This story is for TolkienGirl, whose encouragement convinced me it is finally time to start writing Winchester angst (Don't worry, the Dean story is coming soon!). I'm a long time fan of the show, but this is my first foray into writing for the fandom. Not sure how canon-compliant this story is, to be completely honest with you, but it's what I wanted to write and so I wrote it. Probably depends on your interpretation of pre-Series Winchesters. My interpretation is . . . complicated.

Disclaimer: I own nothing Supernatural beyond a button pinned to my backpack that has a freaked out Sam and a freaky clown on it.

"I remember what she looked like," he says one morning, when it's just him and Dean and no one else. It's only their second day in Sacramento but Dad's already found them a place where they can train—and play, even, as long as it goes in that order. The field is nothing but frozen dirt and sparse grey grass almost up to Sam's armpits, thick with a wet, white mist that never quite dissipates in the pale winter sunlight. It's got a rusty old chain-link fence at one end, separating it from the dull rumble of the highway, and from where he sits Sam can see the back of the motel like a gravestone jutting out of the earth, slate and cold.

"How's that?" Dean huffs between push-ups. Dad only told them to do their regular number of reps each morning while he's away but Dean always insists on doing about thirty extra. He's still stubbornly at it, the back of his t-shirt soaked dark with sweat along his spine. Sam finished his own set a while earlier, so he's just watching and waiting for Dean to finish up now so they can walk back to the room to scrounge up some breakfast. His own sweat's long since gone ice-cold on his skin, making him shiver.

Privately, Sam thinks Dean's pretty stupid to work himself harder than he has to. It's not like Dad's even there to see.

"Sammy?" Dean forces out on an exhale as his body lifts away from the ground again, his face all crunched up in concentration.

"I remember what she looked like," he repeats, chin in his hands.

"Who looks?"

"Mom," says Sam. "I remember Mom."

For a moment the only sound is that faraway freeway grumble and a crow somewhere barking like a dog, and then Dean spills out of his perfect push-up form to lie sprawled half on his side, muscles quivering, his face flushed bright as he stares. His eyes are as wide as Sam's ever seen them, round like quarters.

"What do you mean, you remember Mom?"

"I just do. She had yellow hair, and a white dress on."

"Don't be stupid," Dean says, and then he grins. It's an awful grin, and he's still breathing too hard, the air cutting through his teeth back and forth like a saw. "You were just a baby, Sammy. You can't remember stuff from when you were a baby. You're remembering her from Dad's pictures, is all."

"She was on fire," Sam says, very quietly.

The grin just crashes off of Dean's face.

"Shut up, Sam," he says.

He jumps to his feet and jams his hands into fists and his fists into his pockets as he glares at his little brother.

"You don't remember anything," Dean grits out, his voice gone all funny, and then he sets off back towards the motel so fast he's almost running, head down, shoulders tight and high. He doesn't even wait for Sam to catch up with him, doesn't even look round to see if he's following.

*

A few months later finds them all sitting together at a crappy rest stop McDonalds in the middle of Nowhere, Alabama. It's about three in the morning and the windows are like slick black mirrors, with not another soul in the whole place apart from the bored-looking workers behind the counter. Dad's in a pretty good mood, sipping at his black coffee with the newspaper from their last motel on his knee, and Dean's drowsy but still managing to inhale his food like it's the last hamburger on earth. Sam swings his legs, bumping the rubber heels of his sneakers against the seat he's sharing with his brother. He finds it easier than Dean to sleep in the car, so he's feeling pretty awake. He makes a game out of counting the sporadic lights of the cars on the freeway as they slide, silent and ghostlike, across the dark outside the window. They look like little pairs of yellow eyes.

"Hey, Dad," he says when he gets too bored. "Can people remember things from when they were babies?"

Dad's eyes flick up from his paper but otherwise he doesn't move.

"Depends how young," he grunts. His eyes narrow.

"What's got you curious about that, Sam?"

Dean kicks him, hard, under the table, but Sam kicks back, because maybe he's only six years old but he's not dumb.

"No reason," he tells his father in his most wide-eyed-and-innocent way, and Dad, already impatient to get back to the newspaper he's marking up, doesn't press further. They finish their food and Dean takes Sam to the restroom and then they all head back out into the balmy night. Sam can tell his brother's pretty mad at him, but he snuggles into his pile of blankets in the back seat with a happy, vindicated sort of feeling because Dad didn't say No.

