Chapter Text
Sam sits by his father’s bedside staring at the jagged green line on the monitor that indicates his Dad’s heartbeat. Nearby, Dean paces angrily around the room as they wait for the doctor to arrive.
When he does, he knocks politely but doesn’t wait for permission before stepping into the room with a nurse trailing behind him. “Sam, Dean are you ready?” he asks not unkindly. Sam nods.
After they discovered that the demon was possessing their father, Dad had managed to break free of its control just long enough to order Dean to shoot him. To Sam’s shock, Dean hadn’t even hesitated. Now, the demon was dead, killed instantly by the colt. Since the gun technically wasn’t fired with the intention to kill him, John Winchester seemed to have escaped the gun’s magic. He hadn’t however escaped the bullet itself and now their father was lying in a hospital bed with a serious brain injury.
The doctors did the best they could but soon the hospital staff was sitting down with the brothers and telling them that their father would probably never recover, and they should consider withdrawing life support. They had stayed up all night going back and forth about it. Sam yelled at Dean for killing their father and Dean calmly insisted that the man had spent his entire life hunting that demon and that this is what he had wanted. Dean had surprised Sam by insisting that Dad wouldn’t have wanted to live as a vegetable and eventually Sam had found himself agreeing. Now the time has come and here they are.
Sam tries to pay attention as the doctor explains the process to him again and waits for his consent. Then he lets himself tune out as the medical staff go about their business of removing tubes and silencing monitors. “We’ll give you some time alone now but let us know if you need anything” the doctor says before disappearing.
John takes hours to die. Sam finds himself wishing that he would hurry up so the whole thing could just be over and then immediately feels guilty for thinking it. It’s almost anticlimactic when it finally happens; that jagged green line stops being jagged and flattens out. John Winchester is dead and as soon as he is Sam hears the last thing he expected. Mad laughter echoes through the room. “Take that you old fool, I’ve always known one of us would get you someday.” Sam’s first thought is that someone next door must be watching TV but when he turns around, he sees Dean grinning like a kid in a candy store and realizes the laughter is coming from him.
“Dean, what’s going on?” Sam asks, confused.
When Dean turns away from the fresh corpse of their father and looks at him, Sam can’t name the expression he sees on his brother’s face. “So long Sam. Have a nice life.” With that Dean turns on his heel and starts towards the door.
“Dean, stop!” Sam yells, his extreme confusion making him panic.
Dean freezes in place with his hand on the door handle. “No!” he yells. “No, damn it. This is supposed to be over! I’m supposed to be free.”
Sam still doesn’t understand what’s going on, but he knows it’s not good. “Dean what are you doing?”
“Just let me go Sammy” Dean says, still not moving. “Tell me I can leave.”
“I’m not going to do that. Dean, come here.”
To Sam’s surprise his brother immediately turns around and walks to him, glaring murderously the entire time. “Christo” says Sam, watching his brother’s eyes carefully. Nothing happens.
“I’m not a demon, Sam.”
“Then just tell me what’s going on because Dad is dead and you are seriously freaking me out.”
“Nothing. Like you said, Dad’s dead, and I just need to be alone for a while.”
Sam’s not buying it. “Tell me the truth.”
“I’m trying to get away because your father has been holding me prisoner for the last twenty years.”
“What?”
Dean sighs, “look Sam, this would all be a lot easier if we just went our separate ways. You can mourn your dad and then you can go back to school or whatever and we can both get on with our lives.”
“Why do you keep saying “your dad”?”
“Because I’m not your brother.”
“Then who are you and what have you done with him?” Sam says, angry now. He wonders if he should be getting out his gun and pointing it at whatever is standing in front of him, but they’re in the middle of a busy hospital and he still doesn’t know what he’s dealing with.
“I didn’t do anything. You never had a brother.”
Sam’s brain is whirling but he’s not in such a state of confusion that he hasn’t picked up on something odd: the creature (or whatever it is) seems to be doing whatever he tells it to. Acting on a hunch, he orders it “explain to me who you are and what is going on right now.”
The creature that looks like Dean glares at him even harder. “I’m a shapeshifter” it spits out “and I’ve spent the last twenty years pretending to be your brother because your father ordered me to.”
“You’re lying.”
