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They move back to San Francisco, in the end, him and Eileen. After burying his brother, that is, burying him safe and secure in a grave lined with salt and runes and caked in flowers. Sam could make a hundred thousand excuses as to why—for the heat, for the people, for the ocean, for the opprtunities-but even he knows it’s because the city, the university still spells out normalcy, after all this time, after all these years and these horrors. The normal life he could have had for himself, had in the palm of his hand before it’d slipped out of his fingers like sand.
They name their baby after his brother Dean, and he does not speak until he is five, which almost drives Sam insane again with an anxiety abated only by how much Dean clings onto him, soft little fingers curled around his hair or hands.
The kid is shy. Always has been, since the second he was born—no crying, no fussing. He stares at the world with big, wide eyes and tiny, curious little hands that reaches for everything and everyone within eyeshot. Eileen and Sam sit on the floor to teach him his first steps, back and forth, he falls over himself in silence. He’s heard stories of parents driven mad by the endless crying, the sleep deprivation. Sometimes Sam wishes he was more loud, more demanding, more annoying, because, God, all the kid ever does is watch. He climbs into Sam's lap and just watches him with those brown eyes of his, never saying a word. He gets as close as he could get, until they’re close enough that the kid's little nose presses up against his jaw, and he just stares. And, once in a blue moon, he reaches up to touch Sam's mouth, his face, his hair. Not like he’s playing, or even like he’s experimenting. Just... touching.
They get along. He supposes they do. Dean learns how to walk, how to talk, skipping the babbling phase altogether for full words, he hardly needs Eileen or Sam’s encouragement to practise his letters with crayon over and over.
It's almost scary, really, how easy the kid is. He eats anything they put in front of him, he sleeps through the night, he's never loud or fussy, and he's smart. So damn smart. It makes Sam nervous, sometimes; makes him suspicious.
What Dean does not budge on though, is the other children. He refuses to play with them. Simple as. He clambers onto his father’s knee at conferences or when they go to catch up with old friends of take him to the park.
Sam doesn’t push it. Not when the kid looks at him like that—like he’s begging without saying a word, all big eyes and clenched fists in his sweater sleeves.
He knows that look too well. It's the same one he used to give Dean back in the day—back when they were kids who didn't know how to ask for help without feeling stupid about it.
So Sam just nods, lets him burrow under his arm while Eileen tries (and fails) not to laugh at them both over her coffee cup.
"Guess we're skipping playdates," she mutters, but there's no real annoyance behind it—not with their boy curled up safe against Sam’s ribs like nothing else exists out there worth touching anyway
The silence lingers.
Dean goes to high school. It’s a ten minute ride, he takes the long walk because the noise of the cars on the intersection scares him. No gun, not like him and his brother Dean. His son is no hunter.
Sam’s anxiety climbs, and climbs. The terror he feels when Dean is a few seconds late answering his phone is overwhelming. Weekly, then daily he has to remind himself how wrong John was to raise them both as killers. How much they suffered.
(It becomes harder and harder to believe himself.)
Sam catches himself watching the kid from his office window—Dean, all lanky limbs and careful footsteps like he's trying to make noise disappear underfoot. No hunter's swagger, no smirk. Just this quiet kid with a backpack too big for his shoulders.
And Sam hates it.
Hates how good he is at not being what they were—hates how much that terrifies him more than any damn monster ever could.
He doesn't say anything when Eileen finds him gripping the kitchen counter at 2AM again. Just presses her palm over his white-knuckled fingers until they loosen one by one.
"Kid’s safe," she signs, mouth pressed into his hairline. “That's enough."
But Sam isn’t sure what ‘enough’ even means anymore—not when their boy walks home past houses lit up gold while he stands in shadows of things left buried but never really dead either.
Time drags on. Dean is fourteen and his teachers say he excels in science. Sam carves runes into every single windowsill in the house, buries salt under the tiles of the front and back entrance. Dean is sixteen and agonising over revision on their kitchen table. Lucifer whispers through Sam’s dreams, voice crooning. Dean is eighteen and knows exactly by now how to bring his own father back from the tidal wave of hallucinations that returned with a vengeance for Sammy.
Dean is twenty with blood seeping onto the kitchen floor, on the ax in Sammy’s violently shaking hands.
Sam doesn’t remember the first time he carved the runes. Doesn’t remember when Eileen started flinching at his hands or when Dean learned how to brew the ginger tea and when to keep his few friends away from the house and when staring was seeing what wasn’t there rather than just staring.
But this?
This is new.
The kid–their boy–is on his knees, palms pressed flat against cold tile like that could stop anything now. His mouth moves, words muffled by horror and static between them:
"Dad."
