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The room was barren concrete where every sound echoed into a resonant chord, bouncing off of the flat walls and filling Dean’s ears with an ugly reverb. It reminded him of Bobby’s panic room and the way it funneled sound.
Sam’s voice was warm. Just how Dean remembered it, even when it broke with desperation.
“Dean,” Sam said. The shackles around his wrists pulled on a chain, thick metal on concrete. “Dean, please.”
Sam’s every muscle trembled, shining with sweat. His hair dripped damp down his face and over the lines of his collarbones, chest, arms. He drew in slow breaths, wincing like it burned in his lungs when he inhaled.
Dean couldn’t remember how he’d felt in those first hours, in the long stretch of days that had turned into weeks and then months and then years. He knew that the fire still bit into his skin when he got too close, that the air was an acrid, thick, sulfuric fog that never eased, but he didn’t remember how long it had taken his soul to adjust. Sam’s staggering breaths and winces might be expected; a smart detail.
Dean refused to look up and meet his brother’s eyes.
Sam tugged hard against the shackles, muscles strained to the sound of chunky metal. “Dean, come on.”
“I can’t,” Dean said. Regret touched his flat tone, but only barely. “I can’t, Sam, and even if I could, it’s not going to make a difference, because it’s not real. So just shut up.”
They were alone. Dean could feel Sam’s eyes boring into him with heightened betrayal as he looked away.
Dean had been in this room before. He remembered—it was seared into his memory like a brand. It hadn’t been Sam that time, but Mom—a beautiful, living, breathing likeness of her with blonde curls and gentle eyes. The room itself was unremarkable, just concrete floors and walls, no windows, no doors. Every few feet were little divots in the concrete slabs, spaced evenly apart and running about shoulder-height.
They looked like they might have once tethered hooks or chains to the walls. For what, Dean could only guess.
He remembered Mom so clearly because it had been one of the last times he’d trusted what he was seeing, the time that broke his resolve and turned him angry. He’d gone to her, embraced her, and he could still remember the way her head had rolled back until her neck cracked and popped, how her screams had echoed off of the concrete walls as her spine curled back like a Swiss roll. He could still remember Alastair’s echoing laugh.
Sometimes, the illusions were so tangible that Dean could forget where he was.
He should have known better. Like a child being taken by surprise by a magic trick, he caved in awe or desperation, some mixture of both—and there were so, so many tricks.
A hopeless plea in Bobby’s voice, a cell phone ringing off the hook, the soft touch of Cassie’s hands on his shoulders as she leaned up on her toes to kiss him. He could even smell the mint of toothpaste on her breath. Once, Dean had spent a month in Lisa’s first apartment, the place she had rented when they first met. One night in bed, Dean dug his fingers into the soft curve of her lower back, only for his hands to sink in as if she were made of Play-Doh.
Dean had frozen still, a jolt of fear running down his spine—first thinking he’d hurt her, then turning his hands over in terror, expecting to see blood and skin in his palms. Instead, there were handfuls of writhing worms and clumps of wet dirt. Then he’d backed up on the bed so fast he’d fallen off of the edge, arms swinging behind him, and when he expected his shoulders to hit the carpeted floor with a thud, the motion stopped. There was no thud, just a jolt of punctured illusion, then a return to reality: his arms and legs strapped to a torture rack and his forehead covered in sweat. He remembered every single time with unrelenting clarity.
Sometimes, in the illusions, it was so dark that Dean could hardly see an inch in front of his face. Sounds and smells that shocked him with visceral terror would loop for days until Dean was dozing through them.
Other times, he was in the Impala, driving forever down roads lined with crops in the night. Often, it was a faceless motel, and still other times, it was someplace so deeply ingrained in Dean’s memory that it felt a violation in itself. Bobby’s kitchen, the church pew where Dean first read the Bible, his childhood bedroom, or the woods outside of Austin, Texas on the night of Sammy’s first hunt. The wind had blown warm over the lake that night.
Dean had moved through the stages of grief about the process a long time ago. He’d ripped into the part of his brain that knew it wasn’t real, and he’d fought tooth and nail for the reprieve.
It was hard not to when it was Mom and she was happy. Five minutes was good, if that was all he got. If he could just sit and talk with Bobby, wearing the hat he got at the gun show in Tulsa when Dean was fourteen, he could deal with what came next. Those small pieces kept him going, and that was what they wanted.
