Chapter Text
(I) Fall
Sam
The first week is a blur. The pain of knowing they’ll never see Jack again is somewhat lessened by the pride and fierce joy of knowing he remade heaven and earth. He built the world they had fought for, for all those years.
“Most parents are lucky if their kid ends up semi-functional," Dean says one morning as they eat breakfast. "We actually raised the new God."
By some sort of implicit agreement they take a few weeks to rest and lick their wounds. They settle into new routines. Shared breakfasts, shared dinners, Sam can’t get Dean interested in a morning jog but Dean takes afternoon hikes with Miracle and all three of them go on evening drives. It’s peaceful and Sam grabs on to it with both hands, he wants to keep them there for as long as he can.
Sam sends one overly long, history-filled email to Eileen and then tries to erase it from his mind. He’s determined to give her time and space and just hope that maybe their paths can meet again. Dean asks him about her, of course. If he wants to be with her, wants to build a life with her, but all Sam can say is, “If it happens,” with a small shrug.
“Rise and shine, Sammy!” Dean wakes him up one morning.
He throws a camping pack at Sam. “You, me, and the mutt, three-day hike. Let’s get moving.”
Elk River is perfect. Despite how late it is in the season, not all the leaves have fallen, so gold and amber cover trails and trees alike. The air’s brisk, bracing, and makes Sam feel alive. He gives a silent thanks to Jack, choosing to believe he kept the world like this for them, for this moment. Those first few hours of the hike Dean laughs and jokes, even sings. Miracle races all around them, bringing sticks and pieces of dead animals. At one point, Dean scoops up a flat rock and skips it to the other side of the river.
“Cas would have really liked this.”
It’s the last thing Dean says for hours.
When they hit a high scenic point, Dean stops and stares out for a long time. The cold starts to creep in and after a while Sam has to jog around a bit, do some squats and jumping jacks to warm up, but Dean just keeps looking out. Miracle and Sam play a few rounds of fetch as the sun dips lower and lower.
“We should set up camp soon. We were planning another mile up, yeah?” Sam finally prods.
“How does a dick like Chuck make all this?”
Dean’s eyes are brimmed with tears, then again it could just be from the cold. Sam doesn’t know what to say, so he waits for Dean to finish his thought.
“He didn’t deserve it.” Sam can hear the all-too-familiar anger edging into his brother’s voice. “He didn’t deserve to enjoy any of what he created.”
Dean reshoulders his pack and they set off. They make camp, neat and orderly like John taught them. As night comes on the cold sets in for real and the stars are distant pinpricks. They stay close to the fire and Dean builds it up, seeming to relish the task of keeping the blaze alive.
“I think we camped this park once,” Sam says. “One of Dad’s wilderness survival weekends, maybe? He’d have failed you for a fire that high, though.”
Sam leans back and opens another beer, happy to shed some of the weight for tomorrow’s hike.
“Yeah, it was ‘94, I think. That picture spot where we stopped, that was the rendezvous point. He dropped us maybe six clicks off the trail, remember?”
“Not really,” Sam laughs, feeling pleasantly buzzed and calm. “It all kinda blends together.”
“Well, we ain’t practicing evasive wilderness techniques now. Enjoy the heat, little brother.”
Dean throws another log onto the fire.
They sit there a few hours more. Sometimes in silence, sometimes reminiscing. Mostly about Jack, Mary and Bobby. Sam even brings up Cas, but Dean gets silent and stoney faced and breaks into the whiskey. Sometime after 1am the cold is just too much. Like it’s seeped into every part of Sam’s body. He calls it a night and as he and Miracle drift off in the relative warmth of his sleeping bag, Dean stays drinking by the dying fire, eyes on the stars.
When Sam unzips his tent around dawn, Dean’s already making their instant coffee.
“You sleep at all?”
“Not really,” Dean admits as he hands Sam some tortillas smeared with peanut butter. “I can still get drunk though, so give thanks for small miracles, or whatever.”
They get an early start and Sam’s surprised by how hard Dean pushes on the hike. The pace is much faster than they need, especially for someone running on no sleep and whiskey fumes. They get to their camp point along the river hours earlier than planned. Sam surprises himself by reaching deep into that chest of knowledge bestowed by John Winchester and fastening some fishing equipment.
Fishing’s hard. Sam remembers that from their youth. They’d almost never caught anything with the spears or hooks that John taught them to make, it was only ever the basket traps that got anything. The stuff they’d just sink into the river and leave alone for hours. But they spend the afternoon alternating with the spear and the fishhook and somehow find themselves with a small pile of fish.
