I Want to Hear More About Sam

And how was he supposed to react even if Dean did walk through that door? If he hadn’t known he might be coming, without any warning, any invitation, Sam might have been angry with him. But this waiting time to think about was only making him increasingly nervous. Assumedly if Dean was coming it meant he wanted to see him, but…

The hand that wasn’t holding his gun gripped his phone a little tighter. He wanted to try calling him, or at least try calling the last number he had for him, but it was probably ridiculous. Dean probably wasn’t even coming and if he saw the caller ID he wouldn’t even bother picking up.

Sam had asked him to come with him, to get out too, and Dean hadn’t given him so much as an email in four years.

Sam sighed and gave a sidelong glance to his bedroom door where he knew Jess would be sleeping by now. She’d made a cute Halloween nurse, and one day she was going to make a cuter doctor.

He should be in there beside her already – or else start doing something beside waiting… But where did you even start on lore for timetravel, or demons? Especially when Sam was trying very hard to stop dwelling on the implications of a timetraveller apparently trying to stop his life following one trajectory. It was the sort of thing people talked over in philosophy class about Hitler.

Or maybe it was some kind of Sarah Conner deal and the guy was trying to stop Sam doing something good – but then why wouldn’t he have just killed him?

A scratching noise at the door had Sam sitting bolt up to attention again. He definitely wasn’t imagining things – that was someone trying to pick through all the locks on the door.

Sam had told Jess he wanted to get the chair fixed and she said he worried too much.  Ha. He should go wake her up just to – wait, what was he thinking? He didn’t want her involved in this. Whatever this was…

Sam cocked the gun quietly as he waited. If this was Dean he’d gotten a lot faster at this than he used to be…

When Sam finally watched his brother’s shoe step out into the dark hallway with a childishly wide grin spreading over his face, Sam had to shake his head. Sam knew that smile. Dean was clearly so proud of himself that he’d done so well in getting in without anyone there to catch him. He never allowed himself to break any of their Dad’s big rules, so any small acts of rebellion in a general sense always put him back to a place of glee.

“Y’could have just knocked,” Sam said, trying to force his voice up from a low croak.

Dean blinked and turned to look to where Sam was standing behind the door, gun still in hand and starting to smile despite himself.

“Jesus, fuck, when d’you get so tall, Sammy?”

“It’s Sam,” Sam corrected, not able to muster up any heat behind the words. For a moment all they did was stare at each other, more awkward that Sam could ever remember either of them being, before finally Dean said something.

“I had this whole plan worked out about, y’know, getting in late and breaking in to surprise you.”

“I guessed. Well, that -”

“Didn’t work, yeah, I know.” For a moment Sam was worried his brother’s face was about to shut down and turn hard and cold on him when instead Dean broke out into another smile and let his hands fall relaxed at his sided. “Guess you ain’t as rusty as I figured you’d be. And c’mere already.”

Starting to smile along too despite himself, Sam ruefully walked into his older brother’s open arms and clutch tight onto the familiar leather of that jacket.

Nothing left worth saving…

No, not that, never that.

And Sam wasn’t sure if he’d stopped worrying about the strange prophecies or if he’d just become certain that he wouldn’t let them come true but Sam suddenly felt more relaxed than he had in almost two days.

“Hey, nice place by the way…” Dean said, pulling away to glance around him.

“Thanks,” Jess said, stepping out behind Dean and managing to look deeply wary in her sleepiness, her ruffled hair still framing her face as though she’d planned it. She looked at Sam, half shrugging as she asked, “Who?”

“Brother,” said Sam.

“His brother,” Dean tried to answer at the same time.

“And he couldn’t have… called first? Oh wait,” added, clicking her fingers slightly as she leant her head back on the doorframe. “I forget. This is the family that hasn’t called once in uh, how many years?”

“Oh, trust me sister that went more than one way, and I’m here myself because I like bringing bad news in person,” Dean told her, shifting slightly as he stood and added slightly more bite to his smile.

“Bad news? What king of bad news?” Sam thought he could guess, but he still had to ask.

“Well, the kind where Dad’s on a hunting trip, and -”

*

It was harder to say no than Sam had expected. He’d wondered sometimes as a kid how it made sense that on some levels they’d always understood each other personally, when at other times Sam felt as though he might as well talk in a foreign language for all the good it did trying to talk to Dean about something important. That night as Dean got back in his car felt like that, not helped, Sam knew, by the fact that he couldn’t tell Dean the real reason he didn’t want to go anywhere.

