Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Just like basically every morning for the past four years, Sam is the first one awake. He’s got the coffee brewing, and he’s cracking eggs into a bowl when Dean comes in, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

This is Sam’s favorite time of day.

Jack always sleeps in until at least nine, these days, a welcome departure from his infancy when he had his dads up at all hours with his fussing.

“Mornin’,” Dean yawns as he plops down on a stool. Sam brings him a mug of coffee, then returns to breakfast prep.

“Sleep okay?”

“Yeah, pretty good. Kid’s always harder to get down when Cas’s gone, but it wasn’t too bad.”

“Lemme guess, he’s still curled up in your bed.” Sam smirks, putting a few slices of bread in the toaster.

“Don’t give me that look,” Dean scolds without any real heat behind it. “You couldn’t sleep in a bed by yourself until you were like nine.”

“Point taken,” Sam laughs, heating some butter in a pan. He fishes a spatula out of the utensil drawer, for the eggs. “How long’s Cas gonna be gone?”

“A few days, got a ghoul case in Georgia. He’s got that on his own.”

“Wish I got to see him before he split, I’ve got a sprained wrist that coulda used some juice.”

“That salt and burn do that?”

“Yeah, should’ve been paying better attention, but,” Sam shrugs, “Nothing I can do about it now.”

“You could’ve woken us up, last night when you got in. You know Cas doesn’t need to sleep.”

“I know, but that’s y’all’s time, I don’t want to bust in and wake up you and Jack.” Sam pauses. “I mean, obviously if it was urgent, of course I would, but it’s just a sprain. It isn’t even my dominant arm. Hasn’t even slowed down breakfast.”

“Alright, alright.” Dean takes a sip of his coffee. Sam’s phone is near him, on the table, and when it rings, Dean lifts a questioning eyebrow. Sam nods, and Dean picks up the call.

“You’ve got Dean,” He says as he puts the phone on speaker.

“Dean? It’s Ketch.”

“Haven’t heard from you in a few months, how’s it going?”

“It’s been…interesting.”

“In our line of work? That’s never good.” Dean huffs a nervous laugh, catching Sam’s gaze for a second and letting his unease flicker across their shared eye contact.

“I’ve been tracking…something. In Oregon. Something that’s been executing angels. I wasn’t sure of the motivations – perhaps a witch, harvesting grace for spell ingredients? But I got very close, last night, and managed to interrupt it. The angel survived. And…” Ketch inhales sharply.

“And?” Dean asks, voice steady, but his face betrays the depth of his worry.

“Whatever this thing is, it’s questioning them, interrogating them, before it kills them.” Ketch pauses, and Dean holds his breath. “It’s asking them about a nephil, and the nephil’s whereabouts.”

“Shit.” Dean hisses.

“Whatever this thing is…” Ketch exhales hard, and Sam can imagine him closing his eyes in frustration. “It’s after your son, Dean.”

“And you’re calling to warn us?”

“That, yes. And to ask for help. I called Sam, since I assumed you’d want to stay home with Jack.”

“Sam’s kinda out of commission at the moment.” Dean glances up at his brother, then back down at the phone on the table. “But, uh. If you need back up. I could come.” There’s a long pause after this, and then Ketch clears his throat.

“Right. Okay. If you’re sure. I’ll text you the information, and my location.”

“Alright. I’ll keep an eye out for it.” He hangs up, and they remain silent for some time, the only sound the wet sizzle of eggs scrambling in the pan, and the eventual spring-loaded snap of toast popping up.

“You sure about this?” Sam asks, because Dean hasn’t gone out on a hunt in over a year. Sure, he’s consulted on hunts, gotten pretty good at research and manning the phones, but he’s been on the sidelines for a while now.

“No, not really.” Dean mutters over the rim of his mug. “But you’re injured. Cas is probably a third of the way to Georgia by now. And Jack’s in danger. I can’t hang Ketch out to dry, when he’s the only thing standing between whatever this thing is and Jack.”

“I could go – “

“Come on, Sam, with a bum wrist?” Dean scoffs. “You’re doing okay around the house, but even driving there would be pushing it, and you know it.”

“I know.” Sam sighs. “I just. I know this isn’t how you’d do this, if you had a choice.”

“You’re right. But I don’t really have a choice.” Right on cue, Dean’s phone pings in the pocket of his pajama pants, and he checks the message. “Ketch is in Corvallis. We’ll do breakfast, and I’ll explain some of this to Jack. I’ll call Cas, once I’m on the road.” Dean thinks out loud as he pockets the phone again.

“Alright. Well. Food’s about ready. You wanna go wake up Jack?”

“Guess so,” Dean breathes, rising from the table with a new weight on his shoulders. Sam wishes more than anything he could take that burden away.

By the time Dean returns, Jack clinging to him like a koala, head tucked under Dean’s chin, Sam has eggs and toast plated, accompanied by berries and yogurt. Jack gets a cup of chocolate milk, while Dean and Sam move on to their second servings of coffee.

Dean coaxes Jack out of his arms and into his own seat, and for a little while, Sam can pretend it’s just like any other morning, eating breakfast with his family, and not the prelude to something stressful and scary. Sam’s just getting started on his yogurt when Dean reluctantly shatters the illusion.

“Hey Jack,” Dean begins, voice soft and fatherly in that way that Sam has had to adjust to, has had to recontextualize in his brain. It’s a tone of voice that used to stir a desperate swell of nostalgia in him, every time, for the parts of his life when Dean spoke to him that way, when Dean had to parent him. He’s used to it now. Mostly. Sometimes it still catches him off guard, leaves him breathless and small. This is unfortunately one of those times, and he tries to stifle the feeling with a big gulp of coffee.

“Mhmm?” Jack hums in response around a bite of eggs, flashing his big blue eyes in Dean’s direction before turning his focus back to his plate.

“I’m going to have to leave you with Sam for a few days. There’s a really important thing that I need to go help Uncle Ketch out with.” Sam fought not to roll his eyes at the name that Dean had started using as a joke, only for Jack to take it up with the utmost sincerity.

“Why can’t Sam go? And you stay?” Jack asks, mostly curious, not so much asking for this outcome, just wondering aloud. Still, Sam can see how it hurts Dean to hear, the way his jaw twitches as he absorbs the question.

“I’d go, but my arm’s hurt.” Sam explains, trying to give Dean room to breathe. “Dean’s going to go instead, so I can heal.”

“Can’t Dad fix you?” Jack asks, turning those puppy dog eyes on Sam. He wonders if this is why Dean always complained about him giving that look when they were kids. It’s hard to think of anything other than making the kid happy, when he looks at you like that.

“He could,” Sam concedes, “But your dad’s away for a few days, helping people in Georgia. He can’t fix my arm until he gets back.” Jack nods sagely, absorbing the information.

“Okay.” He returns to his breakfast, carefully stacking a piece of egg on the corner of his toast before bringing the combination to his mouth. Sam looks over at Dean, who is so nervous that he’s begun to sweat, despite the ever present chill in the bunker.

“Baby, you understand that it’s just gonna be you and Sam? Until me or Dad gets home?” Dean asks, brushing his son’s bangs off his forehead out of habit. Sam’s chest aches a little, watching it. Dean hasn’t been away from Jack for more than 36 hours at a time since he was born. Sam wonders if it will be harder on Dean or Jack, and he genuinely isn’t sure.

“I know.” Jack looks up at him, smiling softly. “Me and Sam will be okay.”

“Of course you will,” Dean smiles, and Sam can see the way he’s shoving all the panic down deep, to deal with later. “I’m gonna get packed up, after breakfast, and then I’ll get on the road.”

“Okay.” Jack says, tone easy and light, as he shoves away the last bits of egg and the cast off crusts of his toast in favor of his dish of yogurt, which he’s clearly been saving for last. Sam’s noticed the way Jack eats everything in a very methodical way, starting with his least favorite foods and ending with the ones he likes best. Sam wonders if he learned it from him, since he happens to do the same thing.

Dean finishes his food a few minutes later, but sticks around until Jack is done. They both retreat to Dean’s room, where Jack will hang out with him while he packs. Sam cleans up the kitchen in a haze of anxiety, realizing that, on top of the perilous situation Dean is hurtling into, Sam will be babysitting for at least three days, probably more. He’s watched him plenty, sees the kid every day, almost all day.

When Cas and Dean need time to themselves, Sam is always more than happy to hop in the driver’s seat for a little while, sometimes even a whole night while Dean and Cas sleep over at a motel. But it’s never been like this, where Dean and Cas are both away doing something. Where they could be in danger. Before, if Jack asked when his dads would be home, Sam could always tell him exactly when – ‘tomorrow morning, they’ll be back for breakfast,’ or ‘only a few more hours, they’ll be back to tuck you in, kiddo,’. Now he’ll have to look into those guileless eyes and say ‘I don’t know, I’m sorry,’ as if that will do anything but make it worse.

He's snapped out of his tense rumination by the sound of Dean’s voice as he comes down the corridor, muffled by the concrete walls.

Dean rounds the corner, Jack up on his shoulders, little hands clutching loosely at Dean’s jaw for stability, even though Dean’s arms are locked over the kid’s shins securely where they hang down over his chest.

Sam smiles, because moments like this have him in awe all over again, that his big brother gets to have this, somehow. That he gets to have a son, gets to be a dad, gets to be a husband. It started off in a dark place, but these moments remind him how bright it’s all become.

With an overdramatic grunt that’s purely for Jack’s entertainment, Dean hefts his son down to the floor.

“You’re getting so big! Soon you’re gonna have to carry me around,” Dean teases. Jack laughs and shakes his head.

“You’re way bigger than me!” Jack insists, and Dean grins wide, glancing over at Sam, who’s still smiling at the domestic scene unfolding in front of him.

“Oh, okay. You’re right. I guess I’ll just have to get Sam to carry me, until you’re big enough to take over.”

“Dean, you’d crush me,” Sam retorts, and Jack is sent into a fresh bout of giggles at that mental image.

“Come on, Sammy, you could handle me! What’s the point of being so tall, if you can’t give your brother a piggy back ride every once in a while?” He whines, giving Sam a playful nudge on the shoulder.

“I’ll have to start benching higher, if you want a piggy back ride.” Sam rolls his eyes, still smiling. He doesn’t want his brother to leave, not only because it means worrying, and managing Jack’s worry, but simply because he’ll miss him.

Dean huffs a wistful sigh, adjusting his backpack on his shoulders. Jack quiets down, aware that this is it, the goodbye. Sam’s smile rounds out, drifting into a vestigial curve.

“I’ll only be gone a few days,” Dean says, like he’s reassuring himself more than his child, as he crouches down to be at eye level with Jack.

“I know,” Jack says soberly, nodding.

“I’ll call every day,” Dean promises, “And I’ll miss you so much.”

“I’ll miss you, too.” Jack whispers, and it’s the first time all morning that the breezy agreeableness is absent from his tone. Sam can see it dawning on the kid, that Dean’s really leaving, that he’ll really be gone. Dean pulls him into a tight hug, giving him a quick kiss on the temple before releasing him and standing back up.

“I love you, Jack,” Dean says, and Sam kind of can’t believe Dean’s keeping it together. He can still remember those early days, when Dean wouldn’t leave the bunker, would barely leave Jack with Sam long enough to take a shower, couldn’t fall asleep without Jack being in the same room. It’s been years since then, but not that many years.

“I love you, too,” Jack answers, looking up at Dean, something hesitant in his body language, coiled like a spring. Like he’s trying not to close the short distance between them and cling to Dean’s leg, to keep him from leaving.

Dean ruffles his son’s hair, then heads up the stairs and out the door, stopping at the threshold to wave one more time. Jack waves back, though his eyes are distant, thoughtful. Sam’s seen that look. He recognizes it about a half of a second before the tears start flowing. The door’s only been shut for a minute, maybe two.

He hears Jack sniffling, and he drops onto one knee beside him, wrapping his injured arm gingerly around his little shoulders.

“Hey, buddy, it’s okay. He’ll be back before you know it, okay?”

“I know,” Jack hiccups, pressing his face hard into Sam’s collarbone, making a hot wet spot on his shirt with his tears. “Sorry, Sam.” The words are almost incomprehensible, delivered directly into the fabric of his flannel, more vibrations against his shoulder than actual sounds.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Sam assures him, bringing his good hand up to rub his shoulders in soothing circles. “It’s okay to be sad, to miss people.”

Jack doesn’t say anything, but he nods against Sam, and his snuffling gets significantly quieter.

“Is there anything we can do that will make you feel better?” Sam asks, running through a few tried and true options in his head. “You wanna watch a movie? We could read together, or color?” Jack shakes his head minutely. “Hmm, do you wanna go on a walk? Or play outside?”

“No,” Jack whispers, pulling his head away from Sam’s chest enough to be heard.

“Okay, well you let me know if you think of something, alright?” He asks, tucking his arms under Jack’s armpits and lifting him up to rest on his hip. “Otherwise, you and I are gonna go get some stuff together for lunch.”

“Okay,” Jack murmurs, voice a little raspy from crying. Sam is, as he always is when he carries Jack, surprised at how light he is. Even only supporting him with his uninjured arm, he hardly notices the bulk. He decides he’ll make something Jack really likes for lunch, to cheer him up. Maybe dinosaur nuggets. And grapes. And maybe he’ll let him have some cookies after, even though he normally only gets dessert with dinner. It’s really the least he can do, given the circumstances.

Chapter Text

They’ve only been in the kitchen for a few minutes when Jack starts squirming in Sam’s grasp, and he takes it as a positive sign. If the kid was more upset, he wouldn’t be eager to get down and do his own thing, to lose physical comfort and contact. Sam lowers him down onto his feet, but Jack makes no move to go do anything else.

“Dino nuggets okay?” Sam asks, moving toward the fridge.

“Yeah.” Jack looks down at the floor. “But…later?” He looks up, eyes red and irritated from his earlier crying. “I’m not hungry.”

“Sure, buddy.” Sam crouches down, because it’s always easier to talk with Jack when he isn’t towering over him, three whole feet taller. “Is there something you wanna do?”

“Can we watch Oscar?” Jack asks, and Sam can’t help but smile. The kid’s been hooked on Sesame Street since before he could talk, but he’s always called it ‘Oscar’ because his favorite character is Oscar the Grouch.

“Yeah, of course. You wanna walk or get carried?” He offers, extending his arms in case Jack wants to be picked up again. But Jack shakes his head.

“Nah, I can walk.” Sam stands back up and they walk to the room that Dean has slowly converted into something of a family room, with a couch and an overstuffed chair, as well as a pretty nice TV up on the wall. It’s one of the only rooms in the bunker that has a rug on the floor, and it’s much cozier for it.

Jack climbs up onto the couch and curls up against the arm. There’s really no in between with him – he either wants to be crunched in on himself, as small as possible, or sprawled out across whatever he sits on, starfishing and taking up a comical amount of space. Whichever mode he chooses is usually a good indicator of his mood.

