Chapter Text
Bobby’s looks the same as always, and the familiarity leaves Sam feeling both comforted and even more rattled than before as he pulls down the driveway and around back. It seems like something should have changed after so long away—feels like decades inside Sam’s head. There are minor changes in the salvage yard, at least: fewer broken hulks of cars, slightly more organization.
Sam wonders if that’s Dean’s doing.
Bobby is outside, working on an engine beneath the midday sun despite the early summer heat. He’s stripped down to his undershirt, cap pulled firmly over his head and shading his eyes. There’s a greasy rag sticking out of his back pocket and an open tool chest at his feet. As Sam pulls up, his truck gets a dismissive glance from the man before he turns back and refocuses on what he’s doing.
The black and tan, shaggy-haired mongrel at Bobby’s feet gets up, though, and takes a few steps toward the truck. From the wagging tail and the lack of a chain, Sam guesses it’s friendlier than its predecessor. He hopes so, anyway.
He turns off the engine and carefully eases the cab door open, ready to slam it shut again at the first sign of a snarl. But the dog just wags its tail harder when it sees the door swinging wide. It dances forward, and then back, and then, as Sam decides it’s safe to emerge, makes up its mind and dashes for the cab.
Sam swears, heart leaping up into his throat, and tries to yank the door shut. The dog is faster than his reflexes, though, and it squirms up into the cab and onto Sam’s lap. He gets his hands in its fur, trying to hold it off, and then snorts out a surprised laugh as the dog strains and gets its face close enough to lap at the tip of his nose.
Looks like he might be in danger of getting licked to death, but other than that the dog seems harmless. Of course, it is barking now, even as it does its best to wash Sam’s face for him, and in the cab the noise is kind of deafening.
As he fights to push the dog’s muzzle away, Sam sees Bobby toss down the wrench with an annoyed gesture.
“Damn it, Bonham,” Bobby shouts, turning away from the engine. “How many times do I have to tell you to leave the customers alone, you dumb mutt!”
Bonham—as in ‘John’? Sam wonders—barks one last time, tongue curling around Sam’s wrist since it can’t reach anything else at the moment, and then squirms out of the truck and runs back to bound eagerly in circles around Bobby.
Sam gives himself a second to wipe his face with his shirt and then climbs out of the cab himself.
Over by the engine, Bobby catches sight of him and goes white.
It’s weird, being stared at like that—like he’s some kind of ghost instead of just the prodigal son returned—and Sam flushes, shuffling his feet where he is and hanging onto the driver’s side door for comfort. After a few minutes where the only thing moving is Bonham—the dog is nosing its way around the yard now, tail still waving jauntily—Sam finally clears his throat.
“Hey, Bobby,” he offers.
Bobby shakes himself at the sound of Sam’s voice, and a moment later he’s striding forward. Sam forces himself to let go of the truck so that he can meet the man, stepping forward himself with a smile that feels (but hopefully doesn’t look) awkward on his face. Bobby hauls him into a fierce hug, which feels really strange after so long without human contact—none of Azazel’s kids were really into touching—but also loosens something deep in Sam’s chest. His hands start to come up belatedly to hug back, but Bobby is already pulling away.
Pulling away and punching Sam.
Sam’s head jerks to the side with the force of the blow. His teeth snap together and he’s immediately flooded with the red surge of copper that always comes from being struck that hard. Even when Sam’s vision clears a moment later, he can still taste blood—maybe bit his cheek, maybe his tongue. He probably should have expected this kind of welcome, but somehow he’s still left breathless with shock at the attack.
Lifting one hand to cradle his jaw, he complains, “Ow!”
Bobby moves, abrupt and sharp, and before Sam can start flinching away from another blow, he’s being hugged again. He continues to hold his jaw while staring over Bobby’s shoulder at Bonham, who is running in circles and barking excitedly at all the commotion.
“Damn, boy,” Bobby breathes against Sam’s shoulder. “Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes.”