“Think Jack did that for us?” Sam asks, nodding at their haul.
“It’s a nice thought,” Dean sighs. “He liked fishing. But no, the kid was nothing if not a man of his word and he said he’d be hands off. Nah, Sammy, I think fishing is just easier when you got wisdom and patience.”
“You think we got wisdom and patience?”
“Not really, but we ain’t loud, stupid kids anymore.”
They clean and cook the fish. They’d finished the beer the prior night, so Sam drinks whiskey. He’s so warm and happy by the fire that he starts talking on and on like he hasn’t in years, and Dean throws out a chuckle or a grunt here and there. Before he knows it, Sam’s drunk, and he can’t stop talking about John.
“It was good you made that wish, man. That extra time with Dad was cathartic, you know?”
Sam rolls his head back, looking at Dean sideways. Dean’s face is screwed up a bit, but he nods.
“Mmm, one honest-to-God family dinner heals a lot, I guess.”
Sam watches his brother. He had always been a bit disappointed in Dean for his faith, or obedience, or whatever, to John. He’d felt superior, like he was stronger and smarter and braver than Dean for ducking out from under the yoke. But even a decade after John’s death, Sam was still learning things new about the father Dean had. Like that John let Dean rot in a boy’s home, or would send him away on solo hunts when he was pissed off. It changed the picture.
“You know, I always thought we had the same father–I mean, obviously we do but like, I never got how different he was to you. Not until much later. I mean, you drop new shit on me sometimes and it’s like wow, okay. I dunno if I ever really said it, but I am sorry I was so pissy about how you were with him.”
Sam’s still smiling, still warm. Dean looks him over and breaks into a small smile of his own.
“You get awfully lovey-dovey on the sauce, huh?”
Sam tosses pinecone at Dean’s head and then picks back up on John. He starts to go on about how he’d do it differently for his own kids, and what parts he’d keep. Raise them near the life but not in it, teach them enough to be safe but not enough to live in danger. He can see it in his mind's eye. He and Eileen, having a kid or two. And then Sam’s babbling. He does that when he’s happy-drunk, and it’s been a long time since he’s been happy-drunk. He talks for nearly an hour about settling into a small house, maybe in coastal New England or near the Great Lakes. Talks about soccer games and hooked on phonics and the damn PTA. Says he’ll do a lot of the work around the house with his kids. Build out decks and additions and move walls around, he wants to literally build a home with them, that way even after twenty, fifty, seventy years, even after Sam’s gone, it’ll be their home.
Dean watches the sky as Sam talks. When Sam finally peters out he hears a soft, “That sounds real nice, Sammy.”
And then they both just let the time pass and the fire die.
The last day of the hike Dean’s different. Sam can see the energy shift. It’s all suppressed anger and restlessness. The things that Sam knew for decades, the things he’d hoped would slacken and fall away after losing Cas and Jack and defeating Chuck. Miracle senses it, too, and keeps next to Sam for most of the return hike. When they finally get back to the Impala and place their packs in the trunk Sam takes his chance.
“So, you wanna talk about why you’re suddenly so on edge?”
Dean slams the trunk shut and walks over to the driver’s side.
“Didn’t think so,” Sam sighs.
When they’re less than an hour out from the bunker Dean finally speaks. “I’m sorry, man. I know I get like this and I’m sorry. I just, I dunno. I gotta find a hunt. Once we’re home, I’ll see what’s on the wire.”
Sam watches the shadows lengthening. He knows he shouldn’t push, Dean’ll button up if he pushes this conversation too far. For a guy who’s so emotional, Dean’s skittish as hell.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Sam finally says. “After everything we’ve been through, it’s kinda a miracle we’re even vertical. If you need a hunt to keep you, I dunno, steady or whatever, that’s fine. I’m game for hunting. But there’s other things you could try too, you know.”
“What, hang up the shotgun and pick up a monkey wrench? Do engine rebuilds and body work at the local garage?”
Sam shrugs. “You could, you know.”
“Maybe. When I was with Lisa–” Dean’s voice breaks a little, “-I did some construction, carpentry stuff. Working with my hands keeps me, I dunno.”
“Keeps you in the moment, out of your head, I get it.”
