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persephone-garnata · 3 years

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The Only Thing You Can Never Buy In Heaven

Just finished my first fanfic in more than two years!

Thank you, SPN finale :D

remembering this scene

It’s a wincest one-shot about our favourite co-dependent soulmates, with middlegame Sam/Eileen. It’s mostly canon-compliant, except for Miracle goes to Heaven too, and there’s the Samulet, because I love the Samulet.

Read it on AO3 here or below the cut:

The Only Thing You Can Never Buy In Heaven

Dean loved driving around in the Impala, Led Zeppelin blasting on the stereo – the sound much cleaner now, the acoustic guitar opening of Ramble On coming through as clear as a crisp spring day. Always his favorite song to drive to, along the endless highways of Heaven.

He visited with old friends – Bobby, obviously, his mom and dad, he went to the Roadhouse to catch up with Ellen, Jo, Ash and the rest. There were so many he knew who had died before him – hunters and civilians alike. But mostly, he just drove around – through countryside in all seasons, spring and summer and winter and fall, through mountains and deserts and cities and forests, along the shores of lakes and oceans. He stopped at countless roadside diners and ate countless plates of delicious food, without having to think about cholesterol once.

But there was always something missing – or rather, someone. Someone to tell him to think about cholesterol, even though he didn’t have to. Someone to sit shotgun, and keep him company on nights beneath the stars. He knew he wanted Sam to live a full life, to enjoy all those years he deserved – a career, a family, a house with a white picket fence. And after all, against the backdrop of eternity, what difference did a few decades make?

Enough difference, it turned out, to make him feel constantly like half of him was missing. Especially since there was one thing he couldn’t find, no matter how much he searched, no matter how many boxes he emptied out or pockets he rifled. You’d think that, in Heaven, you should be able to get hold of whatever the hell – or whatever the heaven – you wanted, but there seemed to be at least one exception to that. He found the replica and hung it from the rearview mirror, but it wasn’t the same.

‘Do you have idea where I can find my old necklace?’ he asked Bobby, one time when they were sitting on the porch together, drinking beers and shooting the breeze. Bobby gave him a slightly sad smile, and didn’t ask which one he meant. There could only be one.

‘Think Sam’s still got it,’ he said. ‘Back on Earth. You’ll just have to wait. Won’t seem like no time at all. Like I told you – he’ll be along.’

‘But –‘ Dean creased his brow - ‘Sam still has Baby, too, and yet there she is.’ He pointed at the car, sitting gleaming on the driveway. ‘And – I don’t know how this is supposed to work, I was never that good at all this stuff, but isn’t there loads of stuff in Heaven that’s on Earth too?’

‘Oh, you got that right,’ said Bobby. ‘There are exceptions to the rule, see? Cosmic special cases. And that necklace is one of them. Can’t be in two places at once.’

Dean took a long pull of his beer, thinking. ‘Can’t I make a new one?’ he asked. ‘Or – buy one?’

Bobby laughed at that. ‘Buy one? It ain’t something you can buy, boy. In fact, I figure it’s the only thing you can never buy in Heaven.’

‘I just – don’t feel right without it.’

Bobby turned his shrewd gaze on Dean. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It feels like there’s half of you missing, doesn’t it?’

‘Well – yeah.’

‘That’s ‘cause there is half of you missing. That’s how soulmates work.’

Dean nearly choked on his beer, and Bobby had to slap him between the shoulder blades. ‘Oh, you didn’t think I didn’t know about the soulmates thing, did ya? The amount of time I spent with you boys – gimme some credit.’

‘I – well – we – I thought…’

‘You thought what? That soulmates aren’t supposed to be brothers? That incest would keep you out of Heaven? I think we both know that ain’t true.’

Dean sipped his beer in silence, not trusting himself to say anything at all. He’d always known – or at least suspected – that the link between him and Sam went deeper than any bond normal brothers, or lovers, or even brother-lovers, shared – but soul mates? He remembered what Ash had said to him at the Roadhouse-Heaven, all those years ago – about soulmates having shared Heavens, and had he expected that he and Sam would share their own little piece of eternity?