“It’s, uh, good to see you too?” Sam tries, bewildered by the conflicting messages Bobby’s sending out. Dean must have been giving him lessons.
Bobby immediately pulls away again, smacking Sam on the back of the head as he releases him. Sam grimaces, but the smack isn’t much harder than Dean’s Punch-Buggies-No-Punch-Backs used to be, and he manages to keep the grunt in his chest where it belongs.
“I oughta beat the stupid out of you!” Bobby shouts, glaring up at him. “Four years and nothing! Not one damn phone call. Lemme see your hands, boy: all your fingers better be missing or broken.”
“I’m sorry, all right!” Sam blurts.
When Bobby’s eyes just narrow further, Sam moves back with his hands held defensively out in front of him, just in case Bobby ends up deciding that kicking Sam’s ass is the way to go after all. He knows he doesn’t deserve anything else—Bobby’d be within his rights to give Sam the beating of his life for leaving him holding the bag like that—but he can’t force himself to stand still for it.
Bobby continues to stare at him, expression flickering between pissed off and relieved. “You’re sorry,” he repeats scornfully. “Well sorry ain’t gonna cut it this time, kid. Do you have any idea what kind of mess you left me with?”
“I had to go,” Sam maintains, certain that at least in this he’s right. He was right to go: what he became during that second, isolated year proves as much. “I wasn’t safe.”
“You weren’t thinking!” Bobby yells, spit flying from his lips with the vehemence lacing his words. “You asshole. You know how damned close I came to having to bury that boy?”
That one word—bury—gets trapped in Sam’s head and amplifies, reverberating around until he can’t hear anything else. He can’t breathe either—taste of blood and soil in his mouth, the weight of packed earth pressing down on his chest and clogging his throat.
“Is he—” he gasps as the world fades in and out around him and his blood roars in his ears. “Bobby, is he—”
“He’s fine,” Bobby mutters, and Sam lets his knees buckle under the relief that floods in.
He splays his hand on the earth and feels the grit of the salvage yard scrape against his fingers and palm. His head drops, hair hanging around his face and curtaining his vision—narrowing it down to the spread of rocks and gravel around his hand. Then a nose intrudes, and a hopeful pair of eyes, and Sam gets his other hand on the scruff of the dog’s neck and hangs on to keep from being knocked over.
Bobby curses under his breath and a second later Bonham is being dragged back away from Sam. Sam unclenches his hand and lets the dog’s warm body slide out from beneath his fingers.
Dean’s okay, he tells himself as he takes several deep, shuddering breaths. He’s okay. Bobby’s just pissed. He didn’t mean that; he was being overdramatic.
Except Sam doesn’t think he can bring himself to believe it.
“Oh, go chase some rats,” he hears Bobby snap, and glances up in time to see the man push Bonham in the direction of the garage. The dog lets itself be moved back several steps and then eels around Bobby’s body to dash straight back toward Sam. Before his numb mind can process what’s happening, Bonham collides heavily with him, knocking him on his ass in the dirt. The dog licks his face twice and is gone again, running in excited circles around Sam’s truck and barking its head off.
“Bonham!” Bobby yells. “Shut up!”
Bonham’s barks take on a new, frenzied pitch as it hurls itself into another circuit, spraying Sam with pebbles and grit as it passes him.
Sighing, Bobby adjusts his cap. “Get off your ass and come on in the house so we can talk.” The look he gives Sam is sour. “Or were you just dropping by to say howdy before running off again?”
Sam shakes his head as he makes his wobbly way to his feet. “No, I. I want to talk.”
“Get moving, then,” Bobby says, “’Fore I lose my patience and shoot something.”
There isn’t much difference between the disgusted look he’s giving Sam and the one he shoots toward Bonham, and Sam isn’t sure which of them would be more likely to catch that bullet. The dog’s been here longer, though, and it’s still running around annoying Bobby. Odds are, the man would have gotten rid of it by now if he were going to.
