Prelude

Your fingers barely brush against the black symbol marking your chest as you pull down the collar of your shirt. There's something resolute contained in the way you move the fabric aside, like it doesn't matter, like nothing matters as much as it used to, but that's okay because you're mostly calloused and scarred over now, at least that's what you tell yourself. It matches the haunted way your eyes drift down for a second to look at nothing. There's an empty acknowledgement in your eyes that says you've known the betrayal of body against will. And maybe that's why your rote movement clashes with the intensity of the glance your brother casts at you as he does the same, the way his brow furrows, as if he's watching, on guard for that haunted piece of you to grow too vulnerable, too exposed, before he'll offer himself as a shield.

Interlude

Sam said he didn't remember. Dean felt like such an asshole for believing him, but he went ahead and did it anyway. They left Bobby's on a Tuesday as afternoon began to stretch into evening. Sam spent the first part of the drive saying nothing much of anything except to answer yes, I said I was fine whenever Dean asked.

When Dean plugged in a cassette, Sam flinched at the sudden flood of sound invading the cabin, drawing in on himself and retreating up against the door.

Dean glanced at him suspiciously. Sam's eyes were closed. His fists were clenched in his lap, white-knuckled and twisted around the leather cord of the anti-possession charm Bobby had given him.

"Sam, come on, man. Something's not right with you. What gives?"

"Can you pull over?" The urgency warred with the quiet and rushed quality of his voice, and Dean almost didn't catch it.

"Yeah, hang on, we're almost to the next—"

Sam lashed out with sudden rage and desperation, his fists slamming violently into the dashboard and against the side of the door. "Dean, stop! Stop the goddamn car!"

Dean fishtailed onto the shoulder, and Sam lurched, gagging, out of the passenger's side while the car was still in motion, stumbling and catching himself on his hands and knees as sharp gravel drove itself into his palms. He scrambled unsteadily to his feet, bracing a hand against his knee as he ran, retching, from the roadside.

He finally dropped to his knees, heaving and sobbing in the tall grass about ten paces away from the Impala.

The blade cutting into Steve Wandell's throat. The look of fear on Jo's face before he slammed her head into the bar.

Sam let the horror of it crash over him and pour out of him, suffocating, drowning him. He felt Dean's steady hand on his back, saying something firm and reassuring that mattered and grounded him even if Sam couldn't put the pieces together into words or sense. His brother's voice brought him back from the edge. But then another wave of horror crushed him.

The sound of Dean's body hitting the water. Dean's strangled cry as Sam's thumb ground into the bullet wound.

Sam choked, gasping, and found the edge of Dean's jacket with a trembling hand. Dean. Dean should have left him. Dean should have killed him, wiped out the evil in him. But he hadn't. Not yet. "I can't," he stuttered. "What I did. Dean. W-what I did." He squeezed his eyes shut and curled his shoulders in at the barrage of images, sounds and sense memories replaying again.

Dean pulled Sam in close. "You didn't, Sam," he said in a hoarse whisper.

He felt one of Sam's hands trembling against his knee, still fisted around Bobby's charm, as if his fingers had frozen that way, convulsively. Dean could see the edges of the metal cutting into Sam's palm leaving bloody smudges against the denim of his jeans. Dean caught Sam's hand and tried to ease his fingers open, but Sam just clung to it harder, driving the sharp metal in deeper. "Oh, Sam."

Sam shook his head, vomit and misery clinging like acid to the back of his throat. "It's going to happen again," he rasped. "They take the same vessel, over and over, you know that. Dean, I…" He looked up at Dean, and Dean understood that there was more he didn't know about the week Sam had been taken, god, didn't want to know. Whatever it was, and however much it hurt him to try and bury his feelings about it now, he had a job to do.

"It's never going to happen again." Dean's voice was harsh with conviction, closing his hand around Sam's fist.

As evening darkened into night around them, the wind picked up and cold pinpricks of rain began to dot the dry, rural earth they knelt on. Dean brought his arm up higher on Sam's shoulder to shelter the exposed skin on the back of his neck. He let Sam sob until he couldn't anymore, with his face pressed against Dean's chest the way he used to when everything was too much, and he angled his back to the wind against the downpour.

The next turnoff found them parked outside a shitty tattoo parlor on the outskirts of Sioux Falls with rain pounding the dirt roads around them into mud, Sam still trembling with his head in his hands while his brother hastily drew the symbol on the back of a Wendy's napkin.

Satisfied, Dean folded it once and tucked it into his back pocket. "Come on," he said, swatting Sam on the leg. "I doubt the classy proprietors of 'Outlaw Tattoo' will ask, but if they do, you're sober and over eighteen."

Sam didn't budge until Dean came around to his side through the rain and yanked open his door, shouting, "Jesus, let's go!"

He kept his eyes on the floor and let Dean do the talking, even when the heavily inked man he was consulting with nodded to Sam and asked "Is he okay?"

"He's fine," Dean snapped. Sam buried his fists in his pockets and hunched his shoulders.

"Are you guys…?"

"Brothers."

"Right."

It wasn't clear from his tone whether he really believed it or not, but Dean seemed more concerned about how accurately the guy was transcribing the design, and Sam's heart was galloping what-if, what-if through a stockpile of nightmares. What if the artist's eyes flashed black. What if the same dark cloud of demon swirled around him from behind, impossible to fight and too fast to escape, and thrust itself into him again oh god paralyzing the part of him he could control but leaving him awake, aware, conscious, seeing, feeling. Forced. Trapped. "Dean!"

He wasn't even aware he called out, just that the room was spinning sideways and he couldn't breathe.

"Sam. Sam! Sam, c'mon!" Dean was holding the front of his shirt, tapping the side of his face. Beyond Dean's face Sam could see the tattoo artist saying something about legal limits and intoxication. Sam squinted and reached up to touch Dean's wrists, maybe to reassure him, he wasn't sure. One hand left bloody smudges on Dean's arm.

Sam looked at the palm of his hand, his empty hand, and convulsed in panic. "Oh god, Dean, where is it? Where?"

Dean understood at once, yanking his own charm from around his neck and quickly closed it into Sam's hand. "Here. Here, Sam."

He turned to the man behind him. "Look man, I know what you're thinking, okay? That we're a couple of nutjobs. And that's fine. You can think whatever you need to think. Just help me out with this one thing, okay? Help me do this for my brother. You do the work, we pay you for it, and we'll be gone. You'll never see us again. No trouble. Deal?"

The guy made a face, indicating that it's already trouble, but says, "Yeah sure, whatever. Two hundred each. I got John set up now, he can take one of you first while I get mine set."

"You first, Sam. We're doing this." He wedged a hand under Sam's arm, helping him up and clasping him on the shoulder. "I'll be in the next chair." Then he added, lower so that only Sam could hear, "This will work. I swear."

Coda

Once drawn outside the range of a bullet or the reach of a knife, or a protective embrace, the illusion of safety slips away, and maybe that's the enormity of it. That's the weight that remains unsaid and unsettled between you. But your fingers brushing against the tattoo touch the echo of what it means. Safety is the illusion that lets you close your eyes at night. The blade under your pillow. Your brother's name within earshot. The promise set in ink over your heart.