[Big Bang 2010] Book One, Part Four

[annabethbigbang]

November 2, 2010

Sam was chopping up vegetables for dinner when the doorbell rang. He wiped his hands on the nearby dishtowel and used the knife to scoop the veggies into a bowl, then checked his watch, and started walking for the door.

He was home early and he'd wanted to surprise Jess with dinner, because she was out having a regular check-up on their baby that was due in just a few months. But on his way to the door, he felt his head start to throb and a very bad feeling rose up in his body, like filthy oil floating at the surface of clean water.

He thought she forgot her key. He thought that she'd come in, kiss him hello, and say that nothing was wrong with their baby, which was what he feared, suddenly, with all his being.

He didn't expect the police.

He opened the door and the officer standing there wore blue, and Sam's first disconnected thought was that blue often equalled sadness. He held the screen door open with his hip and forced a smile that felt like it might wobble right off of his face and onto the porch and tumble away.

"Yes, officer? Can I help you?" Sam was less worried about Jess now; she wasn't due back until a little later anyway. But now he was terrified that somehow Dean had done the unthinkable, broken John out of jail, and the police were here to arrest Sam as some sort of accomplice. He didn't know what he was going to do, but he couldn't let that happen.

"Are you Sam Winchester?" the man asked, and in the driveway Sam could see his partner, leaning against the shiny cop car.

"Yes..." he said. "Is there a problem?"

"Sir," the cop said, "you might want to sit down. May I come in?"

Sam nodded slowly, as if underwater and every movement was forced sluggishness, and sought out his living room recliner. He looked up at the cop and his eyes caught on a bottle half-turned away on the little end-table across the room. He'd spent enough time with Dean and Dad to recognise a bottle of hard liquor, even if he knew they didn't keep any in the house, especially not with small children. His mind wandered and he had the breath-leeching thought that Dean had been in his apartment.

But the next words out of the officer's mouth made the world drop away, made Dean dissipate into nothingness in his head. He was free-falling without a parachute, the wind rushing so hard in his ears he could barely hear the words being spoken.

"Your wife is Jessica Lee Winchester, correct? You have two sons? I am sorry, sir," he went on, "but your wife drove off one of the cliffs in San Diego. We recovered the car and the bodies—you need to come down to the morgue with us and identify them."

Sam couldn't think. He couldn't feel his pulse any more—he couldn't feel the cooler air of outside against his skin. Everything was dim and getting dimmer; his head felt like it was weighted by bricks. His stomach twisted and rolled and he tried to think, to process what the man was saying—he was still speaking, but it was garbled like that cartoon teacher on Charlie Brown.

He tried every technique he'd ever used on a hunt when it had gone badly and he'd been breathing through pain so bad he thought he'd die—and none of them worked, because this was worse than that. It was a thousand times worse than the pain of his thigh when the creature had sliced through it all the way almost to the bone with its talons.

This pain felt like that again, like talons slicing through his heart, shredding his skin to ribbons, muscles, tendons—he felt it all like he was dying. He couldn't see the officer any more. He couldn't breathe—his chest went tight and he found himself floundering for air.

He couldn't calm himself, couldn't bring himself back down. Every breath he managed to suck in made him sink deeper into the earth, being buried alive.

Sam couldn't even cry. All he could do was swallow through every click of his dry throat and try to breathe so that he didn't die. So that his heart didn't stop, even though he couldn't feel it beating—it had stopped the moment the words had left the officer's throat.

Words slowly crept back into his brain. Jess, Tyler, James. The new baby—it was going to be a girl, and they had been going to name her Ella. He couldn't—

He became aware of a hand on his shoulder as though his body was coming back to life by degrees, as though he'd been frozen by hypothermia and was just now waking up. He focused his eyes with difficulty and found the cop looking into them.

He heard, very distantly—like if Dean were speaking to him, wherever he was:

"He's in shock."

Sam shook his head and it felt like rocks tumbled around in his brain. And then everything winked out of existence except the yellow-eyed man, standing right in front of him, wearing cop-blue.

"Your turn, Sammy-boy. Shame all the others just couldn't cut it. But I knew—I knew they wouldn't. Had to be you. Wake up and smell the rotting flesh, kiddo. You have a job to do."

Sam isn't sitting in his living room recliner any more; he's standing in the midst of what he somehow knows used to be a field, a beautiful meadow of grass and yellow flowers. It's barren now, a desert. And the yellow-eyed man is laughing.

"What do you want from me!" he shouts, and it barely makes a sound, like being spoken into a vacuum. There's a bright flash of light at the edge of his vision and everything goes black, though he hears the last few words anyway:

"Should've listened to your brother, Sammy. Nothing you can do about it now."

Sam woke up on the floor, his jeans twisted, his head pillowed by a cushion from the couch, and the cops were standing over him, talking furiously and quietly, and one of them was speaking every so often into his radio.

Across the room, the mirror had shattered. The windows, too. Sam felt for his head and there was an ache underneath his fingertips that perfectly marched in time with the pulse in his fingers.

"We're going to take you to the hospital," the first cop said. "Get you checked out; you had some kind of seizure. And then we're going to bring you to identify them. That's very important. Unless, of course, the doctor says—"

"No," Sam said, and his voice was gravelly, his throat rough inside like he'd been screaming. "I'm fine."

He stood up and everything receded. The pain disappeared. He forced it away.

"Sir—"

"Just take me to them. To my family. I need to say good-bye."

But even as he struggled to his feet, even while he walked assiduously carefully to the door, he was making plans. What he could sell off fast. What money he still had saved up. How long it might take him to find out where Dean was, if Dean didn't answer his phone—and he probably wouldn't.

Sam's life had, in an instant, crumbled down into ash like any one of a number of ghosts they'd salted and burned.

There was nothing left of it—except for Dean.

End Book One



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