If he was honest with himself, he’d never thought he’d reach Heaven at all, after his years in Hell, and all the other things he’d done, and now that Jack had reconfigured things so that everyone could visit each other – well, that meant the soulmate rule no longer applied, surely? And yet – the feeling he always had, the ache like he’d lost half of himself – dammit, like half his soul was missing – that had to mean something. He’d wanted Sam to have his own life – had finally come to terms with the idea that they had horizons beyond hunting, and that his baby brother might want to explore those horizons without him – and yet now – there was only one thing he could think about.

He had finished his beer, and was on the verge of getting up to get back behind the wheel (no issues with drink-driving in the Great Beyond) and go for a long drive with only Led Zeppelin for company. Perhaps he’d even see if he could go and visit John Bonham, and some of the other rock stars who’d reached the top of that Stairway a long time ago. Then something burst out of the bushes and came running up to the porch – a shaggy dog, woofing in delight and licking his hands.

‘Hey, Miracle!’ said Dean, petting his head. ‘You’re a good boy, arentcha, a good boy…’ his voice trailed off as he thought about something. ‘Wait, if you’re here, does that mean…?’

‘All dogs go to Heaven,’ said Bobby, and lifted his beer bottle. ‘Guess he ain’t on Earth no more.’

‘Wow,’ said Dean, his hands pausing in Miracle’s long fur until the dog nudged him to make him continue petting. ‘Did Sammy look after you? Did he give you a long and happy life?’

Miracle just barked enthusiastically, which Dean took as a Yes. He buried his face in the dog’s fur and felt, for a little while, just a little bit closer to Sam.

***

It took Sam a long time to accept that his brother was really gone. The bunker felt so empty, all the time, and as the hunts gradually dried up, he decided he needed to move out. The echoing underground spaces just felt haunted – not by Dean, Sam could have coped with a ghostly brother – but by his absence. He caught himself, several times, eyeing up a gun, or a bottle of sleeping pills, or a coil of rope, or a knife, and wondering how long it would take for him to be reunited with Dean. And he had to admit that, if it hadn’t been for Miracle, he probably would have gone through with it. The dog just kept demanding to be fed, and to be taken out for runs, and to be petted. He never gave up on Sam, so Sam couldn’t give up on himself.

Finally – on the day he got the call about the werewolf hunt – he resolved to leave the Bunker behind him. He knew that, once he turned the light out and closed the door behind him, he’d never be back again. So he packed up the trunk of the Impala with three boxes of possessions: one for himself, one for Miracle, and one for Dean. The last box was full of memories – shirts which still held a lingering scent of Dean, his old leather jacket, his watch, his most beloved vinyl records, his favorite weapons, a few photographs – and his necklace – the one with the amulet.

Sam had kept that necklace in his pocket for so long it had almost become a part of him, but he’d always thought of it as a part of Dean. Now, he lifted it up to the light inside the bunker, looked at that inscrutable face, and felt a powerful tug inside him – a tug of both sadness, and hope. He put the necklace inside the box with the rest, and for the first time since Dean had died, thought that maybe, just maybe, things might turn out right.

That werewolf hunt turned out to be his last hunt for a while. Sam drifted around, sleeping in whatever dog-friendly motels he could find, or on the back seat of the Impala when he couldn’t find one. He scoured the local news and the internet, looking for more cases, trying to throw himself back into the job. Yet it seemed that the monsters were thinner on the ground now, and soon Sam realized his heart wasn’t in it any more – the family business just wasn’t the same without the family.

He toured around for some time, checking in with old friends. He saw Jody and Donna and Clare and Alex. He saw Charlie and her girlfriend. He saw Jesse and Cesar. He saw Garth and his family – little Sam and Castiel were growing well. No Dean though – his absence was a constant pain, like the ache in a missing limb, and Sam felt it even more acutely when he saw other people’s happiness.

