Who: Dean & Sam What: Catching up. Where: Ford's motel room, Vegas. When: During plot. Warnings/Rating: Bro feels.
After crossing through the door multiple times and realizing that, despite employing every tactic he knew, the other guy always ended up being the one who emerged in his world, Dean had reluctantly acknowledged that maybe this wasn’t the work of angels or demons, or even Lucifer himself. The forums had exploded with similar experiences, the wrong people in the wrong places all coping with varying levels of success. As for him, he had no intention of setting mob boy loose in a world populated by big bads and scary things just yet, which meant he was staying in Vegas for a while. For a guy like him, all those flashy casinos and bars were like a magnet pulling him in, and hell, it was a call he didn’t want to ignore; priorities, however. Even Dean had them. Cas’ girl was through the door getting her angel on, which left one other person to look for.
Sam, of course.
If that Ford guy had been telling the truth, then he was around somewhere; the trick was figuring out if he was on this side or the other. No sign of a Ford C. on the journals, though, and Dean was sort of counting on Sam having the same idea; there was logic in the two of them tracking each other down. Instinct too, sure, because he just wasn’t capable of not trying to find him, at the very least, but there was strength in numbers, especially when it came to them. Bemoaning the loss of his car, which had tragically not followed him onto the other side, he found a suitable enough vehicle to get him around (ha-ha, like hell was he walking everywhere, or taking public transportation) and crossed his fingers that no cops decided to pull him over.
With practically nothing to go on but a strong sense of who his brother was and how his mind worked, Dean started his search with motels. He went for the run-down hovels, the sort that took cash and didn’t ask questions and didn’t care all that much about I.D. Armed with a map of Vegas and a smile, he hit one after the other after the other, marking each unsuccessful hit with an X. Not the most stimulating of tasks, but there were no reports of supernatural activity hitting the airwaves yet; what else did he have to do with his time?
Sam’s response was more structured, almost systematic, which was fairly indicative of Sam’s personality. Ford and Sam experimented a few times going back and forth through the door, with Ford trying various magical and supernatural tests to see if this was something unique to Sam, but nothing came of it. As one they decided to just deal with it as best they could for now. Ford, a little worried about the huge supernatural target that was now painted on his back in his role as the new Sam Winchester (so to speak), decided to give Sam the lay of the land in Vegas, where it was safer for both.
The two men were circling each other warily, in a purely figurative sense, as Sam’s presence brought no more specific emotion than what Sam’s mental “voice” could offer. Ford could generally read quite a lot from Sam’s mental “tone” but they weren’t anything like the same person, and there was no great emotional feeling from one or the other. They were both equally reassured by that, and right now they were trading favors the way two desperate men might do if they abruptly woke to find themselves chained permanently together at the ankle. Ford brought over some of Sam’s stolen money, a set of clothing, a silver knife, and after a brief (carefully civil) disagreement, one of the unregistered guns Sam always kept nearby.
Armed with knife, gun, wallet, and Ford’s observational silence, Sam made his way into the familiar city. He came here with Dean annually--unless one of them happened to be dead at the time--and therefore he knew Vegas pretty well, far better than Ford did. It didn’t take Sam long to work out the location of Ford’s truly depressing little motel room and use it to branch out in a star pattern and bribe the night desk of six motels with the promise of some cash if anybody called in looking for Ian Kilmister. (It didn’t surprise Sam that not one of them was a Motorhead fan.)
Said caller would be directed to Ford’s hovel, and there Sam waited for his brother to show up. He didn’t imagine it would take more than a couple hours, and in the meantime he flicked news channels and read newspapers, trying to find any supernatural pattern to his presence here.
Adrian was never much of a presence in Dean’s mind, not enough to ever make a significant impact, and now was no different. It was just him and the radio cranked up high, a road trip that wasn’t a road trip and felt all wrong with no one in the passenger’s seat either way. But there was no time to dwell, because he got lucky with the next motel; one of the aliases he rattled off at the man behind the counter rang a bell. Bingo. It made him smile, the fact that the name earned him an address and directions; trust Sam to be the organized one, the planner, while Dean was more inclined to spend more time doing and less time thinking.