For Dean, he just couldn’t understand why Sam wouldn’t even bother giving the man who’d raised them a weekend at least of time, or say anything but babbling reasons of why Dean should stay.

“C’mon, you’ve barely ever been to California-”

“And how’d you figure that? Time’s been passing while you’ve been here-”

“-And you’ve never met Jess-”

“I got the subtle hint that she didn’t like me much, Sammy-”

“-And Dad’s been gone longer than he said he’d be hundreds of times before -”

“Not like this he hasn’t,” Dean looked Sam hard in the eye from the other side of the Impala’s familiar gleaming hood, his jaw set. There was that look Sam had been afraid of turning up. “He was getting close this time, he was -”

Close. Close to the creature that had apparently started everything in making Sam – what?

Why couldn’t Sam have gotten five more minutes to ask questions?

“Just come with me to follow this one lead, Sam. Help me track him down, find out what happened to him.”

“I’m not -” Sam hesitated, surprised at how much Dean’s words were affecting him, at the part of him that wanted to leave with him. “I’m not leaving Jess, Dean. She’s been… threatened.”

“Threatened? Like human threatened or like our kind of threatened?” Dean asked, suddenly focused. There was a more confident air to the way he asked a question, too. He sounded like he was a professional and believed that.

“I’m not sure,” Sam said slowly. “But I know I’m not leaving her alone up there.”

“Well bring her with us then.”

“You’re not serious…”

“Why not? If she’s in danger she should start learning how to defend herself on her own. And if you want this to go long term she deserves to know who you are, and you deserve to know what she thinks of that.”

The sudden passion in Dean’s voice shocked Sam and for a moment he wasn’t sure how to react, could even see himself imagining a scenario with Jess getting into the Impala with them, to drive off with a gun in her hand…

“No,” Sam said, finally certain. “I won’t do to her what Dad did to us. I can’t be that selfish.”

“What, it’s selfish to help out your family now?”

Sam didn’t answer. “You could do this alone, Dean.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe I don’t want to.”

The vulnerability in his brother’s eyes was so jarring Sam almost got into the car beside him on that alone.

“I’m sorry, Dean.”

*

Dean had been right, it was a strangely nice feeling that Jess knew a little more about his life, even if it was only the basics of his father being missing and that his brother was still pissed off at him. But it helped him get through sending texts and calls after Dean to no response, demanding to know what was going on, what had happened with the lead, that if he was driving this far west any time soon they had a spare bed and a party coming up…

Sam got one response after a week of his aggressive campaign.

Still alive, no word on Dad. Found his journal. You get to that interview?

It was almost nothing, but it was more than Sam had been expecting, and Jess had to tease him for the rest of the day that she had literally never seen him write a reply so quickly to anything in his life.

It wasn’t like they talked all the time after that, but they kept in contact, which was better than the radio silence of before, and it made Sam start to hope that maybe one day he really would be able to Bring him home…

Then one day he actually got a call from his brother.

“Dean?”

“You have a laptop, right?”

“Uh, sure. Dean what -”

“I need you to some light digging for me…”

Out of habit Sam wanted to start saying no, but he could recognize the mild panic in Dean’s voice. Dean was in trouble, and Sam was currently all the cavalry he had to call on.

And besides, he wasn’t doing a lot of sleeping currently, not with his dreams getting so much worse.

“What do you need, Dean?”

“Y’got anything on the internet there about wendigos?”

“Wendigos.”

“I know you heard me right, don’t give me that.”

*

For months they kept on like that, talking when they needed each other, and, as time went on, that seemed to get more frequent. It was clear that Dean was lonely, and liked having someone there to be able to call on, especially when he’d still heard nothing from their Dad. Occasionally he’d try asking Sam to join him on a case – and occasionally, as happened with Sam’s friend framed for murder by a shapeshifter, Sam would actually give him cases to work on.

But Sam never left – he’d made his decision and he’d stuck to it, though Sam had no proof now no matter how hard he searched to suggest that the stranger who’d warned him not to had even existed. And Sam never stopped needling at his brother to come back and visit, properly this time.

