The Ship that lost its Soul - Part 3 of 3
Feb. 27th, 2017 08:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amberdreamsReturn to Part 2
It was Castiel who brought Sam back online. Sam noted that four hours and fifteen minutes had passed in the interim, and that Cas looked weary. There was a purpling bruise on one sharp cheekbone and his full lips were dry and cracked, like he’d been biting them.
The first thing Sam did was check on Dean.
His brother was lying on his bunk in his quarters, life signs weak but steady, no cause for alarm. Dean’s face was calm in sleep, lashes dark against skin whose pallor was greater than mere space-pale, but Sam took heart from the absence of that almost zombie-like mottling that marred his brother’s features while the drug was raging through him.
Castiel was talking, telling Sam what he’d deduced, that the treatment had worked, and Dean was as well as could be expected. Sam interrupted.
“You implied there was a way to restore my mind to my body. Is that true?”
Castiel hesitated, but nodded.
“It is possible, in theory. But, Sam, your merger with Lucifer damaged you in ways even I can’t quantify. Separating you from Lucifer’s consciousness was…difficult. I may not have been entirely successful.”
Sam remembered the voice that had helped persuade him to deceive Dean, to harm his brother. Now, with a sudden shock that reverberated through his processors, Sam remembered why it had seemed familiar. Sam was certain Castiel had indeed failed to remove all of Lucifer; something of the archangel survived, insidious and hidden deep in Sam’s circuits.
“That makes it even more urgent that I return my consciousness to my human body. If you really think there’s even a small part of the Devil inside this A.I., just think of the damage he…I could do like this. I have access to the entire IG-web, I can hack almost anything – governments, corporations, weapon systems…”
Castiel blinked, shutters coming down over those fierce blue eyes, and Sam knew the angel was going to dissemble. Or at the very least, not give Sam the whole truth.
“Such a restoration is beyond my capabilities or the resources we have at our disposal,” Cas said and there, Sam thought, was the first lie. “It would require the construction of unbreakable fail-safes inside your mind, and I don’t know anyone who has the skill to carry out such a task.” Sam thought the former was truth, the latter another lie. It didn’t matter. The knowledge that it was possible was all Sam required. He didn’t need an angel’s help to deal with this; he didn’t need Castiel’s support or his lack of resources or his concealments.
“You should leave now,” Sam said, making sure his tone was imbued with the utmost finality. Castiel did not argue. The angel had a war to fight, after all. Let Castiel tell himself that the Winchesters were a distraction from a bigger picture; whatever he needed to assuage his own guilty conscience.
Sam watched Castiel’s vessel cast loose, listening to the reassuring silence of space. The solution lay inside himself. Or he should say, inside the Impala’s A.I., where Sam resided. It might be a gamble; there was a possibility that Sam was wrong and could lose everything that made him Sam Winchester, that he would become a machine in truth. He’d been wrong before, and Dean had borne the brunt of that failure. But this time, if he failed, it was only Sam that would suffer. Dean would be okay. Dean had already lost Sam once and survived – twice if you counted Cold Oak. Sam was confident it was worth the risk.
Sam altered the Impala’s course from it’s random trajectory and set it for the Dakotas. He performed a final sweep to ensure all his systems were glitch free and the autopilot was engaged. He made one last check that Dean was still sleeping peacefully, with his life signs getting stronger by the minute, before he sent his consciousness questing deep into the Impala’s AI.
He reached the core and began work, building around all the holes in his memories. He found the globe of blue-white light at the centre of the darkness and recognised it at last. He wondered how he hadn’t sensed it before – the residue of something slimy, a lingering wrongness. The remnant of Lucifer’s grace pulsed and Lucifer’s voice dripped honey-poison as Sam worked. He tried to shut out, but it was hard.
Sam… don’t you want to live forever? Don’t you want to fly free and high, away from this human prison, to leave behind that sack of blood and bile that stops you reaching your full potential? Think of the power you are throwing away, Sam; together we could touch the Hand of God, together we could rule the universe…
Sam refused to reply, just continued with his circuit-weaving. It was a plotting of complex coordinates, a construction that at any other time Sam might have found beautiful. Now, he was more concerned with making something indestructible; as Castiel had said, making an unbreakable wall that Sam could depend on to keep all the damage Lucifer had caused locked up tight forever. He wasn’t sure whether the construction he was creating would remain inside the Impala’s systems, or whether it was all part of the whatever it was that made up Sam’s consciousness. Maybe it would be brought across with everything else that made Sam himself and not someone else, when he completed the transfer. Either way, the construction needed to be seamless. Not so much as pentaquark could be allowed to escape.
Lucifer’s white light flared nova-bright in protest. Sam ignored it and after a while the walls were so tightly woven around both the dark and the light that they were invisible to even the closest scrutiny.
Once everything was secure, Sam would find his way through the many intricate paths he’d been unconsciously nurturing all this time, and return to where his body was gradually thawing in its cryopod.
The plan was in motion, there was no turning back.
::-Dean-::
Dean woke with a start, unsure of what had disturbed his slumber. He opened his eyes.
Even that smallest of motions in moving his eyelids set off a cacophony of aches and pains. His whole body felt like he’d been trampled underfoot by an Earth elk. Worse, he must have stood up only to be knocked down by a whole herd of the fuckers. He groaned, knowing he couldn’t lie on his bunk forever.
He sat up quickly, hoping to out-move the pain. It almost worked except once he was upright, he remembered everything, and that hurt worse than the bodily aches that hit as his muscles settled into their new positions.
Sam – the ship Sam, machine Sam – had set him up, sent him into a trap, gotten him turned, for fuck’s sake. His hand flew up to his mouth, pressed at his gums, felt nothing but the reassuring bluntness of his human teeth. His heartbeat slowed, normalised as the adrenaline rush that remembering had triggered ebbed away.
Not a vampire.
