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SWBB_Cover.jpg

Title: A Matched Set

Author: [livejournal.com profile] smalltrolven

Artist: happilysammy

Pairing: Sam/Dean

Rating: Explicit

Wordcount: 10,840

Warnings: Spoilers for 15.03.

Author’s Note: Not my characters, only my words. Written for the 2019 Sam Winchester Big Bang. Set in an AU post episode 15.03 world where Chuck is back and talking to the brothers again instead of trying to kill them. Thank you so much to my artist, happily sammy !

Summary: Chuck is back, and making Sam pancakes again. And asking Sam weird questions about way back when Dean almost died when the Impala was sideswiped by the big rig. Chuck is there with an offer of an apology from Amara, and Sam has some big decisions to make.


Read it over on AO3 right here.

Check out the awesome art masterpost here.


*****

Chuck is making him goddamned pancakes—again.

Or should he say God is making him Chuckdamned pancakes?

Either or, it’s annoying as fuck that he’s back and swanning around the bunker like he owns the place. Well, he does own it all in a way, Sam supposes, as in the way he owns absolutely everything in existence. But still, the pancakes that Chuck has made for him taste of bitterness and regret, not comfort and fluffy goodness like Dean’s do, and Sam can’t choke them down again, no matter how much syrup and butter he drowns them in.

This asshole still killed Jack without a second thought, right in front of them. And then Sam had to kill Rowena with his own two hands, because of the dumbass ghost apocalypse Chuck’s temper tantrum brought on. Sam doesn’t want to eat the damn pancakes and sip coffee and catch up on things like Chuck had blithely suggested. Sam wants to rant and rave and scream and shout, and speaking of all that sort of carrying on—where the fuck is Dean anyway?

“He’s not here right now, Sam. This is all for you,” Chuck says, a little wave at all the food laid out across the table. Chuck cuts another big section of pancake off and stuffs it into his mouth. He’s not quite as untidy an eater as Dean is, but the beard and mustache are getting syrupy and it’s just..it’s gross. Chuck—no, God is gross, how about that for a foundation for a new spiritual movement?

“I can’t—I don’t want this,” Sam says, staring down at the plate on the table in front of him.

The syrup glistens and the steam from the hot pancake wafts up with the scent of sweet sickly apologies.

“I need to set things right with you, Sam, and in my book, that means pancakes,” Chuck says, he picks up his coffee cup and seems to drain it, but it’s still full when he sets it back down.

That’s a perk of being a god (or The God), Sam guesses, one’s coffee cup can always be full and at the right swilling temperature if that’s what you want to put your energy into.

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“Yes, my choices on how I spend my time and energy may seem strange to you, but they are my choices,” Chuck says, his hands clench on the edge of the table, almost like he’s nervous about what Sam will think about what he’s saying. “Of course I care about what you think, Sam. Don’t you get it by now?”

“Don’t I get what?” Sam asks.

“You’re the test case—my test case,” Chuck says.

“Test case for what?” Sam asks.

“For humanity, for the next phase. I mean, I’m really getting too close to the wire making my final design decisions here, but I needed to let it all play out to the ultimate conclusion. You and your brother…phew, you barely made it, but you guys did it! Once again, you did it.”

“Once again…wait, Dean’s a test case too?”

“Yeah, of course, you two are a matched set, like a pair of these salt and pepper shakers,” Chuck says, picking up the ridiculous kissing clowns that Dean had bought to tease Sam. Chuck shakes a little from each figure onto his fried eggs.

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In Sam’s memory he can hear Dean joking, “One of them looks just like Cas with his trench coat, see, Sammy? And look he’s smooching your favorite kind of clown.”

“So if I’m hearing you right, you’re saying that Dean and I, that we’re a matched set of test cases for you to play with?” Sam asks, he’s still not over it, honestly he will never be over it that they’ve been messed with their whole lives, either by Chuck or Lucifer. It’s fucking exhausting being a plaything for all-powerful deities with too much free time on their hands.

“Yeah, absolutely, you’ve got it. Listen, you’ve got to remember the whole soulmates thing, right? You and Dean, soulmates, totally epic, right?” Chuck asks, forking up another load of pancakes.

Sam tries to drink some coffee and considers what to say, even though Chuck is eavesdropping into his thoughts. Sam internally screams “Get out! You’re so rude! Let me think!” He smirks at the flinch on Chuck’s face, he has no idea whether he’s still listening in or not, but fuck him anyway. Chuck flinches again, there’s his answer.

“Before we go any further, first tell me where Dean is, please,” Sam asks, putting a little whiff of begging on the last word. He even throws in a low level of puppy dog eyes, Dean always says that’s the hardest to resist.