It was on the ride there that he realized this had the potential to be an awkward reunion. He and Sam hadn’t left on the best of terms the last time around, after all; Dean had failed to consider the possibility that this might not be the same Sam, or that their timelines would be vastly different. He and Cas were on the same wavelength, and even he and other-Sam had only been a couple of months off at the most. He wasn’t thinking the gap might be just a little wider this time around.
Pure luck kicked in when it came to clothing. Adrian’s fit him pretty well, not perfectly, but not enough to complain about, and so he was wearing comfortable yet unfamiliar jeans paired with a shirt and a worn canvas jacket tugged overtop. Dean knocked once he found the right door, but he entered right after, announcing himself with a “Hey, Sammy,” as he stepped inside.
It was just like any number of days in any number of cities during any one of the last few years. Sam in the gloom of some musty-smelling room, hunched over some newspaper with nothing on but the bleak news, Dean strolling in off the street with something fresh to break the case. Sam looked up from his position on the sunken bed; none of the chairs were big enough for him to stretch out on and this motel room was a level of depressing that not even the Winchesters frequented--the chair was all there was, not even a table. This was Ford’s room and not Sam’s, so it was the one King in the closet-size room and not two queens. To Sam the room felt a little odd, a little oblong.
“Hey,” Sam said, with a huff of sound that was the same greeting from any of those days, cities, years. Not cheerful, not grim, not shocked to see his brother, not any lingering resentments. Sam gave his brother a loose smile and then stretched back from his task with an unfurling of gorilla-long arms into the musty, chill air. It was too dim in the tiny little room for Sam to get a good look at Dean, and he didn’t notice a thing about him that set off any alarm bells. “Good to see you,” he yawned. “You know what we’re dealing with yet?” Like they were in the middle of a case already and it was time to catch each other up on what the cons of the day had revealed. Sam gave his head a little tip to get his hair out of his face; he’d been letting it grow and it was getting downright shaggy.
It wasn’t until a few seconds after Sam spoke that Dean realized he’d been waiting for something. What, he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but based on the fact that the last time they’d talked Sam had seemed convinced that he was another Lucifer hallucination, well, it was probably something along the lines of holy water-salt-knife. But there was no suspicion to be found anywhere in his brother’s expression, nothing of the tension that had brewed between them or the issues they’d had getting on the same page. Huh. Maybe he’d gotten over all that. or, more likely in his mind, he just didn’t remember any of it. “Yeah, ditto,” he said, moving closer to get a better look, since the lighting sucked in this hellhole. And they’d seen some hellholes over the years, to be sure.
“Not yet. Ruled out Lucifer, though, and the angels. Seems like everyone’s up in arms about this damn hotel, and--” He stopped abruptly, both in speech and movement, and stared. There were bigger things to worry about just then, like how they’d gotten to where they were and how they were going to get back, but he had a hard time getting past one little thing. “Sam. Your...” He made a vague gesture towards his mop of hair in place of words. “What the hell?”
“Lucifer,” Sam scoffed, looking worried at the mere mention of the name but also doubtful as to its source. “It can’t be him.” Sam thought that Dean looked healthy, without really understanding that his brother looked healthy because he was missing age lines and wear that Sam had already accepted as part of “just Dean.” Nothing to really set off any alarms, and it wasn’t like Dean had done anything drastic in the way of fashion lately.
Sam just blinked across the room at the question, entirely nonplussed. “What?” He put one hand on his chest, to see if he was bleeding or dying of heart attack. He realized that Dean’s hand was flipping a little higher in the air toward his head, and he brought two hands both long and wide up to wrap around his head. It felt the same. “What?” he asked, with increasing volume and rising tone of concern. He and Ford had plenty of time during their experimentation to work out the clothes problem, as Sam had a considerable amount of weight and height on the younger man. Sam looked down to check once more.
The worry made sense. But the doubt, especially considering that Lucifer was still a very real threat (where he came from, at least) puzzled him. It wasn’t enough to set off alarm bells, but it did make Dean wonder why there wasn’t more of a reaction. This whole Lucifer thing had really messed Sam up, especially with him hell-bent on using him as his vessel, and despite evidence to the contrary he still would have expected Sam to push a little more, to not be so quick to dismiss that particular theory. “Last I checked, Cas said he was still MIA, but that could’ve changed between now and then,” he suggested, as he tried to figure out whether he was overthinking things or there was actually something there to explain the nagging feeling that something wasn’t as it should have been.