“Come have Christmas in a home for once,” Sam begged. Now that Jess knew what questions to ask he was opening up more, about Dean, at least, and even she was starting to like the idea of actually getting to know him. But Dean always brushed off those suggestions, sometimes even becoming actively hostile and hanging up the phone on Sam whenever he brought it up.

But when Sam let him know that he’d finally asked Jess to marry him Dean called him immediately and promised to start drinking on Sam’s behalf.

“I want you at that wedding, Dean,” Sam admitted to him, hearing the line go quiet. “And… and I’d like you to be best man.”

Dean stayed quiet a few moments before whistling out. “Man, you did not make many friends in college, didja?”

“Dean.”

“I’ll think about it, Sammy.”

Sam didn’t hear from Dean again for three weeks, when he unceremoniously buzzed at their apartment door on Christmas Eve and looked a little surprised that anyone had even answered, but covered it well.

“I, uh… I figured I’d announce myself this time,” Dean said, scratching at the back of his head with the hand not holding a large green wreath.

It was a little awkward at first, having their first Christmas alone together with Sam’s brother who’d mostly only ever been a story to Jess, but the alcohol Dean had ran out to get as Christmas presents that morning helped smooth things along, to the point where Sam started to be afraid to leave his brother and fiancé in a room together for fear of what they might tell each other.

“And Sam had this imaginary friend as a kid…” Dean started as the doorbell rang again.

“Ok, ok, we’re not going here.”

Jess grinned, looking between the brothers with an expression Sam wasn’t sure how to name. “I mean, much as I wanna hear this, I also wanna go pick up Sam’s present.”

“That’s it here?”

Jess smirked in a way that had Sam squirming.

“Not gonna lie, I’m worried,” Sam admitted to Dean the moment she left the room.

Dean shrugged and retook his seat beside him slumped on their living room floor. “Eh, she seems to have ok judgement, from what I’ve seen so far. Great cook. And smart girl letting you nowhere near that kitchen.”

Sam shoved at him. “Look… thanks for coming, man.”

Dean waved his look away with a hand. “Please. Cut the Hallmark card short, you know I’m not here for that. But… you were right, I didn’t exactly have any better place to be.”

Watching the suddenly somber look on his brother’s face Sam struggled to think of something to say to him when he heard the door open again, and moments later he was covered in something fluffy that was jumping at his back.

“Your face!” Dean shouted with a bark of laughter as Jess came in with a big smile.

“I know you’ve been wanting one since we got our own place, and Amy’s dog had some puppies a few months back, so…”

Sam finally managed to get a grip on what looked like a small black lab puppy and held him up to get a look at her face, only to have his face licked all over as she wriggled in his hands.

“Jess…” he breathed not taking his eyes off the little dog.

“I know I acted like I didn’t want one, and I wasn’t sure for years but…” She shrugged and folded her arms around herself tightly. “Fuck it, we’re getting married, right? We’re like adults now, we can probably manage to not kill a dog.”

Something strange passed over Dean’s face then as Sam spared a glance away from the puppy to him, but it wasn’t until later that night when they were saying goodbye that he understood what it had meant.

“I guess…” Dean explained, he hands buried deep into his pockets as Sam walked him down the stairs and out. “I guess part of me still wasn’t taking it seriously that this was like, your life.”

“Dean, you knew I was getting married…”

“Well sure, but now you’ve like…” Dean glanced up at the apartment door they’d just left behind them. “Now you’re like… building something. I’m almost twenty-seven. What the hell am I building?”

Sam felt his face soften. “Dean, you’ve saved so many people.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“…But any time you wanna take a break from that? You know we got a spare bed here, Dean.”

Something of Dean’s cocky smile managed to return to his eyes as they made it outside and Dean looked back at him. “Thanks. But uh, I’m getting close now, I think.”

“With Dad?”

“Yeah, he called, not long before Christmas.”

Sam stiffened and moved a little closer. “What’d he say? Is he alright?”

Dean snorted and didn’t look round. “Oh, y’know, he seemed fine. Gave me another case.”

Sam’s jaw dropped open. “After all this time you’ve been -”

“Leave it, Sammy,” Dean ordered, a growl to his voice. “And… I’ll call you some point in the New Year, alright?”

