Fic: And I Shall Raise You From the Dust

[brosedshield.livejournal.com]

Title: And I Shall Raise You From the Dust
Author: brosedshield
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't profit
Characters: Sam, Dean, John
Warnings: depression
Rating: PG-13 (though that 13 may just be a habit)
Word count: 2474
Spoilers: preseries
Summary: Sam chose to give up his dreams of college, Stanford and normalcy for his family. Now, after a hunt leaves him broken, he gets everything he wants (after he can't want it any more).
Beta Credit: lavinialavender is the best beta and friend a person could ask for :)
Author notes: This is a very odd sort of fic. For one thing, the original draft was written over two years ago and it stayed in the digital equivalent of a dusty drawer for the majority of that time. For another, this is an AU continuation of the AU of an AU, and as such will probably not make sense unless you read Beneath the Trees, Where Nobody Sees by minviendha and also You Get What You Need by khakigrrl, which you should because both fics were so darned good that I wanted to see more. This fic is written with khakigrrl’s blessing, though two years late. I only hope that it does justice to the stories that came before.


He’s angry, angry under the skin where it won’t show and oozing out with every word, and he’s not sure even what he’s angry about. Maybe about his legs, maybe that John and Dean ganged up on him again (or, maybe, that he’s finally got the fucking normal life he dreamed about and he’s never wanted it less).

Dean drives Sam to his first day of classes at Stanford. He’s pale and twitchy with nerves that Sam doesn’t feel. It’s not just his legs that are numb today. They stop outside Varian Physics and Dean puts her in park—not a legal spot, except for the handicapped sticker on the mirror and Sam’s braces sharing the seat with him—and beats a nervous rhythm on the wheel.

Sam supposes that it’s good one of them is feeling something, but he doesn’t have the energy. Except for the impotent, misdirected rage he feels looking at the tan stone and the dull ache in his back he’s gotten used to (all feeling ending abruptly mid-thigh, he wouldn’t swear that he’s still alive).

He doesn’t want to do this. Doesn’t want to do a damn thing, but getting out of the car is probably the only thing that will get that terrified, stumbling-on-eggshells look out of Dean’s eyes. First-year classes won’t kill him, and anything less will make no noticeable difference in the life of Sam Winchester.

“Dean, chill,” he says. He just wants Dean to stop.

Sam could have driven—the hand-controls on the Impala only the most obvious sign of Dean’s willingness to make sacrifices for his little brother—but they agreed that Dean could drop him off.  come in. Dean hovers at his side like a chicken with only one chick and sometimes Sam thinks about letting go, just to feel Dean catch him.

They’ve agreed that Sam will hop out—the idea’s almost funny, because he doesn’t actually have enough flexibility left to manage more than an inching pace—and manage the curb leading up to the building himself with Dean watching, and then Dean will drive away and pick him up after his introductory physics.

“Sam, you sure you can…I mean, you don’t want me…” Dean shakes himself and cuts off the words. They’ve had this talk four times today and the weekend was worse—Sam thinks of them as “talks” whereas they would have been arguments a year ago when he could feel things—and Dean is trying not to push. He’s bad at it. He never really stops pushing Sam.

“I’ll be fine, Dean.” Sam tries to put confidence in his voice, or at least assurance, and it’s hard, but he thinks he must have managed. Dean relaxes marginally, hands sliding down to the controls.

Unsaid is the promise that Sam will not stop as soon as Dean is out of sight, that he will actually go to his classes and listen to the professors for the allotted time, and probably learn something, if only because Sam Winchester has never been able to stop learning things in his life. Returned is the promise that Dean won’t look at him with his personal scathing mix of self-loathing and fear when Sam limps back out.

Sam would rather be killing things. Dying, even. But for once his family has made a decision that isn’t based on his mother’s death, and Sam doesn’t understand them any more, isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do now that hunting is not the center of their insular little world.

Because here they are in Palo Alto. Dean and Sam have a tiny apartment near the campus, little more than a bedroom, kitchen, and handicap-accessible bathroom, and John is off, somewhere, hunting. He has Dean’s cell phone number, but neither he nor Dean have bothered to call, and Sam sure isn't.

It’s what he would have dreamed of, once upon a time, but it’s hard to pick up the pieces of a dream, even when you haven’t shredded and buried them. He can’t reclaim his ex-dreams in a moment, can’t turn back time and care again with a snap of his fingers like the snap of a bone.