His reaction to Dean’s criticism of his hair, however, was hilarious, plain and simple. His lips twitched as he watched Sam go into panic mode, and then he laughed, unable to hold it back any longer. He didn’t respond right away, intentionally prolonging the amusement, before rolling his eyes. “Your hair,” he explained, as though it was obvious what he’d been referring to. “It’s all... shaggy and long.”
Sam pressed one eye and both lips down as he rolled his head on his spine toward one shoulder in an expression of annoyance. His panic disappeared and he let his hands fall onto his lap, dislodging a few folds of newspaper. “Will you let it go? One lame ass comment is enough, a week’s worth, maybe. But we gotta be on month five, man. Get some new material.” Sam gave a little laugh and a grin. He settled his spine down from the long stretch and put out his heels. Running shoes and worn down jean cuffs. The chair was small, and his elbows and knees hung out of it on either side of it.
Sam moved on, his tone of voice meandering and yet businesslike. “Dean, Cas has been MIA for weeks. And he was MIA before that. And oh, before that, he was MIA again. I’m sure he’s fine.” Sam wasn’t entirely sure of that; he fingered the thread on his knee and frowned. He kept it to himself. “I tried a few things too. It’s not witchcraft, at least nothing I know off the top of my head. Ford could check the record but... it’s dangerous for him to be me. I’m sure.”
There, just then, Dean’s smile faltered. As always, he strove to hide it even as it happened, but turning a blind eye to the implications in Sam’s thoughtless brotherly banter was impossible. Judging from his comment, there was at least a handful of months between the two of them, but the part of him that had come to expect the worst suspected it might be even more. “Month five, huh?” He nodded, more to himself than to Sam, and ran a hand along his jaw. For all his efforts otherwise, Sam was the one person he’d never been able to fool.
But it just got worse from there. Cas was a lot of things these days, but MIA for weeks? Yeah, no. That got the alarm bells ringing. “Cas hasn’t been MIA for weeks, Sam,” he said, after a long, long moment of contemplating saying anything at all. “It’s just been me and him since you left the first time.” As for it being dangerous for the other guys to be them, he nodded, because that was the reason why he was staying in Vegas and keeping Adrian from crossing; he didn’t think he could handle it.
Sam was exaggerating about the number of the months (probably) so he just rolled his eyes in a move honed by years of practice. Months, years, whatever. The mocking could probably continue and Sam would begin to accept it as part of the norm until Dean found something else to give him a hard time about. This was normal operating procedure and it made them both feel better about their fucked up lives. (Sam generally resisted pointing that fact out so Dean didn’t drown in overt emotion and leave for burgers in protest.)
“You and him,” Sam repeated. He blinked and sat up out of his previously relaxed position on the undersized chair. He hunched his shoulders over his knees and frowned at his brother. “What, like you and Cas? Have you seen him since that hot dog kid died? Why didn’t you say anything?” Sam wasn’t thinking about the doors just then. He’d only been part of that phenomenon for all of a week, and he wasn’t used to thinking about a previous version of him in somebody’s head. It was too damn weird.
A trickle of frustration crept in, though it wasn’t directed at Sam and Dean did his best to stem the flow before the crack could get wider and less manageable. It was no secret that Cas hadn’t always been Mr. Reliable, but ever since defecting from Heaven he’d been around more often than not and even more so in Sam’s absence. “Yeah, like me and Cas. What hot dog kid?” No bells were ringing, not even the rusty broken kind. Death was always guaranteed to get his attention, though, and even without connecting any of the dots he wasn’t liking the direction this was going in. “I can’t say anything if I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Sam.” He knew he was going to start pacing if he kept standing, so he sat on the edge of the bed closest to Sam’s chair, elbows on his knees. “Who’s the hot dog kid, and what does he have to do with Cas?”