“I can’t lie to you; you just ordered me not to. Okay Sam, since you insist on doing this the hard way, here goes. When you were nearly two, and your dad had been hunting a for a little over a year, he ran across a shapeshifter on a case. That was me. After hunting me down like a psycho, instead of just killing me he decided he wanted his own personal slave. He put some kind of curse on me that forced me to obey any order he gave me and then he ordered me to shift into a child and pretend to be your brother.”
Sam doesn’t know if he believes this story or if this is all some kind of trick, but he decides that the best way to figure it out is to get more information.
“Dad wasn’t some kind of witch. How could he put a curse on you?”
“I don’t know. He forbade me from ever trying to find anything out about it. I assumed it would have been broken when he died but apparently it’s been transferred to you somehow.”
“So, you have to do whatever I tell you?”
“Looks like it.”
Sam thinks to himself about how he can find out how much of this is true and comes up with a plan. He walks over to his bag and pulls out a silver knife. If he orders Dean to touch it and it burns him, it will confirm he’s a shapeshifter and provide more evidence on the whole obedience curse thing. “Come here and put your hand on this” he instructs the creature.
It walks over and lies its hand on the flat of the blade. Almost immediately its skin begins to sizzle and smoke and it grits its teeth in pain. “Okay stop” Sam says after a long moment, unable to stand the sight of his brother in pain even if it’s not really his brother.
The creature pulls its burned hand away and cradles it against itself. “Fuck you Sam” it pants.
Before Sam can process this unwelcome confirmation there’s another knock at the door and the doctor is back. With him comes the whole process of declaring death, and signing papers, and receiving condolences from the hospital. Sam does all of this while the Shifter stands sullenly in the corner. When this is finally over, Sam orders him to follow him to the hospital’s café, which is almost abandoned this time of night and they sit down at a corner table.
“I never had a brother” Sam whispers, trying to familiarize himself with the concept. Dean was always his rock-solid foundation in an otherwise anchorless childhood and the idea that that was all fake, is difficult for him to process.
“Yep. Congratulations, you’re an only child” the Shifter says flippantly.
Distantly, Sam realizes that if it wasn’t for this whole thing going on, he would probably be properly grieving his father, but right now, he’s fully in hunter mode, and that means pushing aside his emotions and getting on with the case.
“But I still don’t understand why Dad would have done this?”
“For you Sam. He needed someone to look out for you so he could go off hunting. I was your babysitter and your bodyguard.”
“Did you kill him because you hated him?”
“I did hate him, but I killed him because he ordered me to. I didn’t have a choice Sam, but I won’t pretend to be sad about it.”
“You said earlier that he ordered you to shift into a child. Does that mean that you weren’t really?”
“Well I wasn’t a five-year-old obviously. Did you really think an actual kid that age would be mature enough to look after a baby? I was a teenager at the time, but I was taking the form of an adult. It’s easier to get stuff done that way. You can’t imagine how frustrating it was to be forced to look and act like a five-year-old. Chronologically, I’m about ten years older than my current appearance.”
“Is Dean even your real name?”
“It’s the name your father gave me. I’ve gone by Dean for a lot longer than I have anything else.”
“So, you don’t have a real name?”
“I’m a Shapeshifter Sam. We don’t have permanent names anymore than we have a permanent hair colour or gender.”
“How did I never realize any of this?” Sam asks. The question is largely rhetorical but Dean answers it anyway.
“You’re not as smart as you think you are.”
Sam glares at him. “Okay then, one more question: what were you planning on doing when you tried to leave earlier?”
“I don’t know.” They stare at each other for a while, Dean looking Sam straight in the eyes like he’s daring him to do something. “What are you going to do with me?” he finally asks.
“I don’t know” Sam answers.
***
Sam finds a motel that night and asks for a room with two queens just like he’s always done. The Shifter follows along sullenly rolling his eyes but doing everything Sam tells him to. Part of Sam thinks about how wrong it is that he’s bringing home the monster that killed his father, but he doesn’t know what else to do. If he just lets it go, then he’s responsible for everything it does afterwards. The only other Shapeshifter Sam has encountered was a crazy serial killer and he doesn’t want to take the risk that this one might decide to take up some similar hobbies if allowed. His only other option would be to kill it, but he knows that he won’t be able to bring himself to do that.
Exhausted, Sam crawls into bed and watches as the monster does the same. Despite the familiarity of seeing his brother asleep in the next bed, he knows that nothing will ever be the same.