He kept seeking people out, further and further flung branches of the extended Winchester hunting family. He tracked down Lisa’s son Ben Braeden, now twenty-one and studying medicine, and looking just a little bit like Dean at the same age. He even reconnected with Amelia, now living happily with her husband Don and their two young children – and a big shaggy dog. He really regretted that particular foray into his own past – it just made him feel miserable, and as he drove away from their picture-perfect house, if it hadn’t been for Miracle on the back seat, he’d have probably driven the Impala straight off a bridge into the nearest canyon.

Finally, he worked his way back to Jody Mills, and as he sat in her house late at night, drinking her wine and eating her potato chips, Miracle gnawing a bone at his feet, she said something to him.

‘You know you need to see her at some point, Sam,’

He didn’t need to ask who she meant.

‘It’s – not that easy,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it? You know she cares about you, and I think you care about her.’

Sam sighed. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I really do. But – me and Dean –‘

‘You had something special,’ Jody filled in for him. ‘She knows that too.’

Sam sighed again. ‘Something special’ was one way to describe what he and Dean had shared, he supposed, but how could he ever really convey the true depth of their relationship? How could he possibly tell someone – anyone – the way he and Dean had lived together, hunted together, slept together (and yes, they had slept together, but almost more significant was the way they had always huddled together for warmth and protection, neither of them ever able to sleep properly without the other). How they had been everything to each other – more than brothers, more than lovers, more than anything?

He looked up, and saw that Jody was smiling at him.

‘And I’m sure she knows how you feel without him. If you’re worried what she’ll think of you – don’t. Most hunters – we got something, some pain, we carry with us.’

‘We’re all damaged goods,’ said Sam, and finished the rest of the glass of wine with one big gulp.

‘What’s damaged can be mended, if you’ll only let someone try,’ said Jody, and took the empty glass from him.

‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Sam, and got his phone out right then to send a message to Eileen, before the courage could leave him.

They arranged to meet for brunch at a trendy vegan hipster café (which also accepted dogs) in New York City, where Eileen had settled now. Sam remembered how Dean had never wanted to drive the Impala into Manhattan, so he left Baby at a big parking lot in a commuter town and rode the train into town, Miracle on the seat next to him. And he remembered how his brother had always hated these trendy cafes with their avocado toast and their artisan coffees and their stupid plant milks. Meeting Eileen at a place like this felt like moving on – which felt both fresh and good and right, and gave Sam an aching feeling of guilt.

The café was noisy with both music and chatter – Sam felt glad that he’d spent a long time practising his signing beforehand, so that he and Eileen could have a silent conversation in the middle of the hubbub. They sat on a half-collapsed sofa, twisted sideways to face each other, while they drank their almond-milk lattes and ate their sourdough toast, topped with scrambled tofu, wilted spinach, and a sprinkle of dukkah. Delicious, and not a nitrate in sight. Dean would have hated this place.

After exchanging a few stilted words of standard greetings, Eileen asked Sam to describe what happened on his and Dean’s final hunt. He did his best to describe everything to her – and found that having to do so with his hands really helped, because he didn’t have to worry about his voice cracking. Then she asked him what he’d been doing since, and he told her that too – along with an apology for not contacting her sooner.

‘It’s okay,’ she signed. Then she asked him the killer question: ‘And how are you coping without him?’

How was he coping without him? ‘Not well,’ he signed. ‘If it hadn’t been for Miracle here – I think I wouldn’t have made it this far, to be honest with you.’ He pulled a face. It was the closest he’d yet come to admitting to anyone just how close he’d come to ending his own life, stretching out ahead of him like an endless highway, with nobody sitting by his side.

‘I’m glad you’ve made it this far,’ Eileen signed back. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

There was an awkward pause. Sam drained his coffee and then petted Miracle, just for something to do with hands.

‘So – what happens now?’ Eileen signed to him.

‘I think – you-’ Sam stopped, waved his hands in a clearing-away gesture, and started again. ‘I would like you to be a part of my life,’ he signed. ‘If you want to. However you want to.’

