With Spit and a Prayer

Many thanks to AngelJade, Starflow, From Across the Pond and Emilia for their kind reviews. Sorry this one was so long in coming guys! RL has been getting in my way a bit...

With Spit and a Prayer, Chapter Sixteen

One Hundred and Forty-Six Days
----
Sam stared at the door. It was made of dark wood, or it had a dark veneer anyway, with a wide frosted glass window with letters stencilled on it. Daylight glowed behind the glass, pale and amorphous, and it was oddly familiar to Sam, like looking at his own brain, the window that you were supposed to be able to see through but that was just a wash of grey.

Knock. You’re supposed to knock.

He felt the sweat slide down his spine, despite the cool autumn weather. He was wearing five layers, and he supposed that might have something to do with it, but all the same he felt exposed, like if someone looked at him they would be able to see everything, all the shame, all the wrong. He was only a few dozen steps from Horst’s office, but it felt like the distance was yawning behind him, like if he took another step forward he would never be able to go back.

And then the door opened, and Sam almost broke and ran, but caught himself just in time (just a door, just a door), and the short, squat guy on the other side grinned and stuck out his hand.

“Sam, right?” he said, and Sam looked down at him and wondered if he had ever been as real as this man. “Benny. Good to meetcha.”

Sam licked his lips, and Benny grinned wider and grabbed Sam’s hand, pumping it hard. “Files are in the back room, follow me,” he said, and Sam did, trying to stay upright despite the way the handshake, the feel of Benny’s skin touching his, had made his chest burn like he was suffocating.

“Here ya go,” Benny said, stepping into a small room full of boxes and cabinets. “I tell ya, it’s a mess. Last clerk we had?” He made circles by his temple with a forefinger. “Nutso. Oh, hey, sorry, I don’t mean nothing by that.”

Sam blinked, but it didn’t seem like he was required to speak, which was good because he was concentrating pretty hard on just breathing.

“So, it’s gonna take a while,” Benny said ruefully, surveying the boxes. “I’d do it myself, ya know, but I ain’t got a head for this stuff. And then the doc said he knew someone, college kid even, well, ya know, I don’t care if you are crazy, long as you can rescue me from all this paper. And anyway, doc said you wasn’t dangerous or nothing, so, ya know, I ain’t got nothing to lose.” He stopped the broad grin still in place, and waited.

Sam waited too. After a while it seemed like maybe he should say something. “OK,” he tried, hoping he hadn’t been asked a question.

“That’s great, kid,” Benny said. “I knew I could count on you. So hey, ya want some coffee? It tastes like sewage, I tell ya, but it’s caffeinated, ya know, so I drink it anyway.” He didn’t wait for an answer, just pushed past Sam and out of the room, and Sam fell back against the wall and closed his eyes, breathe, just breathe, it’s OK, until spots danced on the back of his eyelids and he sank to the ground.

Benny didn’t come back with the coffee, and once Sam’s limbs stopped feeling like lead, he crawled to the door and pushed it closed. The room was smaller than he thought, too warm, the air thick with the smell of paper, the smell that always used to make him think of libraries and calm, dust motes dancing in the shafts of sunlight on warm spring days and the way that words felt under his fingers. He remembered that feeling now, but it was like it belonged to someone else, some other Sam who he had met once in another life. Here, in this little closet where the harsh fluorescents gave everything a sharp edge, he just stared at the towers of boxes and had no idea what to do.

Filing. Filing. It’s... open the boxes.

Right, he would need to do that first. He would need to look at the paper and then he was supposed to put it in some kind of order, and he could do that. It was simple, it was the sort of thing high-school dropouts did, and he was smart, he knew he was smart, he could do it. He looked around, trying to find a box to open, but they were all piled up so high, from where he was sitting on the floor it felt like the top boxes were impossibly far away. How could he open them if he couldn’t reach them?

Jesus, he was fucked. Filing. What the hell was Horst even thinking, how was he supposed to do this? He should just... He could leave. He could just leave, and this would be done, and he could go back to the motel and not have to do this. There was a bed, there, and no-one would come in, no-one would expect anything from him, and it was safe.

And if he did that, he would be giving up.

Sam clambered to his feet and hesitated for a moment, hand halfway to the door handle. Then he closed his eyes. I need you to get better. When he opened them again, he found himself stretching for a box on top of the nearest pile, and was surprised to find that he reached it easily, hauled it down and dropped it on the floor. A tiny spark of triumph lit in him, so unfamiliar that at first he didn’t even recognise it. There. There.

After that, getting the paper out of the box was easy, and Sam almost thought that maybe actually he could do this, that it was going to happen, that he could get better (and then Dean would come back). He put a stack of paper in front of him, and that was OK, that was what he was supposed to do, but then. But then. He was supposed to organise it. And.

He stared at the top page, willing the answer to reveal itself. There were words, and he could read them, for fuck’s sake he still knew how to read, but he couldn’t rearrange them in his brain so that they made sense. The paper was all the same, white, rectangular, it was the words that were different, and so he knew that organising the paper would mean understanding the words, but they just tangled into meaningless jumbles, names and dates and lists, they slipped deceitfully sideways on the paper and he couldn’t keep track of them, even though he stared so hard that his vision started to blur. He’d been an idiot. He’d been such an idiot to think that he could do this, God. He couldn’t even go outside without panicking (couldn’t make himself be who Dean needed him to be), how was he supposed to do this?

