#Title is a work in progress but until then im gonna pretend it's the cleverest thing ever

[wilsonthemoose]

Death of Convenience

It should have been easy. Wendigos are no joke but daylight slows them. The weather's been unpredictable though and perfect, idyllic hunts don't exactly stay that way where they're concerned.

Or Sam has one card to play and never stops to think that Dean would care if he killed himself.

Implied/Referenced Suicide, Infant Death, Temporary Character Death, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Head Injury, Angst, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Season/Series 05, POV Dean Winchester

Let's blame it on the tunnel vision. The impending end of the world. The wendigo on the loose, the missing persons reports piling up. Blame it on anything you like. Hell, blame it on the glare coming off Baby's polished hood. He never saw the warning signs.

And there's Sam across from him, frowning like he hadn't considered that Dean would care.

Dean's reeling, nauseated, light-headed, crashing from blood loss, alcohol snatched out of Sam's hand as he was cleaning the wounds on Dean's face, and then the world turning inside out. His world, anyway.

But the thing is, you don't see this sort of thing coming. When your father is leaning down to whisper what can only be his last words in your ear, you don't understand, and when your brother is explaining he is Lucifer's vessel, you are busy regretting you have nothing stronger than beer.

"I guess I'm a little numb to the earth-shattering revelations at this point," he'd said.

Funny how fucking frequently you can be wrong.

 

He'd picked the case for a chance to get away from the cities, get back to the basics. Put a bandaid over the fracture, turn the music up just loud enough to forestall any attempts at conversation, drive a little too fast on winding roads, and pretend everything is fine until it is or until there's no pretending.

They were checked into a fishing lodge. Montana with the summer petering out into autumn, idyllic. Mountains, lakes, dark roads, critters, a world away where you could almost pretend nothing really was wrong.

And at night, footwork complete, witnesses consoled, doors knocked for information, and maps acquired, he went to sleep and dreamt again of his father telling him he had to save Sam or kill him and he dreamt of Sam screaming under Bobby's house and he dreamt of himself tripping seven stairs down and Sam's head hitting the wall harder than it should have and how his father wouldn't clean the blood off Sammy's hair thinking it was his mother's.

When he woke up, Sam was field-stripping the weapons.

 

They walked close together, kept mostly to the trail, shotguns cradled, duffles slung, and a flame-thrower each.

It should have been easy. Wendigos are no joke but daylight slows them. They left early enough in the morning to find and kill the thing by afternoon and be back at the hunters' cabin they'd scoped out by evening.

The weather's been unpredictable though and perfect, idyllic hunts don't exactly stay that way where they're concerned. Darkness descended, casting the bright morning into shades of unreal grey-green half-light.

Dean cursed under his breath, then quietened as they started hearing the wendigo. Human screams imitated, a woman in hysterics, twigs snapping, to their north one moment, south the next. They closed in, shot into the dense trees, and retreated by inches. Screwed six ways from sunday before the freak even struck.

And when it came, it came soundless and out of nowhere, caught Dean's ear with its long claws before Dean even realized it was there. Sam managed a pretty good shot that would have slowed anything else down but only pissed off the wendigo. Ears ringing, legs buckling under him, and eyes filling with blood, Dean reached into his duffle for the flame thrower, fumbling hands too slow as the wendigo went at Sam, claws bared.

Dean saw Sam stumble back, he saw the wendigo lunge, and he saw Sam go down as the claws ripped through half the muscle of his leg. There was a spray of blood from what could only be the femoral artery, and Dean's hand had fallen limp by his side before the wendigo even turned towards him.

 

He hazed in and out of consciousness, bleary-eyed and dizzy, strung up by his arms and feeling like the world was floating. He struggled toward lucidity on instinct, but each time he got close, the pain in the side of his head registered and he lost his grasp on time and space again.

And there was his father leaning in to whisper that Dean might need to kill his brother.

And there was Lucifer in Sam's body, there was his white shoe on Dean's throat. There were the rose petals on the ground, the vine-choked world, the fragrant air.

And Bobby in his wheelchair. Bobby turning the knife around and stabbing himself. Bobby in the hospital bed.

Dean's head lolled to the side, sharp spikes of pain shooting through his face as the torn skin pulled. He struggled to hold his head up and tried to blink the vertigo away.

And there was his brother, shaking him, voice panicked and echoing off the walls of what Dean assumed was a cave. Sam, not limping, not bleeding to death somewhere out there, but here, with him, cutting him down, leaning him against the wall of the cave to look at his ear, wiping blood out of Dean's eyes, hauling him out of the cave with Dean's arm wrapped around his neck.