Eileen nodded, thoughtfully. Sam knew a moment of pure panic – what if she was going to tell him to get lost, that she’d already found somebody else and wanted nothing to do with him ever again? And that moment of panic told him that actually, no matter how close to the edge of despair he’d gotten over these last months, he did want something more out of life – he wanted Eileen beside him.

‘I would like to be a part of your life,’ she signed, eventually. ‘If you’ll let me in.’

‘I will try my best,’ Sam signed back to her. ‘But – you should know – me and Dean – we were much closer than most brothers. Without him – it’s difficult for me.’

‘I understand,’ she signed. ‘And I don’t mind.’

‘Really?’ Sam accompanied the sign with a pleading look – the kind of look Dean had always called his ‘puppy-dog eyes’.

‘Really. I like you, Sam. I like you a lot. You’re a good man. And if you’ve got baggage – well, I have trust issues myself. We can take things slowly, and I understand if you need time for yourself, sometimes. And maybe I’ll need some time for myself, too.’

‘Thank you,’ signed Sam, and meant it.

Eileen sighed then, and looked away, briefly, before turning back to him.

‘I want you to be honest with me, Sam,’ she signed.

‘Of course,’ he replied, although his heart sank at what she might ask him. Being close to a dead brother was one thing – actual Game of Thrones, Flowers in the Attic incest was another.

She didn’t ask him about the incest. Or at least not in a sexual way. That would almost have been preferable to what she did ask him.

‘Do you think you and Dean were – or are – soulmates?’

Sam blinked a few times, and had to ask her to repeat the question. She did, even saying that word ‘soulmates’ out loud for his benefit.

Well, he’d promised to be honest with her. ‘Yes,’ he signed. She just nodded.

‘I thought so,’ she signed.

‘Is that – a problem?’ he asked. ‘Do you – not want to be in life now?’

‘It’s okay,’ she signed. ‘Thank you for being honest.’

‘Is it really okay? Being with me, knowing I’m soulmates with – somebody else?’

‘Most people never meet their soulmates, or never have one in the first place. I’d rather be with you, knowing you’ve told me the truth, than somebody I don’t know if I can trust.’

Sam nodded, slowly. It made sense. Sort of. To be sitting here, with Eileen, talking about his dead soulmate.

‘Shall I get us some more coffees?’ Eileen asked him.

‘Please.’

***

He and Eileen did take things slowly, at first. Then it felt like they accelerated their life together. After Miracle died – the dog had already been old when he and Dean had found him – it felt like the last thing tying Sam to his old life had gone.

As he hugged the old dog to him in the vet’s office, he whispered to him: ‘You’re a good boy, Miracle. You go straight to Dean now, tell him I’ll be all right.’ Miracle just nuzzled Sam a little, and Sam felt the simple love in that gesture, hoped he could take the message to Dean.

He sat in the front seat – the shotgun seat – of the Impala for a long time after that, crying his eyes out. And yet, he no longer wanted to drive off a cliff. He wanted to stay alive, for at least a little longer. He messaged Eileen, and started driving before she’d even answered him.

When he turned up on her doorstep, she saw the absence beside him, and invited him in without a word.

Shortly after that, they got a house together, in upstate New York, parked the Impala in the garage, under a dust sheet, and started their new life. They got married, in a very low-key ceremony, only a few people – their old hunting buddies – present. Eileen got a job in computing – helping to design and test user interfaces to be suitable for the hard-of-hearing. And, while she didn’t say anything to him directly. Sam realized that, if they were going to settle down properly, he should really get himself an actual job. He hadn’t been a hunter for some time – he’d stopped without even realizing it. So he finished his legal training, and finally qualified as an attorney. It felt weird to be doing a ‘normal’ white-collar job at last, but he consoled himself with the thought that, with all the pro-bono work he did, he was still saving people – and hunting things, in a different way.

A few years later, although Sam had never really seen himself as a father – Dean was the one with the strong paternal instincts - they had a child. When they came to thinking of a name, Sam was filled with all sorts of suggestions – but Eileen shook her head, and signed at him ‘How about Dean?’