“Dean is fine, I swear, he’s just not here where or when we are. It’s uh…complicated. Main thing is he’s back in the bunker, and he’s still sleeping in his bed, all snug as a bug, doesn’t even know you’re gone and is currently dreaming of…oh my…well I won’t spoil it for you.” Chuck waggles his eyebrows which is indescribably disconcerting. The last thing he wants is to hear Chuck describe one of Dean’s Busty Asian Beauty fueled dreams.


“Okay…uh, thanks,” Sam says, choosing to believe him, because what other choice does he really have? “So you were asking about if I remember the soulmates thing. I do remember, of course I do, it’s always meant a lot to me, to know that about Dean and me.”

Sam thinks about it every damn day. How they’ve never talked about it once, how it means everything to him that they’re soulmates, and he’s pretty sure it’s the same for Dean.

“I think if I asked him, Dean would say the same,” Chuck says.

“It’s really hard talking to you when you do that,” Sam says.

“Do what, eavesdrop on your thoughts?” Chuck says. “Sorry, dude, you gotta get used to it, just how I roll.”

“So what is it about us being soulmates? Why are you asking me?”

“I wanted to sit and have a talk with you about it,” Chuck says, his face going into this sparkly beneficence that makes Sam want to hurl. He looks like something on an evangelical preacher’s Sunday morning TV power hour program.

The beneficence turns down quite a bit so that it’s tolerable.

“I heard you, you know, that day when you thought Dean was gone.”

Hah, Sam thinks, but he doesn’t say it out loud, instead he asks, “Which day?” Because there have been a lot of them over the years. Too many to count at this point.

“True, true. I mean the time he was in the helicopter ambulance, I heard what you asked me to do, how hard you prayed, it came through so clearly, all that desperate love, it was inescapable, Sam. All of heaven above absolutely ground to a halt at your pleas.”

“Really?” Sam asks, pretty much gobsmacked by the idea that Heaven or angels or God would stop and listen like that…to him.

“And then what did we do next? We all sat back and watched to see what the Winchester men would do, because all three of you had big choices to make. It was fascinating. Your dad had to decide to make a deal with the demon he’d spent his life chasing down, your brother had to decide to not go with his reaper, he had to choose to stay with you, and you had to decide to stand up for Dean, for him to be put first for once with your dad.”

“You just watched? You let my dad do that? Damn himself to hell?” Sam asks, gritting his teeth against the anger he can barely control.

“It was his choice, Sam, It had to be his choice.”

“But you could have saved him!” Sam exclaims.

“No, that’s not how it works, sorry, but those are the rules, but here’s the thing, you guys went three out of three! All three of you did the completely unexpected thing, you each made the unexpected choice. And that’s why it worked, that’s how you ended up being able to save the world from the apocalypse that really was supposed to happen. I mean it had been scheduled for a very long time.”

“Our choices prevented the apocalypse?” Sam asks, gobsmacked all over again.

“Yeah, any other choices made, it would have all gone to shit, the world as you know it would have been wiped out. And, maybe more importantly to this discussion we’re having—it would have turned out much differently if we’d jumped in there to fix everything. It had to be up to you.”

“It was your ultimate test of free-will, huh?”

Chuck smiles widely and the sparkly beneficence ramps up again. He looks very very pleased that Sam has gotten it. “Yeah, the long-standing argument always was free-will versus fate, and this proved that I was right, once and for all. The big secret is, even though I’m the one  writing the plot, the players still have choices to make.”

“Well, congratulations on your choose-your-own-adventure success, I guess,” Sam snarks.

“I was just showing the replay of it to Amara the other day when we were arguing about free-will,” Chuck says, pointedly ignoring Sam’s snarkiness.

“Yeah, what’d she have to say about it?” Sam asks, surprised to be reminded of Amara, it was good to realize that she is still around, still on the board as a possible way out of this hamster wheel.

“She was surprised at every twist and turn in your story, and at the end she was in tears, seeing what she’d done to you both, when she was trying to take Dean away from you.”

“The Darkness, your sister, Amara was crying over us,” Sam says slowly, enunciating each word as he tries to process the idea.

“She said to tell you she’s really really sorry,” Chuck says with a shrug and two upturned hands.

“Okay…” Sam says, not sure what to do with a passed-on apology from a primordial deity, just another day for a Winchester.

“And she’s going to offer you a do-over, to make up for it. Kind of like she did for your brother, when she brought your mom back,” Chuck says.

“This another part of your test-case scenario?” Sam asks, suspicious as hell about the sudden offer of a boon from said primordial deity.

