Young Gun, for cherry916
Aug. 9th, 2015 11:40 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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spn_summergenTitle:
Young Gun
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cherry916
Rating: PG
Word Count: 7,711 words
Warnings: Oblique references to past non-con, nothing graphic. Suicidal behavior. Blood.
Author's Notes: I tried to combine two of the recipient’s prompts into one story here.
Summary: Set after The Werther Project. After Dean finds his brother bleeding out into a bowl to retrieve some dusty old book, he finds himself longing for a simpler time – a time when he understood what was going on in his little brother's head and how to help him. An idle thought has consequences for both Dean and Sam, but that doesn't stop the Winchesters from taking on a case.
Dean shook his head as he wrapped Sam's mangled arms. He probably could have been more gentle about the whole thing; cut wrists didn't exactly feel like a warm summer breeze to begin with, and here was Dean treating them like they'd personally offended him. Of course gentle had gone out the window way back when he'd let Cain give him that spiffy tattoo on his arm, hadn't it? Especially when it came to certain people...especially when it came to Sam. Gentle and sweet hadn't come easily to Dean for a while now, even when he wanted them to. Like now. Then again, the Winchesters hadn't ever been all that good at sweet and cuddly in the first place, had they?
And it wasn't like Sam would know what to do with the kid-gloves treatment, either. He didn't seem at all bothered by the fact that Dean was manhandling his huge, gaping wounds. No, Sammy just stared right back at him as Dean bound up those wrists, eyes a little glassy from pouring out something like half of his blood volume into a bowl in front of a stupid iron safe. He didn't even wince, and Dean knew why. Sam had had worse, and the fact that it shredded Dean inside to even think about that might have had as much to do with his angry tone as the Mark did when he lashed out at his brother. "The hell were you thinking, Sam?" he grunted out. "Think some dusty old book in some rusty old box is worth this?"
Sam just rolled his eyes and looked away. Dean saw red for a moment. He wanted to think that it was just the spell, whatever Cuthbert Friggin Sinclair had rigged up to make sure that only Men of Letters could access the book in the first place. Once Sam had, gasping, explained himself to Dean it made sense in a creepy, no-good way. The spell needed legacy blood, enough to take a life, and Sam with that giant brain of his had been the one to figure it out. But it would only be useful to anyone if two legacies went after it, because otherwise you'd just have a bloodless corpse and a big mess. And that, that Dean had figured out, because Dean was the only Winchester left who valued their life even a little bit. (And wasn't that a funny thing?)
Dean hauled Sam to his feet, noting that Sam grabbed the book and clutched it to himself on his way out. The damn kid and his books. He wouldn't tell Dean why he was here, of course, but Dean wasn't stupid. Pretty far from it, actually, and he practically had a Master's degree in sneaky Sammy. Sammy was hiding something about the stupid book, something about its importance, and Dean needed to know what.
He bundled Sam into the car. "We need to get you stitched up," he informed his brother. "It's not like we can take you to a hospital; they're going to take one look at you and put you on a locked ward. Since, you know, you thought emptying out your veins into a bowl would be a fabulous idea."
Sam gave a sullen shrug. "Worked, didn't it?"
Maybe the ward would be a good place for Sam, Dean mused. It would keep him away from whatever shitshow he had planned with the stupid book, that was for sure. And those places were usually pretty safe. Sam needed to be kept safe, usually from himself because what the hell. "I thought we'd already been over this, Sam," he said as he put the car in gear. He struggled to keep his voice light and neutral as he spoke, but it wasn't like that was something they did anymore either. "Light" had gone out the window sometime around the time the first hellhound growled in Dean's ear.
Sam's head had been sagging on his neck. He forced it back up. "Been over what?" His words slurred a little bit, but Dean knew that he was stone cold sober. Stone cold a lot of things, based on how much blood he'd left behind.
"You. Stunts like this. You don't get to just check out on me, damn it." He slammed his hand down on the dashboard. "After the last time, I thought you'd learned."
Sam gave a little laugh, low and dirty and bitter. "I learned."
"Then what the hell?" He wasn't going to address what he heard in Sam's voice, wasn't going to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Better to just bury it down, ignore it, paper over it and pretend everything on that end was fine. Because it was. "What the hell, Sam?"
The kid just sighed. "Some things are worth it, Dean." He closed his eyes and fell asleep, or maybe passed out, it was hard to tell the difference and keep the car aimed where it needed to go.
Dean pulled into the first motel he could find. Sam was still bleeding through the shirts Dean had grabbed out of Suzie's closet; pink things, appropriately enough. Maybe he should take him to the hospital, he thought as he hefted the kid over his shoulder to haul him into the motel. Sure they'd lock him up, probably throw away the key too. But maybe a good extended stay somewhere was what Sammy really needed, because here he was all hacked to pieces and maybe he needed – maybe he needed help that Dean couldn't give him anymore.
The thought scraped against the grain of everything he'd ever believed in. Winchesters didn't need outsiders. If Dad had heard even about Sam's last stint on he psych ward, with Lucifer dancing around in his head thanks to Cas' metaphorical sledgehammer to his Hell wall, he'd have lost his mind, pun intended, and then he'd have put the kid through extra training for making any of that necessary in the first place. Dean could just imagine his response to this mess now. Kid wants to slit his wrists to get some dumb book? Fine. Leave him there. Maybe. Or maybe that wasn't Dad, maybe that was Dean, resenting the fact that Sam had gone and tried to check out again.
Whatever the problem was, this kept happening. Dean looked at his little brother as he started the long, arduous process of stitching him up. He'd thought about getting an angel to spread his atoms across the universe, and then he'd jumped into the Cage, and then there was that whole scene in that abandoned warehouse when he'd been waving the gun at Lucifer, and then the Trials and wanting to run away with Death and now this – well, it would be nice to say that Sam was just willing to do whatever it took to get the job done, but Dean knew that his brother was just barely connected with the world of the living anymore.
Sam roused himself listlessly a few times while Dean stitched up his wrists, not saying much while Dean sewed. Dean didn't exactly invite conversation either, because what was there to say, really? Sammy was going to hide what he was going to hide, and Dean was going to do whatever it took to keep his brother alive no matter how hard he tried to "correct" it, and there wasn't much either of them could do to change that. Why waste the breath arguing about it?
Dean ran out to buy some fluids to try to top Sammy off. They wouldn't replace everything that the kid lost, but blood banks aren't nearly as easy to knock over as vampire movies might want the audience to believe. He needed a transfusion, and while Dean might still think that maybe a stay with professionals might be in Sammy's best interests he wasn't going to do that to the kid. The last time Sam had gotten "help" he'd wound up getting electrocuted by a fun-loving demon, and Dean wasn't going to take that chance.
He got back and roused Sam long enough to pour some knockoff Gatorade down his throat before letting the kid pass back out. He noticed that Sammy's phone was out, which it hadn't been when he’d left, and that he'd called Cas in the meantime. Could those actions have been enough to pull out his stitches? "If you burst your stitches I'm salting the wound before I stitch it up again," he warned his brother's unconscious form.
The Mark liked that idea a little too much. He tried to ignore it.
Jesus. When had they gotten to this point? Once upon a time, Dean would have known exactly what to do here. Well, for starters, they wouldn't have gotten to this point. Sure, Sammy had gone through his lows when they were kids, but not like this. Never like this. He'd run away, sure. He'd run away a lot, come to think of it. But he'd always had something to run toward, something to look forward to. Half of his fights with Dad had been about Dad forcing them to treat their lives like they were worthless, for crying out loud. (Not that that had been what Dad had been doing, not at all, but Sammy hadn't seen it that way at the time.)
This, though. Jesus Christ. Sam had slit his wrists open, poured out his life's blood into a bowl, for a book. For a book. And sure the book had plenty of esoteric knowledge or what the hell ever, but it wasn't going to be any good to Sam if he was freaking dead. Did he not get that? Whatever he thought he was sacrificing himself for, he didn't get to enjoy it when he was dead.
Once upon a time Dean could have headed this crap all off at the pass. If Dad and Sam were fighting he could have just grabbed Sam and taken him out to look at the stars, maybe with some beers. Or he could have taken him out to a bar and listened to Sam pretend that he didn't want to be there when they both knew that he wouldn't want to be anyplace else. All he'd have to do to make things better, whether it was from Dad's cut-downs or injuries from a wendigo somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, was to wrap his arm around his baby brother and just be the big brother.
That didn't work anymore. For one thing, wrapping his arm around his "little" brother's shoulder required some interesting gymnastics these days. For another, Sam didn't always or often welcome touch anymore; he leaped back like he'd been burned whenever anyone offered, more often than not, and seriously who flinched from a goddamn hug?
For his part, Dean wasn't always ready to offer comfort when it was necessary, either. Sometimes Sam needed to understand that he'd done the wrong thing, needed to be cut back down to size a little bit. Sometimes Dean's temper got away from him and then when Dean was ready to reach out again Sam had already shut down, had either clamped down on everything and turned back to whatever he was doing or disappeared entirely into that monk's cell of his.
