“Who did I kill?!”
September 1st
Sam winced as the needle dragged across his skin again, drawing a fresh line and creating blood droplets that Dean tried to pat away with a paper towel.
“Sorry, Sammy,” Dean said. Dean’s forehead was crinkled with concentration and Sam focused on that instead of the surprising pain on his chest.
Yeah, they had to go deep, but Sam swore that Dean was digging the needle in his chest clear to the muscle. He wasn’t, because Dean wouldn’t do that, even if Sam would deserve it.
The tattoo had been Sam’s idea, a desperate idea he had almost immediately after Dean and Bobby got the demon Meg out of him. The talisman Sam usually carried could be worked around, as Meg proved, and Sam would rather die than ever be possessed again.
It had been, without question, the worst five days of Sam’s life.
Sam told Dean that he didn’t remember it, and that had been true when he first came to, in Bobby’s basement. Then, after Sam slept nearly twelve hours, he started to remember.
Sam thought he remembered the worst of it first… the horrible and cruel things that Meg told Harry. Sam stared at his own hands in horror when he remembered bashing Harry’s head against the metal edge of the car door… tying him up… doing the same to Jo Havelle.
Those memories were enough to send Sam stumbling to a shower, needing to scrub his skin, remove any trace of ever having touched them.
That was when Sam saw the blood in the shower, realized he was dressed haphazardly in a pair of Dean’s too short sweatpants and an old Stanford shirt of his.
Someone, Dean or Bobby, had already put Sam in the shower… washed blood off him… whose blood?
Dean found Sam throwing up in the toilet of the bathroom with violent heaves that didn’t hurt nearly as much as they should.
“Hey, hey, Sam!” Dean started to rub Sam’s back, like he would when Sam was sick or Dean taunted him into getting drunk before either of them were old enough to do so. “You’re okay, man, you’re fine…”
Sam held the toilet bowl with both hands and clenched his eyes shut to force back the tears he didn’t want Dean to see.
“Who did I kill?” Sam asked, thinking of the blood, thinking of their brother. “Who was it, Dean? Just tell me.”
“What? You didn’t kill anyone,” Dean said.
He was lying, Sam could hear it in his voice.
“Don’t fucking lie to me!” Sam spun around and pushed Dean in the chest. Sam swore at Dean almost as often as he actually tried to hurt him, but Sam didn’t want placated or soothed.
“Was it Harry?!” Sam asked, his voice breaking at the same time as the crack in his chest happened. “Dean, tell me I didn’t…”
Sam had to clench his jaw hard to keep himself from breaking all the way apart.
What was he trying to ask? Did he hurt Harry? Yeah, he knew he did. Did he make him bleed? Yeah, he did that too.
But if Sam killed him, if Sam actually killed his younger brother who had liked Sam, maybe even looked up to him some, then Dean was going to have to put a bullet through Sam’s head.
It was that or Sam would do it himself.
“Harry’s fine, okay?” Dean said slowly, no evidence of a lie in his face or voice. Dean reached out slowly for Sam and he grabbed his shoulders to try and hold Sam together when Sam couldn’t. “It was a couple of hunters, nobody we knew.
“And,” Dean said later when Sam had fallen apart on the bathroom floor, disgusted with himself and devastated for becoming the monster he never wanted to be, “it wasn’t you, Sam.”
It felt like Sam, when the memories came to him.
Sam could feel himself hitting Harry, holding a gun to Jo’s head. Sam could remember exactly how the hunters had stared at him - called him an abomination, a disgrace, a freak - as he cut them open.
Meg couldn’t have destroyed Sam’s life more if she tried.
Those hunters had friends and those friends would be tracking Sam, as Meg intended. Sam couldn’t show his face again at places like the Roadhouse, not that he would go there if he could.
Sam thought about calling Jo, apologizing, begging for forgiveness, anything. Then he remembered the terrible things that he had threatened her with and he dropped the phone each time.