Sam settles beside him on the couch, giving him his own space, but sitting near enough that it wouldn’t take much effort on Jack’s part to close the distance. He picks up the remote and scrolls through the list of shows they play most frequently until he lands on Sesame Street, picking up wherever they left off last. They watch in relative silence, Jack’s attention rapt as the episode’s plot unfolds, comforting and unimportant. Sam remembers being a kid watching this show on grainy motel TVs. He remembers Dean watching it with him, even though he was too old for most of it. There were a lot of kid shows Dean complained about, but he never said a single thing against Sesame Street.

When Oscar inevitably makes an appearance, Sam is heartened by the pleased giggle that Jack emits. The episode blends easily into the next, and the next, and it’s two o’clock before they know it, and Sam has to insist that they eat some lunch. He gets Jack to capitulate by promising that they’ll come back in and eat their lunches in front of the TV, so they can watch more Sesame Street.

As he puts the chicken in the oven (dinosaur nuggets for Jack, plain strips for Sam), he has time to stew about the situation for the first time since Dean left this morning. Ketch has been a surprisingly faithful friend, ever since they found out he was even alive a few years ago. He’d been hired by a prince of Hell, Asmodeus, to kidnap Jack from Dean and Cas so that he could be used to the demon’s dark ends.

Even for Ketch, that was a bridge too far, so he bided his time and assassinated this Asmodeus guy instead. In the midst of that whole thing, he called Dean up (it was quite a shock, considering everyone believed he was dead) and told him ‘don’t tell me whether or not you have a certain baby, but on the off chance that you do, there’s a particularly insufferable demon trying to track him down, so keep your wits about you,’ and then promptly hung up and became unreachable. They’d gotten another surprise call many months later, when Jack was almost two, wherein Ketch simply assured them he’d ‘handled it’, and wanted to make sure things were okay on their end. To Sam and Cas’s great surprise, Dean had invited Ketch to the bunker for a fuller debrief, and Ketch was so shocked himself that he agreed.

Ever since that first visit, where even Sam couldn’t help but see that Ketch’s strange relief that Jack and the others were alive and well was undeniably genuine, he’d been something of an advance scout, notifying them of any trouble brewing in Heaven or Hell. And Sam is thankful – truly, he is. But at this precise moment, he wishes Ketch had been able to just handle it himself, to not drag them into it, because now Dean is mixed up in a case – a big case, an important case – for the first time in a long time, and it has his stomach tied up in knots.

He cuts green grapes into halves for Jack, since they’re a choking hazard for small children. While he waits for the chicken to get done, he decides they should have some vegetables too, so he cuts up some celery. When putting Jack’s plate together, he makes sure to sequester the grapes on the opposite side of the plate from the puddle of ranch he knows Jack will need for both the celery and the nuggets. Some of the most cataclysmic fits Jack has ever thrown have been caused by his sweet foods touching his savory ones.

Jack is sitting patiently at the table, coloring in a picture of a flamingo using exclusively a blue crayon and copious determination. When the chicken is done, Sam pulls it out and serves it onto their plates.

“You ready to get back to your show?”

“Um.” Jack looks up, lost in thought, then shakes his head. “We can eat out here.”

“If you’re sure,” Sam shrugs, bringing their plates to the table, then getting up to get them both some water. Jack stays thoughtful, his head tilted a little in that way Sam just knows he picked up from Cas.

“Hey, Sam.” Jack starts, waiting for Sam’s affirmation to continue.

“What’s up, Jack?”

“D is with Uncle Ketch, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.” Sam fights to keep his expression neutral. He doesn’t have words for how annoyed he is that Dean planted that nickname in Jack’s mind. Jack doesn’t even call Sam ‘uncle’ – but he’s not jealous. That would be dumb. He’s not.

“Is Uncle Ketch gonna come to visit, when they’re all done?”

“Maybe.” Sam shrugs, bringing their cups of water over, then sitting down across from his nephew. The nickname isn’t even that bad. Ketch does come by the bunker a few times a year, including around the holidays (since the shady assassin doesn’t seem to have much in the way of family). He’s always been quite fond of Jack, and despite Ketch not having much experience with children, Jack always finds him endlessly amusing.

“He hasn’t visited in a while.” Jack explains, not quite complaining, but close.

“You know, he’s not actually your uncle. He’s not either of your dads’ brother. That’s what an uncle is.”

“I know. Is there a word for what he is?” Jack counters, and Sam just laughs.

“I guess not.” He takes a bite of chicken, and Jack pops a grape half into his mouth. “You know, you could call me ‘uncle’, you know I’m actually your uncle.” Sam eyes Jack, curious to hear his explanation for why he doesn’t already. Even Sam thinks ‘Uncle Sam’ would sound silly, but he’s always wondered why Jack doesn’t say it anyway. It’s not like he knows how weirdly patriotic it would be.

“You’re my uncle,” Jack nods, thinking, “But it would be funny calling you that.” He chaws on a bite of celery, and Sam refrains from telling him to chew with his mouth closed, because he knows it would distract him too much, would keep him from finishing his answer, and Sam wants to know. “B’sides. You’re not just my uncle. I see you every day!” He exclaims.

“Yeah, that’s true. ‘Uncle Sam’ is kind of a mouthful, to be saying all the time.”

“Mhmm,” Jack hums agreeably through a bite of chicken nugget.

They eat in companionable silence for a little while, until Jack starts asking questions about dinosaurs (‘where can we find them?’ and ‘how do you know they’re all gone, that they aren’t just hiding really good?’) which Sam answers with probably too much detail, though Jack seems entertained nonetheless. It culminates in Sam googling coelacanths and horseshoe crabs to show Jack, who is delighted beyond words that such ancient species are still roaming the earth. Sam imagines Cas will be pleased when he gets back, that his son is going to be just as much of a nature documentary nerd as he is.

Which reminds him – he should probably give Cas a call. He knows Dean said he’d do it once he got on the road, but he still probably wants to hear about how Jack’s doing so far. He clears their empty plates and puts them in the sink to wash later, after Jack’s gone to bed.

“You good to color for a few minutes? I’m gonna give your dad a call.”

“Sure,” Jack nods, flipping the page in his coloring book and setting a red crayon loose on the outline of a daffodil. “Can I talk to him?”

“If he answers, absolutely you can.” Sam assures him as he pulls out his phone. It rings a few times before Cas picks up.

“Sam? How are you, how’s Jack?” Cas sounds curious, but not worried. Given that Dean’s off on a quest to protect their son from some monster who’s been torturing and murdering angels for intel, he sounds almost suspiciously calm.

“We’re doing good. You about finished with that Georgia thing?”

“I’ve identified the ghoul’s lair, but have yet to catch the ghoul itself.” Cas says, dry and disinterested. “You didn’t call just to ask about my case, did you?”

“No, uh, just making conversation, I guess. Dean called you?”

“Yes, he said you’d sprained your arm and he would be taking on a time sensitive case in your stead.”

“Well, yeah, that’s part of it.” Sam huffs, suddenly very certain that Dean is about to be in the doghouse. “He didn’t say anything else?”

“Should he have?” Cas asks, an edge in his voice.

“This morning, Ketch called, said he’s been tracking something for a while out in Oregon, something that’s been killing angels.” Sam has paced into the hallway, an eye still trained on Jack but out of his general earshot, and he’s glad now. “He caught up to it enough that he was able to spare the most recent angel, and they told him that whatever this thing is was grilling them for information about nephilim. About Jack.”

“Unbelievable.” Cas hisses, and Sam can’t help but take his side in this. Dean should’ve told him.

“Ketch wanted me to come as back up, but with my arm, and you were already on your way to Georgia, it just would’ve been too much. So Dean decided to go.”

“Dean hasn’t done anything more grueling than a werewolf case in years. He hasn’t done more than a salt and burn in over a year. Do you think he’s up for something like this?”

“Not really, but, I mean, it’s Dean. He knows how to handle himself. It’s like, like riding a bike.”

“If you say so.” Cas can’t hide his frustration. “I’ll try to hurry this case along and meet them in Oregon.”

“They’re in Corvallis.”

“Thank you, Sam, but I’ll just track Dean’s GPS. I think he’s lost his right to privacy in this case.”

“Uh, you got a minute? Jack wanted to talk to you.” Sam asks, regretting the sour mood he’s put Cas in by breaking the news about Dean and Ketch.

“Of course, put him on.” Cas softens immediately at the mention of Jack, and it warms something inside Sam, how Cas just melts for that kid. Sam brings the phone to the table and puts it on speaker, placing it beside Jack where he’s putting the finishing touches on his crimson abstract study of a daffodil.

“Daddy?” Jack asks the phone.

“Hello Jack, how are you?” Cas asks, each word smile shaped.

“Good,” Jack responds, considering his next words, pausing his hand from its coloring. “Sam has been telling me about horseshoe crabs. And seel-ee-can-thsss.”

“That sounds very exciting.” Cas responds, and he sounds like he means it. Sam is certain that he’s going to have seen a documentary about horseshoe crabs before the month is out.

“Yeah. And we’ve been watching Oscar.”

“Very nice. Did you have a good lunch?”

“Mhmm. Grapes and celeries and dino nuggets.”

“I’m jealous, that sounds lovely.” Cas says, and Sam stifles a chuckle. Cas doesn’t need to eat, and only really eats in front of Jack. He doesn't want Jack to get the impression that it’s optional.

“You gonna be home soon, Dad?”

“Not for another few days. When I’m done with what I’m doing in Georgia, I’m going to go help Dean and Ketch in Oregon.”

“Okay,” Jack agrees, but he seems depleted, like he’s suddenly exhausted. He lets go of his crayon, like holding on to it isn’t worth the effort. It rolls impotently to the center of the table.

“I love you very much, and I’ll be home as soon as I can. Sam will take good care of you.”

“I know. I love you, too, Daddy.” Jack murmurs.

“I’ll call again tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay,” Jack agrees, now downright sullen. Sam takes over the call.

“Alright, Cas, you good?” He asks, taking the phone off of speaker again.

“I’m as well as I can be, given the circumstances.” Cas replies, sounding distracted. “Call me if you need anything, or if you get any updates from Dean, since I doubt he’ll update me directly given his present deception.”

“I will. Good luck on the case.”

“Thank you. Goodbye, Sam.”

“Later, Cas.”

He hangs up the phone and finds himself back in the thick of babysitting, with a freshly distressed child on his hands. Sam half wishes that he’d have waited to call Cas until later. He had Jack so much calmer, and he just went and shook it all up again by reminding him that he won’t see Cas or Dean for at least a few days. He realizes this is going to be the longest that Jack has gone without both of his fathers in his entire life, and the only person around to manage the fallout is Sam.

Looking at Jack, who’s flipping idly through his coloring book, apparently reviewing his past work (which consists entirely of monochromatic renditions, as Jack hates using more than one crayon on a given page), Sam can’t help but remember his own childhood, spent in the twin binary disappointments of waiting for his father to return and waiting for his father to leave. Jack has been lucky enough to never share that experience, up until now, when it’s all crashing down on him at once. He can’t decide which would be harder to deal with, expecting your dad to leave you, or getting blindsided by it.

“You done coloring for now?” Sam asks, already knowing the answer but wanting to give Jack the agency of confirming it himself.

“Yeah.” Jack nods, staring down at the paper in front of him.

He looks so small, sitting hunched over the table like this. He’s a cute kid, Sam thinks, and it isn’t just because he loves him. He’s got sparkly blue eyes, round and curious and bright. Jack’s a little short for his age, but it suits his proportions, and Sam can tell he’s gonna sprout up any one of these days, just like he himself did. He’d been a short scrawny kid until his growth spurt sent him into the stratosphere.

Jack’s got soft brown hair, and he wears it pretty short, mostly because that’s what’s easiest for his parents to deal with, but Jack doesn’t seem to mind. Sam’s sure that, if he wanted it longer, neither Dean nor Cas would have the heart to refuse him. He looks kind of like Dean did as a child, Sam thinks, but he isn’t sure if that’s true, or just his own projection, a way for his brain to add another layer of connection between Dean and his serendipitous son.

“Do you wanna watch more of your show?”

“Nah,” Jack mumbles.

“You seem kinda tired, you wanna take a nap?” Jack’s always been pretty good about napping, but it has to be his decision. He detests being put down for a nap by routine, and it only makes him weepy and irritable. Some days, he doesn’t need or want a nap, other days he wants to nap after breakfast and then again after lunch. They’ve all just gotten used to playing it by ear. Sam’s sure some parenting book would have something to say about this, but none of them can be bothered to care. It isn’t like any parenting books have been written about caring for an archangel nephilim, anyway.

“Maybe.” Jack looks up at him, and he does look tired. “But…can I nap in D’s room?”

“Sure.” Sam nods. “You wanna walk or get carried?”

In lieu of a verbal answer, Jack simply extends his arms up to Sam, and he obliges, wrapping his good arm around him and hoisting him up until he can wrap his little arms around Sam’s shoulders. He bounces him a little as he walks slowly to Dean’s room (really Dean and Cas’s room, but it was Dean’s first, so that’s what they all call it), and the gentle motion succeeds in lulling Jack into a delicate early phase of sleep.

Sam’s careful not to wake him up when he transfers him down to Dean’s mattress, though he accidentally bumps his sprained wrist on the headboard and has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from letting out an instinctual curse or two at the pain zinging all the way up to his elbow.

While Jack is asleep, he does a load of laundry, cleans up the kitchen and washes the few dishes they used at lunch. He remembers the early days, when Cas was still dead. He’d gotten a lot better at cooking, because it was one of the few things Dean would let him do to help out. He also got used to cleaning, something that hadn’t mattered much to him in his life on the road. Dean seemed even more bothered by messes and clutter after Jack was born than he was before, and he’d always been the neater of the two of them, so that was saying something. Now it was just second nature, just muscle memory, to wash the dishes and wipe down the counters multiple times a day.

He spends some time researching, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He doesn’t have much to go off of, as far as this case with Ketch went, but it doesn’t feel right to just leave it to everyone else while he waits at the bunker. He revisits some of his research files about nephilim, things he’d compiled when Jack was a baby. He’d gotten very interested in the power of nephilim, the reasons that Heaven outlawed their existence. It would make sense, for someone to be after Jack for his grace. Still, revisiting the files does little more than make him more anxious about the situation than he already had been.

Jack wakes up after almost two hours and wanders out to the library looking sleep rumpled and confused.

“Where’s D?” Jack mumbles from the doorway, and Sam scoots his chair back to offer him his undivided attention.

“Heya Jack. D’s meeting up with Ketch, remember?” Sam prompts, and he hates the way Jack’s expression crumbles as it returns to him, that Cas and Dean are out, that it’s just him and Sam.

“Oh,” Jack breathes, trudging across the room and reaching out for Sam to pick him up. He pulls him up into his lap and lets him curl up against his chest.

“You missin’ your dads?” Sam asks, rubbing Jack’s back with his good hand.

“Yeah.” He sighs heavily against Sam’s neck. “I know they’ll be home in a few days.” He doesn’t sound very comforted by the information.

“They will.” Sam confirms, “But like I said this morning, it’s okay to be sad about it. I bet they’re sad, too. They miss you, too, Jack.”

“Yeah?” He asks, not quite tearful, but verging on it.

“Of course, buddy. Nobody loves anybody half as much as your dads love you.”