Dean loved the Bunker, he wouldn't trade having his own room with his weapons and his kick-ass vinyl collection for the world, but sometimes he wondered if getting off the road and having this much privacy hadn't killed their bond even more thoroughly than Ruby or Amelia had.
The point being, Dean had no idea how to reach out to his little brother anymore. He sat awkwardly on the second bed in the motel room, the one closer to the window in contravention of every precedent the brothers had ever set for themselves because Dean had just dumped Sam's inert form as soon as he could and he wasn't moving Sasquatch again no matter how scrawny he'd gotten, and he looked at Sam. Sam had gotten scrawny over the past couple of years, too. He'd chalked it all up to the Trials but those shouldn't still be an issue. He'd been too busy thinking about himself to notice that Sam had essentially stopped eating again, just like he had when they were kids.
"Damn it, Sam," he rasped, a tear coming to his eye. There was his brother, pale and cold, lying on top of a sleazy motel bed, and here was Dean getting all weepy instead of...what? What was he supposed to do here? "How did we even get here, man?"
Sam didn't answer. Sam didn't move. Sam lay there in a heap, a pale, clammy, sweaty heap, on the bead. Oh, right. Shock. Dean should probably deal with the shock part, right? He shook his head. He should have been thinking about that for a while now. He wrestled Sam under the covers, checking to make sure that the bleeding hadn't started up again before tucking him in. Should he climb under there with him? Maybe share body heat? The thought left him a little queasy; once he'd have cuddled up with Sammy no problem, but those days were long gone and there was nothing to say that he wouldn't get a fist to the jaw or worse if a nightmare struck while Sammy was out.
Still, he hadn't stuffed an angel into Sammy to lose him to hypovolemic shock now, no matter what he wanted. He shoved the invalid to the side and lay down beside his brother, grimacing at how cold Sammy's body felt against his. Jesus, he'd bunked down with corpses that felt warmer.
"Do you ever wish that we could go back to when things were simpler?" he whispered into Sammy's ear.
Dean wasn't thinking about the time when all they were worrying about was finding their dad and maybe a few Hell visions. No, he was thinking further back. Even by then, Stanford had changed Sam. He didn't want Stanford Sam back, or psychic Sam, or Ruby's Sam or crazy Sam or the sad sack that he'd found when he'd gotten back from Purgatory. He wanted his little brother back, the one who still looked up to Dean and was content to let Dean do the heavy lifting. The one who didn't hide secrets from Dean and trusted Dean to know what was best. The one whose idea of a good time was burning down a field with fireworks.
Just before Dean drifted off to sleep, Dean thought that he heard a dark, maniacal laugh deep in the recesses of his brain. Ask and it shall be given unto you, Dean-o. Before he had a chance to wonder anything further about the oddly intrusive thought, sleep overcame him.
*
He woke the next morning to a cold, empty bed. Dean sat up with a gasp, adrenaline flooding his veins and waking him up better than coffee ever could. He'd gone to bed with a Sam beside him, and that Sam had been pretty sick. He should still have a Sam there with him, hogging all of the covers and drooling into the pillow. He needed to assess the situation and quickly.
Fortunately for Dean's nerves, the room wasn't that big. Even Sam, with his tendency to pull disappearing acts in plain sight almost, couldn't get lost in a motel room this size. He hadn't moved over to the other bed – his proper bed, Dean's mind filled in. He hadn't gone after the first shower, using up all the hot water on that ginormous body and all that freaking hair. (Seriously, he should just grab the clippers while he had Sammy at a disadvantage....)
"Okay, Cas. Well, thanks. I'll see what I can figure out from this end," said an impossibly young voice with an exhausted sigh. "Crap. He's up. I'll talk to you later."
Dean knew that voice. He still heard that voice sometimes, in his best dreams and sometimes his worst nightmares. He turned slowly to look at the tiny, scrawny figure sitting behind the hotel's rickety desk. "Sammy?" he asked when he found his breath again.
And it was...it was Sammy, all right. Same sandy brown hair, same irritated little curl to his lip that he'd always gotten in shitty motel rooms, same kaleidoscope eyes. Same moles, for crying out loud. The only difference between Dean's Sammy and the one sitting in front of him was that his Sammy wore at least five layers, for warmth and concealment, and this one seemed to be wearing one of grown-Sammy's V necks and not much else. He was swimming in the thing, too.
"It's Sam," his brother, or his brother's doppelganger, bit out, grabbing at the cup of crappy coffee that the room's ancient coffee maker provided. "What did you do, Dean?"
No doubt about it – he didn't even need to do the usual array of tests. This was Sam. "What makes you think that I did something, huh? Maybe it was a side effect of your dumbass little stunt from yesterday. Did you think of that? Maybe your body just...shrank down to better fit the blood left in your body."
Okay, that was a terrible explanation, lame even for him, and Sammy's bitchface was proportionate. God, he'd missed those days – when Sam wouldn't hesitate to let him know that he'd just put his foot right in it. "It reeks of angel in here, Dean," the boy said. "How can you not smell that?"
Dean sniffed. "I got nothing but mildew and maybe some stale beer, Sammy."
Sammy shuddered, his whole body shaking. "I guess it's a proximity thing," he said pointedly. "I'm guessing archangel, just from the amount of...of residue. Residual grace left behind." He swallowed and lifted a shaking hand to the paper cup.
Dean hesitated. "So wait – you remember all..."
"Did you remember everything from being an adult when you turned fourteen again?" Sam still wouldn't look him in the eye.
"Well, yeah. You were there. You know it."
"So why would it be any different for me?" He opened his laptop; the screen almost looked like a shield for him. "There being exactly one archangel left in play right now, I'm guessing Gabriel."
"So you can just sense angels and you never thought that would be something to share with the rest of the class?" Dean smacked his hand on the dresser.
Sam turned cool eyes back up to him. "Yes, Dean. When an angel does something with his mojo, I can smell the residual grace. What an amazing skill to have. Considering that they're usually aiming their 'mojo' at us at the time." He glared. "So. What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything, Sammy. Believe it or not, whatever Heaven's Littlest Douchebag did, this one isn't on me." He gave a start.
Whether fourteen or thirty-one, Sam's eyes were too sharp to miss that. "You did something. You said something to a hot chick in a bar, or you rubbed a lamp, or you said something out loud in a cursed town. You did something to catch his ear, Dean."
"Jeez, can't a guy have some thoughts in the privacy of his own head?" He rubbed at the Mark as his temper rose.
Sam snorted. "Apparently not. Angels don't do 'privacy,' remember?" He turned his attention back to his laptop.
Dean growled. "I did –"
Sam held up a hand and Dean shut his mouth. "Not interested, Dean. It's not going to get us anywhere. Let's just get back to Kansas, all right? First things first."
The older brother bit his cheek. "What's that, hotshot?"
"I need you to go out and pick up some clothes for me." Sam glanced at the window. "I don't have anything that fits, and if anyone spots you driving around with a kid wearing a tee shirt and nothing else...."
"Yeah, yeah. Got it. One Wal-Mart run coming up." He ducked out of the room and headed for the car, glad of the space.
This – this wasn't what he'd wished for last night at all. Gabriel, if that was who was behind all this, had gotten the age right, but Dean had forgotten about all of the steel in his little brother back then. Sammy then had had a real chip on his shoulder, about what God only knew, and apparently that was at least partially tied to his body because now he had all the vinegar of fourteen with all the crap that had been heaped onto him since then. He'd gotten more words from Sam this morning than he'd gotten in years, and they'd all been – well, pointed. Harsh. He'd thought that they'd come to an understanding about Gadreel – Sam had been wrong, Dean had done what he'd had to do to save Sam and Sam needed to get over it. Apparently Sammy wasn't as "over it" as he'd pretended.
"Freaking angels," he muttered as he drove over to the nearest Wal-Mart. He grabbed some jeans and some shirts, remembering Sammy's size like it had only been yesterday, and moved toward the checkout. Before he got to the line, though, he looked at the stuff in the cart. What was he doing with this stuff? None of it looked like stuff Sam bought for himself, or at least like stuff Sam picked for himself when he took his time and put some thought into it.
He went back into the boys' section and looked for more of the things that Sam looked good in, things that brought out his eyes or showed his complexion better. He hadn't been able to do that when they were really kids; new clothes for Sammy had been few and far between and he'd mostly had to make do with Dean’s hand-me-downs. And sure, this wasn't a real do-over. This was an adult stuck in the body of a fourteen-year-old and he wasn't going to make Sammy better by correcting the mistakes of their childhood. At the same time, he didn't have to encourage the "as long as it's covered, I'm fine" mindset that his brother had developed either. Sammy was a good-looking guy. He should let the world know that.
Dean grabbed some breakfast on his way back to the motel. Sam accepted the bag of clothing without complaint, pulling the clothes on disappearing into the bathroom to change. "You like the clothes?" Dean asked when Sam came out.
"They're okay," he shrugged. "It's not like clothes last very long for us, all things considered." He glanced at the Styrofoam containers of breakfast and turned a little green.