“No, that’s all over with, I swear, you guys broke the rulebook so there wasn’t much point in continuing the game. At least not this time around,” Chuck says, rubbing over the bullet wound in his shoulder.

Sam winces as his matching bullet wound throbs. “This time…wait, you mean there’s going to be a next time around? Like another try at making a new version of our world?” Sam asks.

“Yeah, there always is, like I said, this particular world’s an ongoing long-term project of mine. I change the variables every time, sometimes you’re brothers, sometimes you’re not, sometimes one or both of you are women, soulmates yes or no, that kind of thing,”

“That’s—that’s kind of blowing my mind, Chuck. It’s wild to think that we’re just one iteration of your experiment and there will be more of us after we die or whatever. Have any other versions of us gotten to ask you this stuff before, just curious,” Sam asks, more than just curious, he’s incensed at the idea on his and his brother’s behalf.

“No, this is a whole new thing that’s happened, and with Amara in the mix again, it’s also changed the possible outcomes,” Chuck answers. He sounds a little bewildered, even overwhelmed at the idea of it, which is not too reassuring if God is having trouble dealing with reality or whatever. Or maybe he just really doesn’t get along with his sister. Based on what Sam knows about how Chuck has treated Amara, that’s probably a whole lot closer to the truth.

“Sure, okay, so let’s say I believe you about all this. What does Amara mean by giving me a do-over?”

“Like I said, I let her hear it all, your whole lives. And what she focused on was hearing a verbatim replay of what you said, what you prayed for with all your heart and soul when your soulmate, Dean was flying in that helicopter ambulance. She wants to give you that, what you were asking for in your prayer.”

Sam’s mind goes blank trying to remember what he’d been praying for all those years ago as the blades whirled over head, sucking up all the air, taking Dean away from him. “What did I pray for? It was so long ago, I can’t remember.” He suddenly hates it all so fiercely, this is so much worse than anything Lucifer had ever done to him, having to beg Chuck like this to give him a replay of something he should fucking be able to remember on his own. But so many things have been messed with in his head, angels and demons and it’s too jumbled in there, too much has been moved around, replaced with lies and half-truths, he can barely rely on the reality of now much less remember how things really happened in the past.

“I can fix all that for you,” Chuck says, lifting a hand. “You’ve kind of had a rough go of it over the last few years.”

“No…please, leave my head alone, it’s been fucked with enough, thanks,” Sam says.

“Fine, but you have to give me an answer for Amara, so here’s the same replay for you that I played for her. This is you—twenty-three year old, Sam Winchester, praying his heart and soul out for his brother, Dean.”

It’s like an all-consuming movie starts up, every single one of his senses are engaged, like he’s really there, it’s really happening all over again. His eyes can see the helicopter taking off, his skin feels the pressure from the wash of the rotors turning as it rises up from the ground. He can taste the tang of his own blood in his mouth and smell the copper stench of the blood of his brother and father still drying on his hands, the sound of the helicopter getting quieter as it flies off into the distance. Taking Dean away from him, and suddenly the emotion of it hits him as hard as another semi. He’s trying to hold off on feeling any of the desperation or despair, he needs to stay in control, in case more demons come after them. He needs to keep it together so he can get to the hospital where they’re taking Dean.

“Where are they taking him?” past-Sam asks, turning on the stretcher to follow the helicopter with his eyes until it disappears into the morning’s low cloud cover.

“Please sir, you have to lay still, so we can get you into the ambulance. You have to let us help you,” a paramedic tells him, adjusting the straps on the gurney that past-Sam is buckled into.

“Where’s my dad? Is he alive?” past-Sam asks.

“He’s on the helicopter with the other man,” the paramedic says, injecting him with something.

“You’re taking me to the same hospital, right?” past-Sam asks, a wave of nausea from the pain hitting him just as the pain meds start taking effect.

“Yeah, you’ll be there right behind them, don’t worry,” the paramedic says.

The last thing past-Sam does before he passes out is he prays. He puts all of his heart and soul into this prayer, a lifetime worth of You Owe Me.

Please God, or whoever is out there listening, please keep them alive. Please make them be okay. I can’t—you’ve got to—they’re all I have in the world. Please, God, please make Dean be okay. I need him, I love him so much, I promise I’ll never leave him again if you bring him back to me. And my Dad too, he’s got to be all right, otherwise Dean will never forgive himself.

We were trying to make things right, trying to kill the demon that ruined our lives. Isn’t that what you want, God? Slaying demons is what you want done, right? And that’s what we’ve done, and all kinds of other monsters, our whole lives we’ve done that, saved people. Please, if any of it counts at all, you have to save them now. It’s their turn to be saved, it’s our turn, please save my family.