Bobby’s already heading for the kitchen door Sam left through more than four years ago, head lowered and shaking from side to side. “Goddamned idjit.” The words are muttered—barely audible from Sam’s place by the truck—and he wonders whether he was supposed to hear them.
To his left, Bonham has finally stopped running and is standing stock-still, head cocked and ears up. The dog’s eyes are fastened on Bobby’s back with an intensity that makes Sam think he could dangle a piece of steak underneath the dog’s nose right now and it wouldn’t so much as twitch.
Then Bobby reaches for the screen door and Bonham is off and running, tail wagging even faster than before and tongue lolling. The dog is smart enough not to bark, and Bobby is half in and half out of the house when it bowls into his legs.
“No!” Bobby shouts, grabbing the doorframe to keep himself upright. “Bad dog!”
But Bonham is already inside, and Sam can hear the dog’s barking start up again almost immediately.
Bobby pounds his hand one against the side of the house and then, as though remembering he isn’t alone, shoots a glance over his shoulder. The expression on the man’s face is both daring Sam to laugh and threatening bloody retribution if he does.
Luckily, Sam’s nerves are still wound too tight for him to register any of the amusement he might have felt at seeing Bobby Singer outmaneuvered by a dog, and he’s able to meet the man’s gaze with a straight face. After a few moments, Bobby gives a disgruntled snort and steps into his kitchen.
As Sam starts heading inside himself, he hears Bobby roar, “Get out of that, you mangy mutt!” and wonders why in the hell Bobby’s keeping something around that so clearly irritates him. Then again, he supposes that the man’s tenacity has already been proven by how much he’s put up with from the Winchesters over the years.
Bobby’s leaning against the counter when Sam lets himself in, arms folded over his chest as he watches Bonham shake its head wildly from side to side.
“He ain’t supposed to be in here,” Bobby announces as Sam steps inside, letting the door fall shut behind him. “But it’ll take more trouble than it’s worth putting him out again. He’ll settle down in a couple minutes.”
The fact that Bonham is currently trying to disembowel a stuffed monkey—not to mention the food bowls and the teething marks on the molding around the door through to the living room—seems to indicate that the dog is in here more often than Bobby’s trying to claim, but Sam nods anyway as he hesitates by the door.
He isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do now. Isn’t sure just how far he should stretch Bobby’s grudging invitation.
“I ain’t gonna bite, Sam,” Bobby says caustically.
“I was a little more worried about getting shot, actually,” Sam answers.
That brings Bobby’s head up a little more and the man’s eyes narrow. “You trying to be funny, son?” he demands.
Sam sort of was, but he’s getting now that that was a mistake. “No,” he says meekly.
Bobby gives him a look like he doesn’t quite believe it and then shakes his head and pushes away from the counter, walking across the room to the refrigerator. “Sit down, will you? I’m getting a crick in my neck talking to you like this.”
Sam obediently heads over to the kitchen table and sits down in one of the chairs. Now that he’s settled, he glances around the room for signs of Dean—beer cans hidden on top of the fridge, muscle car magazines on the counters, the tell-tale flash of cellophane from the Twinkie stash Dean used to leave behind the microwave at every apartment they ever rented—and comes up blank. Not that that means anything, of course. Bobby might have put his foot down about that sort of thing, or maybe those are habits Dean has outgrown.
“Is he home?” he asks, turning his attention back to Bobby as the man leans into his open refrigerator. “Can I see him?”
“That’s two questions,” Bobby responds, reemerging with two beer bottles held in one hand. He gestures with them, pointing the wide bottoms at Sam with a meaningful tilt of his head. “You don’t get any right now.”
Sitting down across from Sam, he slides one of the beers over the tabletop while opening the other on the back of a neighboring chair. Sam catches his own bottle and swallows the futile protests bubbling up in his throat. Pushing Bobby isn’t going to get him to Dean any sooner, not when Dean isn’t here—and he can’t be, Sam’s realizing now. If Dean were home, he would have shown up already to see what all the ruckus was about.