"Stomach not doing so hot? Maybe bleeding yourself dry wasn't such a hot idea." Dean smirked at him and pushed a container toward him. "Eat."
"I'm really not hungry, Dean. Maybe later."
"Yeah, don't think I didn't notice how much weight you’ve lost." Dean heard how tense his voice sounded and cleared his throat. "We need to get you back into fighting form, Sam."
Sam huffed out something like a laugh, but he didn't say anything. He didn't eat much, either; just nibbled at the toast that came with the breakfast Dean had bought. Instead he seemed eager to get going, never mind his injuries. Well, maybe whatever had turned him into a fourteen year old again had healed him up a little.
The drive back to Kansas took a good eight hours. Sam didnt talk for any of it. He just stared out the window, sullen and silent. Dean had forgotten about this part too, the way that Sammy could keep up a good sulk for days at a time. "I forgot you were like this," Dean finally said around hour six.
"Like what?" Sam finally deigned to glance at him.
"Sulky all the time. Wouldn't talk for days, sometimes. It's okay, man. It's hormones." He made himself grin, to show that he understood, even though his brother's attitude was clawing him up inside.
"Hormones." Sam shook his head, the faintest of grins coming to his mouth. "Dude." He opened his mouth to say something, then apparently thought better of it and shut it again. "Maybe I just didn't have anything to say that anyone wanted to hear."
"Could've joined in one of our conversations," Dean pointed out.
"Really couldn't have. All you guys talked about was hunting, corpse rock and sex. I wasn't interested in hunting and when I did talk about it I got in trouble. I don't like the whole mullet-rock thing." He waved a vague hand around the car's interior, probably to indicate the dulcet tones of AC/DC currently gracing their ears. "And there was no way that I was going to get involved with your talks about sex. No way." He made a face.
"Probably would've done you good, squirt," Dean smirked.
Sam just shot him a bitchface. "Can we not?"
"Oh, come on!" Dean slammed a hand on the steering wheel, pulling a hand back at the last minute so he didn't hurt his Baby. "You loved my stories, man!"
"First of all, no. No one wants to think about their brother having sex. No one. Exhibit A – your reaction when you heard about me and literally anyone else."
The only person he'd ever heard details about Sam with was Ruby, and he had more than one reason to be disgusted about that. "I tried to set you up with Roni Myers. Remember her?"
"I remember her."
"How come that didn't go anywhere?"
Sam sighed. "Dean. What part of 'Can we not?' did you interpret as 'Caring and sharing time?'"
"Come on, Sammy. Your mind may be all grown up but that body's fourteen. I've been there, man. Recently. I know what that's like! You've got to be going nuts over there!" He shook his head and laughed. "Talking about it will only help you."
"Fine." Sam's tone went absolutely cold. "Every time my body acts up on me I just remember Lucifer and it calms right the hell back down. Happy?"
Dean shut up after that. He couldn't help with that. He didn't even know where to start helping with that. "Oh," he said, and nodded once.
Cas was waiting for them when they got back to the bunker. How the guy kept getting in Dean had no clue – wasn't the place supposed to be warded against anything supernatural? And didn't he have the only key? Whatever – the angel was here now. "Hello, Dean," he greeted. "Sam. It is...disconcerting to see you thus reduced."
"Thanks for that, Cas." Sam glared at the angel for a second before forcing his face into a semblance of good cheer. "Good to see you, though. How are you?"
"I'm well, Sam. Perhaps we should talk privately?"
Dean frowned. Now Cas and Sammy were keeping secrets from him, together? Because each of them keeping their own private secrets from him had worked out so well, now they had to go and combine their skills? He could feel the burning starting up in his arm and tried to force it down. Instead, he pulled out his phone and checked his email. Thank God, he thought. "Hey, no time for your little stamp collector's meet up. I just got an email from Rudy. Looks like there's been a streak of weird deaths over in Woodward, Oklahoma. All of them are different but they all seem to involve the same blonde woman." He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
Sam stared at him. "We just got back, thirty seconds ago."
"People are dying, Sam!" he pointed out cheerfully.
Sam drew himself up to his full height, not even five feet tall at this point. "You're not Dad," he pointed out. "And it didn't work for him, either. I had a severe injury not twenty-four hours ago; I'm going to go lie down now." He picked up his bag and stalked off toward his room.
Dean gaped after him. "Maybe you should explain what's going on," Cas suggested, gesturing to the table. "Severe injury? What happened to Sam?"
Dean explained about how he'd found his brother and the wish he'd made as he fell asleep. "I just...I don't know how to take care of him anymore, Cas," he admitted, gulping at the tumbler of whiskey that had found its way into his hand. "It seems like he's got a foot out the door all of the time and that used to mean he was going to take off. Now it means he's going to, you know. And it's like, I've told him no, he can't do that, he has to stay here with me, but then I turn around and it's the Trials or he's trying to open a stupid box to get a stupid book with his own blood and I just don't know!"
"Dean, that book needed to be retrieved. And if Sam places a lower value on his life than you would like, well, I think that’s learned behavior. Neither of you were taught to value your lives." The angel never looked right sitting down. He always looked like it pained him, like parts of him were moving the wrong way every time he tried to do it, but he made the effort now.
"Yeah, but you don't see me looking for chances to end it all. I didn't take this mark because I wanted to end it." He rubbed at the scar. When he caught himself, he scratched at the space behind his ear instead. The Mark wasn't a big deal. He had it under control. "It seems like ever since he left for Stanford I haven't known how to take care of him. I keep trying and it's like, it just keeps getting worse!"
Cas sighed. "And you wished that you could go back to a simpler time, when you thought you had a handle on him."
"I did have a handle on him," Dean pointed out.
"Did you?" Cas smiled. "Maybe now that you're adults you should talk about that. Maybe things weren't as controlled as you think they were." He stood, probably to the relief of whatever angel parts got in the way of sitting down. "I have things I need to discuss with your brother, but think about what we discussed. We can leave in the morning."
"We?" Dean raised an eyebrow. "You think you're coming?"
"This may be angelic in nature, Dean. You'll need help with this."
Cas wandered down to Sammy's room and Dean was left alone, with his whiskey and his thoughts. He didn't like that much.
The next day, though, Sammy looked a lot healthier thanks to spending some quality time with Cas and his mojo. He looked healthier than he had when he really was fourteen, for that matter, although he still needed to freaking eat something. Dean tried to tear him away from his laptop long enough to stuff some scrambled eggs into him but he just played with them until they got cold while clicking through this, that and the other thing. Dean said something to Cas while sending his brother off on a mission to stock up the Impala with supplies.
"He is focused on his current project," Cas told him in a bland tone. "He's always been single-minded, and his current project is of the utmost importance. I can't blame him for having little interest in food or sleep."
"That's because you're an angel. You don't eat or sleep." Dean folded his arms across his chest. "Let me guess; you've been harping on the 'importance' of this particular 'project' for months." He resisted a grin at the pun in the sentence.
Cas showed no recognition of the joke, of course. "It is vital to the continued long-term existence of humanity, so yes."
"I'm pretty sure that I told him to leave it." Dean felt his face tighten.
Cas frowned. "You are concerned about your ability to care for your brother, but you forget two things, Dean. He has always been concerned to take care of you, even to his own detriment. And you said you didn't want to know. So stop asking. Now. Shall we go and investigate these strange deaths?"
"Cas – wait. Can you help Sammy with his – you know. Little problem?"
"We've got bigger things to worry about," Sam pointed out returning to the war room with a duffel bag full of supplies. "And no, he can't. I asked."
Cas sighed. "It's a combination of Trickster magic and archangel power, well beyond my ability to affect. Gabriel will change him back when he feels that you've learned your lesson, whatever it is."
They trooped out to the Impala and got into the car for the four and a half hour drive out to Oklahoma. Sam let Cas ride shotgun, since he was now the larger of the two. Dean felt a pang at the change. On the one hand he intensely disliked the switch from his brother to the angel at shotgun. He only let someone else sit shotgun when he wanted to make a point to Sammy, and he wasn't trying to do that here. Every time someone else sat there it felt wrong. At the same time, the smaller Sam in the back seat made him remember back to his youth, before Hell, before angels, before everything and for just one moment he was content.
Interviews with witnesses proved to be challenging, since there was no way that Sam could pass as an FBI agent now. Dean told people it was "take your son to the office" day and by and large they fell for it, even praising him for asking such "good questions, you'll make such a great agent yourself someday young man – if you cut your hair!"
At the end of the day, they retreated to the Oklahoma Cattle Pines Motel to regroup. Castiel puzzled over the name of the motel for several minutes – "Cattle are not pine trees, Dean. This makes no sense." – before Sam cleared his throat repeatedly to bring them back to the subject at hand. "So," he told them. "It does seem like the deaths are all linked."
Dean nodded. "All of the men were killed after being seen off in their fields dancing with this same woman," he confirmed. "They're all young, more like late teens to early twenties. My money's on something other than dancing, if you know what I mean."
