Gemini (Supernatural Rewrite Sam x Reader x Dean)

In The Beginning (Again)

(A/N: this chapter contains talk about pregnancy loss, so, TW for that. <3 you guys.)

Your fingers are tangled in the comforter when you wake, twisted so tightly into the fabric that your knuckles ache.

For several seconds, Bobby's spare room means nothing to you. The dark is too complete, the air too still, and your body has already drawn itself inward beneath the blankets before your mind catches up enough to recognize the unfamiliar mattress, the faint line of light beneath the door, and the half-open duffel sitting exactly where you left it at the foot of the bed.

The taste of blood is harder to explain away.

You swallow and immediately regret it. Copper clings to the back of your tongue even though there is nothing there, no split lip, no blood drying along your teeth. You brushed them before bed. Twice, actually, because the first time had not been enough to convince your mouth of what your eyes already knew.

The nightmare does not return all at once. It never does. Hell comes back without bothering with order, heat bleeding into the memory of somebody screaming, then hands where hands should not be, the scrape of metal, a voice close to your ear that you cannot quite hear anymore but your body still recognizes well enough to tighten beneath the blankets. Forty years have left too much behind for memory to bother showing you any one thing clearly. Sometimes that almost makes it worse.

You force your eyes toward the alarm clock Bobby dug out of some closet and plugged in beside the bed.

2:17.

You have not been asleep long.

That realization should make you tired. Instead, you sit up and pull the comforter around your waist, staring at the room until every shape becomes what it is supposed to be. 

Dresser. Chair. Your jacket thrown over the back of it. Boots near the door. Dean's borrowed shirt mixed into the clothes spilling from your bag because apparently at some point it stopped being worth pretending you were ever going to return half the things you stole from him.

Sleeping up here had been your idea.

Neither Sam nor Dean had suggested it. If anything, both of them had made it irritatingly obvious that there was room downstairs, whether that meant the couch, the floor, or shoving everybody together somewhere and figuring out the logistics later. You had been the one to take Bobby's spare room instead.

The first nightmare after you came back had shattered the lamp beside you before you were fully awake. Another had left a crack running through a motel mirror and the desk shoved several feet from where it had started. You still did not know whether you had moved any of it with your hands. That was enough.

Sleeping beside Sam or Dean used to be one of the easiest things in the world. Now the idea of waking up from Hell with one of them close enough to catch whatever came out of you first makes something twist unpleasantly beneath your ribs. You have not told them that part. You only said you slept better alone.

Neither of them believed you.

They let you have the room anyway.

Bobby's house. South Dakota. Upstairs.

Sam is somewhere downstairs. Dean too, unless one of them decided sometime after you got back from the lake that sleep was optional again.

You know exactly how little distance there is between this room and them. A hallway. A staircase. Maybe thirty seconds if you bothered putting shoes on first.

You still do not move.

Your eyes settle on the door instead.

Earlier, you checked the salt downstairs even though you knew Bobby had already replaced every broken line after the witnesses. You checked the windows too, then the locks, then caught yourself standing in front of the basement door thinking about a panic room made of iron and salt and all the reasons going inside it had made your skin crawl. None of it means much against an angel anyway. Castiel proved that before you ever had a chance to start pretending otherwise.