Not pleading. Betrayed.
And Sam wonders if John ever looked this broken holding some version of him back together piece by bloody piece then.
Demon, Sam had thought. It’d been too dark and he’d seen his baby’s dark dark eyes and he hadn’t been able to see fully and then his brain had gone mad and then the spur of the blunt side of his ax and the swing of his arm and the widening of Dean’s eyes, the whites like a deer, and then and then and then-
The scream that tears out of Sam isn’t his—it’s something raw and guttural, the kind of sound that comes from a place deeper than lungs or ribs. His hands are slick with the phantom stickiness of blood before he even realizes he's dropped the axe, fingers scrabbling at Dean’s shoulder like he can undo it if he just holds on tight enough.
Dean gasps—wet and broken—and Sam freezes.
There are no demons here. No monsters wearing his son's face to twist him further into ruin. Just their boy choking on red between them while Eileen shrieks his name from somewhere far away now like she knows already too late what happens when hunters start seeing threats in everything but shadows.
Sam vomits right onto the floor beside them.
Life goes on.
Dean’s eyes skitter, not seeing and not looking. When consious, he tells the nurses and paramedics that he fainted and hit his head against the tiles. He is as calm as ever. He is always so calm.
Sam's hands are still shaking when he signs the paperwork—concussion, fall, head trauma. He repeats it like a mantra under his breath while Eileen grips his elbow hard enough to bruise.
Dean blinks up at him from the hospital bed with those empty eyes of his and says, "I have low iron," like a script Sam has heard years ago, a swaggered drawl, a joke to hide all the pain.
And Sam wants to believe him so badly it hurts worse than any blade ever could.
He presses their foreheads together right there in front of nurses who don’t know how close that is to begging for forgiveness without words left between them anymore.
Dean’s hand moves jerkily, uncoordinated when he tries touching his Dad’s face. It takes him a month to remember how to walk in a straight line. He practises in their house. Back and forth, back and forth.
He's slow. Stumbles at times, like a toddler trying to find his balance. The doctors call it a 'mild case of ataxia', whatever the hell that means—just some fancy way to say brain damage.
Eileen makes it to every physical therapy session.
Sam stays home instead watching Dean pace from one end of the street to the other and back again. Eileen doesn’t trust him with the knives anymore so Sam reads, reads. Works on law cases. He can’t stand the TV or the news-the unending, constant stream of gore that comes with it, the noise, the flashing-so on most days its turned and kept off. He goes on pills. Eileen doesn’t decide this he does, though he knows she approves.
Though it isn’t about approval. Nothing is anymore.
Life goes on.
The pills make the days blur together, make his grogginess worse. The worst thing about it is how good Dean gets at it. He sits on the edge of Sam's bed, pressing a damp cloth gently against his forehead and murmuring under his breath until Sam can breathe again. "S'all right," he whispers, over, and over, while Sam gasps and wheezes like a fish floundering on gravel.
It shouldn't feel right, letting his kid hold his head together, but he can't seem to find the right words to make it stop.
“Do you know what day it is?” Dean asks. It’s his doctor’s voice, the one he practised clumsily on his way through university. Sam had watched him watch videos on smiling nurses, watched him scribble things he should say down in a spiral bound notepad he carries along everywhere with him, watched him whisper to himself in the mirror. The anxiety on whether anyone would realise had abated. What else is a practised routine by now: he knows the days when he has to draw the curtains and make tea. He knows the days he needs to hide the butcher’s knives.
"I'm not... I'm not crazy," Sam murmurs, pressing his palm over his eyes.
He's still dizzy. He must be, because now he can almost see his brother in the room with them, watching with this faint, amused little smirk on his face.
It's not there, though. He knows it isn't. He reaches out blindly, grabs for Dean's wrist. Feels his skin, warm and alive.
“I didn’t say you were, Dad. I’m just asking for the date.” Dean leans in, soft head pressing against his father’s arm. He has his mother’s colourings: dark haired and dark eyed.
Sam swallows, tries and fails to get a steady breath. "Friday," he finally manages, when he can string enough brain cells together to remember it.
He meant it to be firm. Assertive. Instead, it comes out as more of a question than a statement, a pitiful little croak that makes him feel even weaker than he probably looks right now.
“Friday tenth November. We had a grill at the Breaden’s yesterday, for bonfire.”
God damn it.
Sam lets out a sharp, bitter laugh, which breaks off into something that's a lot like a sob. It's humiliating, to be this dependent on a kid who should be out having fun at school instead of playing nursemaid to his grown-ass dad.