Dean called a lot sooner than Sam had been expecting. It wasn’t even two weeks later that Sam picked up his phone at work only to hear his brother croaking out a – “Hey, man, about that spare bed…”

Both of Dean’s legs had been broken chasing a Rawhead, and apparently it was only by a miracle he hadn’t been electrocuted within an inch of his life.

“I was this close, Sammy,” Dean insisted, as Sam and Jess helped haul him up their apartment block stairs.

“So wait, how were you ending up in the position to be the only one to chase down a serial rapist again?” Jess asked, and Sam had to suppress a sigh as his brother started enthusiastically embellishing on his invented heroic adventure.

He was laid up for a few weeks in their spare room, getting antsy at not being able to move around while also clearly enjoying the novel experience of staying in one place and being looked after. Sam even came in one day from class and found Dean scratching at Sadie’s head, and despite his continued insistence he wasn’t sure of dogs he seemed happy and uninterested in moving,

Which seemed to be the case in a more general sense too. Even after Dean started back on his feet again and started talking about leaving again he never quite managed it. And since Jess didn’t seem to mind the extended stay, Sam decided not to mention it.

Not until he caught Dean on the phone to who he assumed could only be their Dad, having an increasingly angry conversation with him which ended in Dean storming out on his still unsteady legs and making Sam wonder if he was coming back at all.

But two days later, Dean told him he had a job interview and after that he stopped muttering about hitting the road again soon.

Two months later, he bought a guitar.

*

When Sam accepted tenure at Stanford Jess turned their house into something resembling the set-up of a small carnival. Hand-made banners their three small but industrious children had clearly helped her on adorned every room, and Sam examined all of them, smiling to himself as he walked in alone, listening to the very loud sounds of his family and the few friends who’d arrived already in the kitchen. Since they still hadn’t noticed his entrance above the din, Sam decided to take his time regarding the wobbling font on the largest banner hanging across the kitchen door.

Congratulations Professor Dad the inscription read, followed by the drawing of a book, and then a ghost emoji.

“Like the banner?” Dean asked as he walked over to him, holding out a champagne flute with an overemphasized flourish.

“I think literally the only thing she’s used knowing about us for since she found out is making small and really bad cryptic jokes,” Sam said, taking the glass without looking away from the banner.

It had been difficult for Dean, as it had been for Sam, to give up hunting altogether, and the resulting fallout of one of Dean’s less successful ventures had been Jess’s rude introduction to the supernatural when a vampire followed Dean home back when they were all still crammed into the small student apartment together. After taking some adjustment time Jess, to Sam’s relief, had been surprised he thought she’d somehow blame him, and was grateful to be able to understand the men in her life a little better.

But she did enjoy making bad jokes out of knowing they’d lived most of their young lives as ghostbusters.

“Well if she didn’t take at least a small break from being gushy and proud of you things’d get boring, right? But hey, man, we’re all feeling pretty proud today. Cheers,” Dean finished, clinking his beer can up against Sam’s glass.

Sam blinked. “I’m sorry, was that you just saying you were proud of me?”

“Don’t start…”

Sam suppressed a smile and took a drink. “So did you bring your meatloaf?”

Dean shrugged. “I heard it was supposed to be a party.”

“Did you also bring…”

“Yeah?”

“The… date you said you were gonna?”

Dean shifted his feet and fixed his eyes on the far corner of the ceiling. “He said he might swing by later.”

While his brother was looking away from him Sam allowed himself a grin. “Well cool, it’ll be good to meet him.”

“Don’t be weird.”

“What?”

“Don’t be… y’know, you when you meet my dates.”

“I’m sorry, but the first time you met Jess you’d just broken into our apartment, I think I can -”

“Are you ever gonna let that go?”

As they stepped into the kitchen together, Sam was attacked by several small pairs of hands clinging to his legs, just as he registered that the dog was in the slow cunning process of running off with Dean’s meatloaf.

“Uh – Jess? Jess the dog she’s got -”

Holding up a wooden spoon like a lecturer’s pointer Jess spun around, her tied hair whipping around her as she turned on their old dog with fury.

“Sadie!”

At Sam’s feet his youngest, Gemma, started giggling. “Mommy’s got her scary voice on.”

Dean laughed as he brought his beer can back up to his lips. “Yeah, your Daddy got lucky there, he loves that kind of thing.”

