Work Text:
I know. I know, alright? I know the secret. I know what they do. Please make Dad and Dean let me come. Please make Dad and Dean safe. I want to come. I’m ready. I know.
“Got a set of freshly blessed rosaries for you boys,” said Pastor Jim.
“Did you bless ‘em yourself?”
“No. The Catholics do it best.” Pastor Jim winked. “I’ll say that for them.”
Please. The PSAT’s the first step. I need this. I won’t ask for anything for the rest of the year, swear to—well. To You.
“I don’t understand why that had to turn into a fight.”
“You don’t?” Dean’s livid, quiet livid, where his voice scratches low and rough. “Every goddamn day, Sam. You pick away at him. Like he doesn’t have enough on his plate.”
An ironic choice of words, because their plates, this last week, have been painfully empty.
“It’s a philosophical disagreement,” Sam says, feeling young. Hating the squeak in his voice. How weak and green it makes him sound. His ideas are old. Old enough to stand toe-to-toe with Dad’s.
“It’s a bullshit excuse to start shit.”
“Two shits in one? We shoulda kept that swear jar around.”
“That was the dumbest idea Caleb’s ever had, which is saying something.” Dean almost smiles, recollecting, before he goes darkly Winchester again. “Sam, seriously. You’ve got to leave it alone.”
“What? The idea that supernatural good exists alongside evil? I believe some people call that—”
“Oh, shut up.”
You have to help them understand. Dad is where I get all this stubborn, unless it’s from You. You have to keep them from breaking. Dean can’t break. Dean—he doesn’t deserve—he should come with me. You have to make Dean come with me.
I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t work like that.
“You walk out—
—that door—”
Not much good, are You?
“Oh, yeah, I’m Catholic. Not as much as my parents wish I was. What about you, Sam?” And then, before he can answer, Jess wrinkles her nose. “Or is that a rude question?”
She has this habit, he’s already learned, of self-correcting, self-evaluating, self-analyzing, mid-sentence. Not in an insecure way. More of…an experiment of thought and growth in real time.
Sam finds it mesmerizing.
“No, it’s not rude,” he says. Dean always said he brought the dimples out on purpose, but in reality, you can’t tell what your smile looks like without a mirror. All he knows is that it feels real. “And no, I wasn’t raised religious. I’m more…spiritual, if anything, I guess.”
Oh, God—
“I’m not going to let you die, period.” Globe on its axis, shadows in his brother’s eyes. The memory of burnt flesh, fire and the electric making destruction where wind and water took them. Dean doesn’t believe him. Sam doesn’t question whether his words are believable.
Some people call that stubborn, born and bred.
Some call it faith.
Oh, God, I’d do anything for him.
(It isn’t exactly a prayer.)