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Moonlight floods the room. There’s a soft sound of traffic outside the cracked-open window, but it’s distant; time itself seems to divert and flow around him. He feels like an island in the middle of a fast-moving stream, and when he begins to hear rustling from the bed behind him he has no real idea if he’s been standing here by the window for two minutes or two hours. Stirring himself back to life, hesitantly dipping his toe back into the current, he half-turns to let her know that he knows she’s awake. In his arms, the baby stirs, making soft hushing noises in his sleep, and Sam instinctively sways on his feet, rocking the tiny little body he holds so close to his heart.
Their child is six days old, and nameless. Every time they try to talk about it, Sam has found a way to duck out of the conversation. He hasn’t made a single suggestion of his own, though he’s firmly shaken his head no to both John and Robert. Yesterday morning, she’d jumped on the fact that he made an interested sort of half-shrug and didn’t outright reject Jack.
‘We can’t keep calling him—’ She’d formed one hand into the sign for L and the other into a W and rocked them in front of her belly, Baby Leahy-Winchester, and he’d laughed and ducked his head to kiss the little boy’s downy head.
Jack, he’d thought, then. I could call you Jack. The rest of the day was filled with diaper mishaps and a lot of frustrated tears as he continued to have trouble latching on when she tried to feed him. His name had seemed like the least of their worries.
It’s three in the morning now, and Sam had woken to the sound of the baby fussing and taken him across the room to rock him in front of the window, looking down over the quiet street. The paint around the window is still fresh and gritty with salt and Sam feels a sudden swooping, nebulous fear. It’s not enough. Earlier in the day he’d googled whether or not it’s dangerous to draw on a baby’s skin with sharpie — it is — but he doesn’t know how he is going to wait eighteen years for the kid to be old enough to get his own anti-possession tattoo.
Out of nowhere he hears a voice, one he’s kept well-buried in the locked room at the back of his mind where he shoves all the memories that are too painful to be left lying around where he might trip over them without warning. Enjoy the world you’re fighting for! The equilibrium between memory and moving on, between regret and gratitude, it’s unbelievably precarious and he feels some days like he’s balanced on a knife edge. Like everything he’s done, every sacrifice he’s made will be for nothing if he’s not careful; but he’s beginning to see the ways that in holding on so tight, he’s left himself without any room to breathe, or grow, or change.
He loosens his hold on the baby as he starts to squirm, and forces himself to breathe in and out on a count of four. There are soft footsteps behind him and Eileen’s hand settles in the center of his back, grounding him further. He turns to look at her.
“Is he hungry?” she asks silently.
Sam looks down at him and shrugs, helpless. Moving until the moonlight falls on his face so that she can read his lips, he mouths the words, ‘I have no idea.’
She smiles and leans against him. She’s exhausted, the shadows under her eyes not obscured even by the shadows in the room, but she’s peaceful, too. Calm. She lifts a hand to stroke their son’s tiny fingers.
He doesn’t know how long they stand there, drifting together, feeling more asleep than awake in this warm little bubble of the three of them. Three is a number he’s used to. It shows up again and again in spells, magic, rituals. It’s been the number of family and home for most of Sam’s life. And it’s the number of times Eileen taps at his arm to get his attention, doing it again more insistently when he’s slow to look over at her. When he does, when she catches his eye, she spells out a name: D-E-A-N, her fingers say, while her eyes form the question. He blinks and starts to look away but she catches his face in her hand. It’s been the hardest habit to unlearn, the impulse to break eye contact in the middle of a conversation. He knows that she sees more of him than he ever would have meant to show, than he ever would have shown anyone else, but the truth is that it’s impossible – and it’s too exhausting to even try – to hide all the time.
Hands moving slowly and without their usual expressive flair, the way she does when she wants to make sure that he follows her exact meaning, she asks, “Do you want to call him Dean?”
Her hands fall to rest at her sides and she stands still, watching him. He holds her eyes long enough to make sure that she means it, what she’s offering, and then he swallows hard, past the extremely painful lump that has materialized without warning in his throat, and looks down at the baby. Their child. His son.
Sam clenches his teeth together, jaw muscles jumping, and then he nods. And nods again.
“Dean,” he says out loud, speaking the name, for the first time, not to the piece of his soul who is lost to him for the remainder of his time on earth but to this new soul, this tiny spark of life that contains the entire universe within his fragile little body. Two tears fall, one after the other, onto the blanket, disappearing immediately in the darkness. Sam swipes the back of his hand over his eyes and then pulls Eileen close with his arm around her waist. He nods again. Dean.
Back in their bed, Eileen holds the baby to her breast and only has to reposition him once before he settles in her arms and, for the first time without any fuss at all, begins to nurse. The look she gives Sam as she lifts her face to his is pure relief and joy, and within a couple of minutes she’s fallen nearly into a doze, leaning against him with her head on his shoulder and both their arms around the baby.
Dean. Sam takes him gently from Eileen when he’s finished, lifting him to his shoulder where he tucks his little face right up against Sam’s neck. He holds him safe and secure there with a hand that spans the baby’s entire back, and he can feel his own heart beating steady in his chest beneath the tiny body. There in the dark, he thinks about all the landmines that lie in wait for them; the day little Dean turns six months old, and then four years older than that. The first time Sam has to leave him for more than a few hours; the first time he has to choose between a hunt and his son. The day his son asks about his namesake.
Against his neck, little Dean smacks his lips and gives a little sigh, tiny fingers flexing, nestling close. The enormity of what he and Eileen have done, bringing a whole new person into this world that they both sacrificed so much to try and save, it crashes over him in waves. Sometimes. And sometimes it settles around his shoulders like a flannel blanket, weighty but welcome.
He thinks about what it will be like, raising a bilingual child, raising him between worlds in ways that everyone will see and in ways that no one will see. He thinks about the fact that Dean will speak his mother’s first language far better than his father ever will, no matter how hard he tries. He thinks about parenting in the age of social media and cyber-bullying and under the toxic cloud of climate change in a country that feels divided beyond repair. He thinks about his own father, about the lengths that John went to keep him safe and close, and sits with the discovery that after forty-odd years his own anger and bitterness have finally burned themselves out, leaving room for the understanding that everything John did was built on a bedrock of love.
And he thinks about his brother, of course, always. As long as he’s breathing, Sam will be thinking of his brother. But also, in this moment and in every moment that follows until the end of this life and beyond whatever comes next, he will always, always, be thinking of his son.