The worst part was Harry.
Sam had only seen Harry once, just for a minute the night before.
Sam and Harry both opened their individual doors to the conjoined bathroom at the same time and their eyes met. Sam’s mouth opened and he found himself at a loss for words.
What did he say?
I’m sorry?
That seemed so insignificant to the trauma he put his own brother through that it was almost laughable.
“I’ll use Dean’s,” Harry said quickly, not meeting Sam’s eyes. “Sorry.”
After Harry turned and fled from Sam as quickly as he could, Sam just went back to his bed.
Dean said Harry and Bobby went to run some errands and that since it was Sam’s idea to carve the Devil’s Trap in their skin (Sam had only suggested it for himself; Dean never forgot his talisman) that he had to go first.
“It’s a good idea, Sam,” Dean said as he continued to do Sam’s tattoo with the kit he got from God knew where. “‘Can’t get in, can’t get out’, it’s a real good idea.”
Sam knew Dean was only saying that to distract Sam from the needle in his skin or to try and get him to lighten up. Since Sam didn’t want either, he asked about their conspicuously missing brother.
“Harry’s been gone a while,” Sam said, speaking slowly so he didn’t distort any of the lines that had to be perfect. “You think he’s coming back?”
“What?” Dean’s hand paused for an instant and he frowned. “Why wouldn’t he come back?”
“Come on.” Sam stared up at the ceiling of the living room where they were working. Dean had laid down a towel, but Sam could still smell the bleach he must have scrubbed the carpet with while Sam had been tormenting people and killing innocent men.
“Harry’s terrified of me, and who blames him?” Sam said flatly. “Honestly, Dean, I should just stay at Bobby’s or, I don’t know, I’ll stay in the garage or something.”
Because even Bobby might not want Sam in his house anymore. Just because Dean didn’t know those hunters didn’t mean Bobby didn’t. They might have been friends, acquaintances at a minimum.
“Sam.” Dean smacked the half-finished tattoo with the palm of his hand, focusing Sam with a gasp of surprised pain. Dean was glaring at him, his eyes a little too concerned to pull it off right.
“You gotta quit that, right now, you hear me?” Dean said. “You aren’t going to blame yourself for what that bitch did. Harry doesn’t blame you. Hell, his first question when I got him was if you were okay.”
“It was?” Sam asked quietly, hating himself that much harder for how that made him feel good.
“Yup.” Dean went back to work and Sam went back to staring at the ceiling. “But you can’t be walking around here acting like you had any say in the matter at all or you’re gonna screw with his head.”
“I think we’re past that,” Sam said, dripping sarcasm that Dean didn’t deserve to have thrown at him. “I threatened to rape Jo in front of him.”
Dean paused again and they were never going to finish at the rate he was going.
“I thought you didn’t remember it,” Dean said carefully.
Sam closed his eyes and said nothing else while Dean did the rest of his tattoo.
It would be great to not remember it, but that wasn’t how Sam’s luck ran.
Sam inspected his tattoo as soon as Dean finished it. It was the solid version of the sigil they used on the trunk of Dean’s car, the one that kept demons out.
Technically, it looked perfect. It should make Sam’s body his own, make it so every horrible thing he did in the future couldn’t be blamed on anyone but himself. It made Sam’s hands shake when he realized that it couldn’t be tested until it was being tested though.
Until a demon tried to possess him again, use Sam’s body and his voice and his face to hurt people, he wouldn’t know for sure that it worked.
“You sure about this?” Sam asked when Dean was the one shirtless laying on the floor. Sam had carefully drawn out the mark on his chest, but hesitated with the gun in his hand.
For Sam, that tattoo was going to be a daily reminder of what his hands did. Dean didn’t have to have the same reminder.
“Shut up and tattoo me,” Dean said. Dean’s hands were laced behind his head and his eyes were closed, displaying complete trust to Sam.
