The Ship that lost its Soul - Part 1 of 3

[amberdreams]

The Ship that lost its Soul

                                                                                                     
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
T.S Eliot – The Wasteland

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Emily Bronte


Chapter One

He was without form and void, a darkness on the face of the deep.

Sam opened his eyes onto nothingness.

There were no waters, nor a face of any kind to move over – not that there should have been, of course. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d made landfall on an ocean planet, and had no idea why those ancient Biblical phrases were running through his head.

He thought about standing, and stretched out both arms to touch – nothing. No walls rough nor smooth, not a hint of trees or rocks, or anything at all to give him a clue where he was. He inhaled, but the air was still and carried no hint of scent, not even the recycled memory of one. It was so  still and quiet, yet he couldn’t hear himself breathing.

Strangely, it was the silence that freaked him out the most. He was so used to the background hum that underpinned their lives in space, from the constant subliminal vibration from the ship’s engines to the soft electronic bleeps and buzzes of the systems that kept its human crew alive.

The Impala’s crew – shit. What had happened to Dean?  Sam had no idea where he was, or where his brother was either. Dean should be here. Dean was always here.

He was awake, he was sure he was awake, and he was also sure that he hadn’t been awake before. Before what? He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember how he’d arrived here, let alone where here was. Other than it was dark, and full of emptiness. How could he find his way out when he couldn’t triangulate a fix on anything?

He couldn’t even find himself. No pulse, no skin, no body.

This was panic without adrenaline, without a heartbeat. How could he exist without any kind of corporeal form? How could he be, in a void?

Was he a thought? A memory? A mythical raven on Odin’s shoulder?

Sam waited, without knowing what he was waiting for.

::-Dean-::

It wasn’t Dean’s abuse of synth rotgut or his endless grieving that delivered the final blow to Dean’s life on Cicero with Lisa and Ben. It wasn’t the tedium of planet-side suburbia, or the long hours labouring in construction for nothing much more than the satisfaction of seeing another mining family move into their new pod-house, identical to every other pod house on the planet. To be honest, Cicero wasn’t that bad. If it wasn’t for the Sam-shaped hole in his heart, Dean would have enjoyed his job and the humdrum existence. Since he’d moved in with Lisa, nobody had died, or been possessed, or been chewed on by a ghoul or a vamp or a zombie. Okay, maybe Dean would have been happy to stake a few zombies, but that aside, he wasn’t missing the killing side of things.

So the death of this normal existence wasn’t anything he might have predicted. What ended Dean’s life on Cicero was a mundane notification from the Space-Ex freight depot that there was a package waiting for him. Apparently, it had to be collected.

“S’gotta be signed for,” said the pimply desk clerk on the vidcom. He waited for Dean to respond, looking as bored as a veteran spacer in the middle of a ten-light-year trip. Dean scrubbed a beat-up hand over his face, feeling stubble rough on his chin.

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” Dean asked, trying hard not to let his irritation colour his voice. Wasn’t the kid’s fault Dean was at the end of a long, brutal day’s work.

Fuck, but he was tired, added to which he could feel the oblivion cravings tugging at his synapses. He wanted nothing more than to dig out that nice bottle of Vismrti that he’d stashed away where Lisa wouldn’t find it, but this juvenile job’s-worth was insistent.

“Nope, man, s’gotta be dealt with today. We ain’t licenced to hold this kinda cargo.”

“What kind of cargo?”

But Job’s Worth couldn’t or wouldn’t say; apparently Dean had to sign for the package first. So that was how Dean came to be standing over a large rectangular wooden crate down at the depot, wondering a) what the hell was inside, b) who’d sent it (as there was not even a hint of its origin on any of the documents he’d just signed, or on the crate itself) and c) how he was supposed to get the damn thing home.

“Got a crowbar?” Dean asked, decision made. If he opened the crate, maybe he could stack the contents in his ground utility vehicle. It was just an average-sized GUV, but it had a good-sized storage trunk for a civilian run-around.

The last thing Dean expected to see when he prised off the wooden cover of the crate was Sam’s face.

Chapter Two

::-Dean-::

Dean was pretty sure his heart stopped. Maybe it was only for a second before jump-starting again with a painful lurch, but he had to close his eyes against a wave of dizziness.

Three hundred and forty cycles of Cicero’s sun; nearly four Galactic semesters. That’s how long it had been since Dean last saw Sam’s face. Then Dean had been beaten to hell, barely conscious, and wracked with the most terrible mix of pride and grief. Sam had just taken on Lucifer and won, but Dean knew with victory came the sacrifice. A huge part of him hadn’t wanted to watch, but sheer stubbornness kept his bloody eyes open to see Sam’s smile, triumph tinged with remorse, fill his com-screen as Sam had turned Lucifer’s vessel into the pull of the black hole, dooming himself along with the Devil. It was what they’d planned, what had to happen, but knowing it was inevitable hadn’t made it any easier for Dean to stomach. He’d thought he was dying too, and he’d been reconciled with that, until Castiel had appeared out of nowhere and fucking healed him, forcing him to face a life without his brother.