Cas had been here. The angel had said something about sorting Sam out after Dean had accepted the vamp cure. Dean remembered that much, followed by the overwhelming fear that he was going to sink his teeth into Castiel’s vulnerable neck before the angel finished emptying a syringe of blue ice into his overheated veins. After that, there had been only the drowning in a freezing ocean of pain until a blessed nothingness swallowed him up.
Dean was on his feet and striding towards the command deck, with nothing more complex in his head than seeing Cas and finding out what had happened with Sam, when an all too human cry rang through the ship.
Dean’s head whipped around, attempting to triangulate the sound before pinning it down as coming from the lower deck, where the cryo-chamber was.
Dean ran.
Sam’s cryo-pod was empty. Dean clutched at his chest as if he could stop his heart trying to jump through his ribcage, then Sam cried out again, and Dean’s brain finally sorted out the shadows and shapes on the floor between the pod and the wall and recognised them as the body of his little brother.
Alive, breathing; writhing in pain.
::-Sam-::
Sam was flooded; his central processor was overwhelmed with emotions he shouldn’t be capable of feeling. Rage, hurt, sorrow. Warmth, happiness, joy. It was too much. He would burn out, crash, flick over to a blue screen of death, because he was just a machine, and machines weren’t designed for this.
“Sam, please,” Dean was talking to him, didn’t seem able to stop - urgent, desperate, full of love that Sam didn’t understand or know what to do with. He couldn’t compartmentalise it, there was nowhere with the capacity in his data banks to store this.
“You’re not a machine, Sam,” Dean’s voice was hoarse, rasping in the back of his throat. It sounded like it hurt, but he didn’t stop. Wouldn’t just stop. “Sammy. You’re not meant to live inside a circuit board, you’re too complex to be reduced to a sequence of ones and zeros. You’re my brother. You saved the fucking world and I-- I need you, okay?”
Sam wanted to scream. He wanted to hit Dean, punch him right in those perfect white teeth to shut him up, because every word Dean was uttering was painful in a way that shouldn’t have been possible. But he couldn’t move, he couldn’t reach out and touch Dean, couldn’t wipe away the tears that trickled slowly down Dean’s face, any more than he could lash out or grip Dean’s shoulders and shake him.
White light consumed him. Darkness, all the blacker for the light that preceded it, swallowed him after.
::-Dean-::
Dean thought his heart was going to give out under the barrage. In this last cycle he’d lost too much – Sam twice in different ways, Lisa, Ben, and the fragile sense of equilibrium he’d gained for a while on Cicero. But now Sam was apparently back in his own body, his soul restored but consciousness fled, and Dean was none the wiser about anything. Bobby’s grizzled face stared at him from the comscreen, the old man somehow managing to look pissed off and concerned at the same time.
“Son, slow down. Now take a deep breath and start over. You’re telling me Sam is alive, but he’s in the deep freeze? And that you were a vampire but now you’re not?”
Dean wiped his hand over his face and tried to compose himself, wishing he’d contacted Bobby earlier, when Sam was inside the ship. It would have been easier to explain that part with Sam the Ship to back him up, because otherwise the whole story sounded like the worst kind of science fiction.
“Yeah, this drug, Lambda, it reversed the turning-into-a-vamp process, so I’m fine now. Don’t look at me like that, Bobby. It wasn’t Sam’s fault – or rather, it wasn’t really Sam who did it, see?” Dean moved quickly on in the face of Bobby’s frown. “Anyhow, Sam’s not in the ship or frozen any more. But he was in cryo, until he managed to transfer himself into the ship’s A.I. and take it over. I don’t know exactly how. Then Cas was here to help with the vamp cure thing, and now Sam, he’s back in his body, but I don’t know what state his mind is in. He’s in the med bay now, unconscious. The last time I could get anything out of him, he thought he was still a machine, and he’s been out of it since. Bobby, I don’t know what to do.”
“Look, Dean, you’re on your way here, right?”
Dean nodded wearily, wishing for all sorts of reasons that Sam had listened to him and never changed their course to fucking Limestone. “Good. So we’ll deal with Sam when you arrive. Don’t land at the Sioux Falls spaceport, you know there’s plenty of space out back here at the yard, and we can get Sam inside nice and easy and quiet-like. It’s probably not a good idea for news of his resurrection to get out into the hunter community just yet. There’s still too many folks as blame you boys for what went down with the apocalypse, and for the troubles in Cascadia.”
Dean sighed. Living on the Fringe sucked sometimes. The angel civil war raging across Callie, Washington and Oregon would have been a hundred times worse, and not contained to Cascadia, if Sam hadn’t sacrificed himself to defeat Lucifer. But getting word out was hard without access to the publicity machinery available to the establishment.
Huh. At least on the fringes he didn’t have to pay taxes.
Before Castiel had left, he’d had left a garbled message, something about important fire-walls inside Sam’s brain. Then he’d gone running back to his precious war with Raphael instead of cleaning up his messes here. Dean wasn’t clear what Cas had meant, and now the damned angel wasn’t answering any of Dean’s pings.
Guess it was down to him and Bobby to mend whatever needed mending inside Sam - as if they had any experience of putting someone back together after he’d had the Devil controlling him, spent who knows how long in relative time trapped inside a black hole with a pissed off angel before metronoming his consciousness between a spaceship’s A.I. and a damaged body.
Yeah, fixing Sam was going to be as easy as spacewalking through an ion storm.
::-Sam-::
“Do you think he’ll remember anything?”
“Why you askin’ me? Ain’t nothing in no book to tell how something like this’ll affect a man.”
“Guess you’ll be writing up something new for your database then, hey, Bobby?”
Sam let the cadence of the familiar voices wash over him, not really paying attention to the meaning of the words that floated through to where he was lying. There was something nagging at the corners of his mind but he ignored it, too content to just exist in the moment to worry about anything. For once in his life Sam wanted to simply be.
His head was empty as a cosmic supervoid, not a single thought there to leave a light trail in its wake. There was nothing except pure sensation for Sam to revel in. He was as hungry for it as if he’d been starved for a century or two.