Sam stared at his brother. He took a long hard look at him, searching for differences, trying to picture Dean in his head the way he’d last seen him. It was... what. It was in the archive, the old library lamps low, the smell of a home-cooked cheeseburger in the air. Dean had been happy and he’d had his smug smile on, and the creases around his eyes had been pretty deep. Sam couldn’t be sure, but he thought maybe the Dean standing in front of him didn’t have those.
The muscles around Sam’s eyes tightened, and he rose up out of his chair. He reached into a pocket and took out a battered pocket knife that had obviously been modified. He took the blade in two fingertips and wrenched the silver line of it out. Sam’s big hand flipped the pocket knife so he was holding it by the flat of the blade, and he offered it wordlessly to Dean. Going to have to rule out the shapeshifter possibility. He didn’t think it all that likely a leviathan or a demon would find their way to this place, not this one, not since Ford had been the one to choose it and not Sam. Shapeshifters, though, those had that weird psychic link.
It was a testament to just how fucked-up their lives were that Dean didn’t even flinch when Sam pulled out the pocket knife. By this point, it was blatantly obvious that something was wrong, but having had prior experience with different timelines he didn’t immediately assume demon, shapeshifter, etc. as he normally would have. Two versions of his brother was beyond weird, and he didn’t like it, especially since he was struggling to reconcile himself with the logic of how that was even possible. He leaned forward and took the knife without a word, rolling up his sleeve to just below his elbow before making a horizontal cut across his skin with the blade. He gritted his teeth together but said nothing, and the blood welled up, normal and very much human. He raised his eyebrows in a silent ‘satisfied?’ before handing the knife back by the hilt, and a tilt of his chin that indicated it was his turn. Better safe than sorry. “We’re in the middle of the Apocalypse,” he said abruptly, deciding to quit beating around the bush and get right down to it. Sam’s reaction would give him a good idea of how far apart they were; he and the other Sam might not have been on the same page, but at least they’d been in the same damn chapter. With this one, they might be in entirely separate books.
Sam watched the blade to make sure there was no trick, then sighed when it came away red and normal. Dean always went a little deeper than strictly necessary, in Sam’s opinion; but he did want to reassure his brother, who had always been more suspicious by nature, and when he took the knife back he pressed it down on the inside of his forearm in the same way. There were small lines there that might have set a school counselor alarm off, but really just indicated a few tests of just this kind. Sam and Dean probably had more scar tissue between them than eighty percent of the population.
Sam cleaned his knife on the tail of his shirt, but he didn’t sit back down. He glanced up into Dean’s face and spoke without thinking. “Which one?” Then he blinked. “Oh it’s... it’s... That’s why you mentioned Lucifer.” Sam closed his eyes for a second, as if he could push the existence of that bastard entirely from his mind. “Oh God. Okay.” Sam visibly steadied himself and then opened his eyes again. He pushed the blade back into its innocuous bed and pocketed it. “Okay,” he said again. “Okay. So it’s... what? ‘09? 2010, for you?”
Sam shifted his weight restlessly on the flat of his shoes. “Do you know who Jesse Turner is? When was the last time you saw... Ellen?” Sam did his damndest to keep everything out of his expression, but he was hoping to avoid traumatic news. Probably a lost cause, given their lives.
Despite not really expecting anything to be out of the ordinary, Dean was suspicious by nature and watched with a gaze that seemed sharply focused on that one spot, where Sam pressed the knife, until blood appeared and confirmed what he’d suspected to be true. Certainty was better than assumption. He raised his eyebrows when Sam asked which one, because seriously, what the hell? “Yeah,” he said. “Lucifer, the Four Horseman, angels breathing down our necks. That Apocalypse. Is there another one I’m missing?” He had no idea how this ended; yeah, Adrian watched a couple episodes of the damn show, but Dean had refused to pay much attention and he’d made enough of a ruckus to ensure the guy left it alone. “It’s 2010 for me, but I’m gonna take a wild guess and say it’s not for you.” He knew, at least, that Sam was ahead and not behind; there had to be a reason he’d discounted Lucifer from the start.
He rubbed his forehead with rough fingers, attempting to alleviate some of the strain without much success. “Sure, Jesse. Little antichrist kid. Turned Cas into an action figure. Disappeared into thin air.” His expression became something pained at the mention of Ellen, just for a second or two, and then it went hard in a very familiar way. “Last time I saw Ellen was right before her and Jo were blown sky high,” he snapped. For him, the wound was still raw and fresh, and he reacted accordingly.