And Sam didn’t like that idea at first – it felt too much like revisiting the past he’d tried to leave behind – but the more he thought about it, the more he found he couldn’t think of his little baby boy as anything other than Dean. So Dean it was, and would ever be. He had another Dean in his life now, and he gave his son all the love he had.

He never forgot the other Dean – how could he? – but gradually, over the years, he accepted that he had other people in his life now, who were more important to him than his dead brother. At least for now, and now was the only time that really mattered. He got the Impala out very occasionally – one Halloween he even sat behind the wheel wearing his costume of an old Grandpa, complete with cheap grey wig.

Eileen and he rarely spoke about the car, or the old Dean. His life before her, and their son, became something packed away in a box that he only rarely got out looked at – like the amulet he still kept, tucked away, and occasionally took out. Whenever he did so, he admired the golden gleam of the metal, still untarnished after all these years, and let himself fill up with all the aching sadness that was normally stoppered up.

***

Time worked differently in Heaven. Dean knew that. It took him a while to get used to though – however long ‘a while’ was here. He kept expecting things to change faster than they did, or for people – and Miracle – to age and wither away. It was an adjustment to realize, gradually, that here things just went on and on – unless you changed them yourself. And Dean didn’t really want anything to change, not really. He wanted everything to go on as it was, until –

Until Sam arrived. Dean accepted that he shouldn’t wish his brother would hurry up and get there – they’d have eternity together, after all, and wanting eternity to start sooner made no sense. Not when he’d told Sam to live on without him. He wanted Sam to live a full life, to hook up properly with Eileen at last, get a job, wear some dorky sweaters, even have a kid or two. Enjoy all the apple-pie-and-picket-fence stuff that he, Sam, had always wanted, and he, Dean, didn’t.

Did he? Hadn’t part of him always enjoyed cooking for his little brother, taking care of him? Hadn’t part of him longed for Ben to be his son? Hadn’t part of him wanted to settle down and have a family?

Well, in Heaven, all things were possible. He could find somebody else – like Rufus had Aretha – and have a new life, for a while at least. However long ‘a while’ was, here. He didn’t know how to start finding someone, though, or who that someone would even be. Whenever he tried to imagine sharing his afterlife with anyone, only one person ever sprang to mind.

And then. One day – one moment – when he was standing on the bridge, enjoying the view over river and the forests, Miracle by his side. He felt, without being able to say how he felt it, that his brother was here. At last. Or – time worked differently here. Maybe not at last. Maybe he was right on time.

Eternity had to start sometime, and Dean guessed it was starting now. He smiled.

‘Hey Sammy,’

He turned around. And there he was, exactly as he remembered him. After however many years it had been for him on Earth. Sam looked a little tired – as if the last few months of his life had been a lot to bear. And – almost shy, almost as if he was worried Dean wouldn’t want to see him any more, that he might somehow have moved on, in the time before he arrived in Heaven. Well, for better or worse, he hadn’t.

‘Dean,’ said Sam, and met his eyes, and smiled.

They embraced, Miracle rubbing himself against both of their legs at once. As they did so, Dean felt something hot pressed against him, and when the drew apart again, he saw a light glowing from Sam’s pocket.

‘Is that…?’

Sam dipped his hand inside his pocket, and pulled out the necklace. The amulet. The only thing you can never buy in Heaven. It was glowing, as it had done in the presence of God, except now –

‘I think that means,’ Dean started to say, but then Sam cut him off.

‘I know,’ he said, and lifted the necklace to put it around Dean’s neck again. Dean ducked his head without even thinking, and felt the weight of the amulet fall into place once more. Once more – and forever. And finally, he felt whole again. He had been reunited with the other half of his soul, and he was now complete. And he always would be.

Sam and Dean leaned together against the parapet of the bridge, and knew they had eternity to explore all the vistas of Heaven. Together.

#wincest #forever wincest fest

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