The brother whose face, expressionless under its uncanny white-rimed frosting, now confronted Dean from behind the plas-screen of a battered-looking cryopod. It was impossible. Unthinkable. But somehow, it was true. Dean’s body folded in half of its own volition, his stomach cramping, and both hands reached out involuntarily to grip the sides of the open crate. He breathed hard through his nose, trying not to hyperventilate. Job’s Worth, whose name badge told Dean he was actually called Reggie, was talking and it sounded urgent, but Dean couldn’t focus on anything except Sam.

“…get it out of here!” Reggie yelled, and finally the sour note of fear and panic in the clerk’s voice penetrated Dean’s fog. At the same time, Dean noticed the cryopod’s warning display was flashing. How long had Sam been in the damn thing if its power was getting so dangerously low? Dean shook his head. There’d be time enough for speculation later. For now, Reggie was right, Dean needed to get Sam out of here.  There was only one destination in Dean’s mind. On the Impala he could hook Sam’s pod up to her diagnostic and power systems, get the thing recharged and look at waking Sam up.

He glared at Reggie, who was ineffectually flapping the shipping documents at Sam’s crate as if he could waft the cargo out of the freight yard if he fanned up a strong enough wind. Dean’s brain finally kicked in. He sized up both crate and pod and realised his GUV was nowhere near roomy enough. He was going to need to find alternative transport. He had to calm Reggie down and get the kid working on the problem with him.

“Chill the fuck out, man! I’ll move him, no problem, but you’ve got to see, nobody’s going to take him into a hover-taxi like this. Come on, help me batten the crate down again so nobody can see what’s inside.”

Reggie reluctantly produced an old-fashioned hammer and some nails from somewhere; Dean didn’t care where. The kid never stopped muttering about illegal carriage and never wanting to be involved in the meat trade, but Dean ignored him in favour of action. Between them, they soon had Sam’s case back to looking like an out-sized but relatively innocuous package.

Stepping outside the office, Dean flagged down the first freight hover-taxi he could find. Luckily freighters came by Space-Ex relatively often. If Sam had been mailed to the Mail Centre in town, Dean could have waited all night. He loaded Sam up and gave the driver directions to the space marina, where the Impala had been in storage since Dean made landfall on Cicero. He hadn’t thought to need her again, but couldn’t bear to off-load his Baby. A ship that old would most likely have ended up torn apart for scrap and parts and Baby deserved better than that. He’d slipped away occasional evenings and weekends to tinker enough to keep her alive, even showing Ben a thing or two about maintaining a space ship to keep Lisa happy, and he was mighty grateful for that indulgence now.

As they wove their way through Cicero Port’s chaotic streets, Dean wondered what he was going to tell Lisa – about where he’d gone, and why he’d abandoned their GUV down at the freight office.

He was still wondering after he’d wrangled Sam’s frozen – notdeadnotdead – body out of the ancient cryo-pod and safely into one of the Impala’s equally ancient but far better maintained cryo-units; carried on pondering after he’d fired up the Impala’s flight circuits that had been dormant for too long; still hadn’t thought of the right words even after Baby had broken atmo and he’d got her nose pointed back into the black where she (and Dean) belonged. Finally he kicked himself into action, switching the comm to voice only.

Such a fucking coward, Winchester. Couldn’t you do this face to face?

Apparently the answer was no, he couldn’t. He patched through a recorded message on the comm, apologising for everything. For the drunk he’d been and the husband he hadn’t been since he arrived on Lisa’s doorstep an emotional wreck. He finished up the recording telling Ben to be good and look after his mother, like the kid wouldn’t do just that anyhow.

Once the message was sent, Dean settled back into the familiar contours of his command seat to re-read the additional documentation that had come from inside Sam’s crate. Guilty conscience or no, Lisa, Ben and his domestic interlude on Cicero were mostly forgotten before the curve of the planet disappeared from view on the rear monitors.

Dean’s attention was focused on an anomaly. Concealed in amongst the plas-sheets was a handwritten note from Castiel.

Typical fucking Cas, sending him a handwritten letter on genuine fucking paper, instead of pinging him a comm over the IG-Web like a normal person. As he read, Dean’s fingers unconsciously stroked the slightly rough surface of the missive, appreciating the rarity of the high quality but fragile wood-pulp product over the cheaper but durable plas-paper he was used to handling.