Sam swallowed the lump in his throat and put the needle to Dean’s skin, starting the first line.
“We were on the way back,” Sam told Dean in a small voice after a few minutes of work.
Dean’s chest barely moved when he answered. His lips curled up in a grin and Sam felt some of the weight shift off him.
“Yeah, cause you knew this place was already clean, bitch.”
As much as Sam thought he’d deserve it, he didn’t want Dean to hate him or be disgusted by him. Sam wanted it to be normal between them - no requests from John for Dean to kill Sam, no dead man’s blood forever staining Sam’s skin.
He just wanted one thing to be untainted in his life.
Sam put the needle in ink and traced his lines with careful precision.
“Jerk.”
Sam was almost done with Dean’s tattoo when the door of the trailer was thrown open. If Sam didn’t immediately jerk the tattoo gun up off Dean’s skin, the entire thing would be ruined.
So Sam saved the tattoo, but ended up with a reflex that had him aiming a tattoo gun at his gun-shy little brother like a pistol. Which, Sam was sure, was going to do wonders to try and patch his and Harry’s relationship back up.
If it could be patched.
“Oh. Hi.” Harry had his backpack hooked on one arm and he kept his hands open and visible while he slowly closed the door, his eyes ticking from Dean’s chest to Sam’s hands all the while.
Yeah, that kid wasn’t terrified of Sam at all.
“You find it?” Dean asked Harry, acting like he didn’t see anything strange at all. Sam hid his face behind his hair and went back to work, moving quickly but still carefully, to hurry up and finish before Harry felt like he was the one who should leave.
“Yeah, it was in a dumpster,” Harry said, confusing Sam at first.
“Anything missing?”
“Er… not really, no.”
Dean tapped Sam on the leg to get him to pause and Sam did so reluctantly. Dean sat up, not even making a face when the movement must have pulled on his chest, and he fixed Harry with a stern look that was as familiar to Sam as anything.
“Someone stole your stuff?” Dean asked in a ‘lie at your own peril’ tone.
Sam closed his eyes in disgust and horror. Please, please, if there’s a God, don’t have let Sam —
“It’s all here, but… well… my mirror must have gotten busted… Bobby said probably when someone threw rubbish on my bag…”
Or, Sam could see it when he closed his eyes, it happened right after Sam tied Harry up and locked him in a storage unit. The bag had been in the floorboard of the passenger seat and Sam could see himself throwing it out the window in a dumpster, not wanting it’s presence to alert Jo that anything was wrong before picking her up. That bag had so much of Harry’s most important belongings in it… and Sam let his mirror, the magical item he used to talk to his godfather, get broken.
If Harry actually cashed in on his playful threat from before and decided to never talk to Sam again, Sam would deserve it.
“Shit.”
When Sam opened his eyes, he saw Dean scrubbing his face both hands. Dean wasn’t looking at Sam though, so Sam looked at him instead of at the kid he freaking traumatized and destroyed his belongings.
“I’m guessing we can’t just go to a magic store and pick a new one up?” Dean asked.
“Well… no, not really. My dad made it…”
Sam could feel Harry’s disappointment like a bucket of cold water over his head. A family heirloom for the kid who just a week ago told Sam how badly he always wanted a family… and it was ruined.
“But, er… remember when I said Sirius is a bit unstable?”
Dean nodded and Harry went on in a stammering mess of words.
“So for a while I sort of thought you two were going to shoot me—”
Nice. Sam forgot about that actually. But just when Harry stopped thinking they were plotting his death, Sam nearly killed him anyway. Dean’s face was hardening, probably trying to figure out where Harry was headed the same as Sam was.
“— but I didn’t tell Sirius that because, like I said, he’s not always in his right mind and I didn’t want him to hurt you guys…”
Dean’s upper lip twitched, he thought that was funny. Probably Dean thought that he could take Harry’s godfather and maybe he could. Sam didn’t think it was funny though because what he heard was that even when Harry thought Sam or Dean planned on killing him, he didn’t want them to be hurt in retaliation.
