“Home isn’t a building.”
August 24
“He said- he said if I couldn’t save you that I had to kill you, Sammy.”
“Kill me?! What the fuck does that mean?”
“I don’t know! It was just before he died, it didn’t make any sense!”
“So - what? You’re going to kill me if I go dark side?!”
“Don’t be stupid, Sam. I’m not going to kill you.”
“Why the hell not? You’ve always done what Dad told you to do!”
It had been a low blow, but not lower than the one Dean had dealt.
Sam had been so sure that Azazel was lying to him, maybe that their entire conversation had been some sort of sick dream. He didn’t know what to do when Dean confirmed it… he just knew he needed some space.
That need for space didn’t extend to Sam’s younger brother who slid in the passenger seat and only blinked when Sam told him he was leaving for a while.
“Can I come?” Harry had asked.
Sam couldn’t think of a reason not to let him and so he nodded and the two of them hit the highway with no destination in mind.
Sam couldn’t guess at what thoughts had Harry quietly brooding in the passenger seat, but Sam’s thoughts were on their dad.
The man who created Sam actually told Dean to kill him if he had to. No regrets, no remorse. Just —
If you can’t save him, kill him.
Sam spent about a hundred miles feeling like his lungs were being crushed by a heavy weight of grief. Dad wanted him dead.
As messed up as their relationship had been, as many times as Sam mouthed some shit off in the heat of the moment, he never truly believed that his dad would ever want him dead.
Even when the visions started and Sam felt uneasy about Dad learning of them, Sam’s deepest fear had been exile.
Despite what he said, that was the worst thing Sam imagined happening. Dad would think he was a freak, a monster, and order him to stay as far away from him and Dean as the world would allow.
Exile, not execution.
After Sam worked through the pain of knowing his own father wanted him dead, Sam got pissed.
Who did that?! Who told their oldest son to kill their brother?
After a lifetime of Dad ordering Dean to watch Sam, take care of him, raise him… then he turned around and said ‘now kill him’?
That was so messed up that Sam struggled to even comprehend it. It would be like telling a woman to kill her child, as strange as the comparison was. Even if that baby would grow up to be Hitler, it would still be wrong to expect the mother to be the one to end him.
Dad was a coward who didn’t kill Sam himself and left it to Dean.
“You’re lucky you never met John,” Sam told Harry abruptly. Harry jolted in his seat, like he forgot he wasn’t alone, and then turned a scrunched up face of confusion toward Sam.
“Our dad?” Harry asked. “Why?”
Sam scowled through the windshield, unsure if he was angry more than he was hurt or if he had finally developed Dean’s ability to filter all emotions through anger. Sam felt mad though, he was freaking pissed, actually.
Even if Sam was a monster who would need put down eventually, asking Dean to do it was cruel beyond reason to Dean.
“Because he sucked,” Sam said, putting that pre-law eloquence to good use.
Harry made a soft sound of amusement and slumped down in his seat with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Dean sucks,” Harry said bitterly. “Maybe it’s genetic.”
Sam might agree, because there was almost nothing left about himself that he liked, but Dean didn’t suck and neither did Harry.
“Why are you mad at Dean?” Sam asked, glancing at Harry from the corner of his vision. Sam deserved a little anger toward their older brother, Dean had months to tell Sam what John told him and never did. But Harry and Dean just spent some ‘brilliant’ weekend together while Sam tried to save a bunch of people who died anyway.
That town where Sam followed his visions to was empty, or close to it. It meant the Hell Gate was unguarded, but Sam had checked it out before he left.
The building that supposedly held the portal was chained up with a lock on it that Sam couldn’t decipher. It didn’t take a key, it was some sort of hex-lock with a uniquely shaped key.
Sam had a few months to figure it out, that was when Azazel said one of his children would open the gate and lead an army of demons.
“I’m hoping it’ll be you, Sammy Boy.”
It wouldn’t be. Even if something flipped inside Sam and made him a killer, he would kill himself before he led some army of demons across the world.
Sam would beg Bobby or Ellen to put him down if it came to it.
Anyone except Dean.
Who Harry was apparently not thrilled with.
“Come on, tell me,” Sam said cajolingly when Harry didn’t answer the first time he asked. If Sam could focus on Harry’s problems then he wouldn’t have to think about his own for a while.
Harry shifted in his seat, getting comfortable in his defensive posture, and he looked just like Dean when he was the one to scowl.
“Dean told me I’m going back to Hogwarts over his dead body,” Harry muttered, eyes glaring down at his feet. “So - so now I have to choose, right? Be a part of our family or go to my school?”
Shit.
If Harry wanted to have Sam’s complete attention, he couldn’t have found a better way to get it.
“Dean said you have to choose between us or school?” Sam asked, tasting those words and knowing they were wrong.
Dean gave Sam a ride to the bus station when Sam left for Stanford. Dean sent Sam a laptop, the one he still used. Dean occasionally left drunk voicemails, almost always on one of their birthdays. Dean wasn’t the guy to say ‘it’s my way or the highway’.