*

And the thing is, no matter how Dean teases him sometimes, Sam's not stupid. Most of the time he's not even sure that he can remember, because like Dean said that time in the field when he first brought it up, it just doesn't seem likely. He knows he's seen a couple old photos of Mom's smiling face on Dad's bedside table every motel they've stayed at. He knows that Dean mentions her sometimes: tries to describe the way she sang, or how her hands felt in his hair, the kind of games she would play with him, the food she'd cook, until his voice sort of chokes off and stops. So maybe it's just those little things that Dean has shared that have stayed with him, that have made pictures in his mind of how she was.

(And ever since he can remember he's known she died in a fiery crash, so he supposes he could be imagining the fire, too. Just projections, not memories, stories he's made up without realizing it.)

Secretly, though, he wants to believe that they really are true memories, because it makes him jealous that Dean and Dad are both allowed to remember Mom but that he's just supposed to be shut out. He knows how her loss hurts both of them. He wants to think that he has the right to a part of that grief, too.

*

Life goes on in silence a couple more years, never staying in one place more than a couple months at a time, until suddenly it's Christmas in Nebraska and Dad's a liar with a journal full of secrets and nightmares. Once he gets over the shock of realizing that the two people he loves most have been lying to him his entire life, Sam confronts Dean and of course manages to force his brother into telling him everything. It's a horrible, frightening story, about demons and monsters and the reason why they have so many guns hidden in the trunk of Dad's car, but Sam doesn't once think to disbelieve his brother's wild tale. It makes too much sense.

He wheedles Dean into teaching him the proper way to load and fire a revolver. He starts going to public libraries in the various towns they stay in and uses their computers to look up arcane websites and mythology databases. It takes forever because the internet connection is never particularly good, but he still ends up amassing an impressive amount of data in just a few weeks. Dad, when he finds out, is impressed. Most hunters still use the traditional dusty scroll and ancient tome method of research, and Dad's tickled that his computer-savvy kid has figured out a much more efficient way of learning the business than even the most grizzled veterans have. He has Sam show him how to use a search engine and buys his own laptop with a month's worth of his and Dean's combined pool winnings.

Soon, Sam is accompanying his family on hunts.

*

After Nebraska, the stuff Sam remembers starts getting clearer, more details filling in. By the time he starts high school the memories aren't simply pictures any more, it's like he can feel what it was like actually being there, how scared he was, how it hurt. The awful roaring heat of the fire. The rictus of agony on his mother's face as the flames licked her skin and ate her up and she didn't even try to get away.

He doesn't tell Dean. He wakes up night after night covered all over in sweat and shaking, and he takes to staying up late with Dad's laptop, to sneaking coffee in the evenings and energy drinks in the mornings. Dad yells at him for being so tired all the time, for not pushing himself during the training exercises, for falling asleep and drooling all over the upholstery in the Impala's back seat, for not pulling his weight in the hunt. Nerves raw, Sam starts to yell back.

Dean watches with worry in his eyes, but when he tries to get Sam to share what's up with him he doesn't tell his brother anything about remembering Mom burning on the ceiling.

(He knows Dean doesn't want him to remember. He just doesn't understand why.)

*

"Because you were freaking six months old, Sam," Dean says, his mouth in a line as rigid as the saltline he pours at the windows each night. He's stripped down to his boxers, sitting crosslegged on the floor as he disassembles yet another gun to pass up to Sam, who carefully wipes down each piece before fitting them all back together. The motel room is thick with sticky heat, the humidity getting into all the gear. Florida is always hateful this time of year, has been since they were kids.

"I know," Sam retorts, a little annoyed. This time it was Dean that had brought it up, ever so casuallly. How ya doing, Sammy, and I heard you last night, Sammy, you were, uh. You were calling for Mom. Are you still imagining stuff?

It was the use of the word imagining that had stung him, riling him up hot with the anger he's becoming so familiar with these days.
"I don't know how I remember it, I just do. Dad ran into the room and he started yelling, and I'm pretty sure I cried 'cause of the noise he was making. And it's not just that basic stuff, I remember details too, like how bright it was, the smell of the smoke and what her face looked like when . . . You know, how hair looks when it's on fire, I can remember that. How could I know what that looked like without remembering it? And it was hot, Dean, the fire—I remember the heat. How could I just be making up the heat?"

Dean's quiet. Then he says:

"I don't know, Sammy."

He rubs one hand over his face and for just that instant looks startlingly like his father. Maybe it's the stubble growing in, or maybe it's something else.