Sam bit down on his lip to stop himself laughing, but as he looked around at the happy scene of his family around him he wondered for the millionth time how much luck had anything to do with it.

And he never could decide if that thought was unsettling or comforting.

*

Outside the Winchester’s home, lit up with light in the winter darkness from the tenure party still continuing inside, the stranger who’d once spoke to Sam about changing fate while mentioning nothing of luck watched from outside. Though it helped to be this close to see clearer, he didn’t actually need to be there – he could see everything just from closing his eyes and focusing for a moment.

He’d become very good at focusing his powers since his visions had first started, what felt like a different lifetime ago.

He always felt a strange mixture of emotions coming back here – a sort of strong second-hand happiness, while also feeling pride in himself for a project well-realised, but that mixed in just as equally with resentment. What had this Sam done to deserve anything he had gathered lovingly around him? He’d never had to fight for what he had on anything greater than in an emotional, or academic sense.

But then maybe that was the point.

They had lived very different lives – maybe they weren’t meant to understand each other’s achievements.

“So this is what you’ve been working on out here. Cute, I guess, but… wow, getting a little creepy involved, don’tcha think?”

Pulling himself from the golden glow of his vision of the kitchen scene the stranger opened his eyes and then narrowed them at his brother, who was wearing his familiar knowing grin that tended to make his victims nervous long before he touched them.

“This is my business, Dean,” Sam told his brother wearily, letting his eyes flash black a moment. It was more of a reflex now than an intimidation tactic, built from long hard years of keeping control of Hell’s throne.

Dean nodded his head slightly as he appeared to consider this and looked down at the house across from them. They were sitting in a neighbour’s garden, but Sam had ensured no one’s eyes would focus there for long.

Suburbia tended to notice anomalies quickly, in Sam’s limited experience of it.

“Is it?” Dean scratched at the back of his head thoughtfully. “Only that guy in there looks an awful lot like me.”

Sam rolled his eyes but said nothing immediately. From no one else would he allow such blatant disrespect: the Boy King of Hell, they still called him, and they still said it with hushed respect in their voices - but the rules had always been different for Dean.

That’s why he’d dragged Dean down, or rather, along with him in the first place.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Dean continued when Sam remained quiet. “I get it. Lemme guess, you went after Brady, right?”

Sam nodded slightly, then smiled up. “Don’t you ever wonder about… how things might have ended differently?”

“Nope,” Dean said, over pronouncing his ‘P’. “Nothing good comes that way. Or nothing simple anyway. Like, dude, time and space you’re messing with here –  just so you could go and create a whole happy pocket universe for yourself. It wasn’t exactly a picnic following you back here I can tell you… So you gotta know all this is messed up. Like what is this to you, a petri dish experiment to come look in through the microscope at? Or did you just wanna know what your dead girlfriend would end up looking like as she pushed into her thirties?”

“Leave it, Dean.”

“And if this is about the kids, well, man, they have apps for your phone for that now if you’d just been trying to see what they’d look like -”

“Dean.”

Dean looked moodily off in the direction of the house. He usually listened to Sam, but he could be something of a law unto himself if Sam wasn’t careful enough in his directions, and sometimes the demon had whims as strange as any of them.

“What made alternate me give up so easy, anyway? Like I’ve been watching this guy all day, and fuck, I think I’m happier with my death and demonhood plotline. He plays guitar in hipster cafes on his nights off. He holds off swearing in front of the kids. Can we talk about that?”

Sam smiled slightly and still made no move to stand up. “You got tired of waiting on Dad and being on your own.”

Dean scrunched his face into a scowl as he continued to stare down the house his other self was living in.

“You thought it would turn out like that?”

Sam shrugged. “Pretty much. Took longer than I thought actually.”

Dean continued staring. “And the old man?”

“Dead,” Sam said. “They don’t know for sure, but they suspected when he quit trying to call them.”

“Was it yellow-eyes?”

Pushing his hands down into the cold grass, Sam got to his feet. “No, werewolf actually. I got Azazel.”

Dean snorted. “How’d it feel being the hero again?”

“Honestly? Not all that different. Speaking of which, since you’re here…”

Dean’s face flatlined. “What?”

“...From what I understand, there might be some angels coming in soon to mess things up here. I’d appreciate your help in dealing with them. Or persuading them.”

