Disclaimer: The boys aren't mine.

Summary: Tag to Plucky Pennywhistle's Magical Menagerie. Dean's feeling guilty, and finds a way to make it up to Sam.

Good Clown, Bad Clown

I'm awake.

This is stupid.

Sam's the insomniac. Sam's the one who likes to do push-ups in the middle of the night. (No, seriously. A week ago I woke up around three in the morning needing to use the bathroom and there was Supergeek working out in the dark. In the dark!)

But today, he's fast asleep. (Again, seriously. I would know if he were faking.) He's fast asleep and I'm wide awake with my head full of horror shows.

It's no mystery, of course. I know why I can't sleep.

I abandoned Sam. It was years ago, and I was a kid, and it wasn't like I left him on the curb in a seedy neighbourhood where he could be kidnapped by child traffickers. But still. I abandoned Sam while I went to hit on girls, and even though it was in a place that was supposed to be safe, I wound up giving him clown phobia and it got him hurt more than twenty years later.

And, just to be clear on this, it wasn't grown-up, house-sized Sam, Sam with the upper-body strength of a bulldozer, that I abandoned. (Because that doesn't count as abandonment. That counts as doing the normal-people thing often enough to make sure Sam and I don't kill each other.)

No, I abandoned my little brother, back when it wasn't ironic to say that, and it got him hurt.

Sam got hurt because I didn't do my job.

See, but that's not everything. It sucks, but that's just guilt, and I can deal with guilt. Repress, wash down, repress, wash down, I'm an expert at that.

What I can't deal with is fear.

And right now? Fear is pretty much all I'm feeling. Fear so strong it outweighs the guilt, because things that happened years ago – decades ago – are not supposed to come back to bite us in the ass. And things I did aren't supposed to come back to bite Sam in the ass.

And if the clown thing came back to haunt us, then who knows what else is lurking? The roulette-playing spirit from Reno? The Tampa waitress? That – oh please no – that dude I screwed over at pool the first time Dad took me hustling?

If I had to pick, I'd go for the pool dude. I don't hustle pool much these days – when it needs to be done, I let Sam do it; never tell him I said this but he's actually brilliant at pool – but I used to do it regularly. And in all my years of parting bar-goers from their cash (hey, not my fault if the guy wants to bet his hard-earned money on a game with a random stranger), I've never met anyone as intimidating as that first pool dude.

He'd looked me over, head to toe, frowned, and said, "I'll remember you."

Dad had taken us straight back to the motel, woken Sam, packed, and we'd been on the road by dawn.

OK, fine, maybe it's stupid to think that the pool guy will remember me now, or recognize me even if he does. And even if he does, he definitely won't recognize Sam, who's as different from the scrawny little kid he used to be as… well, as twelve-foot walls of muscle are from scrawny kids.

And even if he recognizes me and recognizes Sam and still begrudges the twenty dollars I took him for, he'd have to be stupid to go up against us.

Still.

If it's not him, there'll be something.

Someone.

Someone who's going to hurt Sam because of me.

Just like the clowns who already beat Sam up because of me. And I may have laughed at him when I saw him covered with glitter, but believe me I stopped laughing very quickly when we got back to the motel and I saw how badly his chest was bruised.

That could so easily have been a cracked rib and a punctured lung and a trip to the hospital and the heart monitor flatlining and –

Sam's OK.

I have to reassure myself of that, so I get up, sidle over to the next bed, and sit on the edge. Sam stirs, mumbles something unintelligible, and rolls over to face me. He doesn't wake up, though, and I'm grateful for that. The kid needs all the sleep he can get.

I brush the stupid floppy hair off his face. He looks so young. Younger than twenty-nine, younger than however many years he spent in the Cage.

And although it makes me feel like the worst human being in the world, I'm a little grateful for the clown phobia. Not for it almost getting him killed (that isn't, and never will be, OK) but because it feels like recovery – it feels like hope – that Sam could be subjected to a couple of lifetimes' worth (more, if you factor in a hunter's average life expectancy) of the worst tortures Lucifer and Michael could dream up and still be scared of something like clowns.

That's my boy.

And then there's the giant slinky sitting in my duffel.

