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Sam rests his forehead against the cool porcelain and tries to steady himself, tries not to throw up again. He knows he’s getting dangerously skinny for this line of work, and every time he looks in the mirror it means that he can see the barest outline of one more rib, but diner food tastes like ash in his mouth and he hates it.
He can’t call Ruby. He isn’t ready to surrender himself to the darkness he knows will fix the biting hole in his stomach, not here when everything seems so clean and untouched in the moonlight.
He doesn’t want to ruin that with the blood he can’t stop himself from needing with a visceral ache that scares even him, sometimes, when it’s late at night in a shitty motel room with one bed instead of two and he’s still drunk from the copper taste that’s lingering on his tongue.
Sam knows what addiction is, okay. He knows about the physiological and psychological components, the biological precedence he knows he has for at least alcoholism and probably some other fucked-up disorders that explain some of his and Dean’s behaviors, the fact that it’s designed to keep him hooked and Ruby is too.
He knows. But the feeling of telekinesis slamming a demon into a wall just like they used to do to him? The tortured satisfaction he gets when that oily smoke pours out of their mouth in a noxious cloud? It feels so fucking good. It feels powerful. It feels like he’s on top of the world.
This is the trade-off of that high, these sleepless nights when his guts spasm like they want to come out when he vomits and the voices screaming both inside and outside his head and the vertigo that hits like an out of control freight train headed towards a crossing.
But that feeling is the only reason… if he’s lying to himself. Because sometimes, when he likes to think he’s done good for the world even as he’s ruining himself to do it, sometimes he’ll push himself up from the graceless heap on the tile and he’ll turn around and Dean will be there with that disappointed frown Sam used to shy away from.
Now, it makes him smile, a thin, sickly thing, but a smile nonetheless. “Dean,” he rasps with an acid-ravaged throat, looking up at his older brother like that’ll offer him absolution.
“Oh Sammy, what did you do to yourself?” he asks this time, his southern drawl soft and accenting each word. Sam wants to bottle the sound and tuck it inside his chest until he stops waking up expecting Dean to be there like he was when they were kids. Until he stops expecting someone to have his back on hunts in the way Dean did, in the way Ruby never does.
Sam can’t help the way he reaches out, but another bout of nausea hits before he can do more than extend his arm and he’s back to retching in the toilet bowl.
“Really putting the loser in Sam Winchester, huh?” Dean asks wryly, but he kneels beside him and brushes back his hair with hands that feel just as calloused as he remembers from the last time this happened.
Sam leans into the touch like it’s a promise, like it’s a prayer. “I miss you,” he says as he lets his eyes slip closed to better memorize the feeling.
He knows it’s not real, a figment of his imagination, but even if it’s a lie it helps him sleep at night and remember the whole reason why he’s doing this: Dean is in Hell.
Dean is in Hell, and it’s because he saved Sam, and so he’s going to do everything he can to bring his brother back or die trying.
“Don’t get all sappy on me now,” Dean deflects like he always does, voice rough but finers gentle where they’re carding through his hair, and Sam is just tired. Tired of fighting himself, of Ruby’s insistence that this is the only way, of Bobby calling, of Ellen’s radio silence.
“Sometimes I think about taking the knife and slitting my throat,” he responds quietly instead, and Dean’s punched-out, wounded noise feels like a needle between his ribs. “Something inside me is cracking,” he continues, far away and soft like the moonlight bathing them in the silver glow. “I don’t think I’m a good person anymore. I don’t know if I ever was.”
“Oh, Sammy,” Dean repeats, and it’s so sad. It’s so sad that Sam wants to kill himself but he can’t, he can’t find the courage and he can’t leave Dean alone to suffer down there. He can’t be that selfish, even if sometimes he wants to so bad he ends up with the bottle of sleeping pills in his hands that he can’t remember buying.
Dean shifts, does something that makes his knees crack even though he’s twenty-eight, forever twenty-eight and five months in a shallow grave a mile away from a crappy old gas station, and gently pulls Sam sideways until his head is resting on Dean’s knee and his body is awkwardly sprawled out. He goes, willingly. He doesn’t have the strength in him to protest.
His hip is digging into the tile. So is his shoulder. One arm is trapped beneath his torso and it’s already starting to tingle. He hasn’t felt this safe in three months.
“I—” Dean chokes on it, a little. “I love you, Sammy,” he gets out, and Sam blinks furiously to keep himself from breaking down crying and getting tears and snot all over Dean’s jeans.
“Figures the only time you say it is when you’re a freaking hallucination,” Sam whispers. “I’m so tired, Dean.”
“Shhh,” he says, like they’re still five and nine, six and ten, ten and fourteen, twelve and sixteen. Twenty-two and twenty-six. Like Dean is still taller, still running into his room in the middle of the night to flick on the light switch and lull him back to sleep after another nightmare he won’t recall in the morning.
“I love you too, jerk,” he croaks as he buries his face in the scratchy fabric.
“Bitch,” Dean says, and it sounds like he’s running out of air.
When Sam wakes up, he’s on his side on the bathroom floor, a puddle of drool under the cheek that’s pressed against the cool tile. His ribs sting, his eyes are raw like his throat, and there’s a horrible residue in his mouth that means he threw up last night. Again. His hair is all mussed, like someone was running their fingers through it.
He’s so alone it aches.