He can't look at Dean, so he stares hard at the far wall instead, teeth gritted tight enough to make his skull ache. "Right," he grits out, forcing the words out from between his lips. "Yeah. I remember."
The air hangs thick between them for what could be an eternity and could be just a few seconds, Sam isn't sure. It's quiet, save for the low hum of traffic and the faint, soft sound of their breathing.
He thinks that this should be when his brain finally starts working, now that the adrenaline rush of that panic attack is fading, and he's starting to be able to think straight again.
Instead, when he opens his mouth, it's to say, "I need you to do something for me."
“It’s so far away.” Dean complains, as they make the dough together for bread. There is an apron tight around his waist and his hair is tighted up firmly-he refuses to have it cut shorter. He is twelve, and nothing bad has happened to him yet.
“It’s the best medical school in the country, kid,” Sam replies, hands kneading dough, fingers strong and sure. His hair is greying at the temples, lines at the corners of his eyes deepened. He’s a little heavier these days-happier, more relaxed, and that’s added a healthy amount of softness at his middle, which Eileen likes to poke.
“Stanford’s just as good.” Dean counters, that Winchester stubbornness emerging.
Good for you, he meant. Sam knew full on well that the quietness and the peace of New England would suit Dean more than the hectic bustle of California, but Dean had been adamant.
He laughs softly, and gives Dean an exasperated look as he works.
“You’ve got the grades to get into any school you want, and you’re arguing with me about which one to choose?”
He shakes his head with an affectionate smile. God, you’re just like him he thinks, and something inside him tightens and aches and then unspools, all at once.
He sets the lump of dough aside to rise, and pulls Dean into a one-arm hug and squeezes him tight.
Dean hugs him back, arms wound tight and head pressed to his shoulder, unabashed. It’s still a mystery to Sam. A good one, though, after all these years, the ease at which love comes out of them both. Can’t you feel what I am? He’d wondered. What there is, in my blood?
They’d never given him a brother. Sam would learn at some point in time-not from his own son, for he’d realised somewhere that Dean told him everything and nothing–that Dean wished for a sister. A sister he would never get. Sam wouldn’t take the risk of giving him a sibling.
“I don’t want to go to far away from you.” Dean says
Sam’s breath catches—just a little. He swallows hard, arms tightening around his son like he can press the answer right through him.
“Hey,” he murmurs, voice rough with something unspoken. “You know I’d drive to you in a heartbeat if you needed me.”
A beat of silence as his thumb rubs slow circles into Dean’s back—the same way Eileen does for him when the ghosts get too loud.
“…But this? This is your choice.” His voice drops lower, almost conspiratorial: “And trust me—Harvard won’t know what hit ‘em when my kid gets there.”
Dean listens quiet, his brow drawing. By the time Sam finishes, he’s protesting. It may be the one thing they’ll ever fight over and it’s the exact same thing Dean and Sammy fought over too.
In the end, it’s just the two of them, as it always has been and perhaps as it always will be. Sam doesn’t realise that, at sixty-six, handing the list to Eileen laughingly before she steps out to get the groceries while Dean, seventeen, practises his piano in the backroom will be the last he ever sees of her. He won’t even realise she’s dead until he’s nearing his own deathbed, when Dean reminds him gently that she died that day of a sudden stroke.
Dean runs the house. He does a good job of it. There is always something growing outside in fresh green lines, always something left frothing at low on the stove. He reads like Sam does-constantly and almost everywhere and almost everything, thick medical textbooks and essays done by angsty students. His son goes to Church every Sunday and wishes that Sam would come with him, though Sam refuses wholeheartedly. He leaves bundles of lavender around to keep the air clean, keeps his appointments in arranged calenders and reminds his father of them periodically. They salt the house and draw the runes and Sam gives his son the only inheritance he’ll have, the anti-possession tattoo, the passed down blood money of the Winchesters-the Colt, the books, the bullets, the tricks and tools of their trade, the transcibed words of God for safekeeping. Dean takes them with that steadfast solelmnity Sam can already tell will shape the bones and essence of his son. Sam can see something in this boy’s core, as unyielding as limestone that marks his perseverance. Something in the end that would be the undoing of everyone around him and himself. He understands his brother now. He wishes straight to God and to Hell it didn’t have to come like this, but it had.
Sam Winchester leaves the world on sunlit day, in search of whichever abyss’s turn it is for his rotten soul to be weighed and placed in.
(Three days later, Dean Winchester leaves the city for that of his not-cousin Benjamin Braeden’s: a loud bustling house filled with people with life still within them to bring their most haunted, secretive relative back to earth. He would never return to San Francisco.)
(Three days before, Dean had himself sterilized permanently, putting an end to the line of Cain.)