They wanted Dean to need it—that little bit of scarce human interaction—so badly that he’d let it cut deeper when the tables flipped. That way, when Bobby’s hands turned to blackened, angry claws, or when the child he was trying to save began to gouge his own eyes out, Dean would feel it. He’d opened himself up to it.
They had never used Sam. Not in years, even in mention. Not once, not at all—not until now.
“You’re really freaking me out,” Sam said. His voice amplified in the empty room, raw from his harsh breaths. “I just—Dean, can you just look at me? Please, man.”
Dean was sitting with his back against a wall. He lifted his eyes from the ground to meet Sam’s.
Sam was on his knees, shackled in place on the concrete floor. The shackles were bolted to the ground where he sat on his haunches, pinning his ankles flat. His chest arched out, his hands shackled behind him. These were linked to an unforgiving, short chain grounded into the concrete between Sam’s bare feet.
He was completely nude. Dean could see the sweat dripping down each line of his ribs. His thighs were taut with muscle, his legs parted just enough for his dick to rise between them, arching up toward his navel in a display of hot arousal. His pubes were trimmed close to his skin, and the red tip of his dick brushed against the dip of his stomach each time he took those wincing belly-breaths.
Dean was angry, tired, aware of his own disintegrating resolve.
It had been almost as if they wanted him to forget Sam ever existed. At first, Dean had begged Alastair for him. He hadn’t cared if Sam turned into grub and fell into pieces or if he tore Dean apart with sharp teeth that weren’t his own, Dean had needed to see him, just once. Just five minutes—but they never caved.
Sam was the trump card, the finale, the closer. Nothing good came next, but Dean looked up at him.
“Good,” Sam said across the empty concrete room, hopeful and encouraging at once. He met Dean’s eyes and shifted in his shackles. Brows knit together, sympathetic. “I know you’re scared, Dean. I get it, but it’s me.”
Dean remembered the sound of his own throaty voice cutting through the air. Cut him into a million pieces in front of me, you son of a bitch, I’ll take it! Whatever you want to do, just give me five minutes—just let me see him!
Time was a finicky concept in Hell, where the soul never ate, slept, nor rested, but Dean heard echoes in empty, liminal spaces, as if just beyond a thin wall. A woman’s voice, amused and cruel.
It’s been almost a year since the last time we roasted him, Alastair; we could try that again.
A man’s voice, calm and businesslike among a throng of other sounds.
Seven years since the last time he said anything. That’s impressive! Who knew Dean Winchester knew how to shut his mouth, let alone for that long. You must be doing something right—keep up the good work.
When Dean was cognizant enough (and those stints were fewer these days as his mind turned cold and defensive to keep alive what was left), he could piece a rough timeline together. Two decades, give or take.
And they’d never once used Sam.
Not Sam’s voice calling to lure Dean into a trap, not his likeness worn by a demon to drive Dean into ripe anger. When it was Dean’s turn on the rack, Alastair didn’t even use Sam’s name to threaten or taunt Dean to the edge of insanity. Dean had been grateful at first—thank God for small blessings, right? Sam was one less weapon in their arsenal—the worst weapon, a nuke in a knife fight. So Dean had stopped asking.
He’d started to expect the worst, but the worst never came. They never walked Dean into a room and made him watch his brother drown or choke or twist into something gruesome, and that was good. But at some point, Dean had started to forget what Sam’s voice sounded like.
It was as if Sam Winchester had never existed at all.
After decades, sometimes Dean wasn’t even sure he’d ever had a little brother. He couldn’t be sure he hadn’t conjured him up like a security blanket. He remembered asking once—not Alastair, but one of the other demons—a demon new on the job, a young woman. Dean had asked groggily: Do I have a brother?
He’d never gotten an answer, not even by way of a shrug or a knowing smirk.
Sam spoke now, soft and coaxing. “Dean, please. I’m begging here, man. You gotta look at me.”
Dean’s heart was thudding hard in the walls of his rib cage. “I hear you, Sam, but you’re not real.”
It was a fool’s errand to talk to him at all. It always started this way—Dean didn’t take the bait as often anymore. He wouldn’t speak unless his guard was down, and even then there were a lot of fuck yous and blow mes. Five minutes in this goddamn room with Sam chained up on his knees, and they already had him.
Dean hated that they had him. More than that, he hated that they had Sam.
It wasn’t Sam, but it was close enough to feel perverse.
Dean looked away, dropping his eyes back down to the concrete ground between his knees.