“Saaaaaam” Jack groans, but Sam can hear the smile in his voice, and he can feel the shape of it where Jack has his face pressed against the top of his shoulder.

“I’m being serious!” He laughs, “When you were a baby, Dean couldn’t even sleep if he wasn’t in the same room as you. And Cas,” Sam ruffles the back of Jack’s hair as he mentions Cas. “Your Dad missed you so much, wanted to meet you so bad, that he did something nobody’s ever done before. Came back from a place nobody’s ever come back from, except him.”

“The dark place?”

“Mhmm,” Sam nods, his chin brushing the crown of Jack’s head. “Dean didn’t think he’d ever see him, ever again, but he did – because of you. And how much Cas loved you.”

“I love him, too.” Jack whispers, like it’s a secret between him and Sam. “And I don’t sleep good without D, either.” He confesses, even quieter.

“You know, you can sleep in my room while they’re gone.” Sam offers, but Jack pulls away and shakes his head.

“I don’t wanna sleep in your room.” Jack makes an exaggerated face of disgust, and Sam is shocked into laughter.

“Oh yeah? I got cooties or something?”

“No, not cooties.” Jack giggles, “D says that’s where you do all your farts!”

“What?!” He has half a mind to be insulted, but it’s frankly too funny that Jack has been harboring this opinion for who knows how long, so all he can do is laugh.

“Yeah, D says I can’t go in there, ‘cuz it’s where you do your farts!” He reiterates, now a bit bolder, since Sam seems amused.

And of course, now it makes sense. When Jack was new to walking independently, he often would find his way into Sam’s room and knock his books on the floor, or empty his clean clothes out of his dresser onto the floor. So this must have been Dean’s solution, getting him to stay out not through common courtesy, but by telling him it was gross. He thinks fondly back on how Dean trained Sam not to mess with John’s alcohol stash by telling him it was actually poison, and only John knew the secret spell that would make it safe to drink.

“Oh, you don’t like my farts?” Sam cocks a teasing eyebrow, and Jack smiles wide and shakes his head ‘no’ vigorously. “Hmm. Well, I guess we could both sleep in D’s room? If you don’t wanna sleep in your room tonight?”

“Yeah, okay.” Jack agrees, before quickly adding, “But no farting!”

“No farting,” Sam says with exaggerated solemnity. “I’ll save it all for my room.”

“Mmkay.” Jack sits back, no longer pressed so tight against Sam, instead lounging on his thigh, leaning against the library table.

“What do you want to do, before dinner?”

“Could we play outside?”

“Sure,” Sam pats Jack on the back until he hops down onto the floor of his own volition, then he gets up too, stretching since he’s been sitting for so long. “You go put on your shoes, and I’ll meet you by the door, okay?”

“Mhmm.” Jack’s already on his way down the hall to get his shoes. Sam puts on his boots, and grabs the bucket of toys they bring along when they go play outside – various balls, some sidewalk chalk, a frisbee, and a bunch of matchbox cars and dump trucks he likes to push through the dirt.

Jack meets him by the door, and they head outside. It’s a pleasant evening, on the tail end of summer, still warm and bright late into the evening but not so oppressively hot anymore.

They toss a blue rubber ball back and forth for a while, until Jack gets bored of that and takes to running up the hill beside the bunker, then rolling back down it again. When he’s bored of that, and relatively tuckered out from all the running, he plops down in the grass and has Sam sit a few feet away so they can roll the blue ball back and forth between them. Sam can tell that Jack’s gotten what he wanted out of outside time, and he checks his phone briefly – no messages from Dean or Cas, and no missed calls from anyone. It’s just after seven.

“You gettin’ hungry?” He asks, and Jack nods. “Anything in particular you want to have for dinner?”

“Watermelon.” Jack says, with the finality of a king ordering his subjects around. Sam grins.

“We can have watermelon, but we can’t just have watermelon.” He rolls the ball back to Jack. “What do you want to have with it?”

“P’tato chips.” Jack answers after some thought, rolling the ball back to Sam.

“Okayyyyy.” Sam draws the word out on his exhale as he thinks. “Yeah, okay. We can have watermelon and potato chips. What else?” He rolls the ball again. Jack picks it up and squishes at it with his little fingers, barely making the surface compress. Sam can easily hold the ball in just one hand, and if he squeezed it as hard as he could (like Jack seems to be) then the ball would probably burst. He tries to remember what it was like, being that little.

“How ‘bout hot dogs?” Jack asks, after almost two full minutes of focused silence. His face is serious, negotiatory.

“Absolutely. Hot dogs, watermelon, and potato chips, coming right up,” Sam announces as he stands up, reminding himself not to use his bad arm for leverage as he rises. Jack gets up, too, dusting loose bits of grass and dirt off of his own clothes, a habit he’s picked up from Dean, who hates tracking in dirt and detritus from outside. He drops the ball back in the bucket of outside stuff.

When they get back inside, Sam gets to work on dinner, which shouldn’t take too long considering that all he has to do is cook some hot dogs and cut up some melon. Jack barely has time to color in the outline of a fish entirely chocolate brown.

Jack, much to Dean’s surprise, hates ketchup. He doesn’t eat any condiments on his hotdogs whatsoever, though Sam imagines he’ll probably grow out of this. A lot of kids, himself included at Jack’s age, like simple – even bland – food, because their palates just aren’t ready for certain things. He’s sure that when Jack’s older, he’ll be just as adventurous as Dean when it comes to trying new foods.

“When we’re done, can we call D?”

“Yeah, we can call him. I’ll have to talk to him by myself for a little bit first, though.”

“About the angels dyin’?” Jack asks, eyes solemn and sincere. Sam nearly chokes on his hotdog.

“Jack!” He takes a big gulp of water, then clears his throat. “Were you listening to me on the phone with your dad?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Jack looks away, embarrassed.

“Um, how?” Sam asks, at a loss for what else to say. He was definitely out of earshot, he was barely in eyeshot. There’s no way he just happened to overhear him. Yet…

“I dunno. You weren’t being quiet or anything.” Jack shrugs.

“It’s okay, bud, you’re not in trouble. I’m not mad. I’m just, uh, surprised. I was standing pretty far away. Me and Cas were having a grown up conversation.”

“Is Cas gonna be okay?” Jack asks, looking more than a little stressed. “He’s an angel, right?”

“Yeah, Cas is an angel. He’s going to be okay, he’s the best angel. He’s super smart.” Sam assures him, brain galloping away from him a mile a minute. Does Jack have, like, super sonic hearing? He hasn’t really seemed any different from a normal kid, besides the weird mind meld thing he did to Dean the day he was born. That had seemed like a special circumstance, and it hadn’t happened again. Why would he be any different now, any more powerful today than he was yesterday?

“Mmkay.”

“When I talk to Dean, can you try not to listen in? I need to have a private conversation with him.”

“Mhmm.” Jack picks up a slice of watermelon and takes a big crunchy bite.

For the rest of the meal, Sam quizzes Jack about some of the things they saw on Sesame Street earlier, but part of his brain is still reeling from the whole eavesdropping incident, and the rest of him is stressing about the case with Ketch.

Jack’s barely through with chewing and swallowing his last potato chip when he asks again if they can call Dean. Sam gets Jack set up with the TV, then goes into his own room to call Dean, just in case Jack’s hearing is in fact sharper than normal.

“Dean?” He asks when the phone picks up with more than a beat of silence.

“Hey, how’re things going?” Dean asks, though he sounds distracted. “Jack doing okay?”

“Jack’s fine. You didn’t tell Cas about the case? Are you nuts?”

“Sam, did you call him?”

“Of course I called him, Jack wanted to talk to him.” It’s not the only reason they called, but Dean doesn’t need to know that.

“Fuck.” Dean grunts. “Look, I didn’t mean to lie to ‘em, he just, as soon as I told him I was leaving for a case he got so damn worried, and I knew if I told him what was up he’d drop the ghoul thing and drive all the way to Oregon, and that would be dumb. We don’t even know what’s happening yet, and it isn’t like I’m gonna be on my own – Ketch is here, and we’re working some leads.”

“You know he’s like, crazy pissed, right?” Sam sighs, knowing Dean probably does know that already.

“Yeah. And it’s totally fair of him. Just sucks.”

“Sorry, man. How is the case, anyway?”

“So far just a bunch of horrible dead ends. Four angels dead, all across Oregon. The angel Ketch was able to save had been held captive for about a week before he found them, had been questioned several times, always about Jack. The only shit they ‘knew’ about Jack were just rumors Ketch had spread around years ago, though, so probably none of the other angels that got questioned coughed up anything useful either, thank fuck.”

“You got any idea why they would be after Jack?”

“I don’t know, power? Why else? If it was angels that was after ‘em, they wouldn’t be killin’ angels, so I doubt it’s anyone who’s just real enthusiastic about enforcing Heaven’s no-tolerance nephilim policy.”

“Yeah, I figured the same thing. Just, I don’t know, why now?” Sam wonders, “It’s been so quiet since he was like, two. What’s the sudden interest all about?”

“Man, I don’t know. Maybe whoever it is just now heard about him and they’re behind the curve.”

“Maybe…” Sam trails off, “Just strange. I don’t like it.”

“You and me both,” Dean huffs, and Sam can hear the fear underneath the frustration.

“Hey, you and Ketch are gonna crack this thing. And Cas, now that he knows, he’s gonna come out when he’s wrapped the ghoul case up, so that’ll be good.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Dean sighs, still sounding pretty unsure. “Can I, uh, talk to Jack?”

“Sure, yeah, I’ll go get him. He’s watching Sesame Street.”

“Figures.”

Sam goes into the sitting room and pauses the TV.

“Hey, Jack, you wanna talk to D?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Jack sits up straight as a board, ready to talk to Dean. Sam knows Jack loves both of his parents, but he always finds it interesting, the different shapes that love takes. His relationship with Cas is marked by this smooth undercurrent of closeness. It’s about sitting quietly together, reading together, it’s threaded through with peace, contentment, gentle industriousness. Jack’s relationship with Dean is unabashedly tactile, it’s selfish and needy and loud. It’s about being held and carried, playing games and singing songs, reveling in the personality of one another.

“Hey, baby, how’re you doin’? How’re things with you and Sam?”

“Me ‘n Sam are good,” Jack grins, looking up at Sam happily. “I’m okay, played outside some.”

“Yeah? Nice out today?”

“Mhmm, warm and sunny. We played catch, and I rolled down the big hill.”

“Nice! When I get back, we gotta dig out the basketball, I think you’d get a kick out of that.”

“Okay!” Jack agrees, before babbling on about more things he wants to do once Dean’s home again. Sam zones out a little while the two of them chatter back and forth, just enjoying the utter joy that seems to grip Jack when he’s talking to Dean.

Sometimes it seems like it has to be a dream, like they can’t possibly have this happy little family. His brother’s been in a committed relationship for almost four years now, has been a father for just over four years. Sam supposes that Dean’s been a father for longer than that, if he counts his own childhood.

He sees so much of himself in Jack, the way he calls Dean ‘D’, just like he used to. Even when Dean was just a kid, he had that same way of making Sam feel like he was the most important, most interesting person in the world, and he’s still got that skill, because he can see him doing it for Jack, too. Sam hopes against hope that someday, he’ll get to try his hand at that, too, with his own kids. That he’ll have spent enough time watching Dean do it, that he can do it for his own children.

“I know, Jack. I miss you, too.” Sam tunes back in as the conversation winds down. Jack seems troubled by the prospect of the conversation ending. Desperately, Sam does not want Jack to start crying while Dean is on the phone. He’s not sure if it’s because he doesn’t want Dean to be more stressed than he already is, or if it’s because he doesn't want Dean to know that Sam’s not very good at getting Jack to stop crying. Probably a little bit of both.

“We’ll call you tomorrow, okay Dean?” Sam interjects, and Jack looks at him with a scathing expression of betrayal, like he and Dean could stay on the phone forever if it weren’t for Sam’s meddling.

“Alright, Sam. I love you both. Goodnight, Jack.” Dean sounds tired, but not any more stressed than when he first picked up the phone, which is a win.

“Goodnight, D.” Jack mumbles mournfully.

“Bye, Dean.” Sam adds before ending the call. Jack is instantly upset, arms crossed tight over his chest, jaw clenched closed.

“Jack, it’s okay. Dean’s okay.” Jack doesn’t move an inch, or even look up at him. Sam sighs and sits down next to him, and after a few tense moments, Jack crawls into his lap and presses his face into the front of Sam’s shirt. They sit quietly for a few minutes, and once some of the tension has left Jack’s shoulders, Sam unpauses the episode of Sesame Street, and they finish it in increasingly comfortable silence.

When the episode ends, Jack is barely clinging to consciousness, so Sam picks him up and carries him to Dean’s room.

“Can you put on your pajamas and brush your teeth while I go change into my pajamas?” Sam asks, and Jack nods, yawning. When Sam returns, Jack is sitting on the edge of Dean’s bed, wearing his dinosaur pajamas, the ones with green flannel pants and a white cotton shirt covered in blue dinosaur footprints. Sam’s pajamas are far less fashionable, just a worn out brown long sleeved waffle weave shirt and some black sweatpants he got on sale from Old Navy.

“Can you bring me my bear?” Jack asks through a yawn, and Sam nods, yawning sympathetically. He goes into Jack’s room across the hall and grabs the oversized brown stuffed bear off of Jack’s (underused) bed, carrying it with him back across the hall. He hands it to Jack before turning off all the lights except the bedside lamp.

They both lay down, and Jack wiggles in close until his head is pillowed on Sam’s bicep. He reaches out and turns off the lamp with his good arm. It’s just a little too late when he realizes that Jack’s on his non-dominant side, with his bad arm. Before he can do anything about it, Jack rolls over, crushing his wrist down into the mattress.

“Ow!” He yelps, moving away too quickly, which only makes it hurt that much worse as he pulls on it.

“Sorry, Sam,” Jack gasps into the darkness when he realizes what’s happened.

“It’s okay, buddy, you didn’t mean to.” He’ll be glad when Cas is back, and he can take care of the damn thing. “We should probably switch sides, so that doesn’t happen again.” Sam sits up, but Jack doesn’t make any move to get out of bed. Sam doesn’t make much of that – he could just be planning to roll across to the other side, once Sam gets up to switch.

“Is it…here?” Jack asks, and Sam feels a tiny warm hand on his sprained wrist. He grimaces in pain, but doesn’t pull away just yet, because he doesn’t want to make him feel worse than he already does.

“Yeah,” Sam grunts, and the warmth of Jack’s palm grows, almost imperceptibly, then overwhelmingly, and by the time Sam registers how odd that is, there’s a faint golden light emanating from the point of contact between them, and his brain just kind of stops working. His mouth goes dry, and the light dims again, and it’s just the sound of his own heartbeat hammering in his ears.

“Does it still hurt?” Jack asks, and it sounds so far away, like Sam’s hearing him from somewhere underground.

“No, it doesn't.” Sam hears himself say, and his brain lights back up, sirens blaring in every corner of his consciousness, because it’s true. Sam’s wrist isn’t injured anymore, and it’s because Jack fixed it, the way Cas fixes stuff. Because Jack’s got powers. All of a sudden. All at once. He’s got hearing like a bat, and now he can heal people. And the only person around to witness or manage any of it is Sam.

