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He has a scar on his left shoulder. It's the size of a dime and faded into the skin, a reminder of the time before memory.
He doesn't say much at first, but five days have passed, strangers who claim to be friends have come and gone, and he has a scar on the front of his shoulder that's driving him crazy because he can't remember how he got it. Sam's t-shirts are too big for him, worn cotton soft to the touch, and at breakfast one day he shoves a baggy sleeve up and asks, "What's this from?"
Spoon midway to his mouth, eyebrows lifted, coffee steaming in a mug beside him, Sam blinks once, twice, and clears his throat. "What's what from?"
He points at the scar. "This." It looks like such a little thing, now that Sam is focusing on it, but the question is out.
"Oh." Sam clears his throat again. "There were some... there were these people. They were hunting people. For fun. I mean, they'd kidnap people and set them loose in the woods... And you found them, and they caught you and - it was a hot poker."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." Then, cautiously, "Why?"
He shrugs and drops the sleeve over his shoulder. "I thought... I thought you were going to say I fell out of a tree or something."
It's only partially true; he hadn't expected anything at all, isn't even used to expecting answers to his questions. But Sam laughs quietly and shakes his head, and he files that information away with all the other things he's learning: name, age, job that wasn't a real job, names of family and friends, and how to make Sam laugh.
-
People come and go, filling the farmhouse with noise and motion before rushing away again, and they're all glad to see him.
"People like you, Dean," Sam tells him. "They always have."
The words are half pride, half apology. He understands that all the attention exhausts Sam as much as it does him.
"Don't worry," Sam says more than once. "It'll settle down."
He's not sure why, but he believes it, and it helps.
It turns out Sam is right. It settles down; after a few days people mostly leave them alone.
That helps too.
-
Sammy is a chubby little kid badly in need of a haircut, sticky with candy and falling off his bike, following him around like a puppy without a bone, mimicking his words and watching his every move, underfoot everywhere he goes. He's a baby strapped into a car seat, red with diaper rash and screaming at the top of his lungs, drooling on a stuffed blue elephant and throwing up mashed peas all over the place. He's a gangly teenage brat with too-big feet and too-long legs, slamming doors and shouting, grinding the gears of the car and dropping schoolbooks all over the floor, rolling his eyes and scowling and climbing on a bus before it pulls away.
And he's a body, limp and heavy and lifeless, cooling too quickly and fading into gray.
It's not that he doesn't remember anything. He remembers, but he remembers the same way a single puzzle piece remembers that it's a corner, the way a shard of glass in a kaleidoscope remembers that it's clear and red. He remembers Sam being born, growing, fighting, leaving, and-
Sam is in bed, propped up on two pillows and reading a heavy book. The cat is sleeping peacefully beside him.
He stands in the doorway until Sam notices him.
"Hey, Dean. What is it?"
"Were you dead, once?"
Sam doesn't even blink. "Yes. But only for a little bit."
"Oh."
Answer received, memory verified, he turns to leave.
"Dean."
Stops.
"You brought me back. It was - you saved my life."
And there's something unfamiliar, something strange curling warm and bright in his chest, and he realizes that he likes the sound of that, those words in Sam's voice.
"I did? How?"
He hears the thump of Sam's book falling shut. When he turns back around Sam is watching him, his expression tired and unreadable.
"It's a long story."
He waits.
Sam draws his legs up and sets the book aside. "Sit down," he says. "I'll tell you."
-
The snow stops and Sam gives him a pair of shoes, clothes that fit better and a warm sweatshirt, and one sunny afternoon he accidentally runs away.
He makes it as far as the barbed wire fence at the bottom of the field before he hears Sam shouting for him. He's out of breath already, shaky from the effort of walking this far, and Sam's voice carries on the bitter winter wind.
He wants to run. It would be easy to slip through the barbed wire, easy to escape this field and race across the next one, and the next and the next, field after endless field on this frozen prairie until the farmhouse is out of sight and there's nothing around him but wind and sky. It would be easy.
"Dean!"
It would have been easy. Then, there. They let him out in the summer. Bright, hot days choked with humidity, long hours in the fields that wore him to exhaustion and knotted his limbs so painfully he could barely move the next day. Those days were rare, carefully guarded and always gone too soon, and they never removed his chains but he could have run anyway. He could have.
But he never did.
"Dean, where are you? Dean!"
His ears ache from the cold and he can feel the snow crumbling over the top of his shoes, ankle-deep and sharp with ice. The barbed wire cuts across the landscape in a line: one identical field cut from another, a snow-covered slope behind him and blank expanse of land before him. He grabs the wire, placing his hands carefully between the metal thorns, squinting in the sunlight and sniffing against the wind, and he thinks about how very little there is blocking his way.
"Dean."
Breathless and close, footsteps crunching and skidding in his hurry, Sam is suddenly right behind him.
"Hey, man. Are you okay?"
It's just a fence of wire.
"Dean?"