Dean grinned slowly. “Angels, huh?”

“I thought it might be a…. different kinda way to let off steam.”

“You could call it that.” Dean smirked. “Sure. Let’s go keep saving your bizarro science experiment.”

“Thanks.”

Dean looked back again at the house that would still be showing him nothing more insightful than the inane walls outside, and Sam wondered where his brother would start, if he ever decided to make experiments of his own.

*

It was strange, now he thought on it, that there was no one he’d told yet. But then in other ways… he’d always not told people what he was feeling. That had been drilled into him from a young age as surely as the idea he didn’t tell the school what was really keeping his Dad busy most every Parent’s night.

He might tell Brady when he saw him the next day, but that still felt… wrong, somehow. Sam was closer to Brady than he was with any of his other friends up here, but mostly the person Sam wanted to tell was Jess… which, well, defeated the point.

Another night though, after he’d asked her, after she’d, well, hopefully, said yes, then Sam would be happy to talk to Brady about it, maybe even ask him to be Best Man. But part of Sam still squirmed away from the idea of that too – some part of him had always assumed he’d have his brother back in his life by then to ask instead. It had been a very long time since Sam had seen Dean, or their Dad. He really was tragically alone in the world, as Jess so often put it, before she’d grin and pull him closer.

It was one of the reasons he loved her so much – she noticed the things about him that were strange or sad and loved him for them.

Sam had almost made it home to her when he noticed the man following him and started to tense up slightly. He might have only taken on the very, very occasional hunt in his time alone, but the learned responses and training of his childhood still never really went away, even without the regular practice. It was a vigilance Sam remembered noticing in Dean for as long as he could remember, that now apparently he replicated to the extent that Jess referred to him as ‘twitchy’ when they were out in public sometimes – “like a lookout meerkat”.

Tonight he felt like he had valid reasons for being twitchy. Being tailed for three deliberate detours was one too many. Even as he walked and focused on his breathing, Sam started mentally itinerating his pockets. On a good, or bad day depending on how you looked on it, Sam could be carrying a gun, a silver knife and a small bag of rock salt. Today had been a bad, or maybe a good kinda day, in that today his lined inside pocket was only holding his small knife, but Sam started clutching to it through the fabric like it was prayer beads as he risked a glance back and saw that his stalker was still walking at an unchanging 20ft behind him.

There was something oddly familiar in the way he was walking too and it bothered Sam almost as much as the stalking itself.

Sam was still only a ten minute walk from home, even with all of his detours, and the last thing he wanted to do was lead this guy back to Jess. Especially with all the dreams he’d been having lately… but then again maybe they were what was tricking him into paranoia of walking home alone.

Either way, he knew he wouldn’t feel right about going home without finding out now, without knowing for sure.

Taking a quick steadying breath, Sam stopped walking and glanced back to see that his follower had done the same. Fuck, this was horrible. He wasn’t used to feeling endangered and having no one there beside him to share that with.

After fumbling about his jacket pockets as though he was worried he’d forgotten something, Sam turned around and started speedwalking towards the stranger. He smiled briefly in the man’s direction – and the man was tall, maybe even taller than him – but got no response. So after feinting back slightly and checking again that there was no one else in the area Sam pushed his stalker into the wall.

“Why are you following me?” Sam growled and got a low laugh in return from inside the large hood the stranger hadn’t lifted yet. Keeping one arm pinning the stranger’s unresisting chest to the wall, Sam used his other hand to pull down the hood, only to find that he was wearing a balaclava which covered most of his face.

Feeling unimpressed, Sam rolled his eyes and made no move to attempt to remove this. “Who are you?” he pressed, injecting less of a growl into his voice this time.

“I could be a friend.”

“That’s unhelpful.”

The stranger shrugged as well as he could while still restrained. “Yes. Now would you mind telling me where it is you were going to meet your friend Tyson Brady for dinner tomorrow?”

Sam blinked rapidly before narrowing his eyes and pressing down a little harder. “How do you know that and why would you think I’d tell you?”

Sam couldn’t see the stranger’s mouth under the balaclava but he felt sure that he was grinning at him. “Because I’m Asking You To.”

Sam blinked. He could… feel something behind the man’s word, and it was almost as frustrating as being followed by a buzzing noise without being able to see the fly, because Sam had no idea what the stranger was trying to do, or what he was to be trying something.