And there were the smouldering remains of the wendigo at the mouth of the cave. And here, under the relief, panic.

 

"You should be bleeding out somewhere," Dean said, trying to distract himself from the icy-chill sting of the wind. Or maybe trying to let the icy-chill wind distract him from the conversation. He needs to ask these questions and he needs answers, and maybe if they do this right now while Sam is half carrying him through the woods, while Dean's brain is still groggy and lagging two paces behind, then maybe they can both come out of this conversation unscathed. Nothing said between them that shouldn't be.

Or maybe it's a bad idea inviting Sam to pull the rug out from under his feet when he's one unsteady step away from emptying his stomach on the ground.

Sam laughs. "Sorry to disappoint you."

He looks down at Sam's legs, stumbling only as much as they would with most of Dean's weight thrown over his shoulder, and the jeans are torn through in two long gashes along the left leg, stained red-brown with blood.

He looks up at Sam's shoulders and collar, stained similarly, and if he looks too close at his hair—

He doesn't.

He keeps his mouth shut and focuses on walking.

 

"I saw you go down, okay. No way you're on your feet right now."

Sam's shaking a little, takes a swig of the bottle before cleaning Dean's wound with the stuff. Usual light touch a fraction heavier as he pushes the needle through his skin, Dean feels a little jab here and a tug there as Sam stitches the wound.

He doesn't answer.

 

Let's blame it on the blood loss, blame it on everything happening so fast, and the eerie darkness. Blame it on the head injury.

He's wrong. He's got to be wrong.

Sam could have torn the jeans a hundred different ways: when he was running after him, when he was killing the wendigo, when he was running through the cave. The blood could be Dean's own— head wounds are notorious for how much they bleed.

Let's let this one lie.

Count it a win, call in the locals to go get the bodies, sleep off the hunt and hit the road.

 

Pushing is what Dean does, and lately, breaking is what Sam does.

"You—" Dean blinks, "You killed yourself?" he asks haltingly and grips the back of the chair like it might keep him steady.

Sam runs his hands down his thighs and grips his knees. Hunched over like this, scruffy and bloodstained, he makes Dean want to reach out to him and promise him everything's going to be alright like he's still a child and they don't both have the weight of an apocalypse on their shoulders.

But they do and they have the weight of a hundred things said in anger between them.

"Sit down, Dean," he says, "You look like you're gonna fall over." His voice is soft and tired.

He watches Dean pull out a chair and sit, then says, placating and calm, "Look, I was down. Couldn't hunt Bambi on that leg, much less a wendigo." He shrugs almost casually. "Lucifer said he'd keep bringing me back if I killed myself—"

"Sam, why would—"

"To get out of being his vessel."

 

Dean had washed Sam's hair himself when three days later his father still hadn't done it, one ear trained on the sound of him snoring away on the couch. And when he woke up to Sam's hair damp and clean and Dean looking guilty, he'd turned away, shoulders shaking.

Dean had refused to think about it, and after the blood was gone, it was easy.

In his mind for all this time though, unrealized, the thought has always lingered. He'd tripped on the stairs running, and Sam's head had hit the wall.

He's seen Jessica burn on the ceiling, years later, and there were mere drops of blood falling from her corpse. His mother would have burned no differently and all that blood running into the motel sink as Sammy babbled and splashed and cooed— it could not have been hers.

 

The room's spinning, his head is heavy.

Sam's concerned and oh so practical about it all.

"Dean, you okay?" his voice sounds from across a badly tuned radio, under the buzzing.

He thought of it before. Threatened the devil with his suicide and committed it at the drop of a hat out of practicality. Because they got hurt on a hunt. Because Dean froze when he saw Sam go down. Because he'd kill himself to make up for his mistakes, and he'd never say a thing until Dean pushed him. And he'd look confused there, across from him like he didn't think Dean would care so much. Like he could just put a pistol to his head, blow out his brains, and Dean would call it a day.

"Have you done this before, Sam?" Dean asks. This is his pistol pointed at his head, this question, this stupid question that will get them nowhere is his suicide.

Sam looks away. Hunched over, hair in his face, breathing shallow and deliberately steady. Would it kill him to lie?

Dean buries his head in his hands and doesn't look up when Sam puts a hand on his knee.

 

He'd been frankly disturbed. He'd never seen an adult cry before. If his father had cried in the days preceding, he'd done it out of sight of his children.