The way Sam’s voice sounded when he begged was so spot-on that it made Dean feel a little sick. Dean had made the mistake of staring at him for a long time before he looked away, and it was Sam. His eyes, his mouth, the scar at the base of his ribs where he’d been stabbed on a hunt the week after his sixteenth birthday. Every mole, every ripple of muscle, every pound of flesh and ounce of warm blood pumping through his veins, and it wasn’t really Sam, but it didn’t really have to be—
They had Dean. They had him by the fucking heart.
“Dean,” Sam said. It was quiet, a soft breath, and he dropped his head so his hair hung over his face. He tried to twist his arms free as Dean chanced a glance back up. Sam was looking at the ground, and somehow the lack of eye contact felt safer.
“They told me you’d be like this,” Sam whispered. He was working at the shackles. “I mean, they told me you wouldn’t believe it was me. But I didn’t expect it to be this bad. You look bad, Dean.”
The concrete floor had started to dig into Dean’s tailbone. He shifted his weight and didn’t look up at this thing that wasn’t Sam. It was so damn close, he couldn’t tell the difference. He rubbed a hand over his face.
“Yeah, well, twenty years in Hell will do that to a guy.”
“Twenty years?” Sam asked. “You’ve—Dean, it’s only been a couple of months up there.”
Dean heard something in the distance. A banging door or a distant laugh—the kind of thing he might hear in an apartment building when the neighbors got home. It was there, but not loud enough to decipher. There was always a little of that ambiance. Hell-sounds, the echo of a packed office building. He could never make it out.
If he could just claw his way through the walls, Dean felt like he might spill out into the real world on the other side.
Sam’s eyes lifted again and he was twisting around to see every corner of the room. Looking for something. It was that familiar analytical thing he did: take in all the information, figure it out. Except there was no figuring it out, because this was Hell, and that wasn’t Sam. Dean watched, though, with his heart aching.
Sam shifted, craning his neck back. He coughed on the putrid Hell-air and arched forward until his forehead nearly touched the ground—but the shackles on his wrists wouldn’t let him get quite that far. He hung there, lifeless, for a minute, and then he sat up and met Dean’s eyes.
“We’re gonna get you out of here,” he said, and Dean smiled like Sam had told a joke. “I’m serious, Dean.”
“Yeah, I bet you are,” Dean said.
Finally, he stood and walked across the room. Sam was right in the middle, cock still red and rigid, leaking precome in thin, clear lines. The rise and fall of his chest was slow. Sam looked up at him, enraptured, pleading for whatever Dean had to give, his eyes wide and brow knit.
“Tell me something,” Dean said, and he took a fistful of not-Sam’s hair, jerking his head back on his neck. Sam grit his teeth, muscles going tense. “Is there a demon in there, or is this just another illusion? Because I swear to God, if one of you sicko freaks is in there getting your rocks off—”
“It’s me,” Sam said, and now his voice was a rough grit—all the coaxing had gone out of it.
Dean let go. “Right,” he said, “because it’s so like my brother to have a full boner for a damn hour when he’s in the middle of Hell. Yeah, that’s totally normal. What’d you do, pop a Viagra?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “Okay? I don’t know why it’s—it’s embarrassing, okay? Jesus, Dean. I don’t know.”
It had been a bad idea coming closer, but Dean couldn’t take it back. It looked too much like Sam, felt too much like Sam, sounded too much like Sam. Dean scrubbed his hands over his face and paced to the other side of the room.
He was turning to come back when a barrage of noise hit him all at once. Not just noise; a chorus of voices.
“Come on, Dean.” It was Sam’s voice—but not the Sam chained down before him.
It was a younger Sam, the Sam that Dean had picked up from middle school when he’d been barely old enough to drive. It was Sam right before Stanford, when his voice still broke with puberty, but had a little manly grit to it. It was the Sam who had promised he’d hunt Lilith down and break the contract. All of the voices hit him at once, saying the same thing in a drowsy echo, overlapping until their volume hit a fever pitch.
Come on, Dean. Come on, Dean. Come on, Dean.
A sensory memory hit him like a brick. Dean couldn’t have been more than fifteen, sitting in the back of the Impala while Dad went into a gas station to pay for the pump. Sam had shotgun, and Dean shoved a foot into the back of the bench seat to get his attention.
Sam had crawled over the seat back, smiling, and Dean had put his hands on him, not in a brotherly way. It had only been for a second, only to prove some point about personal boundaries, but the look in Sam’s eyes had seared into Dean’s brain and never really left. Especially when it happened again. And again.
Dean remembered that day suddenly like it was happening now: the smell of gas wafting in through the windows, the sweaty road-trip smell of Sam’s hair. Sam’s voice when Dean leaned away, knowing it was wrong.