“Good.” Jack says, simply, before snuggling back down into the sheets. Sam lowers himself back to the mattress, resting his head on the pillow, eyes open wide in the dark room. Jack wraps himself around Sam’s arm, face plastered against Sam’s shoulder, and it’s only a few minutes before he’s out cold, drooling a little. Sam just lays there, trying to think, unable to get past the holy shit of it all. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, it just happens eventually, because he’s too exhausted not to.

Chapter Text

Sam wakes up with a stuffed bear covering half of his face and most of his chest, the left half of his body sweating and the right half prickly cold. He remembers he’s sleeping in Dean’s room, because Dean and Cas are away. And he remembers Jack’s asleep here too – that explains the bear, and the heavy warm weight on his left, since Jack’s still clinging to him for dear life. And he remembers, in the lack of pain twinging up his forearm, that Jack healed him last night.

He sits bolt upright, bear sliding off his face and onto the bed beside him. Now that he’s at a better angle, he can see that Jack is draped over his left hip, face tipped down towards the mattress since he’s been dislodged from Sam’s arm and chest with the change in position. His breaths are deep and even, and Sam is glad the kid sleeps so soundly. He slithers out the right side of the bed, doing his best not to disturb him, then tiptoes down the hall to his own room, and before he really even thinks about what he’s doing, he’s dialing Dean’s number.

Dean answers the phone on the tenth ring, right as he’s preparing to be sent to voicemail.

“What, what, y’okay?” Dean growls across the line, sounding breathless.

“I, uh, yeah. Sorry. You okay?”

“Fuck, sorry. I am, yeah. I’ve just. Look, I’ve been up all night. We had a lead on another angel that got snapped up, and we’ve been chasing our tails all over this stupid town, and I…shit, tell me Jack’s not listening to all this?”

“Don’t worry, he’s still asleep.”

“Jeez, had me scared there for a minute. Okay. Enough of my sob story. What’re you callin’ about, if it’s not for Jack to talk?”

“I…uh…” Sam is suddenly struck by the realization that Dean can’t do anything with the information he called with the intention of giving to him. If he tells him ‘hey, your son has powerful hearing and healing now,’ all Dean can do with that is worry more than he already is. Sam’s job here is to take care of Jack. Not to just, just watch him and make everyone else do all the hard thinking from afar. “I don’t know, I just wanted to talk without him in earshot. He’s trying to be brave, but I know he really misses you and Cas, and I don’t really have a strategy for when shit hits the fan. It isn’t like any of us have experience with this, you know? He’s never been without both of you for longer than a day and a half. We haven’t really built up any methods to manage his emotions and expectations around this.”

“Yeah,” Dean rumbles a gruff sigh, and Sam feels like an asshole for even bringing him this half truth. He’s deliriously glad that he didn’t come out of the gate with the full truth. “I’m sorry, Sam. I should be better at this, and we should have thought more seriously about this as a possibility before now, but I dropped the ball, and now you’re the one holding the bag.”

“Dean, there’s no way you could have predicted this kind of thing, or prepared for it. Stop kicking yourself, okay?”

“Whatever, Sammy. Look, it’s not perfect, but I guess I do have some experience with this shit.” Sam wants to argue, but something in Dean’s tone stops him, and he’s glad he keeps his mouth shut. “Whenever Dad was gone for longer than he said he’d be – and I didn’t have to spend all my time trying to score extra cash to tide us over – I just did my best to distract you. If you asked about him, I deflected hard, and I tried to, you know, give you whatever you wanted, if I could swing it. If you wanted to do something or watch something or whatever, even if it wasn’t what I wanted, I’d do it and I’d keep things light, and calm.”

“You – “ Sam breathes, but he feels incapable of forming a sentence, so it just hangs in the air.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sad and useless advice, don’t I know it. That’s all I got, man. I think he gets more sad, after talking on the phone. Maybe try to limit that to the evening so the whole day isn’t shot? Him bein’ sad at night isn’t ideal either, but at least crying makes him sleepy.”

“Okay, I can – yeah. Thanks, Dean.”

“Hope it helps.” His brother sounds dead on his feet.

“You should try to get some sleep, it’ll help you hunt better.” Sam offers.

“I’ll take it under advisement.” Dean deadpans. “I was in the middle of somethin’, you good for now?”

“I’m good.”

“Good. I’ll talk to you later – if you can get away with it…maybe…maybe see if you can’t keep Jack from wantin’ to call tonight? If we can catch up with this latest angel, we might have this thing wrapped up.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Sam hears the click of Dean hanging up in a hurry, and he pockets his phone in a daze.

He emerges from his room feeling worse, not better, but he sucks it up and goes back down the hall to peek into Dean’s room. Jack is still sleeping, though now he’s wrapped himself around his bear, who should probably have a name (all of Jack’s other stuffed animals have names) but still doesn’t. Sam wonders if that’s a sign of the bear’s superiority, that he defies all attempts to name him, remaining his undiluted self, not even stooping to ‘Mr. Bear,’ or ‘Big Bear,’ always only bear. He’s inimitable, beyond the ability to be confused for anyone else.

Satisfied that Jack will probably be fast asleep for at least another half an hour, Sam heads to the kitchen and mixes up some pancake batter, chucking some blueberries into the mix just because it seems like that kind of a day. They both slept in – it’s already past ten – but he’s honestly glad they did, because it means there’s a little less daylight to fill before they can wind back down again. Days when Jack is up before the rest of the household are few and far between, but when they arrive they feel endless, with how much activity needs to be crammed into them to keep Jack engaged.

Brewing some coffee for himself, he decides that bacon would go well with the pancakes, and as he’s laying it out on the cookie sheet to pop into the oven, it strikes him how profoundly out of character it feels for him to make bacon. Even when Dean makes it, he rarely eats more than a single strip. Maybe it’s a sign that he misses his brother, that he’s craving it in the first place.

Jack toddles into the kitchen, clutching bear, his hair sticking up wildly in the front. He reminds Sam somewhat of Cas, when they first met him, how his hair always stuck up like he’d lost a fight with an electrical socket.

“How’re you doing, kiddo?” Sam asks, flashing him a brief smile before turning back to the pancakes he’s got in a big pan on the stove. “Sleep good?”

“Yeah,” Jack yawns before settling himself at the table, placing his bear in a seat beside him.

“You wanna color? Food’ll be done soon, but you still have a few minutes while I finish the pancakes.”

“Pancakes?” Jack perks up, looking more awake already at the prospect. He’s enamored of pancakes, especially ones with berries or chocolate chips in them. He hates butter on pancakes (too salty, he claims), but loves maple syrup – real maple syrup, not the artificial stuff. Even though Sam knows the kid has a full taste spectrum, he wonders sometimes if his pickiness is somehow angelic, like he’s picking up on the molecules of it all.

“Yeah, blueberry ones.”

“Wow,” Jack beams, and Sam feels right for the first time since he fell asleep last night. He grins back. “I smell something else, too.” Jack comments, sort of as a means of asking the question ‘what else are you making’ but only obliquely.

“Bacon,” Sam explains, and Jack nods, as if to say ‘I suspected as much’.

“D usually makes the bacon.” Jack notes, and he has Sam on that one.

“He does, yeah. But I wanted it today, so I’m making it.”

“Mhmm.” He looks distracted. Sam brings over his coloring stuff, just in case, and is glad to see him flip to a new page and wrangle a light green crayon to tackle the outline of a whale.

Sam serves up breakfast, and he’s halfway through cutting his own pancakes when he realizes he’s left the syrup on the counter. He braces himself on his knees to get up and grab it when he sees it just…floating. In his direction. Slowly, almost meandering. His jaw drops, and he tears his gaze away from the bottle hovering in the air to look over at Jack, who is focused on cutting up his own pancakes.

“Jack.” Sam whispers harshly, perhaps more harshly than he intends. Jack’s gaze snaps up from his plate, and he locks eyes with Sam, unspoken ‘what?’ written across his little features. “Is that. Did you? The syrup?”

“Sam?” Jack looks perplexed. The syrup is still floating, on its gentle way to the table. He knows it is, he can see it from the corner of his eye.

“Jack. Are you…bringing the syrup to the table?” He manages, not looking away from his nephew for even a moment.

“I’m…” And Sam can tell the exact moment that Jack realizes what he was doing, and that it was him doing it, because his head turns to look at the syrup, now only a foot or so away, five feet in the air. And the syrup bottle (blessedly closed, and blessedly plastic) drops to the ground as though a ghost spiked it onto the floor. “Maybe?”

“Okay.” Sam nods, tongue feeling too big for his mouth. He nods harder, getting up slowly, picking up the bottle from where it’s rolling on the floor beside them. “Alright.” He places the bottle on the table. And he doesn’t say another word about it, because what the hell would he even say?

They eat in silence, and Sam isn’t sure if he’s the one imposing it, or if it’s Jack.

“You wanna watch some TV or something?” Sam asks once they’re both done eating, because he isn’t sure he’s got the mental capacity to do something more involved. Thankfully, Jack seems to be on the same page. He nods, and grabs his bear off of the seat beside his before trudging back to the sitting room. Sam puts the syrup away, and tosses all the dirty dishes into the sink before speed-walking back to turn on the television for Jack.

“Can I watch more Oscar?” Jack whispers into the soft brown fur of his bear, not looking at Sam.

“Sure, yeah.” He selects it on the streaming app and stays for a few minutes to make sure Jack’s not freaking out. When he’s sure things aren’t on the precipice of something awful, he clears his throat until Jack glances his direction. “I gotta do a few things, are you okay here for a little while, maybe ten minutes?”

“Yeah,” Jack nods, before turning back to watch whatever conundrum Bert and Ernie seem to be embroiled in.

Sam walks calmly into the hall, then jogs as far away from the sitting room as he can get, just to be certain he’s out of Jack’s earshot. Because he’s gotta talk to Cas about this. He can’t call Dean again. So it’s gotta be Cas. He’ll know what to do.

He selects his contact and hits call, and Cas picks up on the second ring. The sound from his end of the line is loud and unpleasant.

“Sam!” Cas answers the phone with a shout, to be heard over the din.

“Cas?”

“I apologize – for the commotion – “ There’s a colossal crashing sound, and a squealing wail. “I’m in the middle of some unexpected – “ Another awful sound, a sort of meaty wet smack, followed by a bunch of metallic clanging. “Combat. The ghouls were in a sort of – symbiotic,” More squealing. “Relationship with a clan of werewolves, under the agreement that,” A series of wet snapping sounds, Cas’s own breathless grunt, more clanging. “That the wolves could feed on their victims' hearts, and leave the remainder of their kills’ carcasses to a family of ghouls.”

“And you’re fighting them right now?”

“I have been for a while. I expect to be fighting them for a bit longer,” Cas admits, sounding a bit better. “I’ve taken temporary shelter in the rafters of the building I found them in. There are many wolves, and at least four ghouls. I’ve killed two of the ghouls, and seven wolves, but they just keep coming. It’s my understanding that this was a hugely beneficial relationship for them both, and they’re not going to move on without a fight. What did you need? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, just wanted to see if you’d finished up and were headed to Dean yet.” Sam lies, because he cannot imagine trying to explain the truth to Cas while he’s elbow deep in werewolves and ghouls. “Seems like he and Ketch have a promising lead, but could use a little help.”

“Alright. I’ll head their direction when I’m done here. It may be a while, since this will require copious clean up.”

“Right. Yeah. Alright, Good luck, Cas.”

“Thank you, Sam.” Cas replies diplomatically before ending the call and presumably jumping back into the fray.

So much for that idea.

Sam shakes out his panic, starting at his fingertips and letting the movement travel up his arms to his shoulders and neck, then his face and head, letting it loosen him and relax his tension.

He can do this. It makes sense that these skills would develop now. It isn’t worrisome, it’s natural. Like how some kids don’t show their language skills until their caregivers are away, because they haven’t to that point had any urgent desire to communicate a need that wasn’t preempted and fulfilled without them needing to say anything about it.

Maybe Jack has always been able to heal people, but he’s never needed to, since Cas is always here, and Sam and Dean rarely get injured anymore. It’s totally natural, that he would see someone he loves in pain, and try to do for them what he’s seen Cas do a hundred times – after all, if his dad can do it, why would he assume that he himself cannot?

Maybe Jack has always been able to telekinetically move objects, but he’s never needed to, since his fathers are always there to bring him things and carry things for him. It didn’t even seem like he was doing it on purpose, maybe it was just a one time thing, a fluke. Hell, Sam’s had his own bouts of telekinesis. Back when he was still having his visions, he’d moved an armoire out from in front of a closet using his mind, because he’d just thought about it hard enough. Maybe it was like that, just a case of Jack wanting something really bad and it not having been within reach, for the first time in his very young life.

Sam could do this. He just has to keep an eye on the kid, try not to let on that all of this is super abnormal, try not to let his anxiety about it rub off on Jack. If they can both just remain calm, this doesn’t have to be some big thing. Sam snags a few books about telekinesis out of the library on his way back to the sitting room, and is relieved to see Jack sitting right where he left him, snuggled into the corner of the couch with his bear, watching The Count explain the number eight.

He cracks open one of the books – Telekinetic Phenomena and their Catalysts – and begins reading.

Before he knows it, he’s gone through all three books he brought with him, and they’ve cruised through at least six episodes of Sesame Street, probably more. They have absolutely missed lunchtime. Jack is awake, but just barely, chin balanced atop his bear’s head.

“Jack?” Sam murmurs, getting up from the armchair and sitting down beside Jack. He turns and looks up at him, big blue eyes wide and glossy. “It’s almost six. Are you hungry?”

“I dunno.” Jack responds, and Sam can’t blame him. He himself isn’t sure if he’s hungry either. They’ve been so sedentary, it isn’t like they’ve worked up much of an appetite. He pauses the episode of the show, and the screen locks up on a close up image of Big Bird, mouth open in mid sentence.

“Well, I think we should have something, since we forgot all about lunch. Does anything sound good?”

“No,” Jack rubs one of his bear’s ear between his fingers. Sam wonders if that’s comforting, and he wishes he could try it out. He could use a little comfort right about now. He never had stuffed animals, growing up, so he doesn’t have much of a basis for comparison.

“Okay.” Sam pauses, thinks of a few different options for dinner. “Anything you don’t want, that sounds icky?”

“Hmm.” Jack hums a thoughtful note into the fur of his bear’s head. “No tomatoes. Not even sauce ones. And no cheese.”

“Loud and clear, no tomatoes and no cheese. You wanna come hang out with me in the kitchen, or you wanna stay here and keep watching Oscar?”

“Stay here. But.” He rubs his bear’s ear again. “Can I watch a movie?”

“Sure, buddy, what movie?”

“The Jasmine one.”

“Aladdin?”

“Mhmm. With the blue one, and the monkey.”