Sam fixed him with a withering look, but accepted the beer Dean passed him. "Anyway. It turns out that the area's been visited by some pretty awful weather." He turned his laptop around to reveal satellite and radar images that meant exactly nothing to Dean.
"It's tornado country, Sammy. They're prone to that sort of thing." He rolled his eyes. God, he hated how much he sounded like his father right then, but Sammy was reading into things just like he had back when they'd been kids.
Except, except he'd been right when they were kids, more often than not. "Right," Sam sighed. "Except tornadoes don't usually limit themselves to one farm, or one business." He tapped a key without having to look at the keyboard to do it, how he just knew where things were when the laptop was turned around like that, he had an unnatural relationship with that machine, and other images appeared on the screen. "Lightning striking on clear nights? Tornadoes strong enough to kill touching down long enough to tear one man apart, without disturbing so much as a blade of grass on other farms?"
"That isn't normal," Cas confirmed. "Do you think it's demons?"
"Probably not, although the blonde woman did make me think of it. No sign of sulfur though." Sammy pressed some more keys. "There are these Slavic weather spirits called Vila. They're fantastically strong, they can control the weather, and they exert a lot of control over men."
"Vila," Dean repeated. "Like Bob Vila?" He guffawed at the look his brother gave him. "Okay. How do we find one?"
Sammy sighed. "That's the hard part. We mostly have to sit around and wait for one. But Steve Parzych, that cattle rancher we talked to? His son looked awfully shifty when he heard us talking about a blonde."
"Thinking we should go pay him a visit?" Dean grinned when the other two nodded. "Good. I saw him offering you a cigarette, Sammy. Been wanting to talk to him about that."
Sam glowered. "You do remember that I'm not actually fourteen, right?"
"He's contributing to the delinquency of a minor, Sammy. That ain't right."
Sam just rolled his eyes and got ready for the night's stakeout and fight. According to Sam, who then as now had an encyclopedic knowledge of all things creepy, crawly and weird, these Vila might be super powerful but they had been human souls once. "Human women who had been 'frivolous,' according to the lore," he snorted. "Whatever that means. Nothing specifically stated what would take one down, but I'm going to have to go with the usual things that take down spirits."
"We can't salt and burn someone whose remains are in freaking Poland, Sammy," Dean frowned. "I'm not getting on a plane."
"Iron, Dean. Consecrated iron. They're corporeal, even though they can fly and switch between planes." Sam shook his head.
Dean had to admit, he was getting used to hearing his brother's voice again. He guessed that Dad had been right, that some of Sammy's need to push back had been hormonal or whatever. Adult Sammy had still had that rage, until the Cage burned it out of him, but a lot of it had returned with the smaller body and he never thought he'd say that he missed the fire. Even though he'd complained about "bitchiness" at the time, he was starting to enjoy the push and pull of their relationship again. "I guess if that doesn't do the job an angel sword should," he shrugged.
"They usually do," Cas agreed, with no trace of a smirk whatsoever.
The ride out to the Parzych's ranch took about forty-five minutes, all of which passed in silence. Dean parked the car a little way away from their target and they crept over to the field they thought was the most likely place for a teenager meeting up with a secret girlfriend in the darkness.
They didn't have long to wait. The Vila was beautiful, with long blonde hair and a shimmering white dress. She smiled beautifully at the Parzych kid, but then she paused. "Did you tell anyone about us?" she snapped.
The hairs on Dean's arms stood up as static electricity built up in the air.
"No, no, baby," the boy promised. "Some feds came around but I kept my mouth shut just like we talked about."
The woman let out a little growl of frustration. "They weren't 'feds,' Bill. They were hunters, and they're out here now." She waved her hand, and a gust of wind blasted the youth across the field.
None of the hunters felt compelled to hide themselves away anymore. "Nice move," Dean sneered. "I don't suppose you'd care to just, you know, go back to where you came from?"
"I come from Oklahoma, you ass," she spat back at him. A glower from her storm-gray eyes was enough to send a bolt of lightning arcing toward him.
His little brother barreled into him, tackling him to the ground as Cas fired a round of consecrated iron from the shotgun. Dean tossed Sam off of him, cursing, and reached for his handgun. It did him no good. A blast of wind hit him in the face, knocking him away from the spirit.
Sam was now alone with the spirit, still picking himself up from where Dean had tossed him down. He didn't even flinch as the creature leaned down to him. "You're a little young for my tastes, but I suppose you'll grow. Will you come dance with me, boy?"
Sam shook his head. "No. No way." He brought his gun hand up and fired.
The bullets enraged her, but didn't kill her. Shrieking, she gestured with her left hand. Sam's body jerked fifteen feet in the air and then slammed back down onto the baked clay ground. Dean yelled, but another gust of wind kept him back.
Sam was bleeding, and he was clearly hurting, but he managed to pull himself up. With one shaking hand, he reached out and grabbed the monster's hair. Dean couldn't quite tell, at his distance, if Sammy was trying to pull himself up, if he was trying to pull her hair, or if either option worked just fine for him, but either way she screamed when several strands of her long blonde hair came out in Sammy's disproportionately huge hand.
The boy grinned, bloody and awful. "Hold still," he coughed, and pulled out his angel blade.
Stabbing her proved anticlimactic. She collapsed into a heap and then dissolved into dust, and that was it. Dean and Cas could both move again, and they both rushed to his side.
Sammy was hurting, and bad. Dean didn't need to touch him to see the broken bones, and he was breathing with these awful wet sucking sounds. Billy Parzych, the kid who'd been "dancing with" the Vila this whole time, joined them. "He's hurt pretty bad, huh? The ambulance will take a while to get here, but if your car is close..."
Dean hesitated. Healing him in front of a civilian was a bad idea, but so was bringing Sam to a hospital right now. "Hey, Cas?"
Cas was gone.
"The other fed who was with you? He disappeared about two minutes ago. Flash of golden light. Think you were busy watching your boy there," Bill told him. "He looked surprised. I can help you get the boy to the car."
Dean bit back a curse. "Yeah. Okay." What else was he going to do?
The poor kid helped him carry Sam back to the Impala. It had to hurt poor Sammy like anything, but the kid had had worse. He tried not to lash out at Billy about the thing; it wasn't like he expected civilians to know about obscure Slavic nature spirits. He hadn't even known about this one, Cas hadn't known about this one. He had to hand it to Sammy for knowing how to take her out.
He drove them back to the Bunker and carried Sammy not to his own little cell, because there was no way he was going to get fixed up on a mattress that should have been replaced back before their dad was born, but to Dean's room. There, he wrapped the ribs and splinted the leg and the arm. He got Sammy some pills for the pain, which he refused in favor of just a little bit of whiskey to take the edge off.
Then Dean cleaned his brother up, and got him changed into sweats and an old Metallica tee shirt of Dean's that didn't fit either of them as adults really. He climbed into bed beside his brother and arranged him so that he was in a comfortable position, propped up on Dean with his own head tucked under Dean's. Dean turned out the light and they both turned in for sleep.
Gabriel appeared in Dean's dream. Dean had kind of been expecting the pint-sized archangel. "Sam was pretty impressive against that Vila," the trickster said, taking a lollipop out of his mouth.
"You're a dick," Dean replied.
"It's been said." Gabriel snapped his fingers and a bench appeared. "Have you figured out what the lesson is yet?"
"I suck at taking care of my brother?"
"No, dumbass. Sasquatch there was a lot more fun to play with, you know. But anyway. The point is, you keep looking for a golden age that never existed. Even when he was this small, he wasn't some mindless robot. He loved you, he idolized you, but he had a mind of his own and he wasn't afraid to use it. And you were used to that."
"You make it sound like I didn't take care of him," Dean snapped. "I did! I'm the one who made sure he got up for school, I'm the one who made sure he got food, I'm the one –"
"You did some of that, and you did more of it than you should ever have been asked to do," Gabriel acknowledged. "You also went off with your dad an awful lot. Sam was alone a lot of the time, too. But that's not the point. You took care of Sam today, just like you took care of him the night I turned him back into a hormonal teenager. You're wrapped up in each other like the world outside doesn't even exist – which, hey, no judging, but you both need to get out more."
"But he's still a mess!" Dean hissed.
"Oh, and you're not? He's scared to death for you, Dean-o." The angel poked him in the chest. "He tackled you to the ground so you wouldn't get electrocuted, for crying out loud. You remember what happened the last time."
"That's not going to be an issue anymore," Dean reminded him.
"Then there’s that. You want to help Sam? You want to take care of him? Get that thing off your arm. Right now the biggest threat to him is you, bucko." The angel flicked Dean's ear. "Seriously, Dean. Sam's got a lot of issues.So do you. But you did fine, tonight, with the issues you could handle. Try to get out, have a little fun together. Remind him that you're here for him and with him, and remember that he's here for and with you."
The dream faded, and when Dean woke up Sam was back to his proper size. Gabriel had even done them the favor of healing Sam's injuries and right-sizing his pajamas.
Sam pulled away a little when he realized he was cuddling his brother. "Uh. Awkward."
Dean remembered what Gabriel had said. "Just roll over and quit hogging all the covers, bitch."