“Come on, Dean,” he’d said, playful and light, as if Dean hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of.
Dean covered his ears to block it out, but it resonated inside his skull, layering voices building to a crescendo until Dean thought his eardrums were going to burst, until he screamed over it to make it stop. Just when he thought he was going to lose his mind to it, the chorus was gone.
Dean was on his knees. He’d been screaming something, but he wasn’t sure what. Stop, maybe.
“Dean,” Sam called. His voice was an urgent pitch. “Dean, what? What is it? Look at me!”
Dean’s chest heaved. He sat up, looking at Sam with an apprehensive hatred, and said, “Is this what you assholes want? You want me to think about him like that and realize how fucked up I am? What is this, a morality lesson?”
Sam’s brows knit in a question. He watched as Dean got to his feet.
“This is what you want, right?” Dean said. He made his way over to Sam, and Sam flinched away as Dean grabbed him by the jaw with one hand. Dean lifted his face up and looked down into his eyes.
“You want me to think about all the shit I’ve done to him? That’s why I’m in Hell. Not the dead body count. So you’re bringing this rain of shit down on me to make me think about it? Well, I’m thinking about it.”
“Dean, I’m not—”
“Don’t talk to me,” Dean yelled. His voice was a live wire. He let go of Sam’s jaw.
Sam swallowed thickly, hesitant and afraid. “What can I say to make you believe me? You want me to tell you something only we know? Or—”
“They know everything we know, Sam,” Dean said. Anger brimmed in his voice. “It’s Hell.”
“Okay, well . . . They know everything you know, maybe, but if I’m not really here and I’m still up there, there’s stuff I know that you don’t. Like . . .” His eyes searched the room, a breath away from panicking. He looked like a wild animal caught in a noose, then realization struck him. “The time we were in North Carolina. We swam in that lake.”
Dean searched his brother’s face, listening. He remembered that night. The cool breeze, the filthy water.
“You thought you lost that bracelet you really liked, remember? And I found it,” Sam said. “I pretended I didn’t find it until, like, half an hour later—because I knew you wouldn’t go inside until you found it, and I wanted to stay out after dark and keep swimming. So I hid it from you.”
“You could’ve made that up,” Dean said. “They could’ve made that up, Sam.”
“Okay,” Sam said, “how about when we were in Albuquerque, and you were seeing that girl—black hair?” He looked up at Dean, hopeful, but Dean was watching him with apprehension, and so Sam kept talking. “You never knew why she dumped you. Her sister told me it was because you told her about gambling; they were really religious. I never told you that.”
Dean stepped close. When he took Sam’s face this time, it was gentler, lifting his chin up to look into his eyes. There were few simple truths in life, and even fewer in Hell.
No matter how real it looked, this wasn’t Sam. One of Hell’s simple truths—one Dean had learned early on—was that you just had to pinch your nose and take your medicine. Don’t put it off. He could spend days with the illusion, letting it build him up to tear him down, or he could force-push the power button. He could listen to Sam’s anecdotes and start to question himself, but it would only make it worse. He had to take his medicine.
Dean was still mulling that over, holding Sam’s jaw, when the entire world fell out from under him.
The floor fell away, and he spilled down, trying to catch himself. He heard Sam’s voice above him somewhere, yelling as if he, too, were falling. Dean landed facedown on a motel bed, a thump on the mattress and a gust of breath. The pillows were starch-clean, the air a smoky remnant of the eighties.
“Jesus,” Sam’s voice came from behind him. “Who dragged you in?”
Dean twisted to look over his shoulder, half-expecting to see Sam naked and shackled in the middle of the motel floor, but he was standing there in a pair of jeans, buttoning down his shirt. He gave Dean a confused look.
Dean had become friends with not talking, not engaging, not giving them anything to work with. He had a vague idea where this was going, anyway—they’d showed their hand in the first half. So fuck it; he’d play. He crawled back on the bed, propped himself up on his elbows, and said, “Are we doing this, or what?”
Sam looked unsure. “Doing . . . what?” He searched the room to convey his confusion.
“You know damn well what,” Dean said. He started to undo his belt. It was something Alastair always said that he could never really get too far away from, and he said it to Sam now: “Make me take my medicine.”
Sam’s eyebrows rose. His surprise was palpable and so very Sam-like that it sprang up an untapped well of hurt in Dean’s chest. He felt insane for ever being unsure Sam was real. There was a long moment where Sam seemed to be trying to figure out the game. Eventually, he came over. Unsure, but not unwilling.