“Yep, that’s Aladdin, all right.” Sam navigates through a series of streaming platform menus until he locates the film. Once it’s up and running, he heads to the kitchen and decides to make a stir-fry, to get some vegetables into their day. He dices up carrots and onions, rough chops some bok choy, and drains a can of baby corn. Then he loads up the rice cooker (which Dean swore up and down would be a waste of money and space, and which has quickly become a workhorse in their kitchen) and starts heating a drizzle of oil in a big frying pan. He’ll fry up an egg for each of them, since there aren’t any easy proteins thawed out and he doesn't feel like dwelling on it right now.

While he waits for the vegetables to cook and the rice to finish, he ruminates on all he’s read about telekinesis. He feels more at a loss for what to do than he did before he started reading, since all of the books assumed that person with telekinetic abilities would be human.

He considers trying to put up some sort of warding, but everything he’s ever read about nephilim (and he’s read a lot about nephilim in the last four years) indicates that they aren’t affected by enochian sigilwork in the same way that angels are, and he doesn’t want to risk any ill effects by trying it out without any prep. If it backfires, Jack could be in genuine danger. He may be a powerful nephil, but he’s also just a four year old boy. Sam could never forgive himself if he got hurt because of his own slap dash attempts at supernatural childproofing.

He's so caught up in his own thoughts that he almost burns the bok choy, but he reduces the heat just in time. The rest of dinner preparation is a blur, and somehow he ends up coming out the other side with two bowls heaped with rice and vegetables and fried eggs. He goes back to Jack and convinces him to leave the movie and come out for dinner.

“Are we gonna call D tonight?” Jack asks, locking Sam’s gaze with his intense blue inquisitive glare.

“Um,” Sam remembers Dean haltingly asking him to hold off, to let him work the case without interruption if at all possible. “Maybe. But he’s real busy with Ketch today.”

“Are angels still dyin’?” Jack sets down his fork, directing the full weight of his attention onto Sam.

“Yeah,” Sam replies helplessly. “And that’s why Dean and Ketch are so busy. They’re hurrying, to try to help an angel.”

“Oh.” Jack nods, picking up his fork again and taking a few bites of the stir fry. He doesn’t seem terribly pleased with the meal, but Sam’s glad he has no strong complaints. “Can we call Dad?”

“Yeah,” Sam croaks around a lump of rice on it’s way down his throat. “We can call your dad.”

So after dinner, Sam adds the dishes from this meal to those still waiting from breakfast, and they go to Dean’s room to call Cas. The phone rings a few times before he picks up.

“Sam?”

“And Jack.” Sam adds quickly.

“I’m so happy to hear from you both.” Cas responds, and though Sam can hear the truth of it, there’s a patina of exhaustion over his words. “I’ve had an exceedingly long day, and it’s going to be longer still.”

“Clean up?” Sam asks.

“That, and dealing with aftermath on the local level. There are some missing individuals who may yet be alive, who were perhaps being held for nefarious purposes. I don’t think I can leave in good conscience without attempting to locate them and return them to their families.”

“Right.” Jack squirms impatiently beside Sam. “Well.”

“Jack? How are you?” Cas asks, aware that his son hasn’t spoken on the call yet.

“I’m okay.” Jack mutters, and Sam claps a comforting hand over Jack’s shoulder. The kid sounds miserable.

“I’m sorry I’ve been away so long.” Cas offers, but it doesn’t really help. Jack isn’t interested in apologies, or even blame. He wants solutions. He wants his dads. “I can’t talk much longer, but I love you very much. I can’t wait to see you again.”

“I love you, too.” Jack sighs, leaning against Sam despite himself, seeking any scrap of comfort he can get. “Goodnight, Daddy.”

“Goodnight, Jack.”

At least he’s expecting the tears, this time. The second the call ends, he has a lap full of weeping child. He soothes him as best he can, but he can’t help thinking that the only thing that would fix this is Dean or Cas walking through the bunker door. He almost feels like crying, himself. Dean probably could fix this – not just how Jack is feeling, but how Sam is feeling, the bitter ineptitude he’s mired in, the anxious uselessness he can’t keep at bay. On top of all of this, he gets a whiff of Jack’s pajamas, which he realizes the kid has been wearing all day, since Sam was too shaken up after breakfast to remind him to change clothes, and he really needs a bath and a fresh outfit. So of course, just as Jack’s sniffles are winding down, Sam sticks his own foot right in his mouth.

“Before bed, let’s get you a bath.” That’s all it takes to send him into full blown hysterics, and it shouldn’t, because Jack likes baths. Has always liked baths. The warm water, the good smells, the toys he has just for baths that he doesn’t get to play with anywhere else. He likes playing with the shampoo in his hair and splashing around and scooping up bubbles in his palms to blow on until they float away in an updraft of air.

And then, of course, Sam realizes why this could be a touchy subject – because most of the time, Dean is the bath captain. He runs the water, he hangs out and supervises, he sings the song he made up ages ago for when Jack dries off. Even when Dean isn’t the one to supervise bath time, his imprint is left all over it.

Jack’s so worked up that he slides out of Sam’s lap, off the bed, and onto the floor. He’s a tiny angry exhausted puddle, and Sam can’t even find it in himself to be frustrated with him. He reaches down to touch him, but Jack pulls away and coughs a tearful sound of displeasure, so he reels his hand back into his lap and looks on, powerless to do anything but wait him out. Sam decides that, better than just sitting and twiddling his thumbs, he might as well try something, so he gets up and goes to the kitchen to grab bear.

He’s about back to Dean’s room when a sound so piercing and loud reverberates around him that he’s driven to his knees in the corridor. All he can think about as he claps his hands over his ears is that they’re under attack, and he has to get to Jack. With immense effort, he peels his hands away from his head, and he forces himself to stumble the rest of the way back to Dean’s room, bear tucked haphazardly under his arm.

Jack looks up from where he’s sobbing on the floor, face flushed a blotchy pink-red, and Sam feels one of his eardrums pop like a water balloon, blood trickling hot and sticky down the side of his neck.

And then, the sound just. Stops.

“Sam? Can I have bear?” Jack rasps, throat raw from his shouting sobs. Sam can only hear him on one side. On the other, he just feels a pinchy clicky nothing, and it feels like he poured hot water down that ear canal.

“Yeah, sure.” He takes a step into the room and crouches down beside Jack, before just rocking back and plopping down to sit on the floor in earnest. He hands Jack his bear, but he can’t get his eyes to focus. Jack is still staring at him, his face open and worried. Though his little hand lands on bear’s fur, he doesn’t actually pull bear away from Sam.

“Are you okay, Sam?”

“Hmm? Oh. There was. Loud noise. Think my ear’s broken.” He waves a hand beside his bleeding ear, still not sure how to get rid of the floaty disoriented sensation that has him swaying back and forth. Jack reaches up and rests the hand not tangled in bear’s fur against Sam’s temple, and golden light flares where their skin meets. His eyes, normally blue like the wings of a scrub-jay, are sparking gold fire, lit matches phosphorating in tandem. Sam’s face is on fire, and then it isn’t, and he can hear himself breathing again, can hear the rustle of his shirt fabric as he shifts in place.

“Sorry, Sam.” Jack whispers wetly, dropping his hand back to his lap. And Sam doesn’t have any thoughts in his head at all besides needing Jack to not feel afraid, in this moment. Of himself, or of Sam, or of what Sam thinks of him.

“Come here,” Sam chokes out around the mounting wave of tears beneath the surface of himself. He scoops Jack into his lap and wraps him up in his torso and his arms, tucks him tight against himself and rocks him back and forth, bear trapped awkwardly between them in the embrace. “It’s okay, Jack. You’re okay.” He rocks him and holds him until he can feel his snuffling mousy snores vibrating against his neck. Rising to his knees shakily, Jack still secure in his arms, he deposits the boy in Dean’s bed, then heads to the kitchen to brew himself some coffee. Over the course of the night, he drinks a whole pot, sitting watch while he sleeps.

With nothing else to do but think, his mind drifts into every bad scenario it can conjure. He remembers Fred Jones, their father’s psychokinetic friend whose dreams wrought looney tunes flavored cartoon mayhem in the real world while he slept. Watching Jack’s eyes twitch and swivel beneath his eyelids, he wonders if that’ll be the next thing. Because shit, with his luck, there’s going to be a next thing. He just knows it.

Chapter Text

He waits until it’s seven o’clock in the morning on the west coast to call Dean (nine in Kansas, though Jack’s still asleep, since he didn’t fall asleep until well past midnight on account of the tantrum and subsequent fallout.

The phone rings. And rings. And rings. And goes to voicemail. Sam hangs up, because he didn’t even consider the possibility of being sent to voicemail. His hands are sweating so much that he puts the phone on speaker and sits it down on his nightstand. He decided to set up in his own room, because he’s reasonably certain that Jack wouldn’t be able to hear him in here, and that he won’t just barge in unless there’s an emergency.

He calls again, and somehow finds it in himself to be surprised when it goes to voicemail again.

“Dean. I know I said I’d leave you to it. But. Um. Jack’s fine, but, uh. Weird things are happening. He’s telekinetic now? No big deal, really, but. Just wanted to drop you a line. See if you had any idea what I should do. Not that I have to do anything, he’s fine! But. Look. Just, uh, just call me. Okay?”

Sam couldn’t have left a worse voicemail if he tried, but he’s too nervous and out of it and sleep deprived to think about hitting the rerecord button – he’s not sure he’s rerecorded a voicemail since he was in college. So he hangs up and the voicemail is sent and he prays that Dean doesn’t freak out when he hears it.

And because he’s desperate, he calls Cas.

He picks up on the first ring, god bless him.

“Sam?” Cas asks, and he’s not in the middle of a warzone, and he doesn’t seem to be in the middle of a man hunt, and that in and of itself feels like a win after the night he’s had.

“Cas,” Sam says, and it feels so good to have him on the phone, to hear his voice, that Sam feels tears welling in his eyes. “Oh thank goodness. Cas, I need your help.”

“Is everything okay? Is Jack okay?” Cas sounds terrified.

“Yes, yes. He’s safe and he’s sleeping, and I’m safe and I haven’t slept all night.” Sam rambles, giddy with relief.

“You haven’t slept all night?” Cas asks, still sounding pretty damn worried.

“Look, Cas. Some stuff has been going on with Jack and I thought I had it handled but I don’t think I do. He’s, well first, okay, first, he seemed like he had super hearing or something. He overheard my phone call with you, about Dean and Ketch, even though I was whispering and like, twenty yards away. But I thought, hey, so what? Maybe he’s always had really good hearing and it just hasn’t come up before, or maybe I was just talking louder than I thought I was. But then, when we were going to bed, he bumped my sprained wrist, and he – Cas – he healed me. Like you do. Just, poof. Better.”

“Sam, slow down. I suppose it makes sense, that he’d have similar capabilities to an angel – I can obviously use my grace to heal others, and to extend my senses as necessary – “

“Right, okay. But that’s not all. Because yesterday, at breakfast, he levitated the maple syrup, like brought it in from the kitchen counter. Telekinetically. Didn’t even realize he was doing it until I asked him what he was doing. I spent half the day reading up but no dice, nothing written about it in the file I have about nephilim either. And then, last night. Kid was having a rough day anyway, and when we got off the phone with you, he just kind of had a meltdown, which was okay, I’ve handled those with him before. But I went to grab bear, and when I got back, he was crying at this super high frequency. I’m not exaggerating. Like, my eardrum burst. But I don’t think he knew he was doing it, and when he saw I was hurt he stopped, and he healed me – again! And he got to bed okay after that – “

“Sam! Sam, I understand. A lot seems to have happened in my absence. I’m sorry things have been so…tumultuous.”

“Are you still in Georgia? Can you come here? I think Jack needs you, Cas.”

“I’m in Arkansas. I’ve been driving for several hours.” Cas hesitates. “I would like nothing more than to stop in Kansas and see Jack, but I received a very…troubling call from Dean, last night. It would have been around three in the morning, local to his time zone.”

“Troubling?” Sam can feel his heartbeat in his throat, in his fingers. There may as well be a lump of granite in his stomach, with how it seems to drop down into his feet as he processes Cas’s words.

“He was frantic, and I could hardly get a word in edgewise. He only spoke for maybe thirty seconds before the call dropped. Apparently the entity they’ve been tracking is some sort of demon, and he believes it may have lured Ketch in intentionally, but the line went dead before I could ask any questions.” Cas pauses, and Sam can just feel that there’s more to it.

“And then…?” Sam prompts.

“Then I got a call, about two hours later. It went to voicemail, because I was in a complicated intersection, and when I checked the voicemail…Sam, it was Dean’s voice. But it wasn’t Dean. I know it. I would know him anywhere, and it just wasn’t him.”

“What, like, he was possessed?”

“No. Not even that. It just, it was as if his voice was a costume. Being played like an instrument, plucked like a harp. It wasn’t Dean, like the words couldn’t even be coming from his mouth, the shapes were all wrong.”

“What did it say?”

“Just ‘False alarm, still looking for leads, found Ketch, he’s alright,’ – nothing else. Even if it was a false alarm, he’d never phrase it like that, never leave me with no resolution of what actually happened, or what he’d called for in the first place.”

“He wouldn’t.” Sam agreed, breathless with the heft of his fear.

“So I thought I would drive directly to him. I imagine he’s in trouble, given all that I’ve just said.”

“That makes sense – he must be, but. Cas. You gotta stop here. It’s on the way anyhow.”

“I want to. But I don’t know if I have time to make a difference before leaving again.”

“Then, shit, Cas. Then we’re gonna have to come with you. You stop here, I’ll have us packed, we’ll get right back on the road again. You won’t lose any time.”

“You want to bring Jack with us?”

“It’s a bad option! I recognize that. But we don’t have any good options left.”

“Even if it weren’t dangerous. Sam, Jack’s never been in a car longer than thirty minutes at a time.”

“We’ve got road tripping in our blood, Cas. He’s Dean’s kid. He’ll be fine.”

“Okay.” Cas sighs after a long stretch of thought filled silence. “I should be at the bunker by five, probably a little earlier. And the drive to Corvallis from Lebanon will be about twenty four hours, straight through.”

“With how you drive? I bet you can shave off some of that.”

“We’ll see,” Cas concedes, and despite the dire nature of their situation, he can hear the tired smile caressing the words as they’re uttered. “Call me if you need anything, I’ll just be driving.”

“I will.”

Sam musters the energy to shower and change clothes, knowing he has a long few days ahead of him, and it will be who knows how long before he has a chance to bathe again. He packs a bag for himself, and a bag for Jack, and after brief consideration, a small bag of spare clothes and toiletries, just in case any of the other three need things like that. He also crams some first aid stuff in there, even though they’ll have Cas around, and now, apparently, Jack, for that.

Every few minutes, Sam creeps past Dean’s door, just to make sure the kid is still asleep, which he is.

He packs what one might consider to be an exorbitant amount of food for a road trip of this length, but he isn’t interested in taking any chances. Jack has never been on a road trip before, and he won’t be used to the drastically limited options available for snacks. So he packs at least one serving of every snack food he’s ever seen the kid eat, just in case he asks for it. With what they’re up against, Sam is sure that Cas won’t be making pit stops for snacks, so he isn’t counting on any gas station goodies. The food bag ends up being bigger than the bag Sam packed for his own clothes and toiletries, and that isn’t even taking into account the juiceboxes and waterbottles he’ll pull out of the fridge before they hit the road.