Sam Winchester is nothing if not thorough, and when for his family he abandoned the dream of law school and a normal life, he shredded it. He put it in a tiny box in his mind and lost it with the same determination with which he’s hunted werewolves and ganked ghosts. Those dreams are as cold and ashy as their mother’s remains—anger would drive the words, if he said them, but the analogy holds truth—and he has neither the will nor the way to to raise something from that dust. He can no more return to the days when he longed for Stanford than he can get up and walk without his braces and canes.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to—though he hasn’t wanted anything for a long time—but that he can’t.

Dean is there to reach where Sam can’t go, like he has since Sam was too young to feed himself, when Sam raged against Dad and couldn’t stop, when Sam was in the hospital and too weak to move.

But this isn’t flying mashed carrots to his mouth with Impala engine noises, or a hand on his shoulder and a quiet Sammy, or that light, hollow chatter next to Sam’s hospital bed when the constant rattle of daytime television didn’t even come close to filling the silences. College was Sam’s dream, his skill set—I salted and burned this, Dean, you can’t bring it back—and Dean is patently unqualified in this almost-normal world that Sam always wanted.

But because he’s here, looking at Sam hope and fear in his eyes, Sam gets his braced legs out of the car one by one, heaves himself up, and walks into Varian Physics. He doesn’t look back, and even he couldn’t say whether it’s a measure of spite, a vote of confidence (he knows that Dean will be there waiting in 55 minutes come hell or high water), or the knowledge that if he turned around, he’d never follow through.

~*~

Life goes on.

Sam would say fuck it, not do his homework, not give a hot damn about this life he doesn’t deserve, but Dean makes him. Even when he’s not saying a damn thing, he makes Sam carry through when he may otherwise not have done anything, not fill out the forms or do his best. Sam seethes and excels in equal measures, all beneath the grey blank of that same old numb. He doesn’t say much.

Sometimes he does shout, screaming at his brother like Dean is John and he’s fifteen again, leaving another school where it seems like he might manage friends—not many, he’d managed that—and some kind of normalcy.

The fights are always different than those past altercations, because Dean just fades in front of him, shrinking down, like he knows it’s all his fault—maybe it is, maybe if I could have left you I could have left everything else—and Sam always breaks first, apologizing, blaming pain and stress and ends up feeling like the world’s ugliest piece of shit.

Nights like that he takes as many pain meds as the bottle allows and curls up with his fucking useless legs, wishing he could stop hurting Dean, he could just stop.

He wishes he was hunting, like he, John, and Dean did the summer before Dean returned to the whole college idea and John inexplicably played along. Sam wants to kill something. He wants two legs and the opportunity to rip the heart out of something other than himself because maybe then he’d at least get a little sick satisfaction out of the ugliness crawling around inside him. Right now it just makes him feel sick.

Sam’s a hunter now. He made that fucking choice and if there’s one thing he’s learned living a lifetime with John and Dean, it’s that hunting is something that gets into your bones and eats you from the inside until you’re nothing but the drive and the obsession. Every fucking hunter he’s ever met was chasing his own white whale, revenge riding a thin shell of human skin. Look at Dean: big brother, always the best, and he doesn’t seem to understand that hunting pared him down to the basics—music, food, sex—a long time ago. It’s hopeless for both of them.

Sam’s a dog with two broken legs and all he wants is to find a way out of this trap Dean calls real life and college and what you always wanted, Sam.

But Dean keeps trying. He cooks steaks on the grill and complains about the price of toilet paper. He changes sheets and washes dishes. Even when it’s painfully obvious how out of his depth he is stocking a kitchen and scrawling his own name on a credit card receipt. Dean’s broken, they’re both broken—Sam just carries more evidence of it, that’s all, with his damn double canes—but Dean keeps trying until it hurts to watch.

Eventually, Sam can’t stand it. He can’t watch his brother wallow, struggle, die, fail, every fucking day. He can carry the fucking world, but he can’t bear that.

So he tries too.

Sam tries, attending classes, doing the chores he can manage around the house, trying not to snap at Dean, aware he only has to endure until Dean gets bored, antsy, and decides that they can’t do this any more.

Sam keeps expecting it to end. In a hunt, or in a fight they can’t get over. Eventually, caring creeps up on him, the same way therapy built the muscles that let him move his useless legs or how Dean got the hang of paying the light bill on time. He couldn’t say where it began or when it got easy, but he knows exactly when he knew.

The first day of Christmas vacation. Dean was visibly relieved that they had both survived a semester in one place and Sam was equal parts bemused and irritated by his single A-. Dean had printed off what had to be the Internet’s most complicated pie recipe—one that included a homemade lard crust and a pastry fork—and stocked up on cinnamon and apples.