Dear Dean
By now you will have opened the crate and discovered the contents. I can assure you that this is really Sam. As you know, the Angels have resources far beyond those available to the populations of the outer planets, and I was able to make use of these to extract Sam from the black hole. However, this took some time, and Sam suffered some damage in the interim. I regret to say that this is damage I do not have the power or influence to rectify. In the circumstances it was impossible for me to bring Sam back to California Major for full restoration, so vitro-cryonics was the only solution.

Dean rolled his eyes a little. He could hear Castiel’s voice as he was reading, that slightly pompous tone, the overly formal wording. Typical Angel language, from a very non-typical Angel that Dean had dared to call friend.

Sam is not whole. Do not attempt to bring him out of his frozen sleep without first consulting me. Heaven is in disarray. Many angels still support Raphael in spite of everything that has happened, and I admit to being somewhat preoccupied as a result. However, I assure you I am spending every spare moment trying to find a permanent solution that will restore Sam to us.

I apologise for being unable to pre-warn you, I’m sure seeing the contents of this nondescript case will be a shock to you.

“No fucking kidding, Cas,” Dean muttered. Shock didn’t really cover half of what Dean was feeling.

I hope that you will understand the necessity for subterfuge. Hunters are not the only ones looking for the Winchesters, and for Sam in particular. Lucifer was not exactly subtle in attempting to launch the Apocalypse, and the Demons spread the word early on that it was the Winchesters who were responsible for setting everything in motion. I would advise that you stay well clear of the parts of the galaxy visited by the Four Horsemen, at least for the time being.

I will contact you again as soon as I am able.

Dean leant back with a deep sigh. In spite of Castiel’s dire warnings, this felt like the first time he’d been able to breathe freely since Sam died. Or apparently didn’t die. Whatever. The reconditioned air of the Impala smelled sweeter to Dean than any planet-side meadow; even more so now, knowing his brother was on board. It was a knowledge that lodged a sharp splinter of hope in his heart. It hurt, but it was a good pain after so many cycles of dull acceptance. Dean was filled with purpose again. One way or another, whatever Cas said, Dean would fix this. Fix Sam.

The Impala juddered and there was an unpleasant grinding noise from the navigation console. Several lights started flashing on the display and Dean groaned.

“Oh come on, Baby,” he said, “I know I’ve neglected you for a while but there’s no need to sulk like this. I’m back now, ain’t gonna leave you again in a hurry.”

The Impala, unimpressed, shot out a few sparks from the console and dropped out of hyperspace. Dean sighed again and went for his toolkit.


::-Sam-::

It was sight that returned first.

Sense deprivation was a form of torture, and Sam was becoming intimately acquainted with the most extreme case ever. It was the kind of first hand research he could have done without. Sam now appreciated how easily people could be driven mad from a lack of stimulation. His imagination was running wild in this void, so his relief was incalculable when he verified that he was seeing something instead of hallucinating it; even though making sense of the visual input he received was somewhat challenging.

At first the influx of data overwhelmed him. The space that had been empty for far too long was virtually flooded with information. For an indefinable moment Sam floundered, drowning in the deluge, until, gradually, he began to make sense of it. He was receiving multiple images from different sources simultaneously, and once he realised that fact, it became much easier to process each one individually, before starting to reassemble them into a coherent picture.

Even so, what he was seeing made no sense. It appeared to be a star-scape. Which, given that the last coherent thing he could recall was setting a course for Sapidum – best pie in the ‘verse, Sammy – so Dean could get his fix, maybe should have been expected. Seeing stars wasn’t odd. What was weird was that he appeared to be viewing the galaxy without any of the usual barriers essential for the preservation of human life – like radiation screens and reinforced plasplex, for instance. Which was more than a little disturbing.

It led him to conclude that, although he could now see again, not only did he remain bodiless, he seemed to be anchorless, floating in space.

As if the thought of floating had conjured up the vision, a fresh set of images swam into Sam’s view. They represented several different angles but were all evidently the same space-suited person suspended against a vast star-filled black. Whoever it was, they were on a long tether that snaked out from somewhere so close to Sam that he couldn’t tell where it fastened.

A loud burst of static was all the warning Sam had that his ability to hear had returned. If his heart had been where it should have been, it would have been racing from the shock. As the crackling faded, the noise settled down into a slightly discordant humming. It was a processed, digital sound being received via the Impala’s audio circuits, but one that Sam recognised instantly.

It was Dean, and he was singing. It was out of tune, which was nothing unusual but soft, as if Dean was worried someone would hear him, but it was unmistakeably Sam’s brother.

Sam was as agitated as it was possible for someone without a physical existence to be.

