spn_springfling | Fire and Revelation by canonisrelative for <user site="livejour

Title: Fire and Revelation
Pairing: Sam/Kevin
Rating: Teen
Warnings: None

Sam has a prophet in his bed.

It began with fire. Fire and the destruction of innocence -- quite the Winchester special. Then again, fire and revelation are not exactly strange bedfellows around these parts.

Kevin has taken to talking to himself in Enochian when he’s close to a breaking point, and that’s become Sam’s cue to get the kid to put down the tablet, close his notebook, and start herding him down the hall towards the room that’s become his, little though the kid ever sees the inside of it.

Sam has a prophet in his bed. A half-mad prophet drunk on the Word of God and the same cocktail of crazy that Sam’s been imbibing since he was the kid’s age himself. Kid. He smoothes his hand down Kevin’s back and thinks he’s got to stop calling him that, even inside his own head.

Kevin burrows in closer, his forehead hot as a branding iron against Sam’s chest, and Sam has the completely inappropriate thought that he finally gets it, for real, why Dean was upset -- not just pissed, or jealous, but actually unhappy -- that Sam grew up to be bigger than him. Because when he’s like this, when Kevin is asleep and Sam can ignore or forget all the power that beats in the heart of a prophet, then Kevin seems slight and fragile. Just a kid. And the monstrous truth is that Sam has been alone and lonely for so long, Sam has screwed up so badly and lost so much, that he’ll hold on to this mirage, this fiction that Kevin is someone who needs him -- someone he can take care of, protect, keep safe -- for as long as it lasts.

Sam has a prophet in his bed because tonight, instead of allowing Sam to push him into his own room, Kevin had trailed after Sam, followed him into his room and faceplanted onto Sam’s bed where he interrupted his own Enochian ramblings to tell Sam that he’d just translated the symbol for fire and his mind was in flames.

Sometimes, in spite of everything, Sam looks at Kevin and still sees that wide-eyed, wispy kid he’d tackled outside the mental ward who told him the Word of God was meant for him. The same kid who’d said, just before the angels tried to take him home to his mother, I’ve always been better at math and science and music, you know? I never had much use for words, but this… He’d shaken his head. Not so much lost for words as he was lost for a human way to express them. When he handed Sam the tablet every line in his body had drawn together to paint the most eloquent picture of reverence and awe that Sam had ever seen.

There was a time for all of them, Sam needs to be reminded now and then, when the world and the Word was something to be approached with respect and humility.

Kevin stirs now, murmurs something unintelligible, and Sam isn’t sure if it’s the nonsense noise of deep sleep or another holy revelation that will throw him into a panic when he wakes. Sam shifts to press his lips to the crown of Kevin’s head and hopes fervently for the former, shoving aside the guilt that accompanies such a selfish wish. It’s been days since they had any good news and they could really use a break in this case. He shifts closer, listens, tries to catch the muffled words.

Fire, Kevin had said, his hands burning where he twisted them in the fabric of Sam’s shirt, pressing his small fists against Sam’s chest. I understand fire. Power and purity and prescience, Kevin went on like he’d burned a thesaurus and inhaled the fumes. Sam. He was weeping, eyes shining with holy inspiration, lips upturned in a blissful smile. Sam, I can see what Moses saw.

Kevin felt like fire, blazing beneath him, and falling into that fire had been easy at the last. As Sam succumbed, the last sparks of resistance vanishing like so much smoke, his only clear thought had been to rejoice in the feeling that the flames consuming him were, at long last, divine.

Sam is not a prophet. He doesn’t know what God had in mind when He created fire. He remembers his high school chemistry well enough, though, and he knows that combustion rearranges the atomic makeup of a thing so essentially that once
you’ve caught fire there is no returning to your previous state of being. He also knows that the word, fire (middle English, fier, preserved in modern English as fiery), has been used to express feelings of ardent passion since the 14th century and that the phrase To play with fire is attested from the mid-1800s.

Sam has a voice inside of him that’s never quit asking, Is that all there is? Is this all there is to it? It’s an expression of the longing within him to find something greater, something richer, something…truer behind all the facts of the world. That voice has been his lifelong companion but it has quieted, now, for the first time in a long time. Just as Kevin has quieted in his arms. His fire still burns, but it is banked for now.

Sam has a prophet in his bed, and the holy word for Fire dancing in his head. Kevin’s heart is safe beneath the palm of his hand and Sam closes his eyes, lets the effortless rhythm overtake him, allows it to cauterize the chaos of his mind and lure him into sleep.