His skin was hypersensitive. He could feel every place he was in contact with the mattress underneath him, the quilt draped over his body. The mattress was spongy yet lumpy at the same time, the sheets cool whenever he shifted slightly to move onto a patch not already warmed by his body heat.
His nostrils flared, each breath tickled his nasal hairs and filled his head with the scent of his own warm skin, clean linen and faint after-traces of that sandalwood citrus cleanser Dean liked to use when there was water available to wash in.
The lack of a residual hum in the air or vibrations in his bed told him he was planet side. There must be a window open because gentle breeze wafted over his face, raising the hairs on his arms where they lay on top of the covers, and bringing in something outdoorsy that jumbled together the smell of gasoline with earth and tree resin. Even without the evidence of the voices, his nose told Sam exactly where he was.
He was in the downstairs room in Bobby’s place, the one they used when they arrived with some injury or other and it was too much trouble to lug one or the other of them upstairs.
That thought pricked the skin of the iridescent bubble Sam had been floating in, and his moment of blissful calm popped, disappearing into the aether.
Sam didn’t think he was injured. But if he wasn’t hurt, why was he apparently drugged up to the eyeballs? More to the point, why was he here?
“Fuck, Bobby, it’s been days. Why won’t he wake up?”
This time Sam comprehended Dean’s words as well as hearing his voice, and urgency filled his void.
Truth was, Sam had never been completely empty. Even if he could have removed all the particles in his universe, shield against all electric and magnetic fields, Sam would still contain the gravity that was Dean, because Dean could never be shielded or cancelled out. Gravity didn't go away, and it was always attractive. There was nothing Sam could do to block Dean, even if he wanted to. Which he didn’t, especially when Dean sounded so - anguished. Broken.
Sam fought with the bedcover – god, he was as weak as the magnetic field of a distant quasar, and felt about as useful. Finally he managed to stagger to his feet. He needed to grab onto the wall a couple of times but he was determined. He made it through Bobby’s old-fashioned kitchen and into the archway between the kitchen and study, where he had to pause and catch his breath. He was vaguely aware of Bobby’s presence, but his field of view had narrowed down to one area of focus, Dean’s too-pale, too-tired face.
When he caught sight of Sam, Dean’s eyes widened, huge and green as a startled Silurian woebegone. Something snapped inside of Sam at that. He lurched forward and grabbed his brother, pulling Dean into his chest and holding on like he’d fall without Dean to lean on. Which was the truth. He didn’t notice Dean’s infinitesimal hesitation before he hugged Sam back with a ferocity that equalled Sam’s own.
Sam only let go when his brain caught up with the next impossible thing on a growing list of impossible things. Not only was he in Bobby’s house on South Dakota when the last thing he remembered was light years away in deep space on the rim, but also Bobby was standing right there in all his grumpy glory. Bobby, who’d been lost, gone, Sam couldn’t quite remember why or how, just that feeling of desolation from losing him.
“You’re alive!” Sam blurted out, thumping Bobby’s back.
Bobby was even more reluctant to be hugged than Dean had been, but Sam didn’t care. The prickly old man would just have to put up with a show of affection for a change. It wasn’t every day even a Winchester came back from the dead.
Oh god. Sam wasn’t the only one back from the dead, was he? The images that flooded his mind filled Sam with horror. He let go and stepped away from both of them, stammering apologies that fell like stones from his numb lips. It took Dean a while to convince Sam neither of them blamed him for Lucifer’s actions, but Sam still shook with the horror of it. His mind’s eye couldn’t unsee Bobby’s violent death, Castiel’s bloody ending, or the hurt he’d dealt out to Dean.
“It wasn’t you, Sammy, and we’re okay, see? We’re all alive, we’re all still here,” Dean murmured like a mantra in Sam’s ear, a low rumble of comfort, placing Sam’s open hand on his chest so Sam could feel Dean’s heart beating.
Sam allowed himself to be steered into the kitchen though he noticed Bobby didn’t follow. The tension in the air only released when his stomach decided to make a protest loud enough to be heard across the space between one Dakota and the other.
Bobby let out a gruff noise that might have been a laugh and finally came into the kitchen, noisily opening cupboards and pulling out a couple of cans – tomatoes and lima beans.
“Reckon I’ve got enough to rustle up a Brunswick stew, what’d’ya say, boy?”
Sam’s stomach gave another loud gurgle and he blushed. “Sounds awesome, thanks, Bobby.”
He sat in a silence that was comfortable until he started wondering why the way his sitting bones pressed almost painfully into the hardness of the wooden chair felt so good; or why the scent wafting in through the open window next to the kitchen table – damp soil and vegetation decomposing that must be from Bobby’s compost recycler – was making him want to inhale like he was smelling the finest perfume. Bobby had only opened one of the cans of tomatoes but the rich red scent had Sam’s mouth watering. Once he noticed his extreme reactions, Sam couldn’t let it go.
“How long…?” He swallowed, started again. “What happened… you know, after?”
Dean and Bobby exchanged a look Sam couldn’t decipher, and Sam’s heart started beating faster. Bobby turned back to his cooking, his broad back clearly telling Dean to sort this one out. Dean took a seat opposite Sam. His face, spacer-pale with a bit more stubble than Dean usually allowed, gave nothing away. Sam was wound tighter than a nanogenerator coil, his breath rasping in his throat as his anxiety ratcheted up a notch. Fear made him aggressive, and he lashed out first.
“You never even tried, did you? You promised me you’d try for normal, stay planet side with Lisa, but you went back out there, didn’t you? Drifting in the black, hunting, putting your life at risk. What did you do to get me back, Dean?”
Dean leaned across the worn wooden table and caught Sam’s wildly waving hands in his own, his grip loose and gentle, but firm. His hands were warm and rough, and the familiarity of the touch calmed Sam. Dean released Sam’s hands but never broke his gaze, his eyes that clear green that had always reminded Sam of the Teton lakes on Wyoming.
“I went to Cicero, Sam, right after Cas healed me. Lived with Lisa and Ben for a while. Didn’t work out.”
Dean glanced away then, but not before Sam saw sadness tighten the edges of his brother’s eyes. For once, Sam didn’t push. Something else Dean had said snagged his attention.
