault."

"It doesn't matter. You never should have gone through what you did, and and I never should have added more crap to it."

"It does matter. You were just a kid."

"So were you, Sammy…" you say softly, breathless and sad. "God, so were you."

He falls back against the wall, seems for all the world tired and overwhelmed by everything, trembling a little, and averts his gaze yet again. You wonder if it's because it's something he's made a habit out of, from those years he tried to make you forget he was there.

"Yeah, well, if I didn't deserve it back then...I sure as hell deserve it now."

"Don't—"

"You don't know what I've done."

You do know. You don't know if you want him to know that, to know that you still have all your memories from your trip down to the most biblically horrific place for punishment. You don't think he'd ask about it, but you don't want him to know you remember, to have questions about it. You don't want to throw Bobby under the bus, make him seem like some tattletale, because he'd never tell you anything if you didn't already know, or if it was for the best.

"Whatever you've done, Sam… none of it matters, okay? But for the love of fuck, never say that again."

"I've done horrible things for you."

So have I, you think. For you. You think of the choice you made, for Sammy, that set you off on the path you went on, made your hands bloody and broken, made you go mindless and insane for ten whole years.

I've done horrible things for you.

And he's also stood up to his greatest monster for you, and he's left behind the one thing that could have possibly made him happy in any way at all for you, and he's loved you in ways and times that nobody else could have.

You step towards him. "I don't care."

"I thought, as long as you came back, it wouldn't matter how much you hated me. That I'd go through ten more years of it if you'd still be here to do it. I...I'd do it all over again. How fucking pathetic is that?" He huffs a laugh, but it's too watery and it's definitely not funny. It's not fucking funny at all. "So it was either that or breaking the promise you made me make, and I couldn't do that. Not after what you did for me."

You can't think of what to say to that. You wish he'd never talk like that again. "I won't do that to you again."

"You don't know what I've done."

"Fuck," you mutter, rubbing a hand down your face as you look away. You turn your head back at him. "I do, okay? I do know. And I don't care."

It stuns him into silence. The way he's staring at you makes you think he doesn't quite believe you.

"I… I heard about it. While I was downstairs. And I mean...I can't tell you that letting out more demons than we've hunted our whole lives was okay, but...if you think that something like that nullifies everything I said to you in that hospital, you're wrong. It still stands. All of it."

Sam opens his mouth, closes it again. He settles for staring at the space between your boots, lost for words. You can't tell what he's thinking, and there was once a time when you could take one look at his face and know what's on his mind and exactly what he needs, but now there's that decade between that time and now, and it's hard (or maybe he just got better at hiding his thoughts because he had to keep his secrets inside of him). There's lines of emotion etched into his face, brows furrowed, and there's a thin layer of tears on the edges of his hazel eyes, his mouth vaguely scrunched up and his nose stung pink.

His arms shift, stutter just the slightest bit towards you, fists clenching, and stop again, like something is holding him back. His knees are trembling, and you're sure he's about to fall.

He doesn't fall all at once.

He crumbles, piece by piece. His body jolts half-way down, caught by that wall he's been holding on to all this time for some kind of support and groundedness, and then slips down all the way to the floor with a sharp, shuddering heave, face twisting completely as everything he had been keeping in finally comes breaking out, hands and shoulders shaking as he rocks forward, head bowed, one hard, gutted sob ripping out of him. Sounds like it holds every ounce of grief he's ever felt in those eleven years, and you feel like you might as well be having your heart and lungs carved out again, the way it fucking hurts to hear him, the way his anguish and your anguish for him knocks into your chest like stones and leaves you airless and aching.

"Sammy…" you say softly, your knees lowering to touch the ground.

"I'm s-sorry," he croaks out, thick and strangled. He swallows, hands fisted into his head. They move down below his ducked face, rubbing at it. "Sorry. I just…" He laughs, tremulous and wet. "I didn't think you'd… I've wanted this so bad, but I never thought…"

"Things'll be better from now on, Sam. I promise." you say, your voice hushed and a little hoarse. He sniffs, rough and congested, sounds like tearing paper. You bend down and lean forward, trying to get a glimpse of his face. "Hey. Look at me. Look at me."