"Jerk," Sam said after a second.
Recipient:
cherry916Rating: PG
Word Count: 7,711 words
Warnings: Oblique references to past non-con, nothing graphic. Suicidal behavior. Blood.
Author's Notes: I tried to combine two of the recipient’s prompts into one story here.
Summary: Set after The Werther Project. After Dean finds his brother bleeding out into a bowl to retrieve some dusty old book, he finds himself longing for a simpler time – a time when he understood what was going on in his little brother's head and how to help him. An idle thought has consequences for both Dean and Sam, but that doesn't stop the Winchesters from taking on a case.
Dean shook his head as he wrapped Sam's mangled arms. He probably could have been more gentle about the whole thing; cut wrists didn't exactly feel like a warm summer breeze to begin with, and here was Dean treating them like they'd personally offended him. Of course gentle had gone out the window way back when he'd let Cain give him that spiffy tattoo on his arm, hadn't it? Especially when it came to certain people...especially when it came to Sam. Gentle and sweet hadn't come easily to Dean for a while now, even when he wanted them to. Like now. Then again, the Winchesters hadn't ever been all that good at sweet and cuddly in the first place, had they?
And it wasn't like Sam would know what to do with the kid-gloves treatment, either. He didn't seem at all bothered by the fact that Dean was manhandling his huge, gaping wounds. No, Sammy just stared right back at him as Dean bound up those wrists, eyes a little glassy from pouring out something like half of his blood volume into a bowl in front of a stupid iron safe. He didn't even wince, and Dean knew why. Sam had had worse, and the fact that it shredded Dean inside to even think about that might have had as much to do with his angry tone as the Mark did when he lashed out at his brother. "The hell were you thinking, Sam?" he grunted out. "Think some dusty old book in some rusty old box is worth this?"
Sam just rolled his eyes and looked away. Dean saw red for a moment. He wanted to think that it was just the spell, whatever Cuthbert Friggin Sinclair had rigged up to make sure that only Men of Letters could access the book in the first place. Once Sam had, gasping, explained himself to Dean it made sense in a creepy, no-good way. The spell needed legacy blood, enough to take a life, and Sam with that giant brain of his had been the one to figure it out. But it would only be useful to anyone if two legacies went after it, because otherwise you'd just have a bloodless corpse and a big mess. And that, that Dean had figured out, because Dean was the only Winchester left who valued their life even a little bit. (And wasn't that a funny thing?)
Dean hauled Sam to his feet, noting that Sam grabbed the book and clutched it to himself on his way out. The damn kid and his books. He wouldn't tell Dean why he was here, of course, but Dean wasn't stupid. Pretty far from it, actually, and he practically had a Master's degree in sneaky Sammy. Sammy was hiding something about the stupid book, something about its importance, and Dean needed to know what.
He bundled Sam into the car. "We need to get you stitched up," he informed his brother. "It's not like we can take you to a hospital; they're going to take one look at you and put you on a locked ward. Since, you know, you thought emptying out your veins into a bowl would be a fabulous idea."
Sam gave a sullen shrug. "Worked, didn't it?"
Maybe the ward would be a good place for Sam, Dean mused. It would keep him away from whatever shitshow he had planned with the stupid book, that was for sure. And those places were usually pretty safe. Sam needed to be kept safe, usually from himself because what the hell. "I thought we'd already been over this, Sam," he said as he put the car in gear. He struggled to keep his voice light and neutral as he spoke, but it wasn't like that was something they did anymore either. "Light" had gone out the window sometime around the time the first hellhound growled in Dean's ear.
Sam's head had been sagging on his neck. He forced it back up. "Been over what?" His words slurred a little bit, but Dean knew that he was stone cold sober. Stone cold a lot of things, based on how much blood he'd left behind.
"You. Stunts like this. You don't get to just check out on me, damn it." He slammed his hand down on the dashboard. "After the last time, I thought you'd learned."
Sam gave a little laugh, low and dirty and bitter. "I learned."
"Then what the hell?" He wasn't going to address what he heard in Sam's voice, wasn't going to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Better to just bury it down, ignore it, paper over it and pretend everything on that end was fine. Because it was. "What the hell, Sam?"
The kid just sighed. "Some things are worth it, Dean." He closed his eyes and fell asleep, or maybe passed out, it was hard to tell the difference and keep the car aimed where it needed to go.
Dean pulled into the first motel he could find. Sam was still bleeding through the shirts Dean had grabbed out of Suzie's closet; pink things, appropriately enough. Maybe he should take him to the hospital, he thought as he hefted the kid over his shoulder to haul him into the motel. Sure they'd lock him up, probably throw away the key too. But maybe a good extended stay somewhere was what Sammy really needed, because here he was all hacked to pieces and maybe he needed – maybe he needed help that Dean couldn't give him anymore.
The thought scraped against the grain of everything he'd ever believed in. Winchesters didn't need outsiders. If Dad had heard even about Sam's last stint on he psych ward, with Lucifer dancing around in his head thanks to Cas' metaphorical sledgehammer to his Hell wall, he'd have lost his mind, pun intended, and then he'd have put the kid through extra training for making any of that necessary in the first place. Dean could just imagine his response to this mess now. Kid wants to slit his wrists to get some dumb book? Fine. Leave him there. Maybe. Or maybe that wasn't Dad, maybe that was Dean, resenting the fact that Sam had gone and tried to check out again.
Whatever the problem was, this kept happening. Dean looked at his little brother as he started the long, arduous process of stitching him up. He'd thought about getting an angel to spread his atoms across the universe, and then he'd jumped into the Cage, and then there was that whole scene in that abandoned warehouse when he'd been waving the gun at Lucifer, and then the Trials and wanting to run away with Death and now this – well, it would be nice to say that Sam was just willing to do whatever it took to get the job done, but Dean knew that his brother was just barely connected with the world of the living anymore.
Sam roused himself listlessly a few times while Dean stitched up his wrists, not saying much while Dean sewed. Dean didn't exactly invite conversation either, because what was there to say, really? Sammy was going to hide what he was going to hide, and Dean was going to do whatever it took to keep his brother alive no matter how hard he tried to "correct" it, and there wasn't much either of them could do to change that. Why waste the breath arguing about it?
Dean ran out to buy some fluids to try to top Sammy off. They wouldn't replace everything that the kid lost, but blood banks aren't nearly as easy to knock over as vampire movies might want the audience to believe. He needed a transfusion, and while Dean might still think that maybe a stay with professionals might be in Sammy's best interests he wasn't going to do that to the kid. The last time Sam had gotten "help" he'd wound up getting electrocuted by a fun-loving demon, and Dean wasn't going to take that chance.
He got back and roused Sam long enough to pour some knockoff Gatorade down his throat before letting the kid pass back out. He noticed that Sammy's phone was out, which it hadn't been when he’d left, and that he'd called Cas in the meantime. Could those actions have been enough to pull out his stitches? "If you burst your stitches I'm salting the wound before I stitch it up again," he warned his brother's unconscious form.
The Mark liked that idea a little too much. He tried to ignore it.
Jesus. When had they gotten to this point? Once upon a time, Dean would have known exactly what to do here. Well, for starters, they wouldn't have gotten to this point. Sure, Sammy had gone through his lows when they were kids, but not like this. Never like this. He'd run away, sure. He'd run away a lot, come to think of it. But he'd always had something to run toward, something to look forward to. Half of his fights with Dad had been about Dad forcing them to treat their lives like they were worthless, for crying out loud. (Not that that had been what Dad had been doing, not at all, but Sammy hadn't seen it that way at the time.)
This, though. Jesus Christ. Sam had slit his wrists open, poured out his life's blood into a bowl, for a book. For a book. And sure the book had plenty of esoteric knowledge or what the hell ever, but it wasn't going to be any good to Sam if he was freaking dead. Did he not get that? Whatever he thought he was sacrificing himself for, he didn't get to enjoy it when he was dead.
Once upon a time Dean could have headed this crap all off at the pass. If Dad and Sam were fighting he could have just grabbed Sam and taken him out to look at the stars, maybe with some beers. Or he could have taken him out to a bar and listened to Sam pretend that he didn't want to be there when they both knew that he wouldn't want to be anyplace else. All he'd have to do to make things better, whether it was from Dad's cut-downs or injuries from a wendigo somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, was to wrap his arm around his baby brother and just be the big brother.
That didn't work anymore. For one thing, wrapping his arm around his "little" brother's shoulder required some interesting gymnastics these days. For another, Sam didn't always or often welcome touch anymore; he leaped back like he'd been burned whenever anyone offered, more often than not, and seriously who flinched from a goddamn hug?
For his part, Dean wasn't always ready to offer comfort when it was necessary, either. Sometimes Sam needed to understand that he'd done the wrong thing, needed to be cut back down to size a little bit. Sometimes Dean's temper got away from him and then when Dean was ready to reach out again Sam had already shut down, had either clamped down on everything and turned back to whatever he was doing or disappeared entirely into that monk's cell of his.