Which was sad and made Sam feel about half an inch tall.
“The point, kid,” Dean said when Harry trailed off. A quick check showed that Harry was twisting his fingers together, finding the linoleum in the doorway he hadn’t left completely fascinating.
“The point is…” Harry took a deep breath then looked at Dean through his bangs with a nervous puppy sort of expression. “That if you ever wanted to meet Sirius, you’ll probably get your chance soon and - and he’ll probably fix my mirror when he shows up… which he will… probably with a hippogriff.”
Oh.
Sam felt his eyebrows shoot upward, a reaction as involuntary as his response with the tattoo gun had been. Sam waited for Dean to say something about that, about not having a wizard show up on his front steps, anything.
Dean didn’t say anything against it though, he just laid back down, settled himself with a deep breath, and tapped Sam’s leg to get him back to the tattoo.
“Sweet,” Dean told Harry over the sound of the gun buzzing. “Hey, how about you let Sammy make you demon-proof too when he’s done here?”
Sam hissed at Dean, “Dude.”
What kind of a dick move was that? Have Sam carve Harry’s chest with a needle so that Harry never had to worry about demonic possession and attacking people he cared about? The irony in that was just sick.
Not to mention that Harry was fourteen.
Harry shuffled closer and Sam could feel his curious stare.
“Have you both got one?” Harry asked.
“Yes.” Sam looked up at Harry quickly and forced himself to not break eye contact, willing Harry to believe him despite how untrustworthy he had proven himself to be. “I swear, as far as we know, we can’t be possessed again with these.”
Harry gnawed his lower lip and looked to Dean for an answer to his next question, “Does it hurt?”
“Like a son of a bitch,” Dean said so peacefully he might have been falling asleep.
“But… but nobody else has them? It would just be us?”
Dean grinned. Sam sighed.
“Yup, just us, kid,” Dean confirmed, grinning at Harry like it was a damned joke and not - not Sam with two men’s innocent blood on his hands. “You ready to join the coolest gang?”
Awesome.
Dean wasn’t just offering, but encouraging Harry to get a tattoo on him. Nothing like a giant, painful, and permanent sigil on Harry’s chest to remind him of the days he spent locked in a storage unit, probably terrified and miserable.
All at the hands of his brother… who Dean also insisted had to do Harry’s tattoo because he was better at it.
Harry peeled his shirt off and awkwardly laid on the floor, taking Dean’s spot, when Dean was finished.
“This doesn’t hurt at all,” Harry commented when Sam got started.
Dean, like an asshole, had taken off as soon as Harry laid down, mentioning something about a grocery run. That left Sam in the uncomfortable position of being alone with Harry, which he was sure neither of them wanted.
“This is a marker,” Sam told him as he carefully drew the sigil on Harry’s chest.
Dean told him he should do his leg or something, somewhere it wouldn’t hurt as much, but as soon as Harry confirmed that Sam and Dean had theirs both on their chest, above their hearts, Harry insisted on having his in the same place.
“Oh.” Harry chuckled and Sam thought he sounded nervous. “That makes sense.”
Sam hummed and stayed quiet while he drew. With Dean, Sam didn’t notice how much contact he made with Dean’s skin. In some part of Sam’s mind, Dean would always be as invincible as Sam had once decided he was as a kid. Even with the blood that Sam thought still stained his hands, Sam couldn’t infect Dean.
Harry though…
San was overly conscious of trying to touch Harry as little as possible. Sam wondered if his hands on Harry’s skin made him think of when Sam had slammed him against a car door until he blacked out… or when Sam tied him to a chair and left him locked up…
It was just best that Sam made the process as painless as possible.
“I’m about to start,” Sam told Harry once the outline was finished. “Inhale deeply through your nose and try to exhale as slowly as you can, make it last the entire time the machine is buzzing, okay? When the buzzing stops, inhale again.”