Dean!

He tried shouting, screaming, whispering, even thinking hard at Dean without any perceivable effect. Nothing happened, no sound emerged. He had no larynx, no lungs, no mouth to shape the words. The stars kept moving; Dean kept up his tuneless singing and tinkering with whatever arrays he was out there to fix, and Sam? Sam was stuck in this helpless state of ineffectual limbo.  At least now he could see and hear. He supposed he should be grateful for that. He tried to be thankful, he really did, but all he felt was an intense frustration.

The insufficiency of data about his condition was killing him.

Where was he? What was he?

Sam had an inkling, but the idea seemed too fantastical to be true.

Time to apply Sam’s first rule of hunting. Hypothesise – then find the evidence to support the theory.

Sam set out to find his proof.

::-Dean-::

Dean should have been checking their course following his patch-up job on the navigation controls. Scratch that. He should have been alseep in his bunk, but instead, as he had been for the last forty-eight hours since they’d left Cicero, he was drawn inexorably to the Impala’s cryo-chamber and Sam.

After running a hand over the face plate of the plasplex dome to wipe away the thin rime of frost that had clouded the surface since his last visit, Dean perched his ass on the low moulded bench that ran around the wall next to the pods.

“Hey, Sammy,” Dean said.

The cryopod’s internal light gave Sam’s usual healthy skin tones an eerie blue tinge. It sharpened those angular cheekbones and accentuated the sweep of his nose. It made Dean uncomfortable, seeing Sam so uncharacteristically pale and still. So he talked. Dean had a bad habit of covering up discomfort with random and often inane chatter – Sam had always teased him about it. A fixer-bot whirred as it scurried past the open doorway while the cryo-units hummed in a subliminal counter-point to Dean’s anxiety.

“So, I think I fixed the glitch in the navigation system,” Dean said, dangling his hands between his spread knees, wishing he’d brought something to tinker with. He could’ve been stripping down that laser-colt, see why it was misfiring. “We’re well on course for the Dakotas now. I guess we’ll be there in under a sennight. Yeah, yeah, I know you’d be able to tell me the exact time we’ll arrive, but you aren’t talking much right now, are you.”

Dean swallowed, his thoughts bouncing off the walls of his skull, slippery as escaped liquid in zero G.

Best not go there. Best not think about why Sam wasn’t talking to him. Or why it was Dean’s fault that his little brother was lying frozen in a pod colder than the Boomerang Nebula, instead of making busy programming the Impala’s computer, or researching their next hunt on the IG-Web. He’d respected Sam’s decision, he’d run with Sam’s plan, and where had it got them? Knowing Lucifer was in the Cage and the Apocalypse averted simply wasn’t enough to make up for the lack of Sam in his life – it never had been. Dean ran a hand over his face, a nervous habit he recognised as a bad tell for gambling purposes but in these circumstances there was nobody there to call him on it. New calluses in old places caught on a couple of day’s worth of stubble. He probably looked a mess, but who cared. Lisa was light years away and felt even more distant than that.

“Bobby’s got to know how to bring you back, Sammy. And if he doesn’t know, there’ll be something in his library to point me in the right direction. If I have to, I’ll call Cas, but I don’t want to deal with Angels again if I can avoid it. Besides, if Cas thought the Angels could help, surely he’d have revived you himself, instead of sending you to me in a fucking freezer box like a piece of Calliope venison.”

He clenched his jaw briefly then made a conscious effort to let go of some of the tension. He stretched long, hearing his back crack loud in the empty room.

“Can’t wait to get planet-side, take a real shower. Man, I can’t even remember the last time we stayed somewhere with a hot tub. Lisa’s place had those fancy new ion cleaners, because Cicero was short of water…” his mouth snapped shut, his brain shying away from thoughts of Lisa and Ben and yet another failure to add to his long list of failures. He started talking again, distraction tactics. “Maybe we’ll find ourselves a place with a Jacuzzi, like that one in Saquah’mach. Remember that? You were what, ten G-years old, your first time in a Jacuzzi, and you should have seen the look on your face when I told you all those bubbles were generated by me farting. Never saw you move your skinny ass so fast. Fucking hilarious.”

Dean chuckled, lost in the memory. Their childhood might have been a little…unconventional, but it had made the two Winchester boys closer than most brothers would ever be. The thought jolted Dean back into the present. His breath hitched and he stood up too quickly, having to stop for a moment to allow the small constellation of stars behind his eyelids to dissipate. Just a head rush, that’s all.

“Better get back to work, hey? Ship won’t fly herself,” he said, though it was patently untrue. The Impala would keep to her course without Dean’s hand to guide her, unless she flew into an undiscovered planet or an asteroid belt that wasn’t supposed to be there. He should really go get some shut-eye, but that wasn’t going to happen, even though Dean had never felt so weary in his life.