That had been John.
“He said I’d go back over his dead body, Sam,” Harry said. “I can figure out that it’s one or the other on my own, thanks.”
If Sam ignored his grief, his anger, for a minute then he could really appreciate Harry’s similarities to himself as well as Dean. Dean could brood like nobody’s business, but Dean’s heated quips never managed to be as dry and sarcastic as Sam could be.
Sam and Harry, apparently. Harry was really making a case for nature beating out nurture.
“Not from Dean it isn’t,” Sam said confidently. Sam had really screwed up as an older brother when he told Harry he assumed Harry caused the place crash that had been a demon the whole time, but Sam wasn’t being a big brother then; he was talking about one.
“Dean would beg, bribe, and blackmail you into staying, but if you left?” Sam raised a shoulder. “He’d never cut you out. Ever. Trust me.”
Sam knew that for a fact. All the shit they had learned since John’s death about the demons and how Sam’s visions tied him to them and never once did Dean seem ready to dump Sam as a lost cause.
Dean was ready to dump hunting, but not Sam.
As far as Sam knew… it was never Sam.
“Let’s stop for a few,” Sam decided suddenly. He saw a sign for a sporting goods store coming up and had an idea.
Harry remained moody and bemused while Sam had him wait in the car while he rushed in the store, hoping the credit card he had was enough to cover what he needed. It was and so Sam pushed his luck at a gas station with it again, filling the tank, grabbing drinks, then hit the road again.
Sam didn’t go far and he didn’t bring up Dean or Harry’s school until he found what he had been looking for.
An empty field with a small service lane down the middle of it.
Sam actually hated driving his car down the lane when he heard the recently cut down cornstalks scratching the undercarriage. It was no wonder Dean was practically OCD about his car; Sam couldn’t imagine how unhappy he’d be if he tore up such a mind-blowing gift.
“Come on,” Sam told Harry when they were parked.
It was just something that Sam and Dean had always done after a bad case or a bad day.
When the world felt like it was crushing them, they’d park the car, sit in a field or on the bank of some body of water and they would just decompress.
Moments like that would sometimes get Sam’s reticent older brother to talk, if with extreme reluctance, and Sam wasn’t surprised when it worked on his younger brother too.
Sam set up the two fishing chairs he bought, placed the cooler between them, and waited.
It took less than two minutes.
“It’s not like I don’t want to stay,” Harry said, bursting the words like he had been dying to say them. “All my life I’ve wanted a family, you know? This is something that I’ve always wanted more than anything.”
“But?” Sam asked patiently, sipping a bottle of iced coffee with one ankle crossed over the other knee.
“But Hogwarts is my home,” Harry argued weakly. “It’s the only one I really have.”
Sam played that over for a second, trying to find what was picking at him.
“Had,” he finally said.
Harry blinked at him, “What?”
“Hogwarts was the only home you had,” Sam corrected him as gently as possible. When Harry dropped his eyes to his hands, Sam didn’t do anything to make him look at him again.
Some things were easier to hear when you didn’t look. It didn’t need to make sense to be true, most things in Sam’s life were like that.
“Your family sucked, so you made a new one with your friends, right?” Sam mused, picturing it as he did. Harry talked about his friends like Sam talked about Dean.
They were the center of Harry’s world.
“If they weren’t at Hogwarts, it probably wouldn’t feel like home. And that’s because home isn’t a building, it’s where your family is.” Sam reached over to just put his hand on the top of Harry’s head, trying to drive his point home. “So now you have two homes, two families.”
Harry swallowed loudly and kept his eyes fixed on his hands. “So what do I do?”
What Sam hoped Harry would do was stay. Magic was cool, but a boarding school in Europe was a little too far away for Sam’s tastes. Anything could happen to Harry there - and a bunch of messed up crap already did.
But Harry needed to make his own decision so that he didn’t have any regrets.
“No idea,” Sam told him, empathizing even if he didn’t fully understand how torn Harry must feel.
Sam only ever had one family, one home, before he went to Stanford and made a second one with Jessica. With her gone, Sam fell back in with his brother as if years hadn’t passed them.
And with Dean back on Sam’s mind, Sam knew it was time for them to get home to him.
The three of them were a family and it wasn’t Dean that said Sam needed to die. Sam could understand, with a bit of time and distance, why Dean wouldn’t have told Sam what John said.
Sam never would have told Harry, if he were in Dean’s shoes.
They drove further than Sam thought they did and he was starting to feel the crash of the last few days on the way back. Talking helped him stay awake though and so when Harry asked where Sam had been, Sam told him.
Harry was too easy to talk to, really. Or maybe Sam was just desperate to talk about Oregon to anyone… either way, he told Harry everything that happened.
Doctor Robin had been infected with some type of demonic disease that filled her bloodstream with sulfur. It passed through blood contact and her son had went feral and died when it developed in him. There was no way to try and find a cure when the patients were attacking with a single-minded determination and super strength.
When Sam shot an infected man that attacked him, he got his blood in his mouth and thought he was done for.