“Inhale when it’s quiet, exhale when it’s not.” Harry nodded and clenched his eyes shut, his entire body immediately going tense. “Got it.”
Sam pointedly waited for Harry to inhale, then he started.
“Oh bloody hell that’s terrible.”
Yeah, Sam didn’t know why Harry didn’t believe Dean when he said it hurt like a son of a bitch.
Harry had sweat building up on his face and chest, making Sam’s efforts to not touch him moot as he had to keep wiping the sweat away from where he was working, by the time Sam was only a third of the way through the outline.
“Why don’t you take a break, get a drink?” Sam suggested. Sam could use a break too, his fingers were cramping with the force of which he held the gun and he was feeling anxious, restless. He patted down the blood that mixed with the ink on Harry’s chest then scooted away so Harry could sit up.
Harry must have had a head rush from how quickly he sat up and Sam reached out to steady him then yanked his hand back just as quick. Harry didn’t notice though, he was distracted by gawking down at his chest.
“Oh, brilliant,” he breathed. “I wish I could show Ron, he’d really like this!”
Sam wanted to ask why Harry couldn’t show the kid that was his best friend, but he kept his mouth shut and flexed his fingers out. Harry got up after a second of admiring the ink and he paused halfway to the kitchen.
“Do you want a drink? I think the water in the sink isn’t brown anymore,” Harry offered politely.
“No, I’m okay, thanks.”
Christ. Sam had never been so anxious and awkward in his life. How was it that what felt like yesterday Sam had been having a real brotherly moment with Harry, giving advice and talking about their shit? Was it less than ten days ago that Sam had been in Oregon, thinking he was infected with a demon disease?
Demon disease, demon army, demon possession…
Did God actually hate Sam Winchester or was Sam some sort of demon magnet?!
Harry returned after just a minute and he handed Sam a cold bottle of water even though Sam didnt ask for it.
“It was that or beer but, no offense, I just didn’t want my tattoo to get messed up because you were drinking,” Harry explained, resuming his place on the floor. “Will it mess it up if I have my legs like this?” Harry pulled his feet up, leaving his knees bent in the air.
It did actually make it a little more difficult to work around, since Sam was already hunched over on the floor working, but he didn’t say so.
“No, you’re fine,” Sam said.
I’m sorry.
“Let me know when you’re ready.”
“Okay.” Harry closed his eyes and relaxed then immediately opened his eyes right back up. “No! Wait! Sam, you don’t have to do this. I’m sorry. Dean can finish it if you want?”
Sam had been expecting those words, but not in that order or with that hesitant inflection. Sam replayed the words slowly in his mind, trying to make them make sense.
“Do you want me to finish it?” Sam asked, needing more information to guess at what Harry wanted.
“Er… not if you don’t want to, but I’d look like a prat with this half finished,” Harry said, blinking at Sam with eyes so earnest Sam almost believed him.
“Dean can finish it if you want,” Sam assured him. “It doesn’t have to be me, he did mine perfectly.”
“I don’t care who does it! You just - you seem miserable and I am sorry!” Harry suddenly wailed. “I’m so sorry, Sam. I was an idiot and I could have called Dean sooner but I thought you hated me which was stupid and you were stuck! And now you would rather be anywhere except in a room with me and I’m so bloody sorry.”
Sam didn’t know which emotion hit first: relief or guilt.
Relief that Harry didn’t hate him, Sam wasn’t a monster that he feared.
Guilt that Harry was blaming himself for Sam getting possessed.
“That wasn’t - hey…” Sam was at a loss for words again when Harry rolled on his side and his shoulders shook with what sounded like actual heartbroken sobs. “Harry…” Sam reached out tentatively and rubbed Harry’s back. “It wasn’t your fault, seriously. John - our dad,” he corrected himself hastily, “was possessed for an entire day and Dean and I didn’t notice.