How could he sleep when his little brother was lying in the deep freeze with no way for Dean to bring him back?

::-Sam-::

Sam now had full control of audio, but the inputs were still coming from too many directions, and he was struggling to juggle his newfound ability to hear with the sporadic but multiple visual sensor inputs. He’d discovered the internal speaker circuits about the same time as Dean activated the air lock and re-entered the Impala after fixing her communications array, so he’d been able to listen to Dean as he moved through the ship, tinkering with this circuit and that but always circling back to one place. Sam was surprised that Dean wasn’t gravitating towards the command deck, but instead kept turning up in the same room on deck two. It took Sam a while to compute the different sets of data within the Impala’s schematics and to realise it was the cryo-chamber that was drawing Dean in. Apparently the room was exerting an irresistible pull, like a black hole.

Part of Sam shied away from that analogy, though he didn’t know why he found the idea of black holes disturbing. Maybe it was something to do with the black holes in his memory banks, areas where he felt there should be a richness of information and instead there was nothing, just great swathes of blankness and data dead ends. He filed away as irrelevant the additional facts regarding his anomalous reaction. He was more interested in listening in to what Dean was saying to whoever was working in the cryo-chamber, an interest that sharpened focus when Sam realised Dean wasn’t talking to an unknown crew member, or the Impala, or even to himself.

No. Dean was talking to Sam.

But Dean didn’t know Sam was here. Did he?

By the time Sam had worked out how to access relevant visual sensors, Dean was no longer in the chamber.  Sam cursorily scanned the Impala’s internal life signs monitor, her sound and visual systems. Dean had stopped talking and was back to his tuneless singing, having moved on to fine tuning the plant watering system in hydroponics. Sam was satisfied now he’d located Dean, but instead of staying with his brother as Sam had been doing since his senses had fully engaged with the Impala, he switched his attention back to the cryo-chamber. Sam wanted to see what it was that Dean kept coming back to.

Sam stared for some time at the body inside the cryopod – if you can call it staring when you’re using cameras in lieu of eyes; which was, Sam thought, a moot point. He considered that the sense of detachment he was feeling as he observed his human form would probably have disturbed Dean had he been aware of it.  But then Dean wasn’t even aware of Sam, focussed as his brother was on that empty frozen shell.

Sam wondered what he was going to do about that.


::-Dean-::

Fifty seven hours after Dean had held Sam’s frozen body in his arms to transfer him to the Impala’s cryo unit and felt the heat of his fingers leaching out, cooled on the super-ice block that was Sam, Dean’s own systems finally shut down. In an attempt to keep himself distracted and awake, he’d fixed everything on the Impala that needed fixing, as well as plenty of things that didn’t, but now his own body betrayed him. One moment he was checking Sam’s cryopod readings for the umpteenth time and the next he was face planting on the floor of the command deck. He didn’t even remember how he’d gotten from the cryo-chamber to the deck.

Fucking ambushed by exhaustion.

There were at least seventy-two hours to go before they would reach the edges of the central core, and many more after that before they could make landfall on the Dakotas, and logically, Dean knew he should’ve rested long before this. Overdosing on stims couldn’t keep a man going indefinitely, no matter what it said on the packet. It seemed his body was keen to emphasise the point. He didn’t even need to open a bottle of Vismrti to reach oblivion this time.

He groaned as he dragged himself to his feet and staggered towards the command chair.

“For fuck’s sake, Dean. You’ve got a bunk, go sleep in it.”

“Shut up, Sam,” Dean mumbled, but he did as instructed. He diverted his stumble away from the inviting chair, and once in their cabin, threw himself face down on the mattress. He was asleep in a jiffy, too out of it to wonder where Sam’s voice had come from.

Chapter 3

::-Sam-::

Dean slept for a solid forty-three hours, seventeen minutes and thirty nine seconds. Sam could have computed it down to microns, but that would have been obsessive.

It was time Sam put to good use, exploring his new environment, finding out what his limits were. Apart from no longer having his human body, within the confines of the Impala it appeared Sam’s limits were virtually boundless. There wasn’t a single system on the ship that Sam couldn’t access and control. Navigation, life support, hydroponics, even waste disposal, they were all open to his exploring mind/soul/spirit – whatever it was that he had become.

All of that took less than ten of the forty-three hours that Dean was powered down, leaving Sam a lot of time to think over his situation. Sam had played back the ships recordings of Dean’s many one sided conversations with the body in the cryopod. From that data he gleaned all the details of Dean’s plan to take Sam’s body to Bobby to ‘fix it’. Sam considered the merits this idea and concluded that Dean wanted to find a solution to a problem Sam wasn’t sure existed.