“Was that supposed to be significant?”

The stranger laughed again, but it sounded more like the proud grunt you’d give your dog that had learned a new trick rather than a mocking one this time.

“I didn’t think that would work, but it seemed like worth a try. So I’ll guess I’ll do this the hard way and see you tomorrow.”

“Oh yeah?” Sam didn’t actually have a plan of what he was going to do, only that he didn’t like the idea of this man who seemed to know so much about him get away. He was too solid to be a ghost, and a shifter wouldn’t go to the effort of hiding their face. He would recognize Dean up this close, and he couldn’t think of anyone else who’d enjoy messing with him like this. Except maybe Brady himself, but this guy was too tall for that.

“Yeah. But I’ll see you tomorrow,” the stranger said, and, much quicker than Sam had expected, managed to twist his way out of Sam’s grip.

“Hey!”

But the stranger only kept running, almost casually, before disappearing. Sam didn’t know of anything able to do that, and he glared at the empty street for a few moments longer, frustrated at the melodrama of the exit.

Though he was sure now that he was alone, and that he might as well get home immediately, Sam took another few minutes to feel like he had his bearings, before walking around the block a few more times. It was almost another hour before he made it back, and Jess only murmured slightly in her sleep when he climbed into the bed next to her, breathing in deep the scent of her shampoo until he felt settled again. He wasn’t certain why he hadn’t raced home immediately to make sure the stranger hadn’t come after her, but for some reason his gut told him he hadn’t meant any harm to the girl Sam was finally holding in his arms again, or to him.

But that didn’t mean he was able to sleep and let himself stop thinking about how he was going to handle the next day.

In the end he went over to Brady’s house, after deciding that the stranger seemed to know too much about Sam already, or at least the area he was living. And Sam wasn’t risking them going out in public together, but the last thing he wanted to do was leave his friend alone that night.

“Man, I know you had a… weird, childhood, right? But do you uh, need to talk about that? I mean I’m just saying some of this shit was expensive, y’know?”

Sam ignored Brady as he continued to line the familiar apartment with salt. He didn’t think it would actually have any effect on the stalker he was becoming increasingly worried he’d dreamed, but it felt better to be safe than a dead idiot, as his Dad might have said once. It sounded like the sort of thing John Winchester would have said at least once anyway.

“And – I mean you said you didn’t wanna go out because you wanted to watch the game indoors. But, I’m sorry, when have you ever taken an interest in football?”

Sam shrugged and sat down on the couch, forcing his lips up into a smile as he regarded his friend carefully. “It’s a weird childhood thing,” he explained passively, wondering what was wrong with Brady.

Because that was always the flipside of the coin, wasn’t it? If something was coming after a person specifically, there was going to have to be a reason for it, something they’d done to deserve it. And, loyal as Sam wanted to be feeling as he awaited a potential attack on his friend, he didn’t doubt that Brady had done something.

Sam was one of the only ones of their friends who even still spoke to him anymore: Brady had changed over the last few years, and Sam had always wondered if it had been something to do with the family he longer mentioned. But then sometimes… Brady was still himself, and Sam had a small enough group of friends he was able to think of as something like a found family to be determined not to lose any of them.

As it was they made it to half time of the game Sam was only half paying attention to when a strange jagged-edged knife lodged itself into Brady’s chest, having flown into him from great force from across the room. Before Sam even had a chance to process that his best friend was dying on him, that he’d let this happen, that after everything he hadn’t been good enough to save just this one person who mattered – he was going soft, just like they’d said he would, just like he’d thought he wanted and…

He started to notice that Tyson wasn’t dying the way you expected a human being stabbed would.

Sam’s eyes widened as he watched his friend’s body convulse horribly as it almost seemed to light up from the inside – like electrocution, only… there was an unmistakably supernatural level of weird in there too that made Sam want to roll his eyes even as he felt grief hit him.

Grabbing for the gun in his pocket Sam whirled around to see the stranger from the day before, still wearing the ridiculous balaclava, and under it, Sam was sure, a smile as well.

“You don’t want to use that, Sam. It wouldn’t do you any good, anyway,” the man said, almost fondly as Sam felt his fingers pried off the handle of his gun and was forced to watch it falling to the floor against his will.