I’m begging you, you have to save Dean, I’ll never survive without him. I just can’t. If you bring him back to me, I swear I’ll love him so much it’ll fix him, make him right again, make him happy like he deserves. Just us together, that’s all we’ve ever needed or wanted. Please God, please. We can stop hunting if that’s not what you want us to do, we can be enough for each other, I know we can. Just give us a chance, let him live, please. I’ll do anything, give anything for him to be alive. If you want me to say yes to the demon, I’ll even do that. I’ll keep having psychic death dreams for the rest of my life if I have to, I’ll do anything. Please, God, you have to keep Dean alive, bring him back to me safe, whole and alive. I’ll love him and keep him happy, I swear I will.

And then there’s darkness descending like a bank of fog rolling over the stars, past-Sam catches a snippet of an approaching siren’s scream and then nothing else.

Sam comes back to himself, wipes the tears off his face and grimaces across the table at Chuck. “What’s she going to give me a do-over for out of all that mess? I don’t want to re-live my life without him.”

“No, that’s not what…a do-over would mean you’d all have the chances to make different choices from that point. All three of you would get a do-over, including your dad.”

“You mean the choices we all made that you just told me improbably saved the world from the scheduled Apocalypse? What the hell is this, Chuck? My choice would be Dean versus the world? You know who I’m choosing, I’ve been doing it my whole damn life. My dad is already in Heaven, there’s no way I’m messing with that. I mean, look what it did to our mom when Amara dragged her out of it!”

“NO…no, that’s not what Amara was offering you, she wouldn’t do that. Why is this so hard to explain?”

“Probably because you’re an all-powerful deity and I’m a human,” Sam suggests.

“True, true, but you’re more than that,” Chuck says.

“Whatever, like that’s ever helped me in my life,” Sam scoffs.

“Let me try again to explain this to you. Back then, when you promised to give up anything, do anything, that’s the do-over point. You and Dean and your dad would get to go through life again from that point, everything would be different, and it would turn out the way you put it in your prayer, normal. No going to hell for any of you, no losing your soul, or being possessed, no Dean going to Purgatory, no Mark of Cain, none of that.”

“And if I say no?” Sam asks, knowing that there has to be a catch here that he’s not seeing.

“Why would you? Wouldn’t you like a chance to do it all over again, but like a normal guy?”

“No, I don’t want to go back and do it all over again. But if I could have it from this point going forward, now that’s something that I would want.”

“Explain,” Chuck says.

“The choice I’d make is that I’d give up the chance to go back and live life all over again that Amara is offering and choose instead to live my life as it is now, from this point, going forward.”

“But how is that any different from what you’ve got?” Chuck asks, looking genuinely confused.

“The difference is that I’m making the choice to not go back,” Sam says. “And if you don’t understand what that means, then you’ve never really understood your favorite characters.”

“Oh, no, hold on now, of course I understand you, I created you!” Chuck shouts, the ceiling tiles seem to shake with his voice.

“I know that, and thank you. What I mean is, who we are right now, is all a cumulative thing from what we’ve done, the choices we’ve made over our whole lives together.”

“So what you’re saying is that you don’t want an easy do-over freebie?” Chuck asks.

“Easy? C’mon, we never ever choose easy, and nothing is ever ever free, you of all beings should know that,” Sam says, raising an eyebrow at Chuck.

Chuck laughs quietly and nods in answer.

“And besides, what the hell would be easy about it, huh? To go back would mean losing myself as I am now, losing who Dean is now, and I’d never give that up in a million years. I know he would never give that up either. You have no idea what it means to us that we’re still here, we’re still together, messed up as we are, even after we’ve been running through your maze our whole lives.”

“How about if you remembered yourselves as you are now and still got the chance to go back?”

“What’s the point of that?” Sam asks.

“The point is having more time with Dean, in the prime of your lives. Heck, you could go back to school, be a lawyer, have some kids, who knows?”

“No thanks, I’m happy with who I am and where I am, right now and so is Dean.”

“But Amara wants to do something big for you, if she doesn’t get to apologize in a grand way she’s gonna be mad at me, and let me tell you from recent experience, that’s not a good thing.”

“Chuck, listen, if she wants to give us something to apologize to us, then how about both of you are hands off on Dean and I for the rest of our lives? No more interference, no more stories or experiments for us to play out for your amusement, no more of any of that.”

“But…”

“No buts, Chuck. I know you said we’re your favorites, your best matched set for your experiments or whatever. But how about seeing what happens if you don’t interfere with us from here on out? Think of it like a final test for your design.”

****

To Part Two

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