“Being a mechanic or a carpenter or even just some retired hunter swapping stories, training up the youngins’, it’s a nice thought. Cas—” Dean’s voice fully stops working for a moment. He coughs a few times, clearing his throat. “He, uh, he thought that all the anger, all the violence and stuff, that I could let go of it. He told me so before he…”
Dean stops talking. He’s only spoken a few dozen words about Cas since he died. He told Sam that Cas died to save him, but he shuts down at any mention. So Sam waits. It’s a long while and the road lulls Sam a bit. He can feel Dean relaxing into it too. It’s only been a few weeks, really. It’s been no time at all.
“You know it’s just this past year that I’ve finally been alive, on earth, longer than I was in hell?”
Sam snaps his head over so fast he feels a muscle in his neck seize up.
“I know, it’s not fair to bring it up to you. You got, what? Another century before you hit that mark?”
They’ve never really done this. Talked about their time in hell. Things come up now and again, but it’s not like they ever swap stories of what they’d seen, what kind of torture they survived, exactly what their souls have endured.
“I dunno, man, I don’t really think of it like that. Time wasn’t like that in the cage. And, especially after Cas took a lot of it, the whole thing feels, you know, apart,” Sam says.
And it’s true. Like his time in the cage is part of a different life, one mostly remembered but only half-felt. Just as distant as his days at Stanford. Just as distant as his days with Ruby. Maybe he’s just too good at extracting the pieces of his history that are painful. Maybe Dean is so stuck in his pain because he’s just a bit more human than Sam is.
“That’s good. That’s real good, Sammy.”
For a while they watch the landscape change. It’s astonishing, really, what someone as petty and vindictive as Chuck created. Sam wonders how much of it was intentional and how much was incidental. Maybe all this beauty is in spite of Chuck. It’s a comforting thought, somehow.
“For the record, I’m with Cas. I think you’re a lot more than any of the shit you’ve been through, and I think you can get past it with some time.”
Dean turns into the garage entrance and Sam feels that sense of peace he’s had lately around the bunker. That feeling of being home.
Dean parks and turns to face Sam.
“When you, uh, when you went to the big showdown with Lucifer, you asked me to retire, to build a life. And I tried, man. I mean, yeah, I kept researching, kept trying to find a way to bust you out, but I stayed out of hunting like you asked. And it was awful. I drank too much, I was a mess. I felt like a fraud. Like I was squeezed into the wrong body, the wrong life. I wanted to be what you thought I could be, but it just- I wasn’t—“
“I know, Dean, it’s okay.”
“But I’d like to be what Cas thinks I was. I’d really like that.”
Sam doesn’t know what to say.
Dean slaps the wheel. “I’m gonna find us a hunt.”
(II) Winter
Sam
After that, the old Dean is back. He doesn’t let too much time pass between hunts, but he doesn’t keep them grinding around the clock either, like Sam thought he might. He’s reliable and mostly even-keeled when they hunt, though his kills are swift and vicious. Sam doesn’t know if he’s reading into something that isn’t there. Maybe efficiency and economy of action just look cold-blooded? But there’s part of him that warns it would be easy for Dean to go cratering over the edge so he keeps a sharp eye, trying to figure out what Dean’s going to do with all his grief.
The thing Sam hangs his hat on is how well Dean does with the families of victims. He comforts them, speaks gently, he even prays with an old woman who lost her husband, her son, and her granddaughter in the same day. It seems healthy and Sam holds on to the hope that there’s a clear path for Dean to sort through this pain.
But Dean drinks. A few glasses of whiskey, most nights, at first. Then nearly half a fifth every night. He drinks when they hunt too, but never too much. Never enough to push him off his game, just enough to keep him on it.
Sam tries talking about it on the two occasions he finds Dean passed out in a puddle of vomit. But each time Dean just looks at him and pours himself another glass.
One night Dean knocks over the last of a bottle of whiskey and he opens another before even cleaning up the spill. Sam sighs and crosses his arms.
“Look, I know you want it to be another way, but it’s anger or alcohol. And I’m just tired of always being angry, Sammy.”
Sam just nods, and that’s that.
Sometime after that Eileen starts texting. They talk a bit, help each other through a few cases, and finally meet up. They hunt together. Sam knows it’ll work out from that first hunt. He can feel it, that sense of peace, sense of passion, sense of comfort. He wants to tell her he’s building a new life from the ground up and she’s brick one, but instead he waits for Eileen to see it for herself. And he has no doubt she will.
Soon enough Eileen moves into the bunker, and more often than not it’s the three of them on hunts together. And it’s good. It’s life. Eileen’s still cautious, still guarded, Dean’s still angry, still drinks too much, but Sam loves this life for what it is. And that’s good enough.