It’s almost noon by the time Jack rolls out of bed, and Sam is getting things ready to make lunch when he makes his kitchen debut.

“Sam?” Jack whines, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “I feel gross.”

“Gross?” God, Sam hopes this kid isn’t coming down with something. He isn’t even sure that he can get sick. He supposes there’s a first time for everything, and he’s certainly been having a slew of firsts this week.

“Stinky.” Jack clarifies, and Sam lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“Yeah, you haven’t gotten a bath in two days, bud.” Jack hangs his head, and Sam rushes to do a bit of damage control. “But I can help you get a bath before lunch? You won’t wanna be stinky all day, because guess what?”

“What?” Jack asks, brow furrowed and head tipped a few degrees to the side.

“Your dad is on his way here – he’s going to pick us up and we’re going to go on a road trip to meet up with D and Uncle Ketch!” Sam swallows whatever is left of his pride and calls the guy ‘uncle’, just because he knows it will inject that much more enthusiastic anticipation into Jack’s brain. It seems to have been a worthwhile sacrifice, because Jack’s face splits into a huge grin.

“Dad’s coming? We’re goin’ to see D and Uncle Ketch?”

“Yeah, so we gotta get all clean and ready to go while we wait for your dad to arrive.”

“Okay!” Jack seems lighter than he has since Dean left, and Sam had nearly forgotten that this is actually kind of his baseline. He isn’t always a moody, eye-contact avoiding couch potato. He’s an energetic four year old with hobbies and interests and a million things that make him happy. Sam’s glad that he’s feeling more like himself already, but there’s an unmistakable seed of guilt and doubt worming its way into him, because isn’t his whole job to keep things from getting so dismal in Cas and Dean’s absence? What is Sam really good for, if he can’t keep Jack from spiraling in just over two days’ time?

“I’ll go fill up the tub, if you go pick out some clean clothes. Sound good?”

“Mhmm,” Jack spins around and jogs artlessly back the way he came, off to pick out some sort of fashion catastrophe.

Cas and Sam are on the same page about this, that Jack being so young, paired with the fact that he rarely goes out in public, means that he should be allowed to wear whatever he wants in whatever combination he wishes. Dean staunchly disagrees. He has clear ideas of what items go together, and despite the fact that Jack almost never sees anyone besides the three of them, Sam knows it's because he worries about what other people would think.

Sam knows, deep down, it has to do with the way they were raised – Sam never had control over what he owned or wore, and he wants Jack to get that agency. On the flip side, Dean found safety and security in being able to successfully blend, to pass as a normal child who wasn’t struggling to clothe himself and his brother, and he’s terrified of someone looking at his son and assuming he’s not being well cared for.

He ruminates on all of this as he draws the bath, checking the temperature frequently to make sure it remains in that sweet spot that’s neither too hot nor tepid. Bubbles are a foregone conclusion, and he chooses without asking Jack which he prefers, partly to avoid the inevitable decision paralysis that grips him whenever he’s presented with that kind of choice, and partly because Sam prefers these ones (tropical tangerine, according to the bottle) to most of the other ones in current rotation. He’ll have to smell them for the better part of an hour – he may as well not hate them.

Jack comes in, clean outfit folded and stacked under one arm. From what Sam can tell, he’s picked jeans and a green t-shirt, with a bright orange and yellow flannel shirt, as well as some unremarkable boring gray underwear and black socks. Sam figures this will appease Dean’s need for Jack to look presentable, given that the colors barely even clash.

“Hop on in, kid, it’s ready for you.” Sam gets up off the edge of the tub and gets out of Jack’s way.

It’s true, that Jack’s really good about baths. He rarely needs to be reminded to shampoo his hair, or thoroughly wash. Sam’s presence in all of this is mostly about general safety, and for Jack’s entertainment (who would be around to witness the melodrama he embroils his various ducks in, if no one were waiting in the wings?), not about bath efficiency. Sam has brought a book in with him for this reason, and he gets through about thirty pages of a demonic grimoire related to the (mis)use of angelic grace before Jack announces that he’s finished in the tub.

Even though Jack could definitely pull out the stopper on his own, he is never encouraged to do so, because his parents don’t want to connect that idea in his mind, lest he decide to unplug it before he’s actually finished bathing. Sam is of the opinion that, if anything, the kid would figure out some way to lodge the tub stopper more securely, so that no one could make him exit. Sam pulls out the stopper, and grabs one of Jack’s big wearable towels off of its hook. He has a T-Rex one, and a giraffe one, but the one in use during this laundry season is a bear – not unlike bear, though much lighter brown.

Jack’s not a big fan of drying off – or at least, that’s how he describes it. What he actually dislikes is the chill that comes with exposing your wet skin to the cool air outside of the tub. So, in that way, drying off actually fixes the issue. Sam and Cas had been privately quite skeptical of this whole ‘wearable towel’ thing, but Dean had insisted that it would help, and he’d been right on the money with that. Jack’s hesitancy around exiting the tub reduced dramatically after the wearable towels entered the fray.

Of course, there’s also the song, a song that Dean made up when Jack was only a few months old – Sam can no longer remember if this was pre or post Cas’s return, but it was so close to it on one side or the other that it hardly matters. It’s a ‘Dean original’ as Sam has come to think of these things, and that makes it virtually impossible for Sam to replicate. It isn’t like there’s sheet music for it, or a YouTube video he could look up and study. He doesn’t usually even attempt it, but Jack’s had a rough few days, so he gives it a shot. He barely gets a line into it before Jack’s shaking his head and laughing up a storm.

“That’s not how it goes, Sam.” Jack explains.

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s not.” He giggles, rubbing the hood of his towel around on his wet head. “You should have D teach you.”

“Maybe I will.” Sam huffs, grinning.

When Jack is all dry, despite the lack of musical accompaniment, he gets dressed easily.

“What’re we having for lunch?” Jack asks, pulling on his socks.

“I was going to make you a ham sandwich, maybe with some grapes, and some pretzels?”

“Mkay.” Jack agrees, on his way out of the bathroom, before stopping in the doorway. “But no cheese. And no tomatoes.” He warns.

“Still? Not just a yesterday thing?”

“Still, yes.” Jack nods, squinting suspiciously at Sam, as though he suspects Sam will try to sneak one of these things into his lunch anyway.

“Understood!” Sam assures him, hands up to mime his surrender. Satisfied, Jack exits the bathroom, and based on the direction he took down the hall, he’s guessing the kid is either on his way to Dean’s room or his own. Sam heads to the kitchen after peeking in after him, finding that Jack is, for once, in his own room, playing with blocks on the floor. It’s comforting, to see him using his toys instead of parked in front of the television.

In the kitchen, Sam makes a sandwich for Jack (white bread, deli ham, no cheese, no tomatoes, three pickle slices, a few leaves of lettuce, and mustard) and a salad for himself (a mountain of arugula, cherry tomatoes, mozzarella, and green olives). As promised, there are pretzels for Jack, and grapes for both of them (Jack’s sliced in half length-wise).

He fetches Jack when lunch is ready, and they decide to eat outside, since it’s nice out, and since they didn’t go outside at all the day before. It’s overwhelmingly pleasant, sitting in the sun together and taking their time to clean their plates. They both save their grapes for last, and Sam is again struck by the way they share this behavior, this strategic pattern of eating. Neither Dean nor Cas does anything of the sort. Either it’s intrinsic to Jack in some way, or he learned it from Sam. Both options make affection shine a little bit brighter inside him.

Jack babbles about birds through much of lunch, mostly because Sam let slip that birds, too, are the descendants of dinosaurs. Jack is full of questions, and Sam feels pretty good about his answers (‘could all dinosaurs fly?’ and ‘not all birds can fly? why?’ being the most important questions posed). They end up watching a video about dodo birds on Sam’s phone, which leads to watching a video about penguins, which leads to the rest of the afternoon being spent discussing penguins at length while they toss the blue rubber ball back and forth.

Time passes so quickly and so effortlessly for the first time since Dean left for Oregon that Sam isn’t even keeping track of the time, so when Cas pulls up in his big Chevy truck, it comes as a total surprise. Granted, he’s almost an hour earlier than he’d said he’d be, but that’s relatively typical of Cas, who has a bit of a lead foot even when his husband and son aren’t in danger.

Jack, quite literally, drops the ball when he sees Cas get out of the car, and launches himself at the man. Sam scoops the rubber ball up off the ground and deposits it in the toy bucket, watching fondly as Cas and Jack embrace with a desperate ferocity that isn’t usually a facet of their bond. Cas is down on his knees, one arm clasped across Jack’s shoulders, the other palming the base of his skull. Jack’s got both arms up under Cas’s armpits, gripping the edges of his father’s shoulder blades. Eventually, they part, and Cas stands back up, waving at Sam.

“I don’t even want to go inside, it’ll just take that much longer to get going again.” Cas explains.

“You stay out here with Jack, I’ll go in and grab our bags.”

He’s been so stressed and so tired, and having Cas back in the picture is an instant balm to those things. Even though he knows they’re headed into a tough situation, he can’t help but think that the worst has got to be over.

Chapter Text

They’ve been on the road for about an hour by the time Jack is slumped over in his booster seat, neck lolling to the side as a nap sneaks up on him. Sam’s sitting in the backseat (behind the passenger seat, which is pushed as far forward as it will go in order to create some leg room) so that Jack doesn’t feel lonely or bored. Of course, now that Jack is asleep, it just makes for a logistically inconvenient arrangement for having an adult conversation.

“Cas, he’s out.” Sam murmurs, leaning forward and diagonal across the center console. “Can we talk about this?”

“About Dean? Or about Jack?” Cas asks, voice somehow even lower in person than it sounds over the phone.

“I guess both, but Jack first.”

“Alright. You said he had elevated auditory range, healing capabilities, telekinetic reflexes, and that his crying reached a dangerously elevated frequency?”

“I – well, okay, yes. Do you have any idea why all of a sudden – “

“I imagine it has something to do with stress. Dean and I have never been away for so long, at the same time. And if he overheard our conversation, then I suppose he had some understanding that Dean and I were, separately, in dangerous conditions. It makes sense that this might trigger some of his more protective abilities.”

“Is this like, like purely a stress response, do you think? Like it will only come up under similar conditions? Or is this like breaking the safety seal under a jar lid, like, from here on out, this is how it will be?”

“I’m not sure. It may be different for different abilities. Or it may be something he can determine for himself, at a certain point.” Cas pauses, considering, as he blazes down the highway going a cool fifteen over the speed limit. Sam is honestly glad he elected to sit in the back, because riding shotgun with Cas always makes him anxious. Not that Cas is really even capable of being in a car accident, with his superior reflexes and dilated understanding of time. He can’t even be apprehended by law enforcement, because it’s like his car travels in this blurry bubble of imperception, perceived by others but not retained. “Are you concerned about any of these abilities in particular?”

“I mean, the healing isn’t probably going to be much of an issue, unless he whips it out in public or something. We should probably give him ‘the talk’ about when it’s situationally appropriate to use his abilities.” Sam chews his lip as he thinks through the other things. “The hearing is mostly just inconvenient, but ultimately not that big of a deal. It’s the telekinesis and the crying that are kind of the most worrisome.”

“I understand.” Cas nods, just once, because even after all this time, mannerisms like that don’t come naturally to him. They’re things he has to choose to do, and execute on purpose. “The telekinesis will probably require the most intervention, and Dean and I will need to discuss whether we want to encourage the responsible use of the behavior at this stage, or if we’d rather encourage him not to engage with that ability until he’s a little older.”

“And the crying?” Sam prompts, hand drifting up to cup his ear protectively on instinct, remembering the wet clap of his eardrum popping, the hot trickle of his own blood.

“That’s something I’ll have to think about. Unlike the telekinesis, I am unsure if this is something he’s even capable of controlling, or it it’s some sort of physiological response, an elevated state of distress. Even being aware that he’s capable of it might not be enough for him to develop any kind of power over the phenomenon. In the meantime, we’ll have to just do our best to keep him calm, and if further instances arise, I’ll heal the effects. Or, as before, perhaps Jack will do so himself.”

“I get that but,” Sam takes a deep breath, “Cas, I don’t think I can handle my eardrums bursting multiple times a week, you know? Like, that’s just not sustainable, even if there aren’t lasting consequences.”

“I understand…” Cas sighs, and Sam knows the guy is trying his best, and that he’s juggling a lot right now. Sam hasn’t had to think about anything but Jack for a few days, and even though he knows Cas was on a big case, and Dean’s on a bigger one, he’s only thought of those things in terms of how they would affect Jack, in terms of their absence. “I may be able to create some sort of protective buffer, if it happens again, to shield you and Dean from the worst of the effects. I doubt that I myself would be affected, given my own physiology.”

“Right, yeah. Thanks, Cas. For bringing us along, and for, you know. Talking through this stuff. I’m sure this is scary for you, too.”

“I don’t know that it’s scary, but it’s certainly new. I always assumed that Jack would at some point tap into the immense well of his own grace, I just had hoped it might happen after he was old enough to understand it all better. I imagine this is perhaps quite upsetting for him, as well.”

“Yeah, it, uh. Kinda made me think about what happened to me, when I started having my visions and stuff. I had telekinesis, too, for a little bit. I was so scared – of myself, of what I might do by accident. But also of how my dad would react, if he found out. How Dean would react. I don’t want Jack to have to be afraid like that.”

Cas pauses, and for a moment, Sam thinks that Cas is simply done discussing the matter. Sometimes, he does that, just lets his silence be its own sort of bookend to things. But not this time, apparently.

“You are a very empathetic person, Sam.” Cas shoots a warm glance over his shoulder, looking at Sam for the first time during their conversation (since his eyes have, rightfully, been on the road thus far). “I’m glad Jack has you in his life, especially given this new development.”

“Thanks, Cas.” Sam’s eyes are tingling and pricking a little, and he scrubs his hand over them to chase the feeling off before it gets the better of him. “So, um. Dean, and Ketch?”

“Yes,” Cas sighs heavily, and Sam can’t help the amused smile this sparks on his own face, because Cas has no reason to sigh besides performance – the guy doesn’t even need to breathe. Sighing is perhaps one of the human mannerisms that Cas is most skilled at emulating. He’s been doing it for dramatic effect since before he abandoned Heaven to join their ragtag apocalypse team.

“Sucks that Dean had you in the dark about that.” Sam attempts to create an opening into the issue.

“I’m certainly not happy about it. However, I understand his reasoning. It would have been irresponsible to abandon the ghoul case, and had I shuffled it off to another hunter before getting the case underway, they would almost assuredly have been killed.”

“That bad, huh?” Sam remembers the phone call where Cas was mid-showdown. It hadn’t sounded pretty.

“Yes, it was. There were five ghouls – a family of them. And well over twenty werewolves, though it was impossible to determine the exact number, given their condition after the fact.”

“Their condition?” Sam asks, eyebrows shooting up to his hairline.