Sam lifted his head back in one solid motion of combined assent and apology. He didn’t like bringing it up, but those were the things that stood out most in his mind, things that marked out those horrible months, one from another. “So the horsemen, then. How many rings do you have?” Sam was starting to go a little pale. The quiet hazel eyes were widening slightly, like someone had just hit him hard, and abruptly he stopped swaying back and forth on his feet. The thinking expression vanished. He was keeping it together, but not by much, because it was starting to look to him like he was going to go back and relive that time, and he wasn’t sure he could do it. No. He couldn’t do it. It was different taking Lucifer down to Hell, in that split-second where it was all necessary, where it needed to happen and he didn’t know what waited for him. But now he knew. Now he knew what that was like, and he knew he couldn’t survive it again. When Dean didn’t react in a split-second’s pause, Sam snapped in a short, panicked bark, “Dean. How many rings?!”
On the long, bumpy road to the Apocalypse, Dean hadn’t even reached the halfway point yet. He knew about the whole vessel thing, the big end game battle between Michael and Lucifer and the roles he and Sam were meant to play, like puppets on strings, but the cage and Hell and the Horsemen’s rings were further down the path than he’d gotten. He had one, taken on instinct, without full understanding of what he possessed. All that added up to a sense that there was a disconnect somewhere, between what Dean knew and the link that connected Sam’s reaction to the Four Horseman and their damned rings. He didn’t answer right away because the gears were turning, trying to work out why how many rings he did or didn’t have would matter once he realized what rings Sam was referring to in the first place. He didn’t quite flinch in response to the panicked bark, but he definitely sat back a little, brow furrowing as he did so. “War,” he said. “We have War’s ring. That’s it. Why?” His voice took on a sharper, more urgent tone. “What’s so important about the rings, Sam? Because I feel like I’m missing a hell of a lot right now.”
Sam didn’t answer right away. He turned away from Dean entirely and pushed a shaking hand through his hair. He raked his fingers hard over his scalp, trying to ground himself in the present, and he didn’t even notice Ford actively restraining curiosity to leave Sam a quiet in his mind. “Okay.” It wasn’t okay, he was just saying it because otherwise he wasn’t saying anything, and he didn’t think he could stand that. He worked his mouth closed as it tried to gasp air, and he just took in a bunch of damp dust from the disgusting hotel room rather than any real reassurance. Sam sat heavily on the end of the bed. He gave Dean a pleading look, full of desperation. “Are you sure you haven’t just forgotten? Amnesia. You hit your head?”
Dean had already been fast approaching the line between confusion and concern, but all it took was Sam’s lack of response and subsequent reaction to push him right over onto the other side. Like hell it was okay. He knew his brother too well to buy that, and even without being able to see his face, he’d worked out that Sam knew something about where the whole Apocalypse thing was going. The rings obviously played a part, and he was willing to bet his life on them needing all four as opposed to just one, for whatever it was, which meant Dean was way behind compared to wherever it was that Sam came from. He felt guilty almost immediately, a reaction most people probably wouldn’t have understood, but that was just the way he was wired; if there was a way to beat Lucifer, and this Sam had already gotten past all that, all Dean was going to do was drag him right back to square one. “If I hit my head and forgot, I wouldn’t remember, would I?” He knew it was crap even as he said it. “Work with me here, Sam. Fill in the blanks. Tell me what I’m missing.”
Sam stared at a stain on the carpet two feet from the toes of his shoes. It was not possible to describe the look on his face, a movement of mouth and glassy eyes that was all vulnerability and shock. You could see the effort it took for him to continue thinking actively, to process and return. He was thinking about something that scared him, scared him down to the dark, frightened curl of his soul where everything was scar tissue and hope to heal. “The rings are the key to the cage. We open it up. We... we get him in there. The Colt doesn’t work on Lucifer. Nothing does.” Sam pressed his palms together, felt the clammy sweat there seal, and then he folded his fingers in so hard the edges of his knuckles scraped bone against bone.