All of a sudden, Sam couldn’t breathe, and he was struck with a vicious certainty that this was over, all of it. He wasn’t getting better. He couldn’t get better, because whatever was wrong with him was him, and how do you get better from being yourself? He wanted to, so hard, because Dean needed it, because he needed it, and he’d fooled himself, let himself be fooled by Horst and his sympathetic voice and God, he was so stupid. He blinked, trying to drag in a breath, and he felt something trickle down his palm and realised that he had clenched his fists so tight that he had drawn blood, four crescent-shaped cuts on each palm, nestled snugly in the old scars, and that was weird because it had been months since the last time he had done that, not because he never clenched his fists but because his fingernails had never been long enough. He opened his hand, staring at the tiny edges of white that capped each nail. So stupid.

Sometime later, Benny opened the door, and Sam managed to stop himself from backing into a corner. “How ya doing, Sammy?” Benny grinned. “Looks like ya got started, anyhow.”

Sam looked around at the piles of paper surrounding him and fought the urge to throw up at the way the words danced and twisted. He kept his hands pressed firmly to his thighs and tried to smile. “OK,” he whispered, and cleared his throat, trying to sound more normal. “I’m OK.”

“That’s great, kid. I tell ya, I ain’t got a clue how ya get your head round this. Me, I woulda filed everything under A and given up. So ya coming back tomorrow, or what?”

Sam managed to nod, and Benny waited, but he was wrung out, his head buzzing louder by the second, and he couldn’t, couldn’t do whatever it was he was supposed to. Eventually, Benny shrugged.

“OK, well, ya can see yourself out, I guess,” he said, and then he was gone.

Carefully, Sam unclenched his jaw and lifted his hands from his thighs. His jeans were stained, and he remembered vaguely that blood was hard to get out of denim, but that seemed like the least of his worries right now. He was done, it was all done. There was nothing to do now but get back to the motel (somehow, somehow) and close out the world that he couldn’t be a part of.

He was done.

----

Dean pulled into his usual spot across the street from the motel and rolled his shoulders with a sigh. Hustling was getting tougher – he was known in most of the bars in the nearby towns, now, and he was having to drive further and further to get the cash he needed, and that meant more and more time away from watching Sam. It made him nervous, and nervous was never a good state of mind for hustling. And then, and then, Sam had been going to therapy, he’d been doing what the doctor told him. Sam was doing OK. Sam was getting better. And God, Dean couldn’t even describe the relief, it left him almost trembling, because Sam was getting better, two months ago Sam had been so broken that Dean had thought he would never be fixed, and now he was getting better.

And Sam hadn’t called.

After the first call four days before, Sam had called every night, calls that Dean clung to, not even caring any more how desperate he was, that less than a minute of stilted, awkward conversation could be the only thing that had him getting up in the morning. He’d started waiting for them, and they always came an hour or so after sunset, like Sam felt the darkness falling over him and thought of Dean. And today Dean had been waiting already as the sun slipped below the horizon, his phone in his hand, waiting for the vibration that said Sam and hope, and it hadn’t come. Now it was three in the morning, and Sam’s window was dark (it was always dark, Sam never turned the light on), and he hadn’t called. Sam was getting better.

Dean closed his eyes, but not for too long. He wasn’t ready to let himself fall asleep, despite the way that every part of his body felt heavy with exhaustion. He didn’t want to dream tonight, didn’t want his only access to his brother’s voice to be that. His fingers twitched over the phone (because he was still holding the damn thing, even though he knew the call wasn’t coming), and it would be so easy to just push that button, to call Sam. And then. And then. If Sam had wanted to speak to him, he would have called. Sam hadn’t called. Sam was getting better.

Sam didn’t need Dean any more.

And that was good, right? That was what Dean had been waiting for, hoping for. It was Dean who had set this whole thing off, and Dean who had kept it going, pushing Sam further and further into darkness with everything he did, no matter how hard he was trying to pull him out. Dean had made this mess (and Jesus, what a fucking mess), and the only way to clear it up was for Sam not to need Dean. So it was good, it was great, and Dean had resigned himself weeks ago to the fact that he was out of Sam’s life (Sam was out of his life) for good, because it was the only way this could work. He knew that. It didn’t stop it hurting, though.

Dean watched the darkened window until dawn. When the sun was fully up, he shoved the phone down between the cushions of the seat, and drove back to where he had parked the Impala. He almost didn’t take the phone with him when he transferred cars, but at the last minute his hand snagged it like it had a mind of its own, and he let it happen, was too tired to fight it.

He slowed down as he reached the sign that announced he was leaving the city. He’d passed it a hundred times before, on his way to another poker game, but this was different. He wondered if he would ever come back, and thought that maybe he never wanted to, that all he could remember of this town was endless hours of trying not to sleep, trying not to think, and a phone that didn’t ring.

He passed the sign, and didn’t look back.