Dean’s driving force was getting Sam back, but Sam was here, wasn’t he?

Sam checked life support in the cryopod that was sustaining his flesh; everything was normal. Sam’s body could remain in stasis indefinitely, while Sam’s consciousness could live in the Impala’s systems for as long as both the ship and Sam’s body was functional. That appeared to be a satisfactory situation to Sam; he couldn’t see how any intervention from Bobby Singer could improve matters. While Sam inhabited the Impala he was far more use to Dean than he would be in a vulnerable human body. His research skills were vastly enhanced by the processing power of the Impala’s computer. He’d already taken great delight in the ease of his access to the Impala’s database, and during the hours that Dean slept, he had begun widening his scope outwards into the IG-Web. Using the Impala’s resources, Sam was stronger and better armed than any human could hope to be, and with this version of Sam on his side, Dean would be a far more effective hunter than he ever was before. Really, Sam was trying and failing to see any downsides to his situation.

Sam checked the coms log.

Incoming – zero messages for more than three hundred and forty cycles. Outgoing – one, to Lisa Braeden, 14:777:8162:00 Cicero. Sam played the message, listening without any qualms about respecting Dean’s (or Lisa’s) privacy.

It was Dean saying goodbye, which gave Sam a strange sense of satisfaction, especially as he seemed to remember telling Dean to go find her, to live a normal life when Sam was gone. He paused for a moment but no, he couldn’t recall where he’d been going or why. He didn’t dwell on the fact that part of him was happy Dean had apparently dropped that chance at normal the minute Sam (or Sam’s empty shell) reappeared on the scene. Instead he focussed on the important fact. Dean had cut his ties with his recent past, and he hadn’t yet contacted anyone, even Bobby, about Sam’s return from wherever it was he’d been. Dean’s own decisions and his reticence made Sam’s decision easy.

He opened a channel to Sioux Falls moon, South Dakota, and pinged Bobby. If the Impala’s circuits had the means to enable feelings, Sam would have been shocked at how much older Bobby looked when he answered the vidcom. A vivid image of his own fingers snapping together and Bobby’s neck twisting until it snapped flashed through Sam’s visual processors and was gone before he could analyse it. Unsettled, Sam launched straight in to the conversation without considering how Bobby was likely to react to the news of Sam’s reappearance, especially without visual confirmation, since Sam the Ship was unable to show a face on his side of the vid-com conversation.

“Hey Bobby, it’s Sam.”

“Sam who?” Bobby’s glare was shadowed by his ever-present ball-cap, and Sam wondered where the old man managed to find them, when they’d been out of fashion across the Confederation for decades.

“Sam Winchester, of course. How many Sams do you know?”

“Only the one, and he’s dead. So whoever you are, you can go boil your head.” With that, Bobby leaned forward and cut the call. Sam hoped talking to humans wasn’t going to be this frustrating every time.

Very well. Clearly there was no point in heading for the Dakotas. Bobby Singer wasn’t going to accept Sam like this. On the other hand, Bobby would probably do anything he could to help Dean wake up Sam’s weak and useless body, and then where would Sam be? There was nothing in the databanks that indicated it was possible to reinstate Sam into that human vessel. Why take the risk? Especially when maintaining the status quo meant Sam could live forever…

The tantalising idea of his own immortality brought Sam’s thought processes to an abrupt halt, as if his system had hung. When he performed the equivalent of a reboot, permutations raced through his circuits, driven by a solar wind that was equal parts anticipation and concern. Like this, Sam might be indefinite, infinite, but Dean was not. And for some reason that Sam didn’t feel like analysing, Sam craved Dean’s annoying presence. Sam liked Dean tinkering with his new body, he liked being taken care of – and if there were memories that Sam set aside and sealed away that spoke of other ways Dean had taken care of Sam when he was flesh and blood, nobody would ever know, least of all Sam himself.

It came down to this. Sam did not want to live forever, if forever meant he would be alone, without his brother. That option was unacceptable, ridiculous, and as useless as a measurement smaller than a Planck length.

Sam checked Dean’s quarters, monitoring the continued slow breathing and lack of rapid eye movement. Deep sleep. Good. That would give Sam time to research. He needed to know what had happened to bring them here, but more importantly, he needed to come up with another solution to keep Dean where Sam wanted him. Here, on the ship, with Sam.

He opened up as many channels as the Impala’s systems could cope with and started analysing multiple layers of data from the nearest planetary groups and beyond.

Sam’s confidence was as boundless as the many universes. No intergalactic security could resist the man/machine/ship Sam Winchester had become. He would search and he would find an acceptable solution.