Bobby squints across the table at Sam while taking slow pulls on his beer. Sam can tell that the man’s sizing him up and does his best to sit there quietly while he’s evaluated. His hands won’t be still, though: peeling at the damp label on the side of the beer until it comes away in soggy strips.
“You gonna drink that or just play with it all day?” Bobby asks finally, breaking the silence.
“I don’t drink anymore,” Sam answers, which gets him a surprised widening of Bobby’s eyes. He holds the man’s gaze, letting Bobby read his expression and confirm the truth of that statement, and after a moment Bobby grunts and nods.
“Not a bad idea,” he concedes, taking another pull from his own beer.
Encouraged by the approval, Sam leans forward and says, “Please, can you just tell me he’s okay?”
It’s begging, plain and simple. Sam doesn’t care. He’s come to terms with the fact that he doesn’t have any pride left when it comes to Dean.
“I haven’t decided whether I’m discussing him with you yet,” Bobby replies after a brief delay. “Depends on what you’re here for.”
“I don’t know,” Sam answers honestly, and as Bobby’s eyes start to go cold and hostile, he hastens to add, “I mean, I’m not leaving. I’m. Not unless he wants me to. I just—I don’t know how I feel anymore. About Dean. I love him, but I—I just don’t know how.”
He pauses in case Bobby has something to say to that, but Bobby sits there quietly. He isn’t looking at Sam anymore, instead frowning down at his beer while his thumb slides slowly through the condensation.
“And I don’t know what he wants from me,” Sam adds. “But I need to talk to him. I—I need a chance to explain. I have to tell him how sorry I am, about—about everything. The rest is up to him.”
Bobby grunts at that: a disbelieving noise that Bonham finds interesting. Abandoning its stuffed monkey, it comes over and drops its head on Bobby’s leg. Bobby absently scratches behind the dog’s ear for a moment and then lifts his eyes again, pinning Sam with his gaze.
“You really gonna be fine with it if he doesn’t want anything to do with you?”
The way Sam’s throat closes up at the mere suggestion answers that question for him, and much as he knows it would be wiser to lie, he can’t. Especially not when Bobby would see right through him anyway.
With a shake of his head, he whispers, “No, I really wouldn’t. But if it’s what he wants, I’ll leave.”
He doesn’t promise that he won’t look back because he knows he will. He’ll spend the rest of his short, pathetic life looking back.
Not that Sam is planning on suicide. It’s just that he knows himself well enough to recognize that Dean’s loss—for good this time—will gut him like a deer carcass. It will leave him empty and bleeding out inside, too distracted by the pain to focus on anything else.
A distracted hunter is a dead hunter. Dad taught Sam that. He taught them both that.
If Bobby senses any of Sam’s unvoiced thoughts, then his glum expression doesn’t show it. “Guess that’s something, anyway,” he mutters before tilting his beer back again.
Sam endures the silence as long as he’s able, and when he can’t take it any more, he leans forward and puts his elbows on the table. “How bad was it when I left?”
He doesn’t actually want to know—is terrified of the answer—but he has to ask. He has to ask because he has to know how much he needs to answer for. He has to know what to expect from Dean when he sees him again.
“How do you think it was?” Bobby snaps, temper flaring back up immediately. He pushes Bonham’s head out of his lap and gets to his feet, striding over to the sink and slamming his bottle down on the counter beside it. Wrapping his now-empty hands around the edge of the metal basin, he stares out the window at the sunlit world beyond while Bonham whines and rolls its eyes imploringly in Sam’s direction.
“I ain’t having that conversation with you,” Bobby announces after an endless, strained moment. “Dean wants to tell you, that’s fine, but if you weren’t here to see it, then I don’t think you get the five minute recap. I ain’t dredging that shitstorm up again just so you can wallow in self-pity.”
Sam’s chest aches unbearably as he nods. It isn’t hard to read through the lines of Bobby’s turned back, of his vehement avoidance of the question. And it isn’t as though Sam was expecting anything else. He knows it must have been bad.