Dean knew, at least, about Lucifer’s cage, but he’d been unaware until then that there was a way to shove him back in. He thought about it for a few moments, mostly working through the logistics of how they would have gotten Lucifer in, after collecting the rings and opening it in the first place. Obviously the Devil wouldn’t willingly walk right back in to captivity, and he doubted Zachariah and his crew would be too keen on that plan either. But what bothered him, what dampened would-be relief that there was a way to beat Lucifer, was Sam’s reaction to it all. Surely, if he came from a time after all this had been accomplished, he should have been a little more optimistic about the whole thing. Not scared like he was, reminding Dean of back when they were just kids. So he asked the million-dollar question, the one he suspected was tied to whatever had happened to leave Sam like this.
“How’d we get him back in the cage?”
Sam thought wildly about just not telling him. Maybe if he didn't say, it wouldn't happen. Maybe there was some other way. For a crazy moment that smelled like the sky above the edge of the cliff, he believed that could be true. The crash was incredible. Sam shut his eyes, and his jaw slid sideways before he clenched his teeth down against the words. "I did. I mean... I took him there. He was inside me so... So I did it."
For a full thirty seconds, Dean was still. It took that long to process Sam’s word, to piece them together into a scenario that he could comprehend. As soon as it all clicked in, he stood abruptly, agitated, and began to pace. “No,” he said. A good word. He said it again. “No, Sammy. You can’t.” Belatedly, he realized Sam already had, and so he backtracked. “Not again, I mean. It already happened for you, right? So it’s done. Over. Lucifer’s gone back home, Sam, and he might never show up. Hell, there might not even be an Apocalypse waiting for us when he get back.” Wishful thinking, maybe, and hell, he needed to talk to Cas, but the conviction in his voice was there, even if it did sound a little too forced. He slowed and looked over at his brother, a new concern striking him in the midst of his controlled panic attack. “Why didn’t I stop you? There had to’ve been another way.” Dean found it hard to believe that, no matter how bad things got, Sam saying yes to Lucifer and throwing himself in his cage had ever become not only a viable option, but an actual solution.
“No!” Sam made a sharp movement with a hand fully capable of palming a basketball with minimal effort. A puff of stale motel air wafted past his face and disrupted the leaves of newspapers sliding off the bedspread. “There’s not,” he said, forcefully modulating his voice. “This was... That was... it was what had to happen.” Sam seemed to grow smaller. He was a big man, and it was somehow in his shoulders and in his face, a condensing silhouette and contraction of voice. “I just... we had to...”
That wasn’t good enough, not by a long shot. In typical Dean Winchester fashion, he vowed to fix it, somehow. Maybe he couldn’t turn back the clock, but he could find a way to ensure history didn’t repeat itself. Like hell was he letting Sam sacrifice himself all over again. Everything they’d done, all the lives they’d lost... and in the end, Sam had said yes just to get Lucifer back in his damn box. He couldn’t wrap his head around it, not yet having reached the point where it was possible. “Well, it’s not gonna happen again,” he said decisively. “We’ll figure it out, alright?” He’d need to talk to Cas, see how things were once they were back where they belonged, and put together a concrete plan. There was, of course, the matter of how Sam was even here if he’d been trapped in the cage, but that could wait.
“In the meantime,” he continued, “what d’you say we get out of here? We’re in Vegas, Sam. Might as well make the most of it.” When he couldn’t immediately fix things, Dean fell back on poor humor and distraction techniques, like if he just pretended hard enough it might stick. This time it wasn’t for his sake, but Sam’s. His brother might not have been a kid anymore, but he was still his little brother, and kicking the ol’ I’ll handle it habit of taking things upon himself died hard.
Sam lifted his head and shot Dean a knowing look. He knew exactly what was going on inside his brother’s head, and he knew that “getting around it” was the Winchester family creed. He didn’t point out that those plans had never worked out, and he also didn’t say that he knew Lucifer ten times better than Dean ever would or ever could. Instead he just took in a shaky breath and forced it out again. “Okay.” He wasn’t going to let Dean ‘just handle it’ because this Sam knew better. He knew they had to make decisions together if they wanted them to stick. That was when they worked. He would wait until that time came, because if Lucifer was still there... the time would come.