“I thought we were gonna go interview the couple—” he began, but Dean cut him off.
“Can we save the small talk? Let’s just do this, so you can turn into bats or eat my face, or whatever.”
Sam looked around the room. He sat on the edge of the bed and searched Dean’s face. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fucking peachy, Sam. Never been better,” he said with a hint of honest humor.
It all felt so real.
Dean was back in that place again—that unguarded place he’d put up every wall to hide. They used every trick in the book, and like a soldier learning his enemy’s moves, Dean got ahead of the jump every time. He’d gotten cold and defensive, so that when they tried to dig into the soft flesh of his chest and grab him by the heartstrings, he could ice them out; he did what he had to.
He’d learned a long time ago that trading his defenses for a regurgitated memory was never worth it.
They would always let Dean live in the memory just until his walls fell, then they’d twist and pry it from his fingers so violently he thought he was going to go mad. People think Hell is pitchforks and fire, but it’s much worse.
Alastair would laugh in his face until the putrid smell of his breath filled Dean’s lungs, and Dean would scream. He needed out before the memories of Sam got replaced with this thing and turned sour.
Whatever they did to Sam, or had Sam do to him, Dean would never find a drug strong enough or a knife sharp enough to rip it out of his brain if he ever made it back. So he would pinch his nose and take his medicine to push the stop button; he had to, because that was how it went.
But goddamn, it just felt so real.
Sam turned to him on the bed, put a hand on Dean’s thigh, and ran his hand up, looking not quite sure of himself. “You gotta understand that I’m not saying no,” Sam said, and there was a little smile in his voice. “I just need you to know you’re being really weird about it. Even for you.” A pause long enough for Dean not to answer, and then Sam asked, “What’s wrong?”
Dean heard it like a faint whisper this time: a younger Sam, laughing in the distance. Come on, Dean.
“. . . I don’t know,” Dean said. He looked up to meet Sam’s eyes.
Sam touched his face, and Dean felt his throat go tight. For a minute, he could almost pretend he hadn’t heard it, or that the acrid smell of Hell didn’t make the air thick when he took in lungfuls. He sat up and met Sam’s eyes with a sudden intensity he hadn’t felt in long enough to forget. He touched Sam’s face just to know he was real.
“Woah,” Sam said with a nervous laugh. He gripped Dean’s wrists. “Seriously, what?”
“I miss you,” Dean said, as if telling the illusion of Sam was the same. He ran his fingers over Sam’s jawline and up into his hair, feeling the warmth of him under his hands.
Sam moved on the bed, getting closer. The way he moved was so Sam-like, just right, that it could have been him.
Dean’s eyes pricked with tears. “Look, I’ll do whatever you want, okay?” he said. “You win. Just give me this. Just five minutes.”
Sam touched Dean’s hands, searching his face with concern and a lack of understanding that was so complete that Dean believed it. “Whatever you want,” Sam said. “Whatever’s going on, I’m here.”
“Yeah,” Dean said. Tears slid down his face in hot streaks when he blinked. “Not really, Sam.”
But it felt real.
Sam felt real under his hands, and when Sam climbed on top of him, his brows knit in concern and his mouth spilling gentle reassurances, Dean could believe for a moment that it was real. He was warm, soothing, everything Sam should be. Every expression and gesture and touch exactly right.
The motel sheets were crisp when Dean lay back on them, and he could smell the bulk-brand laundry detergent they’d been washed with. A car door slammed outside in the parking lot. Sam leaned down to kiss him.
His hands unbuttoned Sam’s shirt, and the skin underneath was warm and alive. Dean could find every pucker of scar tissue, every dip of muscle, right where it belonged. There was a welt on Sam’s forearm—gunshot wound, circa 2001—where Dean had stitched him up in the back of the Impala; he always traced his thumb over it when they fell asleep together, and he did so now as Sam’s hair fell over his forehead and he shook it away.
Sam was wearing the amulet—a detail too real to be fake—and Dean took it in his hand to pull Sam down again. His breath was warm.
When he placed his hands on either side of Sam’s neck, he felt the pulse of Sam’s heartbeat under his skin, and when Sam worked his hips down against Dean, he felt alive.
It had been twenty years since Dean had held his little brother.
Decades since he’d worked into the heat of Sam’s body in motel beds and took handfuls of his hair in the back of their car, making him huff hot breaths and grunt Dean’s name. Dean remembered every time in perfect detail, all at once and suddenly vivid. He remembered Sam’s bare skin pressed against his a thousand times, a thousand ways.