“Okay,” he agrees, and then waits for some of the tension to ease from Bobby before asking, “When’s he coming home?” His stomach gives a half eager, but mostly terrified twist at the thought of sitting here and waiting for Dean to walk through the door.
Bobby hangs his head for a moment before looking back at Sam from beneath the brim of his cap. “He doesn’t live here anymore,” he says flatly. “Moved out about two years ago. He’s living over in Humboldt Valley.”
Sam blinks, disoriented. Every time he’s imagined his reunion with his brother, he saw it happening here. Whenever he dared to daydream, he’s pictured Dean living in this house and hunting with Bobby—small jobs, nothing too dangerous or physically arduous. Maybe helping Bobby run the salvage yard between hunts.
Now he ... he isn’t sure what to do with the new information, which has wiped all of Sam’s imagined meetings away and left him with a terrifyingly blank slate.
Bobby rips a piece of paper off the notepad stuck to the refrigerator and starts writing. “Here,” he says as he fills the paper with his hasty scrawl. “Dean’s address.” He hands the note to Sam and then, when Sam sits there looking blankly at the number (42) and street name (Madison), sighs. “Guest room’s open, so I guess you can stay here.”
Sam’s eyes sting at the unexpected offer, and he gives himself a shake, tearing his eyes from the paper and looking up. “Thanks, Bobby.”
“Don’t thank me, boy,” Bobby mutters as he pushes Bonham’s curious snout away from his leg. “I just want you somewhere I can keep an eye on you.”
It should offend Sam, but instead his chest gives a warm pulse and he ends up having to wipe his eyes on his sleeve. Bobby’s clearly uncomfortable with his reaction and turns away, busying himself over by the sink. Bonham abandons him to drop a companionable head on Sam’s knee and gazes up at him adoringly.
Sam rests one hand on the dog’s head while wiping his eyes again with the other.
It’s been a long time since he’s had anyone looking out for him, and if that isn’t exactly the spirit in which Bobby meant his comment, Sam’s grateful enough not to care.
Sam is sure Bobby got the address wrong.
42 Madison St. is a two-story Gable front house with a picture window and a red-bricked chimney. The house is in perfect repair and, from the vivid Colonial blue color of the siding, recently painted. Sam hasn’t ever lived in a house himself, but he’s been in and out of them a lot over the years, and he can tell from where he’s parked by the curb in his truck that this one is going to be nice inside: gleaming wooden floors, plush couch and loveseat, marble counters in the kitchen, Monet paintings on the walls. Probably a flat screen TV in the living room. Jacuzzi in the upstairs master bath.
The yard has been meticulously maintained, the white walk freshly scrubbed and gleaming and the lawn both lush and well trimmed. There are trees lining the property—small enough that Sam can tell they were probably imported when the house was built not more than three years ago.
A garden lines the walk up to the house, filled with exotic grasses and moss and the popping colors of irises, hydrangea, and peonies. Rose bushes hug the line of the house, stretching up to brush the lower sill of a large picture window. There’s a stone birdbath in the middle of the growth, complete with a trio of tiny sparrows splashing around with their feathers puffed out.
The Dean Sam remembers would have slept on the street before spending a single night underneath that suburban roof. He would have thumbed his nose at the storybook perfection and then checked them both into a Motel Six without a second glance.
Even if Dean could somehow have been manipulated or tricked into accepting this kind of home, the house is just too damned expensive. Sam doesn’t know much about mortgages and property taxes, but he knows enough to recognize that Dean would never be able to afford something like this. Not a rootless drifter without so much as a bank account or social security number to his name.
But there’s a ghost in the driveway.
Transfixed by the sight, Sam gets out of his truck and makes his way over on unsteady feet. Despite the late June heat, he feels chilled and his hands tremble. The ghost seems to recede as he advances, retreating before him and wavering in his vision as though it might vanish at any moment like a mirage. But then, between one step and another, he feels warm metal beneath his fingertips.