I don't know how Sam knew I had my eye on it – he was off trying to play bad cop while I was trying to 'earn' it – but he did, somehow, the way Sam seems to know everything about me.

I don't think I can overstate how good it is to have my baby brother back.

A sudden chill creeps into my blood as I remember that year – that year – and the six months after it. I never slept without nightmares, not once, and the ones where I saw Sam jumping and the hole closing over him were the good ones. In the bad ones I was back in Hell, torturing people on the rack, spending hours – days – on one stubborn soul that refused to break no matter what I did to it – and then hazel eyes would look up into mine with hurt and fear and betrayal and –

And I have to do something to make myself feel less guilty about this.

I have a sudden idea. I grab Sam's laptop and settle down at the table.

It's several minutes later that I realize that Sam's awake, staring at me in the darkness.

"Go back to sleep," I tell him. "I'm fine."

"Uh-huh." Sam sounds disbelieving. "That's why you're sitting here in the middle of the night, angsting so loudly I could hear you in my sleep." He shakes his head. "I'm fine, Dean. No permanent damage."

"How is it clowns?" I say. And then I wonder how that happened, because that wasn't the question I meant to put to him right now.

"Dude, what?" Sam asks, sitting up.

Well, now that I've asked it… "Your greatest fear. After everything, how is it clowns?"

"You thought it would be Lucifer?"

"Well… Pretty much, yeah."

Because after forty years in a Hell that's significantly less miserable than the Cage, I know a thing or two.

Sam shrugs. "I stopped being scared of him pretty quickly. I knew what he could do to me. It wasn't fun, and it was a lot worse than I imagined it would be when I jumped, but… You know."

"No, I don't know."

Sam sighs, that put-upon sigh that he uses in lieu of Big brothers are stupid. "I wasn't as scared of him as I could've been because the fact that he and Michael could do that to me meant I was in the Cage and they were in the Cage and my plan had worked and you were OK. It was horrible, Dean, but it meant you were safe and you hadn't been forced into being Michael's vessel, so I wasn't that afraid of it."

Yup, rip my heart out. That's my boy.

"And clowns are scarier than Lucifer and Michael?" Sam looks away, and I press harder. "Sammy?"

"There were always clowns at Plucky's," Sam says in a tiny voice. "And whenever we went to Plucky's it meant you were going to leave me there and… you know…"

And now that you've done that, you can just tie it into knots.

"Sam, I'm sorry –"

"I know," Sam says quickly. "I know, and it was years ago. You don't have to apologize. I just… You asked why clowns freak me out."

"You know I'm not going anywhere, right?" Sam nods, and I add, "Except to Vegas. Come take a look at this." Sam looks disinclined to get out of bed, so I take the laptop to him. "We missed Vegas week thanks to Becky – we should do something fun to make up for it."

Sam's staring at the screen like he doesn't believe his eyes. "You want to go to a Broadway show?"

"That's the kind of pansy thing you like, isn't it?" Now Sam's transferred the incredulous stare to me. I shrug uncomfortably. "I promise I won't abandon you at Plucky's."

"Wait…" Sam's eyes narrow at the screen. "Commedia dell'arte? Really, Dean? The stupid clown toy and having to go back to Plucky's and then getting beaten up by clowns wasn't bad enough? Now you want me to go to a Harlequinade with you?"

He sounds hurt, and I hurry to explain.

"Not – look, I get it, Sam. You're not over it yet. But I don't think getting beaten up by clowns is going to end any phobias here."

"And having to watch them for two hours is?"

"I'm going with you." I tilt the screen further towards him. "I booked two tickets, see? I'm going with you. We'll get dinner at one of those fancy places where the portions are just about big enough to fill a tablespoon, and then we'll see the play, and then we'll come back to our motel room and get drunk off our asses and I'll let you tell me about the classical influences of Italian theatre or whatever the hell it is." Sam still looks like he doesn't get it – freaking moron – so I explain. "We replace the bad memories involving clowns with a good memory involving clowns. Big brother abandoning you so he can hit on girls with big brother making sure you have a good time."

"Oh."

"What do you think?"

Sam smiles at me. Shyly, the freaking girl.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, let's do that."

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