The nurse, Emily, left Sam locked in a room while she took any uninflected townsfolk as far as possible. Judging from what had been reported by dozens of terrified family members, those who were infected had two hours until it took over their body. Then they had anywhere between four to six hours of vicious and violent behavior, followed by their death.
So Sam sat alone in the pharmaceutical lab and wrote a letter to Dean. Sam wasn’t sure how it would get to Dean, but he had been sure that Dean would find him eventually.
Or find his body anyway.
When nine hours had passed and Sam didn’t feel any different, he checked his own blood beneath the microscope and found nothing. It looked normal, Sam felt normal, if emotionally raw. Sam left two hours later, after quadruple checking his blood when investigating the supposed portal to hell, the entire town had been deserted.
Sam edited part of the story out. There wasn’t any need to tell Harry about spending nine hours thinking he would never see his brothers again. The letter was still in the console of the car, Sam would throw it away eventually.
“They all died?!” Harry asked in a horrified voice when Sam finished recounting almost the entire case to him.
“They died or fled,” Sam said, working hard to sound unaffected. It chilled Sam to his core to discover how quickly an entire town had been decimated though, freed up for whatever Azazel had planned.
“That’s horrible.” Harry shuddered in his seat. “Demons are evil, aren’t they?”
Sam huffed and nodded his head ruefully.
Yeah, demons sucked.
Harry filled Sam in on his weekend for the two hours. It was actually one hundred and ten minutes of a play-by-play recap of quidditch match followed by ten minutes to tell Sam that he wasn’t the only one in danger that weekend.
“You tried to shoot a government official?” Sam asked, forgetting about the road just long enough to gape at Harry. “In front of witnesses?!”
“He stunned Dean,” Harry repeated, his eyes cold with some impressive anger. “He’s lucky Hermione wouldn’t get off me because I’ve never heard of a spell to heal a gunshot.”
Sam couldn’t decide if Harry had the biggest set of balls he ever heard of or the smallest brain to exist. Either way, Sam figured that Dean must have been less pissed to be hit by a magic spell when he found out Harry was prepared to kill someone in retaliation.
“Jesus.” Sam huffed, blowing his hair off his forehead and decided that the moment called for coffee.
And… and Sam should probably feed Harry. They’d been gone at least eight hours with only chips, cold coffee, and soda. Harry was a growing kid, he needed nutrients.
“It might have been easier to leave Dean stunned the rest of the weekend,” Harry said thoughtfully when Sam took the next exit with a Denny’s. “He dared me to call Hermione pretty right in front of Ron and his siblings.”
Sam chucked at Harry’s indignant tone and pink cheeks.
“That sounds like Dean,” he said, kind of cheered by the thought of Dean and Harry goofing off while they were gone. There was a twinge of jealousy too, but if Sam ignored the illogical feeling then it would go away.
“Oh, no.” Sam groaned when he had a horrible thought. They had just pulled in a Waffle House parking lot and Sam frowned at Harry. “Dude, she didn’t hear Dean dare you, right?”
“What? No. She was reading,” Harry said simply, like that cleared it all up.
For Sam, it totally did. Sam had perfected selective hearing while reading when he had been a kid. It worked out pretty well while he was in college, even better for long car rides with Dean who liked to sing.
“Is she pretty?” Sam asked Harry slyly when they both climbed out of the car and stretched.
Harry went a little red in the face and scowled heavily at Sam.
“Shut up, Sam,” Harry sniffed without any heat. “Hermione’s boring and naggy AND,” Harry looked like he had just found the most important part of his argument, “she doesn’t even really like quidditch. You should have seen her at the match, Sam. I don’t know why she was even there since she looked at me more than the game.”
Sam looked at Harry’s totally serious face and he just sort of lost it.
“You’re - so - dumb!” Sam laughed, holding the car hood for support. A few people walking out of the restaurant tossed Sam amused looks, but Harry was not one of them. Harry glared at Sam with the reddest face Sam had ever seen on him.
A girl kept looking at Harry during some big deal sporting event and Harry just decided it was because she hated sports. And, Sam noted to himself, none of Harry’s arguments included the denial of him finding his friend pretty
“You’re the worst,” Harry decided. He turned his back to Sam and began storming to the doors. “When we get back, I’m not talking to you.”
“You can try!”
Contrary to how Sam felt when they left Bobby’s place, he was in a much better mood then. A little time, a little distance, a lot of compartmentalization, and a little brother worked wonders.
John was dead, Dean wouldn’t kill Sam, Sam wouldn’t lead any demon armies.
If Harry decided to stay with Sam and Dean instead of going back to Hogwarts then Sam really didn’t have anything to bitch about.
Apart from a bone deep exhaustion, Sam felt good. He even made a mental note to bring Dean back an entire apology pie.
“I’ll get that,” Sam said teasingly, darting forward to grab the door and hold it open for Harry.
Harry rolled his eyes at Sam, the lights in the restaurant lobby flickered, and everything went black.