Around the time Eileen moves in, Sam asks her what she wants to know about his past. He promises to tell her all of it, any of it. He warns her that he did a lot of really shitty things, always with a good intention, but usually to bad effect. Eileen says she doesn’t care. She says Chuck stacked things against them, led them down those roads. She says it doesn’t matter what he’s done before, she’s happy to know him now. And that’s better than just good enough, that’s the beginning of something.
Deans starts hunting more and more, with a wide variety of partners. He does best on hunts with Claire or Jody, or some of the other strays they’d gathered over time (he calls Sam after a crossroads demon hunt to announce that Max Banes has successfully resurrected his sister and brokered a deal with Rowena to avoid hell, and Sam’s happy to see the twins from time to time after that).
Dean seems to enjoy himself, at least. And he’s kind–never actually nice, but often he’s kind with the other hunters. Sam wonders if Dean’s throw-away thought about training up the new generation will come to be something. He encourages Dean to write a journal, to start to more officially catalog all his knowledge in the Men of Letters Library. He and Eileen were doing the same.
One night Sam finds Dean passed out in a chair in the library, a whiskey bottle knocked over at his feet. There’s a journal open in front of him, pencils scattered on the floor. Sam picks it up—it’s beautiful. Dean sketched in depictions of the monsters he’s faced. Sam had forgotten, or maybe never realized, that Dean is a talented artist.
He thumbs through the book. Dean included descriptions of monsters, how to defeat them, and details about his own hunts. Names, locations, dates, even color commentary. Sam pauses at the page on tulpas, laughing at Dean’s comments on their prank war. There are notes about the best pies and burgers near the hunts. And little flourishes of poetry, too, like how the Eastern Texas roads arrange themselves in early winter.
Sam flips back to the beginning. Dean’s first hunt was when he joined John to help kill a water sprite that was attacking young children. Dean was just shy of eight. Some hunts go easier with bait, Dean notes in the margin.
“Jesus,” Sam breathes.
He remembers being ten years old and angry that he was still being kept out of hunts when Dean had been hunting for years by that age. He never really reevaluated just how fucked up that was. Sam flips through a few pages and winces when he reads about how John used to have Dean pose as a runaway at truck stops, chum in the water for all kinds of monsters. Another memory comes back, one where Dean commented off-handedly about needing to know how to avoid roofies, and something drops in Sam’s stomach. More unrealized truths about John Winchester…
He flips to the most recent entry: hell hounds. The entry has details about the night Dean was dragged to Hell. A few pages after that have been torn out, crumpled around the trash bin. Sam covers Dean with a blanket, picks up the papers, and spreads them on the table. He hisses at what he sees.
The first few sketches are of hell.
Meat hooks, geometric patterns, pieces of Dean, pieces of other people, arms, skulls, black smoke everywhere. He crumples the pages again and places them back by the bin. There are a few pages with the headings HIERARCHY OF HELL and TRANSFORMATION OF A HUMAN SOUL and THE RACKS OF HELL. Some notations have been too heavily scribbled out for Sam to read. He puts those pages back into the bin as well.
The last page is torn in half. Sam places the pieces together and sees the words RAISED FROM PERDITION. The illustration’s incomplete, but it’s something like a spot of light cutting through the geometric pain of hell. A red marker’s been scribbled through the whole thing. Sam stares at it for a long time. Eventually, he pockets it and joins Eileen in bed.
Sam never sees Dean touch the journal again, but one day he finds it stuffed in the back stacks of the library. There aren’t any additional entries.
The first time it happens Sam thinks he probably should have seen it coming.
It’s a long, bloody few days. Witches were seducing men; loser, semi-criminal fathers, and getting them to hand over their young children. They drained the kids of their life force, a slow, tortuous death. They’re the kind of kids that get eaten up by the system, the kind that most people wouldn’t notice if they dropped off the face of the Earth. The kind of kids Sam and Dean probably once looked like to the outside world.
When they find where the kids are kept, Dean loses it. He hacks at the head witch until she looks like ground beef. There isn’t much Sam can say since he wanted to do the same. The surviving kids aren’t conscious but he thinks they can probably pull through.
Sam has the deputy sheriff (the one who witnessed floating women with glowing eyes absorbing light from the eyes and mouths of children) meet him halfway to the hospital.