He does, and the anguish and sorrow there almost makes you wish he hadn't, because it fucking hurts.

"Sam," you murmur, swallowing, arms tentatively raising up. You reach out and almost touch him, but they're left hovering over his arms instead, and the way he's looking at you makes you feel like he's been silently begging for you to make everything better since that day in 1994 when you left and everything started going wrong, and it makes something deep and unreachable inside of you hurt. "Sammy, come here."

"I don't feel clean," he whispers, almost sobs it out, and it punches you in the gut.

"Doesn't make it true, okay? Now come on." Your vision is growing blurry as you watch him, and your lips are pressed together tightly, jaw clenching briefly with mourn. You wave one hand of your open arms at yourself, jerking your head. "Come on. Let me hold you, Sammy."

You want him to come to you, but you realize he won't. Not now, at least, because he will still remember the foreign, unwanted hands that touched him wrong (as if it made him the fucking dirty one and it makes you feel sick in your heart and your stomach to think that he thinks that), the gun in his hands when he pulled the trigger at the fucker that let it happen to him. He will still remember the feeling of blood on his hands when he stabbed a man that came at him first, the hilt of the Colt when he put it into the lock of the gates of Hell. So you grab him by the collar, haul him into your arms yourself and bury your chin into his shoulder, hands coming around to his shoulder blades and the back of his head, looking up and away through tears that fall in a blink.

When he brings his own arms up after a while to reciprocate the embrace, it's slow, unsure. And then it's firm. And then strong. And then desperate. He doesn't make another sound, but there's water on your neck, cold and wet. You pull him closer to your chest, closing your pinched eyes.

It hurts your ribs, but you don't let go for a long while, and neither does he.

...

When you do let go after a long while, you press a quick, fleeting kiss to his temple before you push him back, keeping your hands on the sides of his neck.

You brush your thumbs over his cheeks and you tell him, "I'm gonna be right here." You stare him resolutely in the eye, even though you can barely see shit through the tears. "I know I'm…" You trail off waveringly, looking up. You scoff at what an understatement that is, what you're about to say, but you puff out air and manage to say it, "I know I'm hell too late now, but I'm gonna help you get through this, whatever that takes." You inhale shakily, biting your lip, nodding. Run your quivering hands over the shoulders of his shirt, tug gently at his collar and whisper firmly to him, "So you tell me what you need, whatever and whenever, and I'll do it. I'm gonna be right here, no matter what, alright?"

Sam nods, smiles wanly but he breathes out like something inside of him's freer.

"Yeah. Good…" You breathe in deep, let it out slowly. You lift one hand up to run it over his head. "Now you gotta tell me what you did to save me, so that we can stop it before it takes you."

It catches him off. His head twitches slightly in puzzlement, and he says falteringly, "Dean, I...I didn't do anything."

"Don't lie to me. You were close to where I was buried, and the whole site looked like a nuke went off. That's not a coincidence, so if you've done something to get me back up here-"

"I-I didn't do it. I wish I had, but I didn't. Dean, I tried everything—" You kind of think you already figured that out. "...I even tried bargaining with demons, but they wouldn't deal. You were in Hell for months. Months. And I'm sorry I couldn't..." There's that habit kicking up again. His voice is breathlessly desperate, weighed with failure and mourn, his face even more so. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you."

"Hey, it's okay, Sammy. You don't have to apologize. I...I get it."

As much as you're relieved to hear that, it leaves a very pressing question unanswered. You wonder who gave you this chance at a second life, at making things right. You wonder if you should be thankful if you still don't feel like you deserve it.

…

"I, uh...I don't know if you want this back but…" he's saying as he takes the amulet out from his collar, off over his head. He piles it into his palm, tentatively holds it out to you. You're staring at it, can't quite remember how to work your vocal chords, because you can see it in your mind's eye again, the memory of that Christmas night when he was eight and you were twelve and you and him could never have even thought of the awful things happening the way they did.