Not a ghost after all, then, to be dispelled by rocksalt and matches. No, this is a revenant: should have been buried long ago, pulled apart for scrap metal. Instead it’s sitting outside this piece of suburbia, polished and whole.
Dean left no scars on the Impala’s sleek frame when he was putting it back together, erasing all the traces of violence that he couldn’t scrub from his own body, and as Sam runs his hands over the trunk and up to the roof of the car, it’s like that terrible crash never happened. It seems, for a moment, like their lives never happened—or at least not the way Sam remembers it, with all the darkness and blood. He walks forward, putting his hand on the driver’s side door handle and giving it a tug.
The door clicks, pulling open, and Sam is overcome by a wave of vertigo at the thought that he could get behind the wheel and close the door behind him, shutting in the heat and what must be his brother’s scent—old burger wrappers and melted chocolate and DeanDeanDean. Heart beating too quickly, he pushes the door shut again instead and rests his forearms on the roof. He doesn’t want his first meeting with Dean to involve his big brother bailing him out of jail for attempted grand theft auto, and this is the type of neighborhood where people probably wouldn’t take kindly to a stranger (especially a stranger like Sam, with his size and his cheap clothes and his unkempt hair) making himself at home in someone else’s classic muscle car.
But damned if Sam can bring himself to step away from the Impala either.
Bowing his head, he looks at his reflection in the roof—tries to find some measure of reassurance that he doesn’t look as frightened as he feels and comes up empty. He’s clearly petrified. It’s all he can do not to bolt back to the truck and peel away in a shriek of leather and exhaust—fuck walking right up to the front door and asking to come in—and it’s painted across his face in stark lines of terror. His eyes are too wide; his lips too thin. He knows without having to see it that the shallow rise and fall of his chest is obvious to even the most casual of glances.
Sam’s field of awareness widens gradually as he stands there, spreading to take in the brightness of the day—oversaturated sunlight and heat pouring down and flooding his senses. Scents come next: the flowers, the freshly cut grass, the warm asphalt. And, somewhere close, the smell of meat cooking on a grill. Nearby, there’s the sound of children laughing—across the street one of the neighbors has their sprinkler going, the thwicker-thwicker-thwick sound of the water spraying out provides a steady counterpoint to the closer birdsong, to the noise of a passing car.
Sam makes himself move at that, recognizing that he’s just begging for someone to phone the cops even if he isn’t actually sitting inside of the Impala, and slowly heads up the gleaming front walk. He feels filthy in comparison to the spotless stone, and wishes suddenly that he’d bought some new clothes for this. The ones he’s wearing are years old: his shoes scuffed, the jeans fraying at the ankles and hopelessly stained—gun oil, mostly, but there’s some blood mixed in there as well. His t-shirt is faded, the collar pulled wide from one too many spins in the wash, or maybe because one of the vamps he was tangling with last month grabbed onto it and used it to spin Sam into a nearby wall.
Just below the front step, he pauses and lifts his hands to his hair, trying to smooth it down. It’s a futile endeavor—his fingers are shaking too badly to manage the trick even if his hair wasn’t already an irredeemable mess. With a short, hard exhalation, he makes himself take the final step up and presses the doorbell.
His hands go directly into his pockets afterwards—if he can’t stop them from shaking, at least he can make his nerves less immediately noticeable. He works at getting a falsely bright smile on his face, which hurts—his face muscles ache with the unaccustomed expression. Sweat trickles down the back of his neck as he stares at the sun glinting off the knocker on the front door, waiting for the wood to pull back and reveal his brother.
Time ticks past, agonizingly slowly, and Sam starts up a count in his head. When he makes it to three hundred Mississippi, he draws one hand from his pockets and pushes the bell again.