“’For a while’. You said you lived with Lisa for a while. And then you left. So how long was I…gone?”
“Four G-semesters,” Dean said, then frowned when Bobby made an odd coughing noise, like he disagreed. Sam made some calculations in his head. He remembered Castiel (when had he seen Cas? Wasn’t he dead too?) telling him he’d extracted Sam from the Cage after four semesters, which, looking at the star date on Bobby’s kitchen clock, left at least a semester unaccounted for. Dean’s evasiveness and the guarded expression on Bobby’s face were giving Sam a bad feeling.
He was distracted by Bobby shoving a huge plateful of stew in front of him. The smell alone was enough to wipe his mind clean of any thought more coherent than filling his empty stomach, and when he next looked up Dean was smiling, his eyes soft at the corners with that fond look he reserved for Sam.
Though Sam was sure there was more to his missing time than either Dean or Bobby was saying, something deep inside him was telling him to let it lie.
They spent two days at Bobby’s, with Dean spending most of the time out in Bobby’s yard helping the old man repair some space junker that was probably beyond saving. But Dean was happy. Sam could hear him through the open windows, whistling a tuneless accompaniment to Sam’s own puttering around, using Bobby’s computers to do aimless research about nothing.
Dean kept asking him was he feeling okay, but he wasn’t sure how he was feeling. On the one hand he was revelling in his ability to taste and smell and touch. He didn’t understand the impulse, but he couldn’t stop stroking his fingertips across every surface, testing the variety of textures. He wanted to eat even though he wasn’t hungry, just so he could bliss out as the different tastes – sweet, sour, earthy – exploded on his tongue. He’d go stand outside to watch Dean and Bobby working just so he could feel the warmth of the Dakota twin suns on his skin and breathe deep of the smell of engine oil and Dean’s sweat as he passed by the junker.
On the evening of Sam’s third day awake, Bobby handed Dean a case in the Minnesota system, a possible haunting. Dean’s eyes lit up and Sam knew he was thinking of the vast open star-scapes and the freedom of the black, but then his face shuttered, wary, as he glanced over at Sam.
“I’m not sure, Bobby. Maybe I should finish off the work on the XD-17 first. Isn’t there any hunter closer?”
Sam rolled his eyes and snatched the infotab out of Bobby’s hand before Dean even finished his question.
“Oh cool, Dean, look. The case is in one of the outliers, Thief River Falls. We could swing by the Alexandria Magnetar.” He watched Dean, careful to keep his own expression easy, casual. He didn’t want to show Dean how desperate he was to take this case. The moment Bobby offered this chance, Sam felt an overwhelming need to be on the move – to run away? to atone? – he didn’t want to examine his own reasons too deeply. He could see Dean wavering.
“The magnetar? Is it active?”
Sam pressed his advantage, hiding a smile. “Yeah, it’s going through some serious star quakes; should be a real powerful gamma-ray flare display going on right now. But if you want to finish the XD-17…”
Dean grabbed the infotab, scanning it rapidly. “Can’t play when there’s work to be done, Sammy boy. Better go pack.”
::-Dean-::
Sam was fine. He was inexplicable, a mystery, but that was normal.
Of course, Dean couldn’t help watching him, but that was nothing new. Dean had been watching since Sam was a babe in arms, so he wasn’t going to break the habit of a lifetime just because Sam had freaky artificial walls inside his mind. Some things were different – for instance, it was Sam who set their course for Thief River Falls, and as the hours passed in the peaceful boredom of the black, Dean increasingly ceded interactions with the ship to Sam. Dean wasn’t sure this was a good idea, considering where Sam had just come from, but it made Sam happy to interface with Baby, so Dean couldn’t find it in his heart to object. Even though he was starting to feel like a superfluous booster engine round the two of them.
Apart from this role reversal in their relationship with the Impala, they readily fell into their old rhythms; teasing each other about random shit, long comfortable silences over meals that Dean still prepared, knocking shoulders sharing a bunk to watch old movies. Dean was occasionally reminded that this wasn’t the old days when he wandered into command to find Sam deep in conversation with the ship, but on the whole, given Castiel’s dire warnings and Bobby’s pessimism, Dean thought things were going pretty well. When Sam pushed that stupidly long hair out of his eyes and smiled, Dean was shocked to recognise that the unfamiliar warm feeling in his chest was close to happiness.
::-Sam-::
Sam was content.
He felt Dean’s eyes follow him everywhere, but that was comforting in its familiarity. They’d never worried too much about personal space; it was hard to maintain an illusion of privacy on a ship the size of the Impala, and this was all Sam had ever known. It had been even worse when Dad had been there with them, which was probably why Sam and Dad had always clashed so badly.
Since they’d left Bobby’s, Sam had felt even more at home on the ship than he remembered, as if every nut and bolt and circuit were part of him. He breathed deep of the recycled air, he endlessly invented opportunities for physical closeness with Dean just to revel in the warmth of the touch of Dean’s hand rubbing the back of his neck in absent-minded affection, or casually smacking Sam’s butt when passing by on his way to rustle up something tasty in the galley.
There were gaps in his memory, Sam was aware, but it didn’t bother him too much. He was sure he’d remember, eventually. When the time was right.
::
In a cocoon of woven shadows, Lucifer’s fragmentary grace is singing.
On a raven’s wing, I’ll fly you to heaven
I’ll burn you with golden eyes of ember
Come fly with me to heaven
Come touch the Hand of God
I’ll make you a king
I’ll make us both kings.
A/N: The overall inspiration for turning Sam into the ship comes from Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship who Sang, though it’s only the loosest conceptual relationship! Lucifer’s song at the end is a paraphrasing of The White Buffalo’s Come Join the Murder.
I did a lot of world building in my head so I hope this all makes sense on the page.
Chapter 6
::-Sam-::It was Castiel who brought Sam back online. Sam noted that four hours and fifteen minutes had passed in the interim, and that Cas looked weary. There was a purpling bruise on one sharp cheekbone and his full lips were dry and cracked, like he’d been biting them.