::-Dean-::

Dean woke with a start to the sound of a proximity alert being piped through to his quarters.

“Fuck!”

He rolled out of his bunk, for once glad he’d fallen asleep fully clothed even though he probably smelt rank. He ran through the corridors to the command deck and slammed his hand down on the array to see what unexpected obstacle had registered on the Impala’s sensors. He frowned when the displays showed there was nothing within two hundred parsecs of the ship. What the fuck was going on? He started to type in the parameters for a diagnostic, but the moment Dean began his interrogation of the command centre, the vid screen activated. It was full of static but there was a clear audio playing a message on a loop.

It was from Sam.

Dean’s legs gave out and he sank into the command chair as the message repeated.

“Hello Dean. I thought I’d record this message so you could get used to hearing my voice again before we talk further. After speaking to Bobby earlier, I’m thinking you might need some time to acclimatise to the novelty of my presence inside the ship. When you are ready, just say so, and we can discuss the case I’ve found for us.”

It was definitely Sam’s voice; his cadence; his tone of voice. But the matter-of-fact delivery with its lack of empathy was totally foreign, and Dean couldn’t wrap his sleep-befuddled mind around what this meant. He stood abruptly and left the message running while he staggered to the galley for some caffeine.  Two shots later and his synapses finally started to fire up, even though his hands were shaking. He told himself it was down to the sudden caffeine high and nothing to do with Sam’s message.

Fuck, get a grip, Winchester. Sam had somehow recorded a message, and on the ship’s internal coms. Dean felt like kicking himself for not having checked the obvious straight away. Though there was no real need for urgency, given that the message had been waiting for him to activate it, he still ran to the cryo-chamber. His heart raced ahead faster than his feet could carry him, only to sink heavier than gravity inside his chest cavity when he took in the sight of Sam, lying where Dean had left him, frozen in his cryopod.

Of course he was. Where else would he be?

“Where else? Try right here, Dean,” Sam said. The sound of his brother’s voice set Dean’s nerves jumping as if someone had applied an electric shock to his spinal column. He spun round in a circle, staring wildly as if Sam was going to step through the metal walls like a ghost. God, Sam’s not a ghost, is he?

“Dude. You look like an Arizonan dust devil. Stop spinning before you make yourself sick. We don’t want a repeat of that time on Calisto when you tried out the multi-axis trainer.”

“Low blow, Sammy,” Dean bristled. “I was eight years old and – hold up, how the fuck do you remember that anyway? You were only four!”

“I remember everything, Dean. It’s all there, laid out for me to find. I have all my early memories, all my knowledge, and everything is so orderly, so organised. It’s beautiful.”

Sam sounded awed, like back when he was twelve and seeing the Aurora Nebula for the first time, but Dean shivered. He was starting to guess what had happened, and the thought was chilling. He didn’t want to confirm his suspicions because if the ‘what’ was scary, the ‘how’ was even more daunting. But he had to know.

“Where are you, Sammy?”

“I’m in the Impala, Dean.”

Dean took a deep breath. Okay. It was okay. He could handle this. Anything was better than Sam being dead or lost in the Cage Black Hole, right?

“In the Impala how, exactly?”

 “My consciousness resides in the Impala’s systems. I can see using her viz-ports, hear and speak using her audio systems, interact with the universe via her sensor array. It’s interesting.”

Dean coughed. Interesting. Yeah, understatement. He sat down abruptly, his legs suddenly as wobbly as a new-born yorg calf. Words spilled out before he could stop them.

“You said you have all your memories…Do you—do you remember anything? About the Cage I mean?”

::-Sam-::

The Cage.

Sam’s circuits fired, his thoughts careening through data at speeds faster than starlight. Everything ordered and orderly, everything structured and clean and—empty of any information that linked Sam Winchester to the black hole known as The Cage. There were no memories. Nothing.

Sam followed threads; gleaming, frail, silver threads; pathways to his past. Nearly every memory they led to was filled with Dean, but there were gaps. Here and there were Dean-less areas, and worse, blanks. It was very concerning. Disturbing, even.

Sam had only been awake in this form for a short time, but already he had become accustomed to the predictability and symmetry it offered him. There should not be any holes here, no routes that ended abruptly in nothingness. Yet there they were, his own personal black holes.

He became aware that Dean was speaking, and realised he’d been silent a beat too long. He couldn’t afford to lose himself like that. He pulled his focus back onto Dean, who had unfortunately had time to notice his absence - dammit.

“Sam? Sammy? You still there?”