Dean loved the Bunker, he wouldn't trade having his own room with his weapons and his kick-ass vinyl collection for the world, but sometimes he wondered if getting off the road and having this much privacy hadn't killed their bond even more thoroughly than Ruby or Amelia had.
The point being, Dean had no idea how to reach out to his little brother anymore. He sat awkwardly on the second bed in the motel room, the one closer to the window in contravention of every precedent the brothers had ever set for themselves because Dean had just dumped Sam's inert form as soon as he could and he wasn't moving Sasquatch again no matter how scrawny he'd gotten, and he looked at Sam. Sam had gotten scrawny over the past couple of years, too. He'd chalked it all up to the Trials but those shouldn't still be an issue. He'd been too busy thinking about himself to notice that Sam had essentially stopped eating again, just like he had when they were kids.
"Damn it, Sam," he rasped, a tear coming to his eye. There was his brother, pale and cold, lying on top of a sleazy motel bed, and here was Dean getting all weepy instead of...what? What was he supposed to do here? "How did we even get here, man?"
Sam didn't answer. Sam didn't move. Sam lay there in a heap, a pale, clammy, sweaty heap, on the bead. Oh, right. Shock. Dean should probably deal with the shock part, right? He shook his head. He should have been thinking about that for a while now. He wrestled Sam under the covers, checking to make sure that the bleeding hadn't started up again before tucking him in. Should he climb under there with him? Maybe share body heat? The thought left him a little queasy; once he'd have cuddled up with Sammy no problem, but those days were long gone and there was nothing to say that he wouldn't get a fist to the jaw or worse if a nightmare struck while Sammy was out.
Still, he hadn't stuffed an angel into Sammy to lose him to hypovolemic shock now, no matter what he wanted. He shoved the invalid to the side and lay down beside his brother, grimacing at how cold Sammy's body felt against his. Jesus, he'd bunked down with corpses that felt warmer.
"Do you ever wish that we could go back to when things were simpler?" he whispered into Sammy's ear.
Dean wasn't thinking about the time when all they were worrying about was finding their dad and maybe a few Hell visions. No, he was thinking further back. Even by then, Stanford had changed Sam. He didn't want Stanford Sam back, or psychic Sam, or Ruby's Sam or crazy Sam or the sad sack that he'd found when he'd gotten back from Purgatory. He wanted his little brother back, the one who still looked up to Dean and was content to let Dean do the heavy lifting. The one who didn't hide secrets from Dean and trusted Dean to know what was best. The one whose idea of a good time was burning down a field with fireworks.
Just before Dean drifted off to sleep, Dean thought that he heard a dark, maniacal laugh deep in the recesses of his brain. Ask and it shall be given unto you, Dean-o. Before he had a chance to wonder anything further about the oddly intrusive thought, sleep overcame him.
*
He woke the next morning to a cold, empty bed. Dean sat up with a gasp, adrenaline flooding his veins and waking him up better than coffee ever could. He'd gone to bed with a Sam beside him, and that Sam had been pretty sick. He should still have a Sam there with him, hogging all of the covers and drooling into the pillow. He needed to assess the situation and quickly.
Fortunately for Dean's nerves, the room wasn't that big. Even Sam, with his tendency to pull disappearing acts in plain sight almost, couldn't get lost in a motel room this size. He hadn't moved over to the other bed – his proper bed, Dean's mind filled in. He hadn't gone after the first shower, using up all the hot water on that ginormous body and all that freaking hair. (Seriously, he should just grab the clippers while he had Sammy at a disadvantage....)
"Okay, Cas. Well, thanks. I'll see what I can figure out from this end," said an impossibly young voice with an exhausted sigh. "Crap. He's up. I'll talk to you later."
Dean knew that voice. He still heard that voice sometimes, in his best dreams and sometimes his worst nightmares. He turned slowly to look at the tiny, scrawny figure sitting behind the hotel's rickety desk. "Sammy?" he asked when he found his breath again.
And it was...it was Sammy, all right. Same sandy brown hair, same irritated little curl to his lip that he'd always gotten in shitty motel rooms, same kaleidoscope eyes. Same moles, for crying out loud. The only difference between Dean's Sammy and the one sitting in front of him was that his Sammy wore at least five layers, for warmth and concealment, and this one seemed to be wearing one of grown-Sammy's V necks and not much else. He was swimming in the thing, too.
"It's Sam," his brother, or his brother's doppelganger, bit out, grabbing at the cup of crappy coffee that the room's ancient coffee maker provided. "What did you do, Dean?"
No doubt about it – he didn't even need to do the usual array of tests. This was Sam. "What makes you think that I did something, huh? Maybe it was a side effect of your dumbass little stunt from yesterday. Did you think of that? Maybe your body just...shrank down to better fit the blood left in your body."
Okay, that was a terrible explanation, lame even for him, and Sammy's bitchface was proportionate. God, he'd missed those days – when Sam wouldn't hesitate to let him know that he'd just put his foot right in it. "It reeks of angel in here, Dean," the boy said. "How can you not smell that?"
Dean sniffed. "I got nothing but mildew and maybe some stale beer, Sammy."
Sammy shuddered, his whole body shaking. "I guess it's a proximity thing," he said pointedly. "I'm guessing archangel, just from the amount of...of residue. Residual grace left behind." He swallowed and lifted a shaking hand to the paper cup.
Dean hesitated. "So wait – you remember all..."
"Did you remember everything from being an adult when you turned fourteen again?" Sam still wouldn't look him in the eye.
"Well, yeah. You were there. You know it."
"So why would it be any different for me?" He opened his laptop; the screen almost looked like a shield for him. "There being exactly one archangel left in play right now, I'm guessing Gabriel."
"So you can just sense angels and you never thought that would be something to share with the rest of the class?" Dean smacked his hand on the dresser.
Sam turned cool eyes back up to him. "Yes, Dean. When an angel does something with his mojo, I can smell the residual grace. What an amazing skill to have. Considering that they're usually aiming their 'mojo' at us at the time." He glared. "So. What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything, Sammy. Believe it or not, whatever Heaven's Littlest Douchebag did, this one isn't on me." He gave a start.
Whether fourteen or thirty-one, Sam's eyes were too sharp to miss that. "You did something. You said something to a hot chick in a bar, or you rubbed a lamp, or you said something out loud in a cursed town. You did something to catch his ear, Dean."
"Jeez, can't a guy have some thoughts in the privacy of his own head?" He rubbed at the Mark as his temper rose.
Sam snorted. "Apparently not. Angels don't do 'privacy,' remember?" He turned his attention back to his laptop.
Dean growled. "I did –"
Sam held up a hand and Dean shut his mouth. "Not interested, Dean. It's not going to get us anywhere. Let's just get back to Kansas, all right? First things first."
The older brother bit his cheek. "What's that, hotshot?"
"I need you to go out and pick up some clothes for me." Sam glanced at the window. "I don't have anything that fits, and if anyone spots you driving around with a kid wearing a tee shirt and nothing else...."
"Yeah, yeah. Got it. One Wal-Mart run coming up." He ducked out of the room and headed for the car, glad of the space.
This – this wasn't what he'd wished for last night at all. Gabriel, if that was who was behind all this, had gotten the age right, but Dean had forgotten about all of the steel in his little brother back then. Sammy then had had a real chip on his shoulder, about what God only knew, and apparently that was at least partially tied to his body because now he had all the vinegar of fourteen with all the crap that had been heaped onto him since then. He'd gotten more words from Sam this morning than he'd gotten in years, and they'd all been – well, pointed. Harsh. He'd thought that they'd come to an understanding about Gadreel – Sam had been wrong, Dean had done what he'd had to do to save Sam and Sam needed to get over it. Apparently Sammy wasn't as "over it" as he'd pretended.
"Freaking angels," he muttered as he drove over to the nearest Wal-Mart. He grabbed some jeans and some shirts, remembering Sammy's size like it had only been yesterday, and moved toward the checkout. Before he got to the line, though, he looked at the stuff in the cart. What was he doing with this stuff? None of it looked like stuff Sam bought for himself, or at least like stuff Sam picked for himself when he took his time and put some thought into it.
He went back into the boys' section and looked for more of the things that Sam looked good in, things that brought out his eyes or showed his complexion better. He hadn't been able to do that when they were really kids; new clothes for Sammy had been few and far between and he'd mostly had to make do with Dean’s hand-me-downs. And sure, this wasn't a real do-over. This was an adult stuck in the body of a fourteen-year-old and he wasn't going to make Sammy better by correcting the mistakes of their childhood. At the same time, he didn't have to encourage the "as long as it's covered, I'm fine" mindset that his brother had developed either. Sammy was a good-looking guy. He should let the world know that.
Dean grabbed some breakfast on his way back to the motel. Sam accepted the bag of clothing without complaint, pulling the clothes on disappearing into the bathroom to change. "You like the clothes?" Dean asked when Sam came out.
"They're okay," he shrugged. "It's not like clothes last very long for us, all things considered." He glanced at the Styrofoam containers of breakfast and turned a little green.