The first thing Sam did was check on Dean.
His brother was lying on his bunk in his quarters, life signs weak but steady, no cause for alarm. Dean’s face was calm in sleep, lashes dark against skin whose pallor was greater than mere space-pale, but Sam took heart from the absence of that almost zombie-like mottling that marred his brother’s features while the drug was raging through him.
Castiel was talking, telling Sam what he’d deduced, that the treatment had worked, and Dean was as well as could be expected. Sam interrupted.
“You implied there was a way to restore my mind to my body. Is that true?”
Castiel hesitated, but nodded.
“It is possible, in theory. But, Sam, your merger with Lucifer damaged you in ways even I can’t quantify. Separating you from Lucifer’s consciousness was…difficult. I may not have been entirely successful.”
Sam remembered the voice that had helped persuade him to deceive Dean, to harm his brother. Now, with a sudden shock that reverberated through his processors, Sam remembered why it had seemed familiar. Sam was certain Castiel had indeed failed to remove all of Lucifer; something of the archangel survived, insidious and hidden deep in Sam’s circuits.
“That makes it even more urgent that I return my consciousness to my human body. If you really think there’s even a small part of the Devil inside this A.I., just think of the damage he…I could do like this. I have access to the entire IG-web, I can hack almost anything – governments, corporations, weapon systems…”
Castiel blinked, shutters coming down over those fierce blue eyes, and Sam knew the angel was going to dissemble. Or at the very least, not give Sam the whole truth.
“Such a restoration is beyond my capabilities or the resources we have at our disposal,” Cas said and there, Sam thought, was the first lie. “It would require the construction of unbreakable fail-safes inside your mind, and I don’t know anyone who has the skill to carry out such a task.” Sam thought the former was truth, the latter another lie. It didn’t matter. The knowledge that it was possible was all Sam required. He didn’t need an angel’s help to deal with this; he didn’t need Castiel’s support or his lack of resources or his concealments.
“You should leave now,” Sam said, making sure his tone was imbued with the utmost finality. Castiel did not argue. The angel had a war to fight, after all. Let Castiel tell himself that the Winchesters were a distraction from a bigger picture; whatever he needed to assuage his own guilty conscience.
Sam watched Castiel’s vessel cast loose, listening to the reassuring silence of space. The solution lay inside himself. Or he should say, inside the Impala’s A.I., where Sam resided. It might be a gamble; there was a possibility that Sam was wrong and could lose everything that made him Sam Winchester, that he would become a machine in truth. He’d been wrong before, and Dean had borne the brunt of that failure. But this time, if he failed, it was only Sam that would suffer. Dean would be okay. Dean had already lost Sam once and survived – twice if you counted Cold Oak. Sam was confident it was worth the risk.
Sam altered the Impala’s course from it’s random trajectory and set it for the Dakotas. He performed a final sweep to ensure all his systems were glitch free and the autopilot was engaged. He made one last check that Dean was still sleeping peacefully, with his life signs getting stronger by the minute, before he sent his consciousness questing deep into the Impala’s AI.
He reached the core and began work, building around all the holes in his memories. He found the globe of blue-white light at the centre of the darkness and recognised it at last. He wondered how he hadn’t sensed it before – the residue of something slimy, a lingering wrongness. The remnant of Lucifer’s grace pulsed and Lucifer’s voice dripped honey-poison as Sam worked. He tried to shut out, but it was hard.
Sam… don’t you want to live forever? Don’t you want to fly free and high, away from this human prison, to leave behind that sack of blood and bile that stops you reaching your full potential? Think of the power you are throwing away, Sam; together we could touch the Hand of God, together we could rule the universe…
Sam refused to reply, just continued with his circuit-weaving. It was a plotting of complex coordinates, a construction that at any other time Sam might have found beautiful. Now, he was more concerned with making something indestructible; as Castiel had said, making an unbreakable wall that Sam could depend on to keep all the damage Lucifer had caused locked up tight forever. He wasn’t sure whether the construction he was creating would remain inside the Impala’s systems, or whether it was all part of the whatever it was that made up Sam’s consciousness. Maybe it would be brought across with everything else that made Sam himself and not someone else, when he completed the transfer. Either way, the construction needed to be seamless. Not so much as pentaquark could be allowed to escape.
Lucifer’s white light flared nova-bright in protest. Sam ignored it and after a while the walls were so tightly woven around both the dark and the light that they were invisible to even the closest scrutiny.
Once everything was secure, Sam would find his way through the many intricate paths he’d been unconsciously nurturing all this time, and return to where his body was gradually thawing in its cryopod.
The plan was in motion, there was no turning back.
::-Dean-::
Dean woke with a start, unsure of what had disturbed his slumber. He opened his eyes.
Even that smallest of motions in moving his eyelids set off a cacophony of aches and pains. His whole body felt like he’d been trampled underfoot by an Earth elk. Worse, he must have stood up only to be knocked down by a whole herd of the fuckers. He groaned, knowing he couldn’t lie on his bunk forever.
He sat up quickly, hoping to out-move the pain. It almost worked except once he was upright, he remembered everything, and that hurt worse than the bodily aches that hit as his muscles settled into their new positions.
Sam – the ship Sam, machine Sam – had set him up, sent him into a trap, gotten him turned, for fuck’s sake. His hand flew up to his mouth, pressed at his gums, felt nothing but the reassuring bluntness of his human teeth. His heartbeat slowed, normalised as the adrenaline rush that remembering had triggered ebbed away.
Not a vampire.
Cas had been here. The angel had said something about sorting Sam out after Dean had accepted the vamp cure. Dean remembered that much, followed by the overwhelming fear that he was going to sink his teeth into Castiel’s vulnerable neck before the angel finished emptying a syringe of blue ice into his overheated veins. After that, there had been only the drowning in a freezing ocean of pain until a blessed nothingness swallowed him up.
Dean was on his feet and striding towards the command deck, with nothing more complex in his head than seeing Cas and finding out what had happened with Sam, when an all too human cry rang through the ship.