You miss that innocence and simplicity, when Sammy didn't have a hell that he had kept a secret, when you didn't have your own that you don't know if you can ever bring yourself to speak of. You think you'd let the flames of your hell, your secrets, burn you from the inside out before you ever could.

You've been staring at it a little too long it seems, because he begins to slowly retract his hand towards his chest, shifting on his feet as he glances down at them. "I understand if you don't—"

You take it, smiling softly in a way only he could make you. "Thanks, Sammy."

…

It takes him two weeks to ask the question.

"Did you see him there?"

It makes you go still, your fingers freezing around the brush and the gun you're cleaning.

It doesn't take you longer than two seconds to figure out who him is.

You glance up at him, and there's something saddening about the way his gaze is a little too rooted to the guns he's cleaning, about the way his voice goes so quiet (so quiet that you almost didn't understand), how his head is bowed over his task, as if he never said anything. You would have thought you imagined it.

You want to tell him, I did. And I hurt him for you. But you're not ready to tell him everything else, to see him see you in a way he never had before, something other than the good he still somehow sees in you (you want to keep it forever, or for as long as you can).

"Just in passing," you answer, continue twisting the brush into the gun with a little more vigor, your voice blank and calm, but your jaw tightening and your veins and chest ablaze. "I know he suffered."

Sam nods, doesn't say much else about it. You wonder what he's thinking, but it's hard to figure that out these days.

"I wish you never suffered," he says after a while, almost mumbles it. For some reason that you can't pinpoint, it makes your heart twist painfully.

…

In the end, everything sets itself right, even if it takes years.

It is not easy to move forward after years of being stuck in the same place, to move towards something better.

But eventually (and gradually), there comes a time when he can get into the car and smile at you without hesitance, when you can do the same. There comes a time when you can deliver one-liners and jokes and feel like you're not overstepping, and he will know you're not serious, when he can laugh a little louder than he used to, when he can speak as if he's not trying to be unnoticed.

There comes a time when you can talk without thinking too much about what you can and can't talk about, when he can tell you about the awful things that happened to him, when you can too. When he can ask you things and tell you things without thinking twice about it and when you can do the same. When he can fight with you without worrying that he's pushed you away forever, and when you can get pissed at him without feeling like you've ruined all the progress you both have made, without him retreating into his shell. When you can sit in silence with him and feel like it's not because everything is being held back, or because you can't think of anything that would be okay to say.

There comes a time when touching him without a reason doesn't feel foreign, when all those fucked up years finally fall away completely and it begins to feel as natural as it once was, when he can touch you without looking like he's expecting rejection.

There comes a time when he begins to stand up a little straighter, his head held higher, because his sorrow isn't weighing him down as much as it used to anymore, when the dark circles around his eyes fade away and when his clothes fill out more. There comes a time when he stops trying to live like a ghost, when he solidifies more, becomes more of himself and less of that phantom he had become all these years. When he stops trying to disappear again on his birthdays and third Mays, and when he finally understands that there is nothing bad about these days at all.

"Let's take a day off. Do something fun and relax," you say as you reach over, turning the knob to decrease the volume of 'Enter Sandman' by the Metallica.

"What about the werewolf?" Sam asks, raising an eyebrow.

"Pass it on to someone else," you answer, shrugging. You glance over at him, and he seems reluctant. You sigh. "I feel like we're long overdue for a break, man. Come on." You nudge him with your elbow. "I'll even let you choose what we do if you agree. Where do you wanna go?"

After a couple of seconds of consideration, his shoulders slacken with a low huff, as if he's given in. He shifts, frowning thoughtfully. "Okay, um... there's this museum in Washington about National History—"

"Of course that'd be your idea of a vacation," you mutter sarcastically.

"What? You asked, jerk."

"Yeah, you're right. My mistake, bitch. I should have known you were gonna go for something nerdy and boring."

Sam rolls his eyes, but there's the slightest hint of a smile.