"Stomach not doing so hot? Maybe bleeding yourself dry wasn't such a hot idea." Dean smirked at him and pushed a container toward him. "Eat."
"I'm really not hungry, Dean. Maybe later."
"Yeah, don't think I didn't notice how much weight you’ve lost." Dean heard how tense his voice sounded and cleared his throat. "We need to get you back into fighting form, Sam."
Sam huffed out something like a laugh, but he didn't say anything. He didn't eat much, either; just nibbled at the toast that came with the breakfast Dean had bought. Instead he seemed eager to get going, never mind his injuries. Well, maybe whatever had turned him into a fourteen year old again had healed him up a little.
The drive back to Kansas took a good eight hours. Sam didnt talk for any of it. He just stared out the window, sullen and silent. Dean had forgotten about this part too, the way that Sammy could keep up a good sulk for days at a time. "I forgot you were like this," Dean finally said around hour six.
"Like what?" Sam finally deigned to glance at him.
"Sulky all the time. Wouldn't talk for days, sometimes. It's okay, man. It's hormones." He made himself grin, to show that he understood, even though his brother's attitude was clawing him up inside.
"Hormones." Sam shook his head, the faintest of grins coming to his mouth. "Dude." He opened his mouth to say something, then apparently thought better of it and shut it again. "Maybe I just didn't have anything to say that anyone wanted to hear."
"Could've joined in one of our conversations," Dean pointed out.
"Really couldn't have. All you guys talked about was hunting, corpse rock and sex. I wasn't interested in hunting and when I did talk about it I got in trouble. I don't like the whole mullet-rock thing." He waved a vague hand around the car's interior, probably to indicate the dulcet tones of AC/DC currently gracing their ears. "And there was no way that I was going to get involved with your talks about sex. No way." He made a face.
"Probably would've done you good, squirt," Dean smirked.
Sam just shot him a bitchface. "Can we not?"
"Oh, come on!" Dean slammed a hand on the steering wheel, pulling a hand back at the last minute so he didn't hurt his Baby. "You loved my stories, man!"
"First of all, no. No one wants to think about their brother having sex. No one. Exhibit A – your reaction when you heard about me and literally anyone else."
The only person he'd ever heard details about Sam with was Ruby, and he had more than one reason to be disgusted about that. "I tried to set you up with Roni Myers. Remember her?"
"I remember her."
"How come that didn't go anywhere?"
Sam sighed. "Dean. What part of 'Can we not?' did you interpret as 'Caring and sharing time?'"
"Come on, Sammy. Your mind may be all grown up but that body's fourteen. I've been there, man. Recently. I know what that's like! You've got to be going nuts over there!" He shook his head and laughed. "Talking about it will only help you."
"Fine." Sam's tone went absolutely cold. "Every time my body acts up on me I just remember Lucifer and it calms right the hell back down. Happy?"
Dean shut up after that. He couldn't help with that. He didn't even know where to start helping with that. "Oh," he said, and nodded once.
Cas was waiting for them when they got back to the bunker. How the guy kept getting in Dean had no clue – wasn't the place supposed to be warded against anything supernatural? And didn't he have the only key? Whatever – the angel was here now. "Hello, Dean," he greeted. "Sam. It is...disconcerting to see you thus reduced."
"Thanks for that, Cas." Sam glared at the angel for a second before forcing his face into a semblance of good cheer. "Good to see you, though. How are you?"
"I'm well, Sam. Perhaps we should talk privately?"
Dean frowned. Now Cas and Sammy were keeping secrets from him, together? Because each of them keeping their own private secrets from him had worked out so well, now they had to go and combine their skills? He could feel the burning starting up in his arm and tried to force it down. Instead, he pulled out his phone and checked his email. Thank God, he thought. "Hey, no time for your little stamp collector's meet up. I just got an email from Rudy. Looks like there's been a streak of weird deaths over in Woodward, Oklahoma. All of them are different but they all seem to involve the same blonde woman." He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
Sam stared at him. "We just got back, thirty seconds ago."
"People are dying, Sam!" he pointed out cheerfully.
Sam drew himself up to his full height, not even five feet tall at this point. "You're not Dad," he pointed out. "And it didn't work for him, either. I had a severe injury not twenty-four hours ago; I'm going to go lie down now." He picked up his bag and stalked off toward his room.
Dean gaped after him. "Maybe you should explain what's going on," Cas suggested, gesturing to the table. "Severe injury? What happened to Sam?"
Dean explained about how he'd found his brother and the wish he'd made as he fell asleep. "I just...I don't know how to take care of him anymore, Cas," he admitted, gulping at the tumbler of whiskey that had found its way into his hand. "It seems like he's got a foot out the door all of the time and that used to mean he was going to take off. Now it means he's going to, you know. And it's like, I've told him no, he can't do that, he has to stay here with me, but then I turn around and it's the Trials or he's trying to open a stupid box to get a stupid book with his own blood and I just don't know!"
"Dean, that book needed to be retrieved. And if Sam places a lower value on his life than you would like, well, I think that’s learned behavior. Neither of you were taught to value your lives." The angel never looked right sitting down. He always looked like it pained him, like parts of him were moving the wrong way every time he tried to do it, but he made the effort now.
"Yeah, but you don't see me looking for chances to end it all. I didn't take this mark because I wanted to end it." He rubbed at the scar. When he caught himself, he scratched at the space behind his ear instead. The Mark wasn't a big deal. He had it under control. "It seems like ever since he left for Stanford I haven't known how to take care of him. I keep trying and it's like, it just keeps getting worse!"
Cas sighed. "And you wished that you could go back to a simpler time, when you thought you had a handle on him."
"I did have a handle on him," Dean pointed out.
"Did you?" Cas smiled. "Maybe now that you're adults you should talk about that. Maybe things weren't as controlled as you think they were." He stood, probably to the relief of whatever angel parts got in the way of sitting down. "I have things I need to discuss with your brother, but think about what we discussed. We can leave in the morning."
"We?" Dean raised an eyebrow. "You think you're coming?"
"This may be angelic in nature, Dean. You'll need help with this."
Cas wandered down to Sammy's room and Dean was left alone, with his whiskey and his thoughts. He didn't like that much.
The next day, though, Sammy looked a lot healthier thanks to spending some quality time with Cas and his mojo. He looked healthier than he had when he really was fourteen, for that matter, although he still needed to freaking eat something. Dean tried to tear him away from his laptop long enough to stuff some scrambled eggs into him but he just played with them until they got cold while clicking through this, that and the other thing. Dean said something to Cas while sending his brother off on a mission to stock up the Impala with supplies.
"He is focused on his current project," Cas told him in a bland tone. "He's always been single-minded, and his current project is of the utmost importance. I can't blame him for having little interest in food or sleep."
"That's because you're an angel. You don't eat or sleep." Dean folded his arms across his chest. "Let me guess; you've been harping on the 'importance' of this particular 'project' for months." He resisted a grin at the pun in the sentence.
Cas showed no recognition of the joke, of course. "It is vital to the continued long-term existence of humanity, so yes."
"I'm pretty sure that I told him to leave it." Dean felt his face tighten.
Cas frowned. "You are concerned about your ability to care for your brother, but you forget two things, Dean. He has always been concerned to take care of you, even to his own detriment. And you said you didn't want to know. So stop asking. Now. Shall we go and investigate these strange deaths?"
"Cas – wait. Can you help Sammy with his – you know. Little problem?"
"We've got bigger things to worry about," Sam pointed out returning to the war room with a duffel bag full of supplies. "And no, he can't. I asked."
Cas sighed. "It's a combination of Trickster magic and archangel power, well beyond my ability to affect. Gabriel will change him back when he feels that you've learned your lesson, whatever it is."
They trooped out to the Impala and got into the car for the four and a half hour drive out to Oklahoma. Sam let Cas ride shotgun, since he was now the larger of the two. Dean felt a pang at the change. On the one hand he intensely disliked the switch from his brother to the angel at shotgun. He only let someone else sit shotgun when he wanted to make a point to Sammy, and he wasn't trying to do that here. Every time someone else sat there it felt wrong. At the same time, the smaller Sam in the back seat made him remember back to his youth, before Hell, before angels, before everything and for just one moment he was content.
Interviews with witnesses proved to be challenging, since there was no way that Sam could pass as an FBI agent now. Dean told people it was "take your son to the office" day and by and large they fell for it, even praising him for asking such "good questions, you'll make such a great agent yourself someday young man – if you cut your hair!"
At the end of the day, they retreated to the Oklahoma Cattle Pines Motel to regroup. Castiel puzzled over the name of the motel for several minutes – "Cattle are not pine trees, Dean. This makes no sense." – before Sam cleared his throat repeatedly to bring them back to the subject at hand. "So," he told them. "It does seem like the deaths are all linked."
Dean nodded. "All of the men were killed after being seen off in their fields dancing with this same woman," he confirmed. "They're all young, more like late teens to early twenties. My money's on something other than dancing, if you know what I mean."
Sam fixed him with a withering look, but accepted the beer Dean passed him. "Anyway. It turns out that the area's been visited by some pretty awful weather." He turned his laptop around to reveal satellite and radar images that meant exactly nothing to Dean.