“What are you - some kind of witch? What the hell was Brady to you?”

The man sighed behind his mask, and his shoulders drooped heavily before he moved to take a seat in the armchair across from the couch and beckoned for Sam to sit down again as well.

“It’s more what he might have been to you, Sam.”

There was something about the way this guy said his name, Sam thought, he especially didn’t like that. It was said with such familiarity, but no one he knew said his name like that.

“Well he was my friend, and you -”

“He was going to kill Jess the night after tomorrow.”

Sam closed his mouth, and forced himself not to look back at the corpse still sitting up next to him.

“That’s ridiculous. He -”

“Introduced you to her, I know. Because he wanted to give you a weakness to exploit. A good plan, and not his. This was a lucky demon having a chance at doing a real favour for the lower downs to get their plan rolling for them.”

“A… a demon? Brady?”

The stranger put his face down in both of his waiting palms for a few moments, saying through them, “I almost can’t stand listening to you even this much. It’s like… ugh,” the man finished, shuddering his way back into a better posture.

“Look. You’ve guessed at it in bits and pieces already, because you’re not a complete idiot.”

Sam’s scowled deepened by another small degree but he said nothing.

“You’re dangerous. Your mother made a deal to let that happen, which is why you never got to know her. And now you’re starting to get the feeling that you’re several pickets short of a white fence, and you’re right – you’re never going to be normal. And not in the never had a hometown, don’t speak to your family kinda sense - in the not human and a danger to the future of the world sense.”

Sam only clenched his jaw a little tighter, but he was thinking about his visions; thinking about the day he’d spent trying to work out if he really was hearing Dean’s voice when he concentrated hard.

Across from him, the stranger shrugged again. “Yes, I’m talking about the visions, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what could be, of why all of hell’s going to be on campaign for your soul pretty soon. And it all starts with Jess dying, or… maybe Dean,” the stranger said, nodding to himself strangely as though trying to calculate something.

Sam didn’t like the stranger saying any more names of people he cared about.

“You’ve got to keep them both close to you, and safe,” the stranger said slowly.

“And how am I meant to be doing that if Dean won’t talk to me?” Sam asked scathingly before he could think to stop himself. “And what am I meant to be exactly? If I’m some sort of antichrist why aren’t you going full terminator on me already?”

The stranger’s eyes lit up a little. “I am from the future.”

Sam shook his head. “I knew that’s where you were going with this. That’s… going beyond dumb now, man.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I don’t know what I should be believing.”

“Well, believe this.” In that impossibly quick way of moving he’d used against Sam the day before he moved forwards and pushed Sam down into what was left of Brady. “I’ll deal with this mess for you. I’ll make sure nothing else ever comes near you or your family. But you have to do some things for me. When your brother turns up tomorrow, you can’t go with him. He’s wrong, you won’t be able to find your father until he wants to be found, you might as well make your interview. It’s probably important.”

Every time the stranger revealed he knew something else about Sam’s life it made his skin crawl more than the touch of him pushing Sam down did.

“But. Don’t let Dean keep hunting on his own for long. Bring him back, bring him home, whatever you have to do. He won’t survive out there alone for long and if he does it won’t be as anything worth saving. And lastly, don’t go darkside. It’s dumb, and it won’t suit you.”

Sam tried to think of a response that would actually be able to sum up his feelings and somehow be simultaneously a good comeback but came up with nothing.

“Do you think I’ll manage all that?” was all he eventually asked.

“I think… You have a good shot. Take it. And if I catch you on some kind of insane hunter’s vengeance quest after me? Know that you’re giving up that good shot. Your choice.”

Sam hated it. Even if Brady hadn’t been human, even if he had been trying to hurt Jess, this guy had still just killed his best friend in front of him, and all Sam wanted to do was believe his ridiculous pitch.

“If you’re from the future and you’ve come her to warn me…”

“Yes?”

“Are you…”

“What?”

Sam held the other’s gaze for a moment, focusing on the eyes a moment. It was tricky for eyes to lie, but these were still, and staring him down, and in… a familiar mix of colours that seemed to switch even as he stared up at them.

“Nothing.”

“Good.”

Wordlessly, the stranger released Sam and let him get back to his feet and away from Brady’s corpse. Sam knew it would still be days though before he felt like he didn’t still need a shower.

*