Dean had gathered Sam up in his arms, allowed to hold him unsupervised now, and he'd tucked them both into the corner, between the headrest of the bed and the wall, smelling cheap soap in Sam's hair. He hadn't been able to reach the shampoo and this thought finally had made him cry too.

 

Dean looks up eventually. "So, Lucifer." Sam tries to pass off a flinch as a casual movement and leans back again. "What was he like?" Dean asks.

Sam's looking straight at him, but it's like a curtain's come over his eyes. He's not there anymore.

"Calm," he says eventually. "Still."

And Dean's watching Sam, sink-washed hair lank around his face, hands clasped and motion-less. Statuesque except that he's breathing. Dean tears his eyes away.

"I couldn't look at him straight on, you know, because he was so bright." His voice is steady, almost a whisper but it's clear. "So he cloaked himself until I could look." And now he starts to shiver.

"He said he wanted me to see him as he is, without vessels or—"

Dean feels himself shudder, clamps his hands firmly on the armrests of his chair. He doesn't want to know so he asks, "What else did he say?" before Sam can go on.

Sam pushes off the sofa in one swift motion and turns toward the window. And there it is again, the uninjured leg, and them both off balance again.

"His sales pitch," he says.

It's all one big joke. Like Lucifer's wearing you to the prom.

"His sales pitch," Dean repeats, another flat note in their disconnected symphony.

In front of the window that can show him nothing besides his own dusty reflection, hands in his pockets, Sam tilts his head. "Justice," he says, almost like he's musing over it, then he clarifies, "For himself." And because he just can't leave it well enough alone now that Dean's asked, he says, "For me." His voice this time is something more than detached.

Dean wants to get up and leave.

"Peace," Sam says. "Balance in the world."

"Sam you know he was just trying to—"

"Yes," Sam says, snaps, and Dean kicks himself, tries to get enough stale, damp air into his lungs but it lingers somewhere in his throat instead.

Whatever Sam might have said next, he doesn't.

Dean wonders what it must be like, being dead with the devil in his true form asking for your vessel.

"Sam?" Dean asks but he's gone quiet now and doesn't turn away from the window. He's still shivering.

Dean eventually gets up from the chair and steps toward him, almost reaches a hand toward his shoulder then doesn't.

 

They leave the cabin the next morning, get in the car and drive off. They don't talk about it again until they've crossed into the next state, where Dean asks Sam not to kill himself again and Sam asks why he shouldn't. That stops Dean short and he wants to say something, needs to say something before Sam reads too much into his silence but this line of argument never crossed his mind.

"We wouldn't even be having this conversation if I hadn't," Sam says. Then, whether to soften the blow or to point out Dean's hypocrisy, he says "You would have done the same thing."

They don't talk about it for weeks.

It's Dean who picks up the thread again, trying to stop thinking about Anna's plan of scattering Sam's remains over the planet, trying very very hard to stop thinking about how eager Sam was for that.

"Sam?"

He looks up, sighs as he interprets Dean's expression, and says, "Can we just stop talking about this?"

"I just need to know, Sam, why did you— why did you think I wouldn't care?"

He doesn't say anything for a long while, fingers drumming a staccato beat on the table between them, eyes averted. Dean's starting to think he doesn't want the answer all that much anyway, and there's no one answer, there's a dozen.

There's a closed panic-room door between them, and no amulet around Dean's neck.

"I guess I can't think why you would," Sam says.

Dean wants to stop talking about it all, wishes he'd never brought it up, wishes like hell it hadn't happened, and resolves, from this moment on, to always let sleeping dogs lie.

"Hey, I— I care, Sam," he tells the tablecloth between them then dares to look up. "I know things aren't great right now. And I know I've said some things that hurt you," his hand strays toward the phantom string still tied around his neck, "But I don't want you to think,  ever,  that I don't care."

Sam's looking at him, earnest and aching and Dean wants him to stop. He knocks his knuckles on the table as he stands, tosses a twenty for the meal. "Coming?" he asks because Sam's still sitting there and he's reminding Dean of the lukewarm insignificance of what he's just said in the face of Sam thinking he can kill himself and Dean wouldn't give a flying fuck. He pushes the door open, steps out of the diner, and gets in the car.

He picks a case, puts a bandaid over the fracture, turns the music up just loud enough that he can forget there's someone else in the car, drives a little too fast, and resolves on pretending everything is fine until it is or until there's no pretending.