“I was in a difficult position, late in the fight. I revealed my true form to the final wave of aggressors, and some of them were incinerated entirely, due to their proximity to my core.”

“Sorry, man. I know you hate doing that.”

“It’s alright. It was necessary.” Cas doesn’t sound alright, but Sam decides it would be kinder to let it slide than keep harping on him.

“You find the missing folks?”

“Yes, and again, I am glad that I remained on the case. I don’t believe a human would have been able to discover their location in as timely a manner.”

“Well, good.” Sam takes a moment to look out the window, at the summer evening settling over miles and miles of farmland. He knows this is technically where he’s from, this terrain, this land, this bit of America, but it’s just never felt like home to him, and he doesn’t know if that’s because of how he grew up, always on the move, or if it’s something else, something deeper. If he would still feel like this, even if he’d grown up like a normal kid with a normal life in a normal Kansas town.

“In any case. Dean had his reasons for withholding information from me, and we’ll need to discuss the appropriateness of such an omission in the future, but I don’t really feel like being upset with him about it in the meantime.”

“I’m sure he’ll be relieved to hear that.” Sam tries to joke, but it falls flat, mostly because they’re both too stressed for that kind of thing. “Are you just going to head right to him? When we get to Corvallis?”

“I don’t know why I wouldn’t?”

“Just, you know. Jack’s here.”

“I can’t think of a safer place to keep him, than with myself, and with you. Besides the bunker, obviously.”

“Guess you’ve got me there.” Sam glances over at Jack, who’s sound asleep, small blue triceratops stuffed animal hugged tight to his chest, tucked under his chin. He’s pretty sure her name used to be Henrietta or something, but she recently got renamed, and he’s not up to date on Jack’s new naming scheme for his stuffies. “Are you worried, about them?”

“Dean and Ketch?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, I am. Dean hasn’t…” Cas trails off, and Sam wishes it were appropriate to just demand that someone finish their thought. Sometimes the curiosity is too much to bear, it ripples through him like a literal itch, and he can’t get any relief. “It’s been a very long time, since I’ve heard him sound so upset.”

“Mmm.” Sam doesn’t trust himself to speak, so he only makes an encouraging sound.

“If I still had the ability, I would have flown to him, right then. I had my phone, pressed against my ear, and I had to remind myself that I was no longer capable of such a thing.” Cas mumbled, words almost lost in the road noise and engine hum.

“If it’s any consolation, I think everybody on Earth wishes they could just teleport to wherever their loved ones are, whenever they need them.”

“I suppose you’re right. It’s just hard to have once been able to, and have lost the capability.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Sam breathes, trying to put himself in those shoes. Like losing the ability to run. You hear someone cry for help, but all you can do is walk there at a sensible pace. It would be agony.

“Knowing you, I’m sure you’ll try to anyway.” Cas’s voice sounds warm, fond. Sam blushes, because Cas is right.

“You got a game plan, for when we do get there?”

“I suppose I’ll do my best to locate them and liberate them from whatever demonic entity has them captive. If they’re…if that’s not. If I cannot do that, I’ll direct my attention towards stopping the entity itself.”

“And me? What should I do?”

“Stay in the car, with Jack.”

“You really want to go this alone?”

“No, but I also cannot in good conscience leave my son unattended in my vehicle, near a being who seems determined to capture him.”

“Well, when you put it like that.” Sam shudders out a nervous chuckle, and the two of them lapse into silence for a while.

Jack wakes up about twenty minutes later, ravenously hungry, and Sam is endlessly pleased with himself for having packed so many snacks, because when Jack requests peanut butter, rice cakes, and golden raisins, Sam just gets to say ‘coming right up’.

For most of the drive, Jack has merely been entertained by looking out the window at the passing scenery, and Sam tries to imagine what it must be like, to have only ever been in the car for less than a half hour at a time, never having seen anything outside of one slice of Kansas (except in television shows and movies) and then all of a sudden, seeing only new things, over and over, for hours upon hours. It must be incredible, if overwhelming.

Once it gets dark out, that’s when Jack gets restless. He has another snack – pretzels and strawberries and these weird little yogurt dots in the shape of chocolate chips that Sam privately thinks are foul. Sam also has a snack, but it’s just a Clif bar and a banana. He teaches Jack the alphabet game, where you go back and forth and try to fill up the whole alphabet with a given theme (they do animals, and foods, and get halfway through articles of clothing before Jack decides he’s tired of it). They play an ill-fated few rounds of ‘I Spy’, which even Sam is bored of almost immediately, considering how little there is in the truck that’s worth ‘spying’.

Jack turns out to be a massive fan of twenty questions, which Sam has sort of modified such that there is no limit to how many questions you can ask, you just get to keep asking until you get it right. Even Cas gets in on this game, and they play it so ardently for so long that Jack ends up falling asleep again in the middle of Sam and Cas trying to guess his word (Sam is almost certain it was ‘dragon’ but he supposes now it’s unlikely he’ll ever know).

Sam himself falls asleep thinking about things he should use in this game with Jack in the future, things that will be hard enough to be fun, but not so hard that they’re frustrating. He thinks ‘horseshoe crab’ might be a good one.

Chapter Text

When Sam wakes up, his face is smooshed against the window glass, which is hot and kind of greasy from where his skin has been touching it for hours. The sun is up, and it wasn’t when his eyes were last open, so he knows he’s been asleep for quite a while. He looks over at Jack, almost on instinct, and something settles in him at the sight of the kid, sleeping all folded up in his booster seat, triceratops dangling loosely from his left hand.

Sam coughs on his next inhale, because he’s been breathing through his mouth all night like a heathen, even though he knows his body just defaults to that when he’s asleep in the car.

“You’re awake.” Cas says, then as if remembering there’s a specific social choreography for this scenario, he adds, “Good morning, Sam. Did you sleep well?”

“Good morning, Cas. All sleep is good sleep, after pulling an all-nighter.”

Cas hums thoughtfully, and Sam figures it’s because Cas has very limited experience with sleeping, since he was only human very briefly, and it was a pretty unilaterally unpleasant experience for him on multiple fronts.

“We’re about forty minutes from the location given by the GPS in Dean’s phone.”

“Forty minutes according to the map app, or forty minutes of your driving?” Cas laughs, just a little, at that.

“The app says forty minutes. It will likely be just under half of an hour.”

Now it’s Sam’s turn to hum thoughtfully, taking in the change of scenery around them, the strip mall suburbs and start-stop lights peppered about.

“You want me to let the kid sleep, or wake him up?”

“I can see merit in both options. On one hand, waking him before I leave to work the case will make it less disorienting when I’m gone. On the other hand, letting him sleep means he may have the good fortune of missing the entire ordeal.”

“I think we should wake him up at least before you leave.” Sam doesn’t want to say ‘in case something happens to you’, but he doesn’t actually have to, because Cas is smart, and he knows.

“Then we’ll let him sleep until we reach Dean’s location.”

Sam can’t stop bouncing his knee nervously as they get closer and closer to his brother’s last known whereabouts. He doesn’t point out that, for all they know, Dean isn’t even there, that it could just be his phone, laying smashed on the pavement. It wouldn’t do them any good, to have it out in the open anyway. They’re both probably thinking the same thing.

They’re about five minutes out when Sam finally caves and wakes up Jack, mostly as a way of distracting himself from the shit about to hit the proverbial fan.

“Daddy?” Jack whimpers as he wakes up, eyes still closed, limbs stretching out in all directions as he reorients himself.

“Good morning, Jack.” Cas rumbles warmly from the front seat, and Jack smiles at the sound of his father’s voice. “Did you sleep well?”

“Mhmm.” Jack affirms before succumbing to a massive yawn. “Are we there yet?”

“Just about,” Sam answers.

“Oh good.” Jack coos, blinking to adjust to the bright light of the morning sun. “Then we’ll get to see D.” He smiles, then adds, “And Uncle Ketch, too.”

Neither Sam or Cas say anything in response to this, because they’re not sure how to do so without lying about something.

Soon enough, they pull up outside a massive abandoned building, what was once some sort of factory or industrial warehouse, but which is now just a shell, pocked with busted out windows and and studded with graffiti.

“You sure you want me to hang back?” Sam asks as Cas parks the car. He can see the Impala, across the parking lot, and he knows Cas parked far away from it in the hopes that Jack wouldn’t see it. He associates the car so strongly with Dean, he would want to go over to it immediately.

“Yes, I’m sure.” Cas replies, hopping out of the driver’s seat. Besides stopping for gas and bathroom breaks, it’s the first time he’s been out of the car in almost two days.

He opens the back door and unbuckles Jack, giving him a solid hug from his position beside the car.

“Are you going to get D?”

“Yes, I am.” Cas replies. “You and Sam will wait for us here. Be good for Sam, okay?”

“Can’t Sam ‘n me come with you?”

“No, you can’t.” Cas does his best to let the kid down easy, but he leaves no room for argument. “I’ll be back in a little while. I love you, Jack.”

“I love you, too.” Jack mumbles, still hanging off of Cas. Sam reaches over and pats his nephew on the back to remind him to let go of his father, and reluctantly, he does. Cas closes the door and turns away, walking off toward the hulking tomb of the old building.

Jack doesn’t cry right away, probably because he’s had a healthy dose of time with Cas to tide him over, and because he’s under the impression that soon he’ll have both of his dads back. And Uncle Ketch, of course.

Sam does his best to distract him. They have another snack – Fig Newtons and honey roasted peanuts and those dried banana chip things that Sam can never figure out if he hates or loves. They watch another video about penguins on Sam’s phone. They play a similarly disappointing game of ‘I Spy’ (warehouse parking lot edition), and pivot to the guessing game they’d been cruising through the night before (Sam was right, the last word had been dragon, but he’s too nervous to really enjoy the victory).

It's been almost an hour when Sam starts to get really anxious, and as much as he tries to hide it from Jack, the kid is perceptive, and he picks up on it in short order.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“He’s working on getting D, and Uncle Ketch.” Sam sucks it up and calls him ‘uncle’ again, because Jack likes it.

“It’s been hours.” Jack whines. Sam knows it isn’t true, but the kid has a point. Even though he knows it’s just coming up on one hour, he feels like they’ve been sitting here waiting for at least three.

“It’s only been one hour.” Sam replies, knowing full well how little comfort that brings, since knowing it this whole time has done nothing to dampen his own nerves.

“Is he okay? Is D okay?” Jack asks, frantic.

“They’re okay,” Sam lies through his teeth. For all he knows, they’re doing awful. Dean could be dead. Maybe Dean was dead before they even left Kansas yesterday. Maybe Dean was drawing his last breath while Sam was trying to think of a food that starts with the letter ‘q’ in the car last night. Dread twists inside of Sam like a living thing, like a coil of eels writhing in a riverbed. As if Jack can tell he’s lying, this is when the tears finally come. Sam succeeds in calming him somewhat with a hug and some gentle motion, and after about ten minutes of this, he’s pretty sure Jack is almost asleep – might actually be asleep, though he doesn’t have a good view of his face in this position.

And then, things get a lot worse. Jack goes completely rigid in his arms, joints locking up, before he pulls himself against Sam so forcefully that his ribs ache where Jack’s arms are wrapped around him.

Jack screams. He screams and sobs and babbles incoherently and Sam feels bad for being grateful that at least he hasn’t started the high frequency wailing yet.

“Jack, Jack, hey, it’s alright,” Sam assures him, smoothing a hand across his shaking back, his sweaty hair. “What’s wrong, what happened?” He asks, when nothing else seems to be helping.

“You gotta help ‘em, Sam!” Jack sobs in response, teeth chattering with a new wave of adrenaline. “He’s got D, and Daddy, and Uncle Ketch!” He gasps out, pausing to breathe between each sentence clause, like his lungs won’t expand far enough to do it all in one go. And as much as Sam wants to believe that Jack’s foreboding is purely an output of his own imagination, he knows how hypocritical that would be. Why not add prophetic visions to the list of things Jack can do when he’s under enough pressure?

“Jack, I can’t go in there, I gotta stay out here and take care of you.” He explains, and Jack shakes his head vigorously.

“Just take me in, too!” He pushes hard against Sam’s chest, then flings himself toward the door, ready to make a break for it. Sam scrabbles for purchase, getting a handful of Jack’s pantleg and using that to unceremoniously drag him back into his lap.

“We can’t, Jack. I’m sorry. Your dad’s gonna handle this, okay?” He stills Jack with a firm grip on his shoulders. Jack just keeps shaking his head.

“No, he’s not.” He insists.

“Jack, I know you’re worried. It’s okay to be worried. But we just can’t go in there. Your dad said so.”

For a moment, Sam thinks the sudden quiet is a good thing, that it indicates that Jack has finally calmed down. He looks at Jack’s face, his lidded eyes, puffy around the base from so much crying. His skin is fever hot and salmon pink, flushed and angry. His mouth is shut, screwed into a focused scowl. But something’s wrong. Through the pale delicate skin of his eyelids, backlighting the tendrils of veins in that thin layer of skin and muscle, Sam can see a golden light building.

“Come with me,” Jack murmurs, barely audible, eyes still shut. He clasps his tiny hand around Sam’s wrist, and between the shutter of his own blink and the next millisecond, they’ve moved. They’re not in the car anymore. Somehow, the two of them have ended up in a messy heap on the cold dusty concrete floor of an abandoned factory.

Sam looks up from the ground and sees the back of a man, wearing a fully white suit, with greasy brown hair curling across the back of his shirt collar. Further away, in front of the man, Dean is bound and bloody, slumped on the ground. Beside him, Ketch is in similar shape. On Dean’s other side, Cas is sitting uncomfortably straight in a metal chair, wrists cuffed to the chair’s base, ankles cuffed to the chair’s legs. His shirt is torn, and a sigil has been carved into his chest, so deep that Sam can see the different layers of flesh and fat under the oily red-black slick of blood. The only indication that any of them have noticed their sudden arrival is the brief pleading contact of Cas’s eyes with his own.

Hundreds of thoughts are competing for Sam’s attention – thoughts about Jack’s newfound ability to fly like other angels, thoughts about how best to protect this kid now that they’ve fallen right into this demon’s trap, thoughts about how to save his brother, how to save Cas, how to save Ketch (if he has time), thoughts about how to save himself.

Above all of these questions, though, one thought looms large:

He is so fucked.

Chapter Text

Sam doesn’t have much time to think of a plan, because as soon as Jack realizes what’s happened (what he decided to do? Sam isn’t sure if Jack understands that he’s the one who transported them here) he’s on his feet, and talking.

“Deeeeeeeeeeeeee!” He shouts, and Dean lifts his bruised face off of his shoulder with great effort to look at Jack. Sam has watched his brother be killed, has held him while the light drains from his eyes. More than once, even. Dean has never looked as terrified, as defeated, as he does right now.

“Baby, no,” Dean groans, coughing a raspy wet sound that culminates in a helpless trickle of blood dribbling out of his mouth. Sam’s no expert, but he would bet real money that Dean is sporting several broken ribs. Beside him, Ketch’s similarly bloody face goes pale underneath, almost as white as the other man’s suit. His eyes flash over to Sam, then to Jack, and he looks bereft. The arm that’s been propping him up where he’s hunched on the ground slips out from under him, and he curls onto his side, pressing his eyes closed in what could be pain, but almost looks like grief.