The irrational part of him pipes up, insisting that Dean isn’t answering because he knows it’s Sam standing out here—that he could stand here pushing the bell forever and get no response. But there’s no peephole in the door, and the curtains in the windows to either side of him haven’t been twitched aside, and he’s only being paranoid.
Heart beating too quickly, Sam steps down off the front step and eases through the garden until he’s standing by the picture window. Cupping a hand around his eyes to shade them from the glare, he peers inside at the living room.
The house is just as nice as he thought it would be.
The couch is plush and covered in soft, grey suede fabric; the wood on the matching chairs has a highly polished sheen. There’s a flat screen TV taking up half the wall in front of the couch, and an entertainment system beneath it with more electronic equipment than Sam can identify, although the controllers sitting on the top shelf indicate that there’s at least one gaming console.
A black marble fireplace is set into the left-hand wall, with an iron grate across the front and a collection of knick-knacks on top of the mantle. There are picture frames mixed in with the tiny statues and candleholders, but they’re too small and too far away for Sam to make out any details. Paintings line all the walls, just as Sam knew they would, but there’s also, incongruously, a Metallica poster framed and hanging just above the fireplace.
The floors are hardwood and shining, with plush rugs and runners strategically placed around the living room and in the hall leading deeper into the house. Sam thinks he can see what must be part of a dining room set in that direction.
Pulling back from the window, Sam looks over at the Impala. Between the car and the poster and Bobby’s words, he’s certain that Dean lives here—improbable as it might seem, both financially and logically. Sam’s confusion over how this happened, as well as his inability to picture Dean in these surroundings, eases some of the anxiety thrumming through him, so instead of hurrying back to his truck and driving off, he heads around the side of the house.
No one answered the bell, and he didn’t see anyone inside, but the Impala is here and Sam just can’t imagine his brother going anywhere without it. Whatever else has changed, the painstaking manner in which the car has been pieced together indicates that Dean’s attachment to the vehicle is as strong as ever. No, Dean is here. Dean is either here and deliberately avoiding Sam (please no), or he’s somewhere he can’t hear the doorbell.
Which would mean he’s out back.
As Sam rounds the corner, his first thought is that the back yard is huge. It seems to stretch on and on—a full acre at least, bounded by a white fence. There’s another garden back here—this one more utilitarian, with cucumbers and lettuce and a couple of tomato plants—as well as a brick patio with a glass table and some chairs and an immense grill. The grill is closed, but the shimmer of heat around it, as well as the bowl of what looks like homemade barbeque sauce sitting on the attached counter to the side, tells Sam that he’s found the cooking meat he smelled before. The table is set with a couple of beers, two plates, two sets of utensils, and several large, towel-covered bowls.
And there’s Dean.
Dean with his hair grown out—grown a little longer than Sam’s used to, actually—wearing a loose pair of jeans and a black t-shirt and—is that an apron? Sam’s mind refuses to answer the question because he belatedly realizes that his brother is chasing a short, longhaired woman across the lawn.
The woman is looking over her shoulder and laughing as she’s chased, the gap closing quickly because Dean has longer legs and she’s not really trying to get away. As Sam watches, Dean reaches out and grabs the woman around the waist, jerking her back and swinging her up onto his shoulder in one smooth motion. The woman shrieks as she’s spun in a circle almost six feet off the ground, Dean’s hands holding her steady as he turns. Below the shriek, Sam catches the lower tones of his brother’s laughter—a loud, open noise that Sam is shamed and sickened to realize he isn’t at all familiar with.
“Dean!” the woman yells, beating ineffectually at Dean’s shoulder as he continues to spin them both. “Put me down! Down!” But she’s starting to laugh as well now, and even Sam can tell she doesn’t mean it.
“Nope!” Dean shouts back cheerfully—and God, his voice. It lodges in Sam’s gut, warm and honeyed, and casts an unbearable light on all the hollow, dark spaces inside of him. He didn’t realize just how much he missed hearing it until now.
“You’ve done it now,” Dean continues, calling even louder to be heard over the woman’s laughing curses. “No mercy!”
