Genre: Gen, hurt Sam, MoC Dean
Length: About 2000 words
Rating: R for language and violence
Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Castiel
Synopsis: Written for the following anonymous prompt in the May 2020 ohsam Sam Winchester Prompt-a-thon: Sam: “Please, Dean… Please, just… Just hit me.” Somewhere, recently, I remarked that I may as well have a separate Hurt!Sam tag for fics where Dean is the one who hurts him. So. Here's another one. This probably isn’t what you had in mind, Nonny, and I kind of hate posting it as a fill for this prompt because it became so Dean-centric. And honestly, even I think it’s a bit much. But here you go. Pure whump without plot, hurt without comfort. Takes place during the end of season 10, when the Mark of Cain is ramping up Dean’s violent tendencies. The title is from “With or Without You” by U2.

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Sam has been standing in Dean’s doorway for five minutes. Dean has been ignoring him for five minutes. He’s aware Sam is there, of course. Hyperaware. The Mark on his arm is like an extra set of eyes and ears, an enhanced version of his consciousness of Sam’s location that normally only kicks in when he’s in full-on hunting mode. But nothing is normal now. The Mark wants to know where Sam is at all times. Dean does not know why the Mark cares so much. He does not question it. He upends the whiskey bottle with a trembling hand, drains the last of it, and does not ask Sam what he wants.

“Talk to me,” Sam finally says. Soft. Tentative. “Tell me what’s going on.”

The thing is, there are things Dean can't tell his brother.

He cannot tell Sam that when he looks at him like that, with the puppy dog eyes full of sympathy and concern and a bit of fear, Dean cannot tell him he has a vivid sense memory of putting his hands on the sides of that face and pressing his thumbs into those sad eyes, pushing until he feels the pop, rendering Sam incapable of giving him that look. He cannot tell him Alastair used to bring him boys who looked like Sam, boys he’d made to look like Sam, and laugh with glee when that was the first thing Dean did to them, every time. No, he cannot tell him that.

What he can say is “Sam, you need to not be here.”

“Where else do I need to be?”

Dean runs one hand down his face. The other clenches into a fist. “Just not here, okay? You don’t know what’s going on.”

“I do, Dean. I know more than you think.” Sam steps closer, still tentative. He’s not quite within Dean’s reach. The Mark is very aware of the distance. “I know that whatever the Mark is doing to you, it builds up. I see the shaking, and the drinking. I know that after a hunt, after you kill something, after you… after you hurt something, you’re better for a while. And I know… I know you shouldn’t be hunting right now. Not the way you are right now.”

Something hot flares up behind Dean’s eyes at that, because hunting is the only thing that helps the way he is right now, and Sam knows that, and here he is saying don’t. The Mark throbs its angry assent.

“So I was thinking,” Sam continues. “If you need to hit something, if that’s what helps. Hit me.”

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Yesterday I was blessed with the opportunity to watch 5.16, "Dark Side of the Moon," on TNT. The scene near the end, where the angel Joshua tells the Winchesters that God knows what's going on and isn't going to do anything and wants them to stop bugging him… well, it hits harder in light of what we learn about Chuck at the end of s14, doesn't it? At the time I thought Joshua was describing a God-the-clockmaker role, a God who just wanted to let his creation run on its own. But now we know that Chuck wasn't just declining to fix things for the Winchesters. He was actively setting them up and enjoying the drama. And yes, I'm sure the writers weren't thinking about how things would play out nine seasons later when they wrote that scene. It's just nice that the Continuity Fairy gave us this unintentional gift.





Other amazing things about this episode include: Dean having to watch Sam get shot, "I Wuv Hugz," Sam's kicked-puppy face, and "I'm dead"/"Condolences."

Another thing that struck me was how hard Pamela tried to get Dean to accept that if he let Michael use him as a vessel, the inevitable deaths of thousands (millions?) of people wasn't anything to be concerned about.

I know that Michael wants to take you out for a test drive… {snip} What happens if you play ball with them? Worst case.

A lot of people die.

And then they come here. Is that really so bad? Look. Maybe… you don't have to fight it so hard. That's all I'm trying to say.

And immediately after that conversation, Ash finds a "short cut to the Garden" that, oddly enough, opens right into the old Lawrence house where they'll be caught by Zachariah.

So I wondered why we ever thought any of this was real. Why we didn't all decide Pamela and Ash were both fabrications created by Zachariah. And then I realized that I had already come to this conclusion, and had ficced it. But where? It's not on my LJ anywhere. I think I posted it in the comments to someone else's post. Probably kalliel; I think she's the only one whose comments I abused in that particular manner. But I found it in my files, and I present it to you now. I don't know when I wrote it, but I see it was probably right after we met Joshua 2.0 in s14. Apparently it was in response to some discussion about Sam and Dean being soulmates with a shared Heaven:

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Scenes from the cutting room floor - missing scenes and rewrites for 13.21, "Beat the Devil."

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