By the time their second attempt was in the oven, their tiny kitchen was a wreck, Dean had raw pie crust in his hair, one of Sam’s textbooks was scorched and Sam realized that he hadn’t felt so exhausted but triumphant since the last time they hunted and no one died.

“It’s not gonna burn this time, Sam, you’ll see.” Dean sounded both fervent and unsure.

Sam smiled at him. So what if it burned? They were down to one apple—two if he counted the one Dean had half-eaten during the cooking process—and his hands were blackened by apple acid from peeling, coring and slicing. The pie in the oven was their last chance to get it right, but it didn’t matter if the pie went up in flames—okay, up in smoke and char—like the last one did. No one would die if they fucked this up. Two burnt pies were not the apocalypse. Not—Sam realized—even a bad day. He had had fun failing at Christmas domesticity with his brother. He’s pretty sure the dough in Dean’s hair was all his fault, either from hitting him with the rolling pin—he’ll swear to his dying day it was an accident—or when he threw dough balls at his head because Dean had mocked him one too many times for his A- (“God, Sam, can’t even pull a 4.0 your first semester, you’re totally going to get a B when the classes get hard.”).

He felt good, satisfied, without the ache of a hunt, like he hadn’t felt since he was young and hunting and pain were something John and Dean wouldn’t let him see. This is exactly what he wanted so long ago, before he stopped wanting things.

~*~

Maybe they could be hunting. At least, Dean could be hunting with John, and Sam could be researching, waiting in the Impala’s driver’s side during hunts, gut knotted, hating his gimp legs that trap him into playing getaway driver when he’d rather be with his family. But that’s not where they are, and the people Sam and Dean could save by hunting are strictly hypothetical. Some days—okay, a lot of days—Sam wishes the wendigo would have just killed him, sure that his death wouldn’t have changed the Winchester family dynamics that much. John and Dean would hate, hunt, drink, and leave him behind—on a pyre instead of a motel room—and he wouldn’t have to wait for them to come back (or not come back at all).

Other days, Sam lives and studies and does contract research on the side to bring in a little extra cash, and thinks that this, this normal life that he always wanted, he has it now, and it’s pretty okay.

~*~

John doesn’t come for Christmas, but Sam doesn’t even realize that neither he nor Dean had been expecting him until he shows up two days later and both of them are surprised.

John is tired, wary, a stray dog that doesn’t know if it’s wanted. “Dean.” The acknowledgement is said without looking, and Dean makes some noise in reply that means almost nothing. “How’ve you been, Sam?” John says it like he doesn’t expect an honest answer.

“I’m doing…well, sir.” Really well. Sam can’t call what he feels “happiness” or “joy”, but it is good just the same. If anything, it’s the bone-deep (and cane- and apple pie-deep) knowledge that he is here now. That life, what he has, isn’t that bad and has already gotten better.

John relaxes minutely. “Good,” he says. “That’s good.”

“Don’t listen to him.” Dean breaks in, bringing over a slice of three-day-old turkey from the Christmas dinner they’d burned only a little. “Sammy got an A- in frosh chemistry! What kind of knucklehead does that?”

John looks at Dean and almost smiles . Sam wonders how long it’s been since John and Dean talked. They’re not very smooth at it, but it’s a process, like learning to walk, and the first step is always standing up. “Awesome ones, that’s who, “ Sam replies. “Get me some turkey, jerk.”

“Get your own turkey, bitch,” Dean snorts, already turning back to the fridge. “You’ve got four perfectly good legs.”

None of them were hale. None of them perfect. But maybe this was enough: to eat cold turkey with his father and brother on December the 27th and be silent, for now, before all the things they had to say. None of the Winchesters needed to be whole, right this moment. They just needed the promise that family would always be there to put them back together when they fell.

END.

Notes:
*All classes are taken from current First Year Law courses listed on the Stanford website, though I suspect that Sam wouldn’t REALLY be taking those classes in his first year (and also that first year courses would have been at least a little different when this fic is theoretically set which is...maybe 1995? I had a note to that effect two years ago, but can’t remember how reliable it was…)

*ETA Some folks pointed out that I put Sam in actual Law School classes instead of getting his undergrad. ARG, not sure where my brain was for that. So, now, because the Stanford website has been confusing, all classes are imaginary, and probably not actually taught in the one building mentioned. If anyone knows what Sam WOULD be taking in his first year (preferably a class in a building that Dean could drive him to!) let me know and I'll switch it around again. Thank you!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

This is really great - optimistic but still realistic!

[brosedshield.livejournal.com]

Thank you!