"It's tornado country, Sammy. They're prone to that sort of thing." He rolled his eyes. God, he hated how much he sounded like his father right then, but Sammy was reading into things just like he had back when they'd been kids.
Except, except he'd been right when they were kids, more often than not. "Right," Sam sighed. "Except tornadoes don't usually limit themselves to one farm, or one business." He tapped a key without having to look at the keyboard to do it, how he just knew where things were when the laptop was turned around like that, he had an unnatural relationship with that machine, and other images appeared on the screen. "Lightning striking on clear nights? Tornadoes strong enough to kill touching down long enough to tear one man apart, without disturbing so much as a blade of grass on other farms?"
"That isn't normal," Cas confirmed. "Do you think it's demons?"
"Probably not, although the blonde woman did make me think of it. No sign of sulfur though." Sammy pressed some more keys. "There are these Slavic weather spirits called Vila. They're fantastically strong, they can control the weather, and they exert a lot of control over men."
"Vila," Dean repeated. "Like Bob Vila?" He guffawed at the look his brother gave him. "Okay. How do we find one?"
Sammy sighed. "That's the hard part. We mostly have to sit around and wait for one. But Steve Parzych, that cattle rancher we talked to? His son looked awfully shifty when he heard us talking about a blonde."
"Thinking we should go pay him a visit?" Dean grinned when the other two nodded. "Good. I saw him offering you a cigarette, Sammy. Been wanting to talk to him about that."
Sam glowered. "You do remember that I'm not actually fourteen, right?"
"He's contributing to the delinquency of a minor, Sammy. That ain't right."
Sam just rolled his eyes and got ready for the night's stakeout and fight. According to Sam, who then as now had an encyclopedic knowledge of all things creepy, crawly and weird, these Vila might be super powerful but they had been human souls once. "Human women who had been 'frivolous,' according to the lore," he snorted. "Whatever that means. Nothing specifically stated what would take one down, but I'm going to have to go with the usual things that take down spirits."
"We can't salt and burn someone whose remains are in freaking Poland, Sammy," Dean frowned. "I'm not getting on a plane."
"Iron, Dean. Consecrated iron. They're corporeal, even though they can fly and switch between planes." Sam shook his head.
Dean had to admit, he was getting used to hearing his brother's voice again. He guessed that Dad had been right, that some of Sammy's need to push back had been hormonal or whatever. Adult Sammy had still had that rage, until the Cage burned it out of him, but a lot of it had returned with the smaller body and he never thought he'd say that he missed the fire. Even though he'd complained about "bitchiness" at the time, he was starting to enjoy the push and pull of their relationship again. "I guess if that doesn't do the job an angel sword should," he shrugged.
"They usually do," Cas agreed, with no trace of a smirk whatsoever.
The ride out to the Parzych's ranch took about forty-five minutes, all of which passed in silence. Dean parked the car a little way away from their target and they crept over to the field they thought was the most likely place for a teenager meeting up with a secret girlfriend in the darkness.
They didn't have long to wait. The Vila was beautiful, with long blonde hair and a shimmering white dress. She smiled beautifully at the Parzych kid, but then she paused. "Did you tell anyone about us?" she snapped.
The hairs on Dean's arms stood up as static electricity built up in the air.
"No, no, baby," the boy promised. "Some feds came around but I kept my mouth shut just like we talked about."
The woman let out a little growl of frustration. "They weren't 'feds,' Bill. They were hunters, and they're out here now." She waved her hand, and a gust of wind blasted the youth across the field.
None of the hunters felt compelled to hide themselves away anymore. "Nice move," Dean sneered. "I don't suppose you'd care to just, you know, go back to where you came from?"
"I come from Oklahoma, you ass," she spat back at him. A glower from her storm-gray eyes was enough to send a bolt of lightning arcing toward him.
His little brother barreled into him, tackling him to the ground as Cas fired a round of consecrated iron from the shotgun. Dean tossed Sam off of him, cursing, and reached for his handgun. It did him no good. A blast of wind hit him in the face, knocking him away from the spirit.
Sam was now alone with the spirit, still picking himself up from where Dean had tossed him down. He didn't even flinch as the creature leaned down to him. "You're a little young for my tastes, but I suppose you'll grow. Will you come dance with me, boy?"
Sam shook his head. "No. No way." He brought his gun hand up and fired.
The bullets enraged her, but didn't kill her. Shrieking, she gestured with her left hand. Sam's body jerked fifteen feet in the air and then slammed back down onto the baked clay ground. Dean yelled, but another gust of wind kept him back.
Sam was bleeding, and he was clearly hurting, but he managed to pull himself up. With one shaking hand, he reached out and grabbed the monster's hair. Dean couldn't quite tell, at his distance, if Sammy was trying to pull himself up, if he was trying to pull her hair, or if either option worked just fine for him, but either way she screamed when several strands of her long blonde hair came out in Sammy's disproportionately huge hand.
The boy grinned, bloody and awful. "Hold still," he coughed, and pulled out his angel blade.
Stabbing her proved anticlimactic. She collapsed into a heap and then dissolved into dust, and that was it. Dean and Cas could both move again, and they both rushed to his side.
Sammy was hurting, and bad. Dean didn't need to touch him to see the broken bones, and he was breathing with these awful wet sucking sounds. Billy Parzych, the kid who'd been "dancing with" the Vila this whole time, joined them. "He's hurt pretty bad, huh? The ambulance will take a while to get here, but if your car is close..."
Dean hesitated. Healing him in front of a civilian was a bad idea, but so was bringing Sam to a hospital right now. "Hey, Cas?"
Cas was gone.
"The other fed who was with you? He disappeared about two minutes ago. Flash of golden light. Think you were busy watching your boy there," Bill told him. "He looked surprised. I can help you get the boy to the car."
Dean bit back a curse. "Yeah. Okay." What else was he going to do?
The poor kid helped him carry Sam back to the Impala. It had to hurt poor Sammy like anything, but the kid had had worse. He tried not to lash out at Billy about the thing; it wasn't like he expected civilians to know about obscure Slavic nature spirits. He hadn't even known about this one, Cas hadn't known about this one. He had to hand it to Sammy for knowing how to take her out.
He drove them back to the Bunker and carried Sammy not to his own little cell, because there was no way he was going to get fixed up on a mattress that should have been replaced back before their dad was born, but to Dean's room. There, he wrapped the ribs and splinted the leg and the arm. He got Sammy some pills for the pain, which he refused in favor of just a little bit of whiskey to take the edge off.
Then Dean cleaned his brother up, and got him changed into sweats and an old Metallica tee shirt of Dean's that didn't fit either of them as adults really. He climbed into bed beside his brother and arranged him so that he was in a comfortable position, propped up on Dean with his own head tucked under Dean's. Dean turned out the light and they both turned in for sleep.
Gabriel appeared in Dean's dream. Dean had kind of been expecting the pint-sized archangel. "Sam was pretty impressive against that Vila," the trickster said, taking a lollipop out of his mouth.
"You're a dick," Dean replied.
"It's been said." Gabriel snapped his fingers and a bench appeared. "Have you figured out what the lesson is yet?"
"I suck at taking care of my brother?"
"No, dumbass. Sasquatch there was a lot more fun to play with, you know. But anyway. The point is, you keep looking for a golden age that never existed. Even when he was this small, he wasn't some mindless robot. He loved you, he idolized you, but he had a mind of his own and he wasn't afraid to use it. And you were used to that."
"You make it sound like I didn't take care of him," Dean snapped. "I did! I'm the one who made sure he got up for school, I'm the one who made sure he got food, I'm the one –"
"You did some of that, and you did more of it than you should ever have been asked to do," Gabriel acknowledged. "You also went off with your dad an awful lot. Sam was alone a lot of the time, too. But that's not the point. You took care of Sam today, just like you took care of him the night I turned him back into a hormonal teenager. You're wrapped up in each other like the world outside doesn't even exist – which, hey, no judging, but you both need to get out more."
"But he's still a mess!" Dean hissed.
"Oh, and you're not? He's scared to death for you, Dean-o." The angel poked him in the chest. "He tackled you to the ground so you wouldn't get electrocuted, for crying out loud. You remember what happened the last time."
"That's not going to be an issue anymore," Dean reminded him.
"Then there’s that. You want to help Sam? You want to take care of him? Get that thing off your arm. Right now the biggest threat to him is you, bucko." The angel flicked Dean's ear. "Seriously, Dean. Sam's got a lot of issues.So do you. But you did fine, tonight, with the issues you could handle. Try to get out, have a little fun together. Remind him that you're here for him and with him, and remember that he's here for and with you."
The dream faded, and when Dean woke up Sam was back to his proper size. Gabriel had even done them the favor of healing Sam's injuries and right-sizing his pajamas.
Sam pulled away a little when he realized he was cuddling his brother. "Uh. Awkward."
Dean remembered what Gabriel had said. "Just roll over and quit hogging all the covers, bitch."
"Jerk," Sam said after a second.
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