“Sorry,” Sam tried for reassurance and thought he’d probably succeeded, at least in part, when Dean stopped pacing and his shoulders relaxed a fraction. “I was sorting through my memories and I can’t find anything about the Cage. The last thing I remember is…”

Sam stuttered to a halt as fresh memories flooded his cortex in a rapid-fire series of uncontrolled flashes, as if a firewall previously holding them back had broken.

Bobby’s neck snapping. That at least he recognised, he’d seen that image before when he’d spoken to Bobby. But the rest, the rest were new. Castiel exploding in a red mist of blood. Dean’s battered face, almost unrecognisable. Dean’s voice, hoarse and choked with his own blood, telling Sam he was there for him. Dean’s eyes, mere slits in his swollen, bruised face, fixed on Sam, with nothing but love shining from them. Accompanying those brutal images was the horror of knowing he’d done that – he’d beaten his brother half to death and was now ready to turn his back and leave.

None of this information had been accessible in all the searches he’d performed while Dean was sleeping, but now, somehow, these data gaps filled and Sam was able to pull some more loose threads together.

“I gained control of Lucifer’s vessel. Our plan worked.” Sam said slowly, beginning to see the pattern of the circuit-weave.

“Yeah, the plan worked,” Dean agreed, but he didn’t sound exactly thrilled by their success.

“And I’m back. You got me back from…” Sam paused, calculated. Now he understood why Dean asked about it. “From the Cage. I flew us – Lucifer and I – into the black hole, and you retrieved me. How did you do that? It should not have been possible.” Another thought struck him. “Lucifer isn’t free too, is he?”

“No, the plan was good. Lucifer is in the Cage and the universe is safe.”

“So how can I be here, then?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Dean said, his shoulders slumped and weary. “Cas said he got you out; some Angel tech, I don’t know.”

Sam thought about red mists. “Castiel was dead. I…Lucifer killed him. Is that a false memory?”

“Cas was dead, Bobby was dead, I nearly died. God brought Cas back and then Cas healed me and resurrected Bobby, don’t ask me how. He says he can’t heal you, so what’s the point?”

Dean’s tone was pained but it was like a force field had suddenly come down between them, distorting the view, and Sam no longer had sufficient data to read Dean’s expression. Dean muttered something unintelligible, then turned and strode swiftly out of the cryo-chamber as though he was reacting to the sound of an alert. Which Sam knew wasn’t the case, as he heard and saw everything that Dean did. More than Dean could, in fact, given Sam’s control of the Impala’s multi-functional sensory array.

Sam followed Dean through the ship. It wasn’t like there was anywhere for Dean to hide from him. The Impala was large compared to a modern vessel of this type, but even she only had two decks and a limited amount of space.

“Where are you going, Dean? Is there something wrong?”

“Holy shit!” Dean startled and looked around him, eyes wide. His hand dropped from the door to hydroponics, where he’d apparently been headed. Sam read Dean’s body temperature and heartbeat – both were elevated.

“I—you weren’t kidding about being in the Impala, then, huh?” Dean said after a second’s pause. Sam scanned his memories and came up with a match for Dean’s expression. It was complicated but Sam was pretty sure it was accurate. Dean was afraid, hopeful, sad and angry. That combination eased the impatience Sam felt, filled him with human Sam-feelings – tolerance, exasperation, warmth and a smidgeon of amusement.

“No, Dean, I wasn’t joking.” Sam said, happy to repeat things if it helped Dean understand. “I don’t know how, but I’m here. My consciousness is alive in the Impala’s systems. I can see, and hear, and sense everything the ship has access to. We can talk wherever you are on the ship, and at any time because I don’t need to sleep.”

“That’s pretty crazy, right?” Dean side-eyed one of Sam’s cameras and gave a tentative smile. Sam almost wished he could smile back, but instead he gave Dean the closest thing a machine could manage. A verbal equivalent.

“It is crazy, but go on, admit it, dude. You were totally going to say creepy and changed your mind, didn’t you?” Sam infused his voice with intonations indicating amused tolerance.

“I…maybe?”

Sam made a little crowing noise. “Aw, that’s sweet, you were trying to spare my feelings.”

He was rewarded with a loud fuck you, and Dean stalking off towards command, but not before Sam had caught the grin on his brother’s face.

“You can run but you can’t hide!” Sam yelled at Dean’s back, injecting laughter into his voice this time. He was getting the hang of this. He deliberately refused to track Dean this time. He could ‘join’ his brother in a minute or two; allow both of them to pretend there was still some privacy on board the ship.

Sam wanted to give Dean some time to adjust to their new situation before implementing his plan for their long-term future. Time meant less to him now than it had when he’d been trapped inside a prison of flesh and bone.

He could be patient.

Part Two this way

Comments

[walking_tornado]

Absolutely loving this.