Dean’s head whipped around, attempting to triangulate the sound before pinning it down as coming from the lower deck, where the cryo-chamber was.
Dean ran.
Sam’s cryo-pod was empty. Dean clutched at his chest as if he could stop his heart trying to jump through his ribcage, then Sam cried out again, and Dean’s brain finally sorted out the shadows and shapes on the floor between the pod and the wall and recognised them as the body of his little brother.
Alive, breathing; writhing in pain.
::-Sam-::
Sam was flooded; his central processor was overwhelmed with emotions he shouldn’t be capable of feeling. Rage, hurt, sorrow. Warmth, happiness, joy. It was too much. He would burn out, crash, flick over to a blue screen of death, because he was just a machine, and machines weren’t designed for this.
“Sam, please,” Dean was talking to him, didn’t seem able to stop - urgent, desperate, full of love that Sam didn’t understand or know what to do with. He couldn’t compartmentalise it, there was nowhere with the capacity in his data banks to store this.
“You’re not a machine, Sam,” Dean’s voice was hoarse, rasping in the back of his throat. It sounded like it hurt, but he didn’t stop. Wouldn’t just stop. “Sammy. You’re not meant to live inside a circuit board, you’re too complex to be reduced to a sequence of ones and zeros. You’re my brother. You saved the fucking world and I-- I need you, okay?”
Sam wanted to scream. He wanted to hit Dean, punch him right in those perfect white teeth to shut him up, because every word Dean was uttering was painful in a way that shouldn’t have been possible. But he couldn’t move, he couldn’t reach out and touch Dean, couldn’t wipe away the tears that trickled slowly down Dean’s face, any more than he could lash out or grip Dean’s shoulders and shake him.
White light consumed him. Darkness, all the blacker for the light that preceded it, swallowed him after.
::-Dean-::
Dean thought his heart was going to give out under the barrage. In this last cycle he’d lost too much – Sam twice in different ways, Lisa, Ben, and the fragile sense of equilibrium he’d gained for a while on Cicero. But now Sam was apparently back in his own body, his soul restored but consciousness fled, and Dean was none the wiser about anything. Bobby’s grizzled face stared at him from the comscreen, the old man somehow managing to look pissed off and concerned at the same time.
“Son, slow down. Now take a deep breath and start over. You’re telling me Sam is alive, but he’s in the deep freeze? And that you were a vampire but now you’re not?”
Dean wiped his hand over his face and tried to compose himself, wishing he’d contacted Bobby earlier, when Sam was inside the ship. It would have been easier to explain that part with Sam the Ship to back him up, because otherwise the whole story sounded like the worst kind of science fiction.
“Yeah, this drug, Lambda, it reversed the turning-into-a-vamp process, so I’m fine now. Don’t look at me like that, Bobby. It wasn’t Sam’s fault – or rather, it wasn’t really Sam who did it, see?” Dean moved quickly on in the face of Bobby’s frown. “Anyhow, Sam’s not in the ship or frozen any more. But he was in cryo, until he managed to transfer himself into the ship’s A.I. and take it over. I don’t know exactly how. Then Cas was here to help with the vamp cure thing, and now Sam, he’s back in his body, but I don’t know what state his mind is in. He’s in the med bay now, unconscious. The last time I could get anything out of him, he thought he was still a machine, and he’s been out of it since. Bobby, I don’t know what to do.”
“Look, Dean, you’re on your way here, right?”
Dean nodded wearily, wishing for all sorts of reasons that Sam had listened to him and never changed their course to fucking Limestone. “Good. So we’ll deal with Sam when you arrive. Don’t land at the Sioux Falls spaceport, you know there’s plenty of space out back here at the yard, and we can get Sam inside nice and easy and quiet-like. It’s probably not a good idea for news of his resurrection to get out into the hunter community just yet. There’s still too many folks as blame you boys for what went down with the apocalypse, and for the troubles in Cascadia.”
Dean sighed. Living on the Fringe sucked sometimes. The angel civil war raging across Callie, Washington and Oregon would have been a hundred times worse, and not contained to Cascadia, if Sam hadn’t sacrificed himself to defeat Lucifer. But getting word out was hard without access to the publicity machinery available to the establishment.
Huh. At least on the fringes he didn’t have to pay taxes.
Before Castiel had left, he’d had left a garbled message, something about important fire-walls inside Sam’s brain. Then he’d gone running back to his precious war with Raphael instead of cleaning up his messes here. Dean wasn’t clear what Cas had meant, and now the damned angel wasn’t answering any of Dean’s pings.
Guess it was down to him and Bobby to mend whatever needed mending inside Sam - as if they had any experience of putting someone back together after he’d had the Devil controlling him, spent who knows how long in relative time trapped inside a black hole with a pissed off angel before metronoming his consciousness between a spaceship’s A.I. and a damaged body.
Yeah, fixing Sam was going to be as easy as spacewalking through an ion storm.
::-Sam-::
“Do you think he’ll remember anything?”
“Why you askin’ me? Ain’t nothing in no book to tell how something like this’ll affect a man.”
“Guess you’ll be writing up something new for your database then, hey, Bobby?”
Sam let the cadence of the familiar voices wash over him, not really paying attention to the meaning of the words that floated through to where he was lying. There was something nagging at the corners of his mind but he ignored it, too content to just exist in the moment to worry about anything. For once in his life Sam wanted to simply be.
His head was empty as a cosmic supervoid, not a single thought there to leave a light trail in its wake. There was nothing except pure sensation for Sam to revel in. He was as hungry for it as if he’d been starved for a century or two.
His skin was hypersensitive. He could feel every place he was in contact with the mattress underneath him, the quilt draped over his body. The mattress was spongy yet lumpy at the same time, the sheets cool whenever he shifted slightly to move onto a patch not already warmed by his body heat.
His nostrils flared, each breath tickled his nasal hairs and filled his head with the scent of his own warm skin, clean linen and faint after-traces of that sandalwood citrus cleanser Dean liked to use when there was water available to wash in.