Sam swallows hard and looks down at his hands gone idle on his knees. He starts rubbing the cloth over the long gun barrel again. He doesn't look at Dean.

"I remember it," he insists to the gun in his hands, and on the television there's some jingle playing about breakfast cereal, and Dean doesn't say anything at all.

*

He's sixteen and almost delirious with pain the next time he mentions his memories of their mother's death to his brother, but this time it's Dean's fault really that he brings it up. Dean's the one stroking his hair with shaking fingers and saying Keep talking, Sam, please. Keep talking.

"Dad's gone to get the car," he coaxes, "and I can carry you out to meet him, no problem, but you've got to keep talking for me, okay? Can you do that?"

It's a weird question because usually Dean's the one telling Sam he talks too much. Then again, it is just like his brother to suddenly decide he's interested in what Sam has to say right when Sam's pretty much sure the last thing in the world he wants to do right now is open his mouth. Jerk.

"Sammy?" Dean says, and he sounds scared. Real scared. Scared enough that Sam relents and tries to pull his scattered thoughts together enough to talk.

"It was like this," he manages to whisper into the hollow of his brother's shoulder, feeling like he's floating outside his own head. It's hard for him to concentrate because his whole right arm is just a blaze of swollen, burning heat, the venom from the monster's fangs spreading despite Dean's belt cinched tightly above his elbow, and it hurts more than anything he's felt in all his life. It hurts like being on fire.

They hadn't expected the creature to move so fast, and none of the lore had mentioned anything about poison.

"What—what was like this. Hey, Sammy? Come on, kid. Talk to me."

"Mom." Sam floats. His booted feet bump against Dean's legs as Dean goes down the stairs as fast as he can without breaking his neck, and he's got Dean's jacket wrapped around him like a blanket, though he doesn't remember anyone putting it there. He doesn't remember much of anything, actually. He's kind of surprised Dean isn't pissed at him wearing his jacket, though, because lately his brother's taken to freaking out if he so much as touches the stupid thing. Apparently it's vintage, a word that Dean says like that means it's a magical talisman of some kind instead of a cheap leather hand-me-down he managed to scrounge at Salvation Army.

"What about Mom?" says Dean's voice, insistently.

His jacket feels good. There's blood on it, but it's warm. It feels like the only thing holding him together, a safe cocoon to bury himself in. Maybe that's why Dean likes it so much.

"Sam."

"Nothing," he tries to explain, the world sliding in and out of his eyes. "Just, you know. They had to carry me out when she died. Fire. Being carried out, and the fire. It's . . . The same. Feels. The same."

He waits for Dean to start flipping out again, about how he needs to stop talking about it, Sam, and Shut up, Sam, and You don't remember anything, Sam, you were freaking six months old.

But all that happens is that Dean's arms tighten even closer around him, and he can feel his brother's breath hitch in his chest. Outside, the Impala's horn blares.

"Yeah." Dean's voice is thick. "Yeah, it does."

*

They don't talk about it again, not after that night Sam almost died, the night Dean carried him out of the abandoned factory and managed to draw the venom out of his wounded arm with nothing but a bottle of holy water and the touch of some blessed iron Dad had stowed in the trunk under the sawed-off. They were lucky. When Sam wakes up in the hospital a couple days later, when he sees the stitches biting up the length of his forearm and all the dead skin sloughing off, when he sees the tears in his brother's eyes and hears the catch in his father's voice—that's when he knows.

He can't do this any more.

*

And yet six years on finds Sam back in the Impala, back sitting next to his big brother in his father's car, his pockets filled with salt and iron filings. He rubs surreptitiously at his chest, trying to massage away the ache left by the Woman in White when she stuck her fist inside of him, and isn't that just the sort of thing he's missed during these years at school. The feel of ghost fingers trying to rearrange his internal organs. It's enough to make him freaking nostalgic, and that's enough to make him feel sick at himself just a little.

"Sam, you okay?"

"'M fine," he mutters, and leaves off rubbing at his sternum. Even from the corner of his eye he can see the doubtful look Dean darts at him, but his brother doesn't call him out on his lie, and an awkward silence grows between them. The road is like a black ribbon, the trees like twisted hands.

"You sleeping all right? Still get those dreams?" Dean asks him suddenly, determinedly not taking his eyes off the highway. Sam hesitates, confused for a moment, and then realizes what Dean's asking him.

"No. Not for a while now."