“Actually…” Sam wasn’t sure if it would make Harry feel better or not, but considering the deep apathy Sam felt toward John recently, it sort of made him feel better. “Dean only figured it out because John said he was proud of him.”
Harry went quiet for a second, though his shoulders were still trembling.
“Every time you two share some story about him, I sort of hate him,” Harry said, sniffling hard.
“Yeah, I, uh… I know what you mean,” Sam agreed, sniffling himself. It made sense why the few times Sam had been hurting, really hurting, that he always caught Dean looking all soft and sad.
It hurt to see his little brother hurt.
Harry grabbed the shirt he had discarded on the floor and Sam politely didn’t comment on him wiping his face off before he shifted back on his back and grinned at Sam. His eyes were puffy, Sam could see tear streaks on his cheeks, but he was smiling at Sam.
Smiling at Sam.
Man, Sam didn’t think he deserved that kind of trusting smile, but damn if he didn’t return it.
“If I talk is it going to mess this up?” Harry asked when Sam got back to work. Sam didn’t think they’d finish Harry’s that day, not with how sore Harry’s skin looked from what Sam had done so far, but if he did at least the outline then they could finish it later.
“It shouldn’t,” Sam said, focusing hard on creating crisp and clean lines. Tattoo artists didn’t get enough credit, it wasn’t exactly easy to manipulate the skin without making mistakes or injury.
“Good, because I was going to tell you about Ron’s sister, Ginny, and what happened her first year at Hogwarts…”
Harry told Sam about a girl, a diary, and kids who got hurt because of a spirit that possessed her. Sam had heard the story before, without so much detail, but he really listened then.
Nobody died because of her; then again… it hadn’t exactly been her fault either.
Dean returned in what Sam was sure was absolutely coincidental timing right after Sam finally finished the outline and told Harry they’d fill it in after it healed. Dean opened the front door, peeked his head in, and saw that Sam and Harry were laughing about how Jo had spent most of Harry’s time in the storage unit talking about burgers.
“I’ve got good news!” Dean was beaming like he’d just won Playboy’s Most Eligible Bachelor Contest. Sam looked up with a grin still on his face and saw Dean hold up three grocery bags in one hand, a twenty-four pack in the other.
“They had pie!” Dean declared.
As it turned out, they also had steaks, potatoes, and Top Gun on DVD.
Sam could see why Dean would want to give up on hunting that night.
With Harry on the couch, Sam and Dean both in a recliner, all three of them with plates of amazing food and a movie playing on Sam’s laptop (Dean swore the next credit card they got was being maxed out for the biggest tv he could buy), Sam could see why Dean was willing to give hunting up. Harry winced every time he moved and his shirt rubbed his tattoo, Dean was giving him shit, and Sam… Sam was just taking it all in.
Demon armies, demonic illness, demon possession… it was crap. And Sam didn’t think staying out of the fight was going to make them immune from any of it, not when the demons seemed dead set on dragging them in it, but, man, it would be nice to have more nights like that.
There was a knock on their door when Dean was booing at Tom Cruise and Sam yelled toward it, thinking it was Bobby.
“Come in!”
“I told him we’d save him a steak and some beer,” Dean scoffed, eyes locked on the screen of the laptop. “Oh, shit, here’s the best part…”
Sam, who had seen the movie more times than he would have liked, pushed himself up when Bobby knocked again.
“Dude, you don’t have to…” Sam opened the door, a greeting already spilling out, and fell silent at the people who stood there.
Because they definitely weren’t Bobby.
One man was familiar to Sam. Sam had seen him pretty consistently on Harry’s mirror before it was busted.
The other man… with long white hair, a white beard that went past his waist, and twinkling blue eyes… Sam didn’t know him, but he could make a guess who he was there for.
“Uh… Harry?” Sam looked over his shoulder at his brothers, sending Dean a significant look before forcing a casual grin for Harry. “I think it’s for you, dude.”