"Well...then where do you wanna go? And for the love of god, don't say a strip club, because I'd rather have my eyes get scratched out by a werewolf any day."

The car is driving on, the open road ahead vanishing endlessly underneath the tires, the roars of engine and low rock tunes sounding like old childhood memories (now tainted with the presence of a man who was meant to ruin it, but still bringing on a sense of nostalgia, for a life before everything became so dark).

He asks you, "well, where do you wanna go?"

There's freedom at the tips of your fingers, and you can go anywhere you want to go, but you can't think of anywhere you could really want to go when you're already home.

You look at him, smiling softly.

And he seems to understand. He grins back at you in the same way, evening sunlight falling over him, and in that moment, you realize that something has gently settled inside of you somewhere along all of this, like your heart fits a bit better in your chest, like your soul isn't too shrivelled and twisted up in your body anymore.

You turn back to face the highway, head tilting sideways in thought. "I was thinking, a beach." You drag out the 'ch', eyes crinkling in a fantasizing smile. You glance at him, smile morphing into a smirk as you reach out to ruffle his hair, saying, "Don't worry, we'll still go to your lame-ass museum—" He pushes your arm off, ducking away and patting down his hair. "—but first...I think I need to do some unwinding, not have my brains go numb with boredom. I mean, think of the sea, Sammy. The sand between our toes. The sun. And all the hot ladies…"

For the first time in too long (since about a decade), you remember again what it's like to not feel like a huge chunk of you is missing, like it has finally fallen in place. You remember again what it's like to take a breath with purpose, what it's like to not feel like an empty corpse walking around waiting to be buried some day, to find a place where you meld into the world seamlessly, because there's a place where you finally belong now, because you can finally imagine your whole life somewhere (when you could barely imagine any life ahead of you once).

It's right here, in this car, next to the kid you were meant to spend it with, that you love more than anything. Next to Sammy.

The End

Author's Note: Hello!

I hope I did the happy ending justice, that you enjoyed it. You might think it was kind of cheesy, but I think they deserve to be cheesy after everything that happened to them.

Here it is. The end. From here on, I've imagined the story to go the same as it does in season four, except less brotherly angst because there's no Ruby here.

It took me five years, can you believe that? All of my 2012 stories are now completed. And well...I don't feel much about it, I guess. I mean, finishing a fourteen chapter story in five years is not really something to be proud of. But it's not hanging over my head anymore, at least, and I can start new works without feeling bad, so that's good.

And well, I learned my lesson. Never start a multi-chapter fic unless you've completed it. So, see you in another five years? Hahah, well, not really. I'll be posting one-shots and short multi-fic stories every now and then, I hope.

So thank you, to each and every one of you, for still being here after all this time, for being so, so amazingly patient and understanding and just lovely all around, for still somehow maintaining interest in my story (or stories). Thank you to those of you who sometimes PM me, asking me when I'll update or telling me that you have really liked my work/works, and to those of you who sometimes come back to leave a review, just to remind me that you're still invested in the story. Thank you to all of you who put in the effort and time into writing a lengthy and/or in-depth review (or reviews) that never fail to brighten my days. Thank you to all of you that take the time to put in a few lines, some so sweet and heartfelt, just to let me know that you enjoyed the story or chapter. Thank you to those for tagging or bookmarking this story, or me as an author, in your favorites or alerts, and for reading it until all the way here. Thank you all for being so wonderful and great, for making the journey of writing this story so beautiful for me with your love and support (and I hope you liked this journey as much as I did). I can't put it into words or think of anything I can say that will match the way you've all made me feel.

To:

kV8

Swiss Blue

jensensgirl3

EmilyAnnMcGarrett-Winchester

whatnosheep

lina89

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neonkittykatXD

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Ariyah's rider (Your review was so wonderful and in-depth. Thank you so, so much. It meant the world)

AQUA-TOT

Kas3y

Meg

booksarelife312

Guest

Thank you, thank you, thank you so very much for your reviews in the last chapter. They meant so much to me.