The lack of a residual hum in the air or vibrations in his bed told him he was planet side. There must be a window open because gentle breeze wafted over his face, raising the hairs on his arms where they lay on top of the covers, and bringing in something outdoorsy that jumbled together the smell of gasoline with earth and tree resin. Even without the evidence of the voices, his nose told Sam exactly where he was.
He was in the downstairs room in Bobby’s place, the one they used when they arrived with some injury or other and it was too much trouble to lug one or the other of them upstairs.
That thought pricked the skin of the iridescent bubble Sam had been floating in, and his moment of blissful calm popped, disappearing into the aether.
Sam didn’t think he was injured. But if he wasn’t hurt, why was he apparently drugged up to the eyeballs? More to the point, why was he here?
“Fuck, Bobby, it’s been days. Why won’t he wake up?”
This time Sam comprehended Dean’s words as well as hearing his voice, and urgency filled his void.
Truth was, Sam had never been completely empty. Even if he could have removed all the particles in his universe, shield against all electric and magnetic fields, Sam would still contain the gravity that was Dean, because Dean could never be shielded or cancelled out. Gravity didn't go away, and it was always attractive. There was nothing Sam could do to block Dean, even if he wanted to. Which he didn’t, especially when Dean sounded so - anguished. Broken.
Sam fought with the bedcover – god, he was as weak as the magnetic field of a distant quasar, and felt about as useful. Finally he managed to stagger to his feet. He needed to grab onto the wall a couple of times but he was determined. He made it through Bobby’s old-fashioned kitchen and into the archway between the kitchen and study, where he had to pause and catch his breath. He was vaguely aware of Bobby’s presence, but his field of view had narrowed down to one area of focus, Dean’s too-pale, too-tired face.
When he caught sight of Sam, Dean’s eyes widened, huge and green as a startled Silurian woebegone. Something snapped inside of Sam at that. He lurched forward and grabbed his brother, pulling Dean into his chest and holding on like he’d fall without Dean to lean on. Which was the truth. He didn’t notice Dean’s infinitesimal hesitation before he hugged Sam back with a ferocity that equalled Sam’s own.
Sam only let go when his brain caught up with the next impossible thing on a growing list of impossible things. Not only was he in Bobby’s house on South Dakota when the last thing he remembered was light years away in deep space on the rim, but also Bobby was standing right there in all his grumpy glory. Bobby, who’d been lost, gone, Sam couldn’t quite remember why or how, just that feeling of desolation from losing him.
“You’re alive!” Sam blurted out, thumping Bobby’s back.
Bobby was even more reluctant to be hugged than Dean had been, but Sam didn’t care. The prickly old man would just have to put up with a show of affection for a change. It wasn’t every day even a Winchester came back from the dead.
Oh god. Sam wasn’t the only one back from the dead, was he? The images that flooded his mind filled Sam with horror. He let go and stepped away from both of them, stammering apologies that fell like stones from his numb lips. It took Dean a while to convince Sam neither of them blamed him for Lucifer’s actions, but Sam still shook with the horror of it. His mind’s eye couldn’t unsee Bobby’s violent death, Castiel’s bloody ending, or the hurt he’d dealt out to Dean.
“It wasn’t you, Sammy, and we’re okay, see? We’re all alive, we’re all still here,” Dean murmured like a mantra in Sam’s ear, a low rumble of comfort, placing Sam’s open hand on his chest so Sam could feel Dean’s heart beating.
Sam allowed himself to be steered into the kitchen though he noticed Bobby didn’t follow. The tension in the air only released when his stomach decided to make a protest loud enough to be heard across the space between one Dakota and the other.
Bobby let out a gruff noise that might have been a laugh and finally came into the kitchen, noisily opening cupboards and pulling out a couple of cans – tomatoes and lima beans.
“Reckon I’ve got enough to rustle up a Brunswick stew, what’d’ya say, boy?”
Sam’s stomach gave another loud gurgle and he blushed. “Sounds awesome, thanks, Bobby.”
He sat in a silence that was comfortable until he started wondering why the way his sitting bones pressed almost painfully into the hardness of the wooden chair felt so good; or why the scent wafting in through the open window next to the kitchen table – damp soil and vegetation decomposing that must be from Bobby’s compost recycler – was making him want to inhale like he was smelling the finest perfume. Bobby had only opened one of the cans of tomatoes but the rich red scent had Sam’s mouth watering. Once he noticed his extreme reactions, Sam couldn’t let it go.
“How long…?” He swallowed, started again. “What happened… you know, after?”
Dean and Bobby exchanged a look Sam couldn’t decipher, and Sam’s heart started beating faster. Bobby turned back to his cooking, his broad back clearly telling Dean to sort this one out. Dean took a seat opposite Sam. His face, spacer-pale with a bit more stubble than Dean usually allowed, gave nothing away. Sam was wound tighter than a nanogenerator coil, his breath rasping in his throat as his anxiety ratcheted up a notch. Fear made him aggressive, and he lashed out first.
“You never even tried, did you? You promised me you’d try for normal, stay planet side with Lisa, but you went back out there, didn’t you? Drifting in the black, hunting, putting your life at risk. What did you do to get me back, Dean?”
Dean leaned across the worn wooden table and caught Sam’s wildly waving hands in his own, his grip loose and gentle, but firm. His hands were warm and rough, and the familiarity of the touch calmed Sam. Dean released Sam’s hands but never broke his gaze, his eyes that clear green that had always reminded Sam of the Teton lakes on Wyoming.
“I went to Cicero, Sam, right after Cas healed me. Lived with Lisa and Ben for a while. Didn’t work out.”
Dean glanced away then, but not before Sam saw sadness tighten the edges of his brother’s eyes. For once, Sam didn’t push. Something else Dean had said snagged his attention.
“’For a while’. You said you lived with Lisa for a while. And then you left. So how long was I…gone?”