It felt how it should. Sam’s pliable heat engulfed Dean so completely that he was helpless, just like every time since the very first time. He opened Sam’s body with spit-slicked fingers and fucked into him slowly, making love until Sam pleaded. The medicine didn’t matter anymore, the acrid air faded out.
It was just them, as if it had always been them.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed with Sam in his lap, Sam’s knees on the mattress, both of them nothing but muscle working under sweaty skin and hot breaths. Dean rutted up into him slow, making love instead of fucking.
“Hey,” Sam whispered. “Promise you’re okay?”
Dean nodded. It was a quick and thoughtless thing—he didn’t want to talk, hadn’t wanted to talk in a long time.
He was trembling. He’d forgotten how good it was, how in sync they’d always been. It had always felt like this with Sam—like their bodies were made for each other. When he was deep inside, he felt like their souls touched. He was too enraptured by the art of remembering to care about anything else.
Fingers clawing into Sam’s skin to bring him closer, fucking him open, tilting his head back and breathing hard against Sam’s throat. Nothing else mattered except this—five minutes worth a lifetime of medicine.
Sam dropped his forehead against Dean’s and rode down on him. “Fuck, right there,” he whispered.
They moved in tandem, neither slowing, and Dean forgot—he forgot that it was the medicine.
A swarming sound began in his ears, like a chorus of locusts, as he chased the heat of Sam’s body. He wasn’t ready, couldn’t reconcile losing this so quickly after it had begun. He wrenched his eyes shut, dug his hands into Sam’s skin tighter, as if he could hold him there if he just tried hard enough. Sam said something he didn’t quite hear.
“What?” he asked. He was still so deep inside of Sam that it made him ache and twitch when Sam drew in a breath. Dean could feel the rise and fall of his body, the impossible warmth, the beat of Sam’s pulse around him.
“I said, ‘did you really think you’d get away with it?’” Sam said. His voice was wry and amused.
Dean’s blood ran cold. He looked up, haunted, knowing what he would find in Sam’s eyes. Sam was smiling, but it was a sadistic, amused smile. Dean felt open, put on display, vulnerable and raw.
“Fucking your own kid brother like it wouldn’t screw him up? I mean, Jesus. I was just a kid, Dean.”
Dean felt like he’d been thrown into the fire. It was like that every time—a sudden twist of the knife, every muscle taut, grinding to a halt, his heart beating loudly in his chest like a bird’s wings in a too-small cage.
He shook his head, and Sam grabbed him by the jaw with an unforgiving grip. Dean’s eyes went wide.
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked. He grinned with eyes that were cold and lifeless. Dean pushed against Sam’s warm body to get free, but Sam was impossibly strong, and he laughed like he’d heard a great joke. “I have to hand it to you—screwing your own brother makes you a great candidate for Hell. I mean, this?” Sam looked around, gestured with the hand that wasn’t holding Dean by the face. “This would be some people’s worst nightmare. Pounding their baby brother like a cheap whore in a motel—but not you, Dean.”
“Fuck you,” Dean said, and he pried at Sam’s hand, fighting the impossible strength.
“That’s no way to talk to the only person standing between you and the rack,” Sam said with pitying glee.
The trump card, the closer. He understood all of a sudden why they’d never brought Sam to him until now—it went in waves, from bad to worse, and Dean could thrash until he ached, but it always came down to the same thing.
He had to take his medicine.
Sam’s voice was in his ears again. An overlay, so many different versions of Sam that they swarmed into a busy cloud and spoke over one another. Some of them were screaming, some were crying, some were laughing with a childish glee that reminded Dean of book bags and cereal and Saturday morning cartoons.
It was a memory that had been pure once, reminding Dean of blurred boundaries, the way Sam laughed and leaned against him in the back seat while Led Zeppelin ripped through the speakers. The open road ahead of them, Dad’s thumb drumming a tune on the steering wheel. Dean had a hand on Sam’s thigh, and Sam turned to him to whisper something against his ear over the beat of the music, and they both smiled. They had been that once.
Now, the sound of Sam’s voice sent a wave of panic down his spine.
Dean grit his teeth and twisted away.
When he opened his eyes, he was back in the concrete room. His chest was heaving in panic, his eyes bloodshot and wet. There was no motel, no Sam, and the echo of voices had gone. Alastair stood in the place where Sam had been.
“Well,” he said to Dean, stepping closer. “Not bad for round one.”
End.