It's just the whole world.
Sam's footsteps crunch closer. "Dean, hey. You okay?"
"Sorry," he mumbles. He releases the barbed wire and steps back, drops his head and closes his frozen hands into fists. "Sorry."
"No, don't - hey." Sam touches his elbow, and when he flinches away Sam does as well, stumbling backward and holding up both hands. "Sorry. Sorry. I'm not - it's okay, Dean. It's okay. You can... I was just worried, okay? You took off and... But it's fine. You can go outside. I don't mean you can't... I was worried."
He looks up, finally, and Sam drops his hands to his sides and turns away.
"I don't know what you want me to do, Dean."
He wants to apologize again, but he says nothing.
When Sam looks back at him, it's with a small, strange smile. "Your ears are going to freeze off," he says. "Let's go back inside, okay? Last thing we need is for both of us to get pneumonia."
-
He's been back for seven days, and for the first time it occurs to him that Sam is just as scared as he is.
It doesn't make any sense, but it does make it easier.
-
Sam tells him their last name is Winchester. Winchester, like the gun, cold steel and black powder. He says the name to himself a few times when he's alone, just to try it out. He knows it's stupid but he likes the way the syllables feel on his tongue.
Sam tells him his name is Dean. Dean after Dean Moriarty, after their mother's favorite book, after the story of a life spent never standing still, never stopping for breath, never driving fifty-five and never wondering where the road turns over the horizon. Sam tells him he's a good brother, a good man, a friend and a hero. He's a crack shot and he's not scared of anything; girls lust after him and kids adore him; he can rebuild an engine and exorcise a demon and save a litter of kittens from a burning building and still have time to buy a round of drinks when the day is done.
This person Sam talks about, this stranger in his past whom he remembers with such awe and love, doesn't sound like the kind of man to spend two years locked in a cage like a helpless animal. He doesn't sound like the kind of man to let himself be captured and chained and bled in the dark. He doesn't sound like the kind of man who needs his little brother to remind him how to eat and how to sleep, how to dress and how to bathe, how to talk without screaming and how to move without fighting.
He doesn't sound like the kind of man to forget everything he ever knew.
-
When people come to the house, people who claim to know him, he goes upstairs and hides in his room until Sam comes to find him.
Sam never mentions it.
And he thinks maybe... Maybe if they do come for him. If they do come to take him back.
Maybe Sam won't let them.
-
It's the tenth day and he's in the kitchen washing dishes. Sam never asks him to, but he does it anyway.
Sam's feet are loud on the steps and he pounds into the kitchen. "Hey, do you-"
He drops a plate. He doesn't mean to, not really, but there's Sam asking the same question, and there's his hand and there's a plate slick with soap, and he doesn't have the balls to throw it so he just lets it drop.
"No," he says. He bites the word off like a curse and grips the side of the sink to keep his hands from shaking. "I don't. I don't remember. I'm not - I don't remember."
His shout startles both of them. As soon as the words are out he drops his gaze and stares at the suds in the sink but doesn't see them. He waits. Don't shout, don't talk back, don't lie, the rules were always simple and the punishment always swift, and a broken plate is wasteful, wrathful, now look at what you've done.
"Um. Okay." Sam's shoes crunch on the shards of broken plate as he steps closer. "But I was just going to ask - I'm going to the grocery store, and I was just going to ask if you wanted to go with me."
He can't look up, not right away. He measures twenty slow breaths, then twenty more, and time crawls as the suds in the water fall flat.
"I'm sorry," Sam says finally. "I didn't - I'm sorry. It must really be really annoying to hear me talking about everything you don't remember all the time. I didn't think."
He pushes back from the sink and shakes his head. It's the tenth day and he's tired, so damn tired, of hearing Sam apologize.
"It's okay," he says. He dries his hands and exhales. "It helps."
Sam is surprised and can't hide how pleased he is. "It does?"
It doesn't hurt, and he's not sure there's much of a difference anymore. He wonders if he's the kind of man who throws plates or if he's the kind to pick up the pieces; if he's the kind of man who tells his brother things that aren't exactly true just to make him feel better; if he's the kind of man who's willing to let his world shrink down to a cell, a house, a room, a barbed wire fence and an imaginary barrier.
He says, "Yeah. I'll go with you. To the store."
Ten days ago he woke up on the shabby sofa in the living room, tucked beneath a blanket and cowering beneath a stranger's worried gaze, and he's so fucking tired of being cooped up in this house.
-
The room he sleeps in is spacious and bright. He measures it with slow steps: twice as wide as his cell at the farm, nearly three times as long, tall enough that he can't reach the ceiling. There are windows, two of them, clear glass blocked only by gingham curtains.
There are no chains.
The bruises around his ankle are fading.
The bed he sleeps in is soft and the blankets are warm. There's a small white cat who sleeps beside him sometimes, curled nose to tail, purring loudly when he brushes his hand over her smooth coat. The floor is wooden, not cement, and while the room is dusty, it isn't dirty. There is a chest of drawers against the wall and a cluttered bookshelf in the corner.