“Four G-semesters,” Dean said, then frowned when Bobby made an odd coughing noise, like he disagreed. Sam made some calculations in his head. He remembered Castiel (when had he seen Cas? Wasn’t he dead too?) telling him he’d extracted Sam from the Cage after four semesters, which, looking at the star date on Bobby’s kitchen clock, left at least a semester unaccounted for. Dean’s evasiveness and the guarded expression on Bobby’s face were giving Sam a bad feeling.
He was distracted by Bobby shoving a huge plateful of stew in front of him. The smell alone was enough to wipe his mind clean of any thought more coherent than filling his empty stomach, and when he next looked up Dean was smiling, his eyes soft at the corners with that fond look he reserved for Sam.
Though Sam was sure there was more to his missing time than either Dean or Bobby was saying, something deep inside him was telling him to let it lie.
They spent two days at Bobby’s, with Dean spending most of the time out in Bobby’s yard helping the old man repair some space junker that was probably beyond saving. But Dean was happy. Sam could hear him through the open windows, whistling a tuneless accompaniment to Sam’s own puttering around, using Bobby’s computers to do aimless research about nothing.
Dean kept asking him was he feeling okay, but he wasn’t sure how he was feeling. On the one hand he was revelling in his ability to taste and smell and touch. He didn’t understand the impulse, but he couldn’t stop stroking his fingertips across every surface, testing the variety of textures. He wanted to eat even though he wasn’t hungry, just so he could bliss out as the different tastes – sweet, sour, earthy – exploded on his tongue. He’d go stand outside to watch Dean and Bobby working just so he could feel the warmth of the Dakota twin suns on his skin and breathe deep of the smell of engine oil and Dean’s sweat as he passed by the junker.
On the evening of Sam’s third day awake, Bobby handed Dean a case in the Minnesota system, a possible haunting. Dean’s eyes lit up and Sam knew he was thinking of the vast open star-scapes and the freedom of the black, but then his face shuttered, wary, as he glanced over at Sam.
“I’m not sure, Bobby. Maybe I should finish off the work on the XD-17 first. Isn’t there any hunter closer?”
Sam rolled his eyes and snatched the infotab out of Bobby’s hand before Dean even finished his question.
“Oh cool, Dean, look. The case is in one of the outliers, Thief River Falls. We could swing by the Alexandria Magnetar.” He watched Dean, careful to keep his own expression easy, casual. He didn’t want to show Dean how desperate he was to take this case. The moment Bobby offered this chance, Sam felt an overwhelming need to be on the move – to run away? to atone? – he didn’t want to examine his own reasons too deeply. He could see Dean wavering.
“The magnetar? Is it active?”
Sam pressed his advantage, hiding a smile. “Yeah, it’s going through some serious star quakes; should be a real powerful gamma-ray flare display going on right now. But if you want to finish the XD-17…”
Dean grabbed the infotab, scanning it rapidly. “Can’t play when there’s work to be done, Sammy boy. Better go pack.”
::-Dean-::
Sam was fine. He was inexplicable, a mystery, but that was normal.
Of course, Dean couldn’t help watching him, but that was nothing new. Dean had been watching since Sam was a babe in arms, so he wasn’t going to break the habit of a lifetime just because Sam had freaky artificial walls inside his mind. Some things were different – for instance, it was Sam who set their course for Thief River Falls, and as the hours passed in the peaceful boredom of the black, Dean increasingly ceded interactions with the ship to Sam. Dean wasn’t sure this was a good idea, considering where Sam had just come from, but it made Sam happy to interface with Baby, so Dean couldn’t find it in his heart to object. Even though he was starting to feel like a superfluous booster engine round the two of them.
Apart from this role reversal in their relationship with the Impala, they readily fell into their old rhythms; teasing each other about random shit, long comfortable silences over meals that Dean still prepared, knocking shoulders sharing a bunk to watch old movies. Dean was occasionally reminded that this wasn’t the old days when he wandered into command to find Sam deep in conversation with the ship, but on the whole, given Castiel’s dire warnings and Bobby’s pessimism, Dean thought things were going pretty well. When Sam pushed that stupidly long hair out of his eyes and smiled, Dean was shocked to recognise that the unfamiliar warm feeling in his chest was close to happiness.
::-Sam-::
Sam was content.
He felt Dean’s eyes follow him everywhere, but that was comforting in its familiarity. They’d never worried too much about personal space; it was hard to maintain an illusion of privacy on a ship the size of the Impala, and this was all Sam had ever known. It had been even worse when Dad had been there with them, which was probably why Sam and Dad had always clashed so badly.
Since they’d left Bobby’s, Sam had felt even more at home on the ship than he remembered, as if every nut and bolt and circuit were part of him. He breathed deep of the recycled air, he endlessly invented opportunities for physical closeness with Dean just to revel in the warmth of the touch of Dean’s hand rubbing the back of his neck in absent-minded affection, or casually smacking Sam’s butt when passing by on his way to rustle up something tasty in the galley.
There were gaps in his memory, Sam was aware, but it didn’t bother him too much. He was sure he’d remember, eventually. When the time was right.
::
::-Epilogue-::
In a cocoon of woven shadows, Lucifer’s fragmentary grace is singing.
On a raven’s wing, I’ll fly you to heaven
I’ll burn you with golden eyes of ember
Come fly with me to heaven
Come touch the Hand of God
I’ll make you a king
I’ll make us both kings.
::-END-::
A/N: The overall inspiration for turning Sam into the ship comes from Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship who Sang, though it’s only the loosest conceptual relationship! Lucifer’s song at the end is a paraphrasing of The White Buffalo’s Come Join the Murder.
I did a lot of world building in my head so I hope this all makes sense on the page.
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Date: 2017-02-27 01:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-02-27 06:13 pm (UTC)I'm so happy you enjoyed this one, even more so because you're a McCaffrey fan! :D
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Date: 2017-02-27 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-02-27 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-02-28 06:14 pm (UTC)The ending added an uneasy fear to the future that I adored - very creepy!
Thank you so much for sharing - what a gripping read! Take care :)
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Date: 2017-02-28 09:06 pm (UTC)