“Well, well, well,” The man in white turns on one heel to look at Sam and Jack. “Samuel, is it? I hope you’re having a pleasant day. It’s come to my attention that you boys have something I want.” Sam fights not to roll his eyes at this guy’s ridiculous southern accent, which almost has to be fake. Of all the demons to take them all captive, it just had to be some asshole cosplaying as Colonel Sanders?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sam hisses, even though Jack’s not even two feet away from him. The man rolls his eyes.

“On your feet,” He commands, and raises his palm, somehow forcing Sam to stand, like a marionette. “I am Asmodeus. Fourth Prince of Hell. I should thank you, for bringing your little lap angel in for a visit. We’ve been having lots of fun, but the party can really start, now that you’re both here.”

“You can’t do this,” Sam breathes, reaching out to Jack so hard that he feels veins popping in his neck. He’s just out of reach, and he doesn’t yet understand the stakes. The kid’s only four. He might not even be able to understand what’s going on here. Sam’s dying to move, but he’s rooted to the spot, useless.

“Oh, I can. And I will. In fact, I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

“Leave him alone,” Ketch rasps, pulling himself back up to a sitting position. From his new vantage point, Sam can see that Ketch is sporting a pretty nasty compound fracture of his tibia and fibula, leg cocked at a disgusting angle halfway down his left shin.

“Ah, Ketch. You had such a simple task. Well, two really. All you had to do was keep Gabriel on ice until I returned from an…important errand. But keeping an archangel prisoner proved to be…”

“Monumentally stupid?” Ketch interrupts, and Sam realizes that Ketch is goading him. Trying to distract him. Sam is pretty distracted himself, considering he’s just now finding out that Gabriel might be alive.

“Indeed.” Asmodeus glowers at Ketch before continuing. “So, I pivoted. Focus on getting my power from something a little less conventional, and a lot more potent. A nephil.” He shifts his focus to Jack, who’s standing, staring, watching slack-jawed at the confusing scene around him. “My boy,” He croons at him, and Sam fights fruitlessly against his invisible bonds. “Jack, is it? These men, they want to contain you. Stop you from reaching your full potential. Keep you hidden away. Locked up. But I can give you the world.” Jack’s gaze flickers onto Asmodeus’s face, then onto the faces of his fathers. Onto Ketch. Onto Sam.

Asmodeus is distracted by Jack, his gullible confusion. Sam sees a chance, just a small one, and he takes it. He tests the efficacy of Asmodeus’s bindings against his left hand, and finds it loose, like a magnetic field, or being stuck in a big puddle of mud. There’s resistance, but also give, at the right angle. Carefully, he slips his hand into his jacket pocket and pulls out the demon killing knife, the one Ruby gave him so many years ago. And he flings it, from the hip, at Asmodeus.

The knife is right on target, cutting through suit fabric and skin, a bright red stain blossoming around the hilt where it’s buried in the demon’s hip. But Asmodeus just chuckles, pulling the knife out and letting it clatter to the floor.

“Agh,” He regards the stain, nose wrinkled in disgust. “Look what you did to my suit!” While Asmodeus is distracted with scolding Sam for the wardrobe malfunction, Ketch gets in a lick of his own, throwing an angel blade with clinical precision to lodge at the base of the demon’s spine. Sam has no idea where Ketch has been hiding that all this time. But Asmodeus only turns, yanking out the blade and dropping it onto the floor as well. He wheels on Ketch, now genuinely angry.

“You’re ridiculous,” Ketch hacks up a bit of blood, spitting it in Asmodeus’ direction. The crazy British fucker is grinning, somehow.

“Oh, I missed you, boy. I’ll have to punish you rather severely, I’m afraid.” He steps closer to Ketch, bending down just enough to get a good look at his blood streaked face. Ketch’s face is stony, but Sam notices the way he trembles, just slightly. “You think you’re so high and mighty, better than the rest of us? You, Mr. Ketch, are more wicked than any demon in Hell. And I know ‘em all.”

“At least I’ve got a soul.” Ketch sputters.

“You think that’s gonna do you any good?” Asmodeus chuckles, standing back up to his full height to tower over Ketch. “Souls are all messy, all conflict. Confusion.”

“I know who I am.” Ketch grits out.

“Do you? You act like you’re some cold-blooded killer. But you know what I see when I look in your eyes? Fear. And regret. And pain. I see your chewy middle, boy. You want redemption, but you ain’t never gonna get it. You can’t be redeemed. These Winchesters can’t give you redemption, neither can this pitiful angel. Nobody can. All you can do is spread your pain around. You don’t know who you are, Ketch. But I do. You’re nothing.” He motions sharply with his hand, and Ketch’s other leg breaks, identical to the break Sam already noticed. He fights not to throw up at the crunch it makes. “And as for you,” Asmodeus spins back around to face Sam.

Cas and Dean are both looking at Sam helplessly, and all he can do is stare helplessly back, fighting against the invisible grip of their collective captor.

“Run, Jack,” Sam turns to plead with him, “Do what you did before, to go back out.”

“Sam?” Jack whimpers, on the edge of tears.

“Samuel, you’re not setting a very good example.” Asmodeus clucks disapprovingly before lifting his hand, making Sam float weightlessly for a brief second before dropping his hand, and Sam with it, crashing him at high velocity down onto the floor. Sam feels his elbows shatter where they connect with the floor, and at least one of his kneecaps, too. “You should keep your chin up,” Asmodeus wrenches Sam’s chin so that it’s held up off the floor, using only a flick of his wrist. “Put on a brave face.” He snickers.

Sam is certain that Asmodeus is about to snap his neck, to wrench his hand around and drop him graveyard dead right here in front of everyone. He clamps his eyes shut, because he can’t imagine having them open to witness his own death.

Instead, he hears his brother’s agonized voice warble out, “Holy shit,” and hears Cas grunt his son’s name in surprise. He cracks one eye open, and Asmodeus is just. Gone.

Or, upon closer inspection, not gone, exactly. His shoes are still here, right were he was standing. Each shiny white shoe is filled and overflowing with ashes. Around them on the floor, are more ashes. Sam has burned enough bodies in his life to know that what he’s seeing is roughly one adult man’s worth of ash. He tries to get up, but his injuries protest, and he sags back onto the ground, gasping through the pain.

“Sam?” Jack crouches down next to him.

“Hey, buddy.” He musters a smile for him, but Jack remains worried. “Was that you?”

“He was really mean.” Jack answers. Sam nods as much as the position allows. “Did he hurt you?”

“Yeah,” Sam figures there’s no use lying about it. Jack rests a warm hand on the top of Sam’s head, and he feels that bright hot warmth flow through him, in what is becoming a familiar sensation. When it subsides, he feels totally fine, uninjured, not even achey from the long car ride. He pulls himself up to standing and scoops Jack up into his arms, giving the ash pile a wide berth as he walks towards Dean, Ketch, and Cas. “Thanks, Jack.” He gives him a quick peck on the nose before tucking him against his hip, balancing him with one arm.

Sam starts with Cas, who besides the sigil and the cuffs is in the best shape. He picks the lock on the first set of cuffs easily enough and Cas helps pick the rest, making quick work of them as a team.

“What’s the sigil?” Sam asks, realizing how quiet it is now that Asmodeus isn’t yapping.

“Enochian. To limit my abilities. Mostly the ability to heal myself.” Before Sam has a chance to respond, Jack has reached down to Cas and dropped his hand down on the back of Cas’s neck, since he’s bent down picking a lock on his ankle. Cas sits upright again as soon as Jack’s hand leaves him, his eyes wide in shock. It’s rare for Cas to be so emotive, but Sam supposes it’s also rare to see your son’s new superpowers in action. “Jack, did you…heal me?” Sam looks down at Cas’s chest, no longer even bloody, just smooth and muscular like usual.

“It looked ouchy.” Jack explains. Cas smiles at him, eyelids drooping to their usual hoodedness.

“It was ouchy.” Cas confirms before standing up, finally free of the ensorcelled cuffs. He reaches out his arms, and Sam moves to transfer Jack into his father’s grasp, but Jack clings tighter to Sam, burying his face in Sam’s shoulder.

“You wanna stay with me a little longer?” Sam asks, and Jack nods. Cas smiles at both of them, and Sam isn’t sure how he doesn’t take that personally. Maybe one of Cas’s superpowers is being magnanimous.

Cas crouches down beside Dean, who’s barely clinging to consciousness, one eye swollen shut, drooling blood onto his shirt.

“Dean,” Cas murmurs, achingly soft, and it makes Sam’s heart do something funny, hearing the raw tenderness there. He knows Dean and Cas are in love – like, cosmically, world-bendingly – but they’re honestly pretty tame on a day to day basis. When things like this happen, and he’s reminded just how deep things run between them, he can’t help but be moved. He almost thinks he wants something like that, someday, but not quite, because he isn’t sure he could handle something that enormous, something that breaks time and cheats death like that. But it’s a nice thought.

He doesn’t need to look at them to know Cas is healing Dean. Sam and Jack just move on to Ketch, who’s taking slow deep breaths and wincing on every inhale.

“Hey, Ketch,” Sam greets him, plopping down beside him so Jack can sit more properly in his own lap, and to give his arm a break.

“Sam,” Ketch acknowledges him breathlessly, dipping his head slightly.

“Thanks, for drawing fire out there.”

“It didn’t help very much.” Ketch deflects.

“Yeah, it did.” Sam assures him. Jack twists around in his lap and grabs Ketch’s forearm with both hands.

“Uncle Ketch!” Jack exclaims, squeezing the poor guy’s arm. Ketch, to his credit, somehow manages to flash him a genuine smile, despite his cracked ribs and broken legs and god knows what else.

“Hello, Jack. You showed up to save the day,” He congratulates Jack, before glancing up at Sam, “and you brought your trusty steed.”

Jack’s laugh bubbles out of him, and before Sam knows it, that golden light is building again, under both of Jack’s palms where they connect to Ketch’s arm, and just like that, Ketch is perfectly fine.

“Better?” Jack asks.

“Absolutely.” Ketch confirms, smiling. “You’ll have to show me how to do that, sometime. It would be quite handy in my line of work.” He stage-whispers conspiratorially, flashing Sam a wink. Sam rolls his eyes, but it’s hard to be in a bad mood with how everything shook out. He should probably be terrified, that Jack can apparently vaporize people on a whim – not just people. Princes of Hell. Presumably he can vaporize anything on a whim. But all Sam feels is relief. His brain must be broken, because he’s just relieved and proud, that this kid is so good and loyal and loving and brave, and he gets to be a part of his life, every single day.

Cas interrupts this train of thought by stomping over, all business again.

“I thought you told us you’d handled this demon years ago.”

Dean is standing behind Cas, hand on the angel’s shoulder, as if to pull him aside for a quick word.

“I did.” Ketch sighs, levering himself up to standing. Now the only one on the floor, Sam follows suit, scooping Jack up into his arms, then up higher, letting him sit on his shoulders in a piggy back ride, hands on top of Jack’s thighs to anchor him in place. Jack folds his arms in front of himself and balances them on Sam’s head, resting his own face on top. “As Dean and I discovered, just a fraction too late, Princes of Hell can be reincarnated, under the right circumstances. Some rather ardent Satanists conjured him, not far from here. He threw himself back into what he’d been doing when I killed him – searching for Jack.”

“It was harder than before,” Dean adds, “Because Ketch has been spreading so many red herrings and false flags over the years.” Cas glares at Ketch, then chances a glance at Dean, over his shoulder, before relaxing somewhat.

“I understand.” He sighs, and Sam smiles, remembering his earlier train of thought about Cas’s deliberate sighs. “It’s difficult, worrying all the time about something like this. We’d felt so secure for so long. To be caught unaware like this, it was horrifying, of course. But it also made me feel quite foolish, for believing we were safe.”

“You are safe – now, anyway.” Ketch replies.

Everyone smiles, at that, and Dean leans in for a brief kiss from Cas. Ketch rolls his eyes, but Sam can see the fondness there.

“You know,” Sam whispers to Ketch as they make their way out of the building, “Jack’s been asking about you. He wants you to stay and visit a few days.”

“Is that so?” Ketch asks, face unreadable aside from the sudden blush flaming up his cheekbones.

“Yeah. So, is Uncle Ketch going to hang around for a little bit, or should I tell the kid that he’s busy?”

“I believe I could spare a day or two, if you wouldn’t mind a guest.” Ketch whispers back.

“I’ll put sheets on one of the guest beds, then.” Sam replies, unable to hide a smirk.

Back at the cars – just the truck and the Impala, since Ketch’s motorcycle is back at his motel room – they decide how to split off for the ride home. Sam will drive Cas’s truck, and Cas will ride in the Impala with Dean. Dean will give Ketch a ride back to his motel so he can pack his things, and so Ketch can get his motorcycle.

Jack somehow manages to get them all into a group hug, and they stand there in the middle of a craggy old parking lot, arms around each other, Jack happy and snug in the center of all four men.

When they pull apart, Jack lingers on Dean, who’s murmuring something into his little ear as they embrace.

“Alright,” Sam bites his lip, preemptively nervous and tired for the long drive home. “I guess I’m gonna get on the road, then. I’ll see y’all back at the bunker, okay?”

“Drive safe, Sammy.” Dean nods, and Sam knows this is one of the many ways Dean says ‘I love you’. Cas smiles and waves. Ketch gives him the slimmest of knowing smiles.

But Jack breaks away from his father’s grasp and runs to Sam.

“You’re leaving?” He sputters, eyes wide and blue and aghast.

“Yeah, buddy. I gotta drive Cas’s truck back.” Sam explains, but Jack keeps pouting. “I’ll see you when we all get home.”

“No.” Jack shakes his head, then turns to face the others. “I’m going to ride with Sam.” He issues it like a royal decree. Cas cocks an eyebrow, but otherwise doesn’t react. Ketch looks like he’s barely suppressing laughter. Dean doesn’t succeed in keeping his own laughter at bay.

“You sure, baby?” He asks, and Jack nods resolutely. “You can’t change your mind, halfway through.” He cautions.

“I know. I want to ride with my Sam.” He explains. And Sam’s heart just about explodes.

“Oh, he’s your Sam, is he now?” Dean chuckles, crossing his arms in silent challenge.

“Yeah,” Jack reaches up and grabs Sam’s hand, craning his neck to look up at Sam’s face. “He is.”

So that’s exactly what happens – Dean and Cas get some rare alone time on the drive home, and they’re about three hours behind Sam when they do finally arrive, so he can assume they made at least one amorous pit stop along the way. Sam and Jack eat pretzels and golden raisins and go back and forth on their guessing game for hours on end, and Sam feels more content than he knows what to do with.

And he thinks, while Jack’s snoozing in the back seat, long after the sun’s buried beneath the horizon, the only sound the rumble of the tires on the highway and the soft hum of the radio turned way down low, that it doesn’t much matter whether Jack calls him his uncle, or if he calls anyone else his uncle, for that matter. Because he knows, without a doubt, that he doesn’t call anyone else his Sam.