“It’s mystical, damage to their life force. But souls are resilient,” he tells the deputy as he loads the three children into the back of the cruiser. He’s keenly aware of the blood spatter on his pants, courtesy of Dean’s handiwork. “My guess is that with a week or less of supportive care they’ll wake up. The threat is gone, anyway.”
The deputy is shaking, sweating, but nods to confirm he understands. He puts his jacket over one of the kids, and seems surprised at how feverish she is when he touches her face. In the weak light of dawn the man looks washed out, like his own life force took a hit.
“So, that it? I don’t get a better explanation?”
Sam gives a half shrug. “You really want one?”
The sun is up by the time he’s back to help Dean clean up the scene. The coven had a lot of acreage so they’re able burn the bodies on the grounds. Dean builds separate pyres for each of the children. He lets the witches burn together in a half-dug pit. It takes hours to build and hours more to burn. They each catch a short nap in the Impala and it’s nightfall again by the time they’re smothering out the last of the embers.
“You should burn the jacket,” Sam says as they shrug out of their dirty clothes. “You’ll never get all that witch blood out.”
Dean doesn’t say anything, he just slides it into the trunk beside the shovel and gas canister.
It’s the kind of job Sam really hates, the sort that shakes something inside you. As soon as they’re passably clean, they hit the road. Sam isn’t sorry to head straight home, even without much sleep for the last two days. He just wants to put the whole thing in the rear view. But they’re barely out of town when Dean pulls into some roadhouse dive. Then he sits at the bar and just drinks.
It’s clear Dean is just going to get piss-drunk, so Sam settles into a booth with a Cobb salad and a beer he can nurse. Figures he’ll wait until Dean’s drunk enough that he’ll let himself be steered out to the Impala. Sam can sleep on the shoulder for a few hours and still see Eileen in the morning.
Dean’s making good progress toward obliteration while Sam texts with Eileen. It’s tough when the case involves kids. Fathers who didn’t give a shit about their kids always hit a sore spot with Sam, and chatting with Eileen is the escape he needs right now. He’s shocked by how much she still gives him butterflies, the good kind, tthat make his stomach twist and make him hope for a softer life than he’d had thus far. When he looks up, a big biker-looking dude is in Dean’s face.
The guy’s shoving Dean, mistaking the vacant look in his eyes for something other than barely suppressed homicidal rage. Sam jumps out of the booth and crosses the floor toward the man, trying to stop whatever is about to happen, but when the guy turns to face Sam, Dean attacks.
He breaks a beer bottle over the guy’s head and proceeds to hit him in the face, like he's trying to pulverize bone.
At least he didn’t pull a blade or gun, Sam thinks, as he tries to pull Dean off. Dean shoves Sam back and keeps pounding on the man.
He’s gonna fucking kill him, Sam hits the ground. Three other guys are there, helping to pull Dean off and Sam is doing all he can to reign in Dean’s wild punches.
“He’s four years old, you sick fuck!”
Two of the guys ease off Dean a bit at that, looking at the biker dude with revulsion, but Sam gets his arm locked around Dean and starts to drag him from the bar.
“If I ever see you again I will put a fucking bullet in your skull!!” Dean shouts back as the door swings shut behind them.
“We gotta go, now. Cops are probably on their way.”
Sam shoves him in the car and drives. Dean stews silently. Half an hour later, Sam notices Dean’s gun tucked away under the seat. He’d left it there on purpose before going into that bar.
“One of the dads?” Sam finally asks.
Dean scoffs in reply.
At first they’d felt bad for the men, thinking someone was just targeting poor single fathers. Dean even comforted one dad, commiserating as another man who missed his son. But once they saw how the coven operated, it was clear the dads were handing the kids over voluntarily.
“You follow him there? Or just make him once we got inside?”
“Noticed his car in the lot. And you should have, too. Just cuz we beat Chuck, and you got a girlfriend now, that don’t mean you should get sloppy.”
Sam doesn’t say anything, just pushes the car on. After a minute, Dean shifts in his seat. “I’m sorry, alright? I really like Eileen, it’s good what you guys have, it’s good if you don’t feel like you need to hunt.”
“You’re sorry for teasing me about having a girlfriend but you’re not sorry for trying to beat a man to death?”
“You saw those kids. He deserved worse than he got.”
Neither of them say a word for the rest of the drive. The next night, after Dean drinks enough to welcome sleep, Sam hears quiet sobbing coming from his bedroom. After that, Dean starts coming home from his bar nights with bruised and bloodied knuckles.
They don’t talk about it.