There are no rats.
The bites on his skin are healing.
The door closes but it doesn't lock, not from either side. There are three doors in the hallway: Sam's room, the bathroom, his room. It's an old farmhouse and the walls groan when the wind is strong. The water in the bathroom runs hot and the mirror is a little warped. The face in the mirror is familiar but alien, too pale and too thin, prisoner's eyes and wasted muscles and skin that bruises too easily.
The only knives are the knives in the kitchen.
His mind shuts down in a red haze of panic one day when Sam is chopping up green beans, the long silver knife flashing through a steady thunk thunk thunk on the cutting board. It's Sam in the kitchen and it's only dinner, but all he can see is a woman in a long skirt and a white porcelain bowl filling up with blood. He knocks over a chair and bangs into the doorframe when he stumbles out of the kitchen, deafened by the roaring in his ears and barely able to see through the shadows over his eyes.
And sometime later he's huddled on the cold ground outside by the corner of the porch, and Sam is kneeling before him, speaking quietly and holding out a warm, strong hand, asking if he doesn't want to come inside where it's warm.
It's a few days before he realizes that after that incident Sam plans their meals around foods that don't require knives at all. He's so stupidly, suddenly grateful that he has to excuse himself from their dinner of grilled cheese and tomato soup before Sam can see him burst into tears for no reason whatsoever.
The cuts on his arms and chest don't bleed anymore, but he can still feel them.
There are no stains on the floor, but he still smell blood, sharp and metallic, underneath everything.
-
"It's not my house," Sam explains. "I'm just house-sitting for a professor."
He doesn't know if he should know where Sam goes to school or what he's studying; he doesn't know if he should feel comfortable in this place, this creaking old house on the frozen prairie.
"I don't remember our house," he admits. It's a missing piece that feels strangely light, too empty, a void where there should be something substantial.
Sam smiles sadly. "That's because we never really had one."
-
Sam never goes to sleep before him.
When he wakes up in the middle of the night, soaked with sweat and hoarse from screaming, sheets twisted around his legs and pillow thrown to the floor, Sam is sitting on the edge of the bed with a glass of water in hand. Sometimes he wakes up swinging; Sam has a bruised jaw and a split lip and after three nights he switched to plastic cups for the water.
Fourteen nights he's been here, and this time when he wakes up Sam has something closed in his fist.
"These are yours." Sam holds out his hand.
Two things: a strange brass charm on a black string and a silver ring. He knows without asking that they found these with the charred, unrecognizable body. These are the things that convinced Sam he was dead.
Sam pats his shoulder awkwardly and stands up. "Don't lose them again, you hear?"
He lies awake for a long time, twisting the ring on his finger and wondering, and when he sleeps again the nightmares don't return.
-
Dean Winchester is a wanted criminal in seventeen states. He's a suspect in multiple homicides, an alleged bank robber, an accused grave desecrator, and he has eighty-nine outstanding speeding and parking tickets in almost as many false names. He's never done an honest day's work in his life and there are dozens of people in dozens of cities who owe their bad credit ratings to him. He owns more guns than a backwoods militia and he once punched a guy out for playing a song he didn't like on a jukebox. He has no known place of residence and there are at least three cities that have conflicting opinions on whether he's alive or dead.
"Yeah, so?" Sam says, looking confused in that way he does when he's not really confused, just humoring him. "So you don't look good on paper. You haven't exactly had a normal life, Dean."
Dean Winchester chases ghosts. He stalks monsters. He sleeps during the day and comes out at night. He carries a weapon everywhere he goes. He believes in the things that live under the bed. He makes deals with devils and has met Death face to face. He's violent and obsessive and dangerous, and there was a time, apparently, when he loved every minute of it.
"And you're my brother," Sam says patiently, "and my best friend."
He can't quite figure out why Sam wants this worthless loser of a brother back, but Sam seems like a nice enough guy, so he's willing to go along with it.
-
There's a barn outside with a car parked in it. 1967 Chevy Impala, black, V8 engine and manual transmission. His car, Sam tells him. The car their parents drove before they were born, the car their father gave to him on his sixteenth birthday, the car he rebuilt with his own hands after their father died. Dents in the bumpers and rips in the seat, an odometer that's rolled over more times than they can recall, doors that creak when they open, an ancient box of cassette tapes on the floor under the passenger seat.
She doesn't have a name. She never needed one.
They stand in the half-open doorway, the morning sun at their backs.
"How do you know I even remember how to drive?" It's a stupid question and his voice echoes weirdly in the barn, but it's better than standing in silence.
Sam doesn't answer right away. He just smiles, a slow and easy grin that means everything, and casually tosses a set of keys into the air.
Dean catches them without thinking. They're warm from Sam's hand, sharp and familiar.
Sam slides the barn door all the way open, and he says, "Let's find out."