Lately it's been a different woman's face he's seen wreathed in flames at night, and he doesn't even want to think about what that could mean, so he doesn't mention it.

Dean seems satisfied, though—maybe even relieved. He stays quiet until the Metallica tape he's been blasting reaches the end of its tracklist, and then he clears his throat.

"Uh, Sam," he begins, and this time he does glance over to meet his brother's gaze. Sam, who had just started slipping into a light doze, his head knocking against the cold glass of the passenger window, squints open one eye grumpily.

"What?"

Dean takes a deep breath.

"It's not that I didn't believe you, you know. All those times you tried to talk to me about—Mom. When we were kids. I just . . . Didn't want you to have to remember that. I remember it, and I had hoped that you didn't. That's all it was."

Sam stares.

"Dean—"

"No, listen. I mean, I want you to know that it's okay. When I was a kid I thought that maybe if I pretended you didn't remember, it couldn't be real, but that probably just screwed with your head even more, I get that now. I've had time to think since you left. And I want you to know that I get it, that you remember and you had to get away from that. Maybe it's my fault for not listening to you all those years, but I get it now."

He shifts a little in his seat, slides his right hand along the steering wheel and then slaps it against the dash as though to punctuate his point.

"It's like that ghost girl who tried to skewer you tonight, you know? She couldn't get away from the bad memories and it turned her into a psychotic, murdering bitch. So I guess I just want you to know that I'm proud of you, Sammy. I'm glad you've been able to get past all that. Put the memory behind you, become your own man. I'm—It's real good."

Dean smiles a quick, awkward smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes and then flips the tape over in the deck without even looking, turns up the volume so loud Sam's sure his teeth are going to start rattling in his mouth. It's okay though because he can't think of a thing to say in reply to that anyway. He thinks of Dad's face, twisted and dark with rage, hollering about how Sam's dead to him if he walks out that door, if he walks out on them, and don't you ever come back. He thinks of how Dean had sat silently on the bed closest to the wall during the whole blow-out, hands gripping his hair as he bent over his knees like he was going to puke. He thinks about Dad and his whiskey, about those few precious photographs of Mom he burned during a black mood years ago. He thinks about Dean's savage joy when he's on the hunt and the things he'd used to say while flying on the adrenaline high after: It'll be just like that, Sammy, you an' me an' Dad, we're gonna catch that murdering sonuvabitch and gut him just like that werewolf, gonna make him bleed and beg, you an' me, we'll take our turns and make him pay, make him pay for Mom, for what he did—

Truth be told, those memories have been haunting Sam a lot more than the one of his Mom burning on the ceiling, lately.

I'm proud of you, Sammy.

He snuggles back into a position that's at least pseudo-comfortable and doesn't bitch about the loud music, which he knows Dean knows is his way of saying thanks.

He closes his eyes.

*

It's a relief to get home, even if he's surprised by how hollow the place feels without his big brother there giving him hell. Funny, how easy it is to fall into old patterns, even after all this time. He wanders into the bedroom, chest still throbbing, and stretches out on the bed, exhausted.

He's thinking about Dean, and Dad, and demons, when he feels something warm and wet on his face.

He opens his eyes.

And then—

Jess.

*

Dean carries him out.

He's screaming, he's pretty sure he's crying too but what hurts is the screaming, like fire in his smoke-filled throat and he just can't stop. He fights his brother every step down the stairs, but Dean was right, when he said that Sam's gotten out of practice. His muscles are lanky and loose as a boy's next to his monster-hunting big brother, and Dean doesn't let go even when they spill out together onto the wet grass, coughing and coughing and blinded by the ashy smoke.

There are sirens, somewhere.

There are sirens, everywhere.

And the fire bursts out through the windows, a heat so brilliant it's nearly white, and inside it somewhere, inside it is—

Sam throws up. He can't even taste the bile through the smoke, but he coughs and retches and spits, and it's like he can't even breathe, like all the oxygen in the world is gone, eaten by the fire. Dean is crouched in the grass beside him, one hand rubbing Sam's back and the other gripping his bicep, and his mouth is moving like he's saying something but his face is white and shocky beneath its mask of soot and smoke, and his eyes are round as quarters.

Sammy, his lips are saying, over and over again. Sammy, talk to me.

But Sam just kneels there as his whole world burns, and he's shaking, and he's shaking, and he's shaking, because God, it's happened again and he realizes now that he hadn't remembered.

He hadn't remembered at all.