He starts to spin her faster as Sam stands there watching stupidly, and then, unexpectedly, jerks and stumbles to a stop. His head snaps up, eyes arrowing in on Sam.
Dean is too far away for Sam to make out any details—he can’t tell from here whether Dean’s eyes are still that same, unbelievable shade of green; can’t tell if his brother’s scars have faded at all. He doesn’t know whether there are more crow’s feet around Dean’s eyes, can’t begin to read his brother’s expression.
But he can see that Dean has put on weight again—maybe he isn’t as bulky as he used to be, but he’s hale and hearty: strong enough to be standing there with that woman draped over his shoulder as though she doesn’t weigh more than a sack of flour. Same broad shoulders, tapered waist, slightly bowed legs. There’s a glint of metal from something around Dean’s neck—not the amulet, because that’s still hanging from the rearview mirror in Sam’s truck, but some other necklace or medallion Dean has picked up since then—and Sam feels a faint stab of hurt at having been replaced.
Dean is wearing an apron, Sam notes numbly: a blue novelty item with the words ‘Don’t Fuck With the Cook” printed across the chest in bold letters. He’s barefoot out in the grass, bottom cuffs of his jeans rolled up to reveal his ankles. Thick, leather bands circle both of Dean’s wrists, and Dean has always liked his jewelry, but he has never worn anything that thick or bulky: they’re more like cuffs than bracelets, really.
Sam takes everything in over the space of a single heartbeat, and then it hits him—Dean is standing there, looking at him—and his breath catches. There’s a roaring sound in his ears—blood rushing through his body faster than it should as his heart races—and his head spins as a wave of dizziness crashes over him. His skin is tingling everywhere, pins and needles like he’s coming awake again after four years of numbing sleep.
Then the woman on Dean’s shoulder squirms around and says, “Dean? Hey, sugar, something wrong?”
Those words blast through the uncomprehending blockage in Sam’s head, and he finally understands that he’s standing here looking at Dean and his—his what? Fuck, his wife? His fiancé?
She’s something, anyway: this woman whom Dean was laughing with, and whom he’s still touching with an ease Sam hasn’t ever seen him offer anyone besides himself or Dad. Dean is touching her almost the same way he touched Cassie so many years ago—in that absent, fond way that reeks of shared emotion and intimacy.
He isn’t broken anymore—that much Sam understood at first glance—but Sam took too long to get his own shit together, and now Dean hasn’t just healed but Moved On. Dean has a house and a girl and a life in this bright, suburban place, and none of it has anything to do with Sam. There’s no place for him here.
As Sam meets his brother’s poleaxed stare, he also understands that nothing has changed on his end. The demon blood is quiet, tamed by the calming routine of meditation he learned up north, and Sam is more in love with his brother than ever.
Which means that it wasn’t the demon making Sam feel this way. Wasn’t the taint in his blood. It was just him, loving Dean more than he probably should and helpless to disengage.
It’s always been him. And it’s always been just him.
Sam’s chest constricts, making his head pulse with disorienting heat, and his eyes sting. The woman—Dean’s girl—is still talking, and now she’s lifting her head to try to see what Dean’s staring at, and Sam can’t—fuck, he can’t be here anymore. He’s going to fall apart, that much is inevitable, but he isn’t—he isn’t falling apart here: some unwanted, filthy stranger who doesn’t belong in Dean’s yard. Who doesn’t belong within fifty miles of this sunlit world.
Turning, Sam stumbles back around the side of the house and toward his truck. He picks up speed as he goes, and by the time he reaches the curb he’s sprinting, throat hot and aching with the sobs he refuses to let spill out. His head comes up as he fumbles the keys into the ignition, chest messy and too full with the stupid certainty that Dean is going to come running around the corner after him. That Dean is going to run across the lawn toward him, yelling his name and asking him to wait.
But the front yard is still shatteringly, irrefutably empty when he finally gets the truck going three minutes later and pulls away from the curb.