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"Mistress Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Maggots and worms and flesh-feasting grubs, and crying eyes all in a row."
Dean jerked awake, panting hard. His heart was hammering, and he looked frantically around the room, scanning for any sign of the yellow eyes that had hissed out the disgusting couplet in his dreams.
The room was empty, Sam sleeping in the next bed, and he dropped back down to the pillow. He didn't dare tell Sam about the nightmares, didn't dare make him think for a second that somehow the yellow-eyed bastard had found a way to cheat Sam Colt's revolver and escaped his own death, didn't dare make him think for a second that he could go back to being afraid of who he was.
Instead, Dean swallowed the bad dreams down, knowing that the demon that killed his mother was dead as a doornail, by his own hand, with his father's pride looking down on him. Rationally, he knew that. Telling his subconscious that was an entirely different story.
He knew that the eyes haunting him should be red, not yellow. But he couldn't quite bring himself to hate the red-eyed crossroad demon as he had hated the yellow-eyed one. Mostly because the yellow-eyed demon had taken everything he'd ever had away from him; mother, father, brother. But the crossroads demon had given it back to him. Given him Sam back, given him a year with his brother, and he couldn't hate anyone—or anything—that had done that for him.
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"Dean?" Sam pulled himself out of the sleepy stupor he was in, pushing himself up on his elbow. He didn't even know why he'd woken up, whether it'd been his own intuition, the almost-psychic yet oddly comforting way he just *knew* when Dean needed him, or whether it was Dean's labored, harsh breathing that had broken into his dreams.
"Go back to sleep, Sam," Dean said softly, his voice level and calm, belying the racing pants of his breath and the rapid rise and fall of his chest.
"You okay?" Sometimes he wished his abilities had been more developed before the yellow-eyed demon's death; he didn't know if it was a block he'd created in his own mind, or whether they were mostly dormant now that the source of them was gone. Either way, whatever it was, these were the few times that Sam resented not being able to sense what Dean was thinking, resented not being able to reach out and find out for himself all the things that Dean wasn't telling him. All the things Dean was trying to protect him from.
"Yeah, Sammy. I'm fine. Go on back to sleep," he repeated, and Sam listened as Dean forcibly brought his breath under control.
Sam knew Dean was having nightmares. Dean didn't have to tell him that; it was fairly obvious. Dean woke before Sam most days, it was Dean who was watching late-night television and George Foreman infomercials now.
But that was okay. Sam laid his head back on the pillow, but didn't go back to sleep. Instead, he watched Dean in the waxing light of the morning, as the first rays of daylight started to creep in the windows. It was his turn now, and he'd find a way to stop Dean's nightmares, even if it meant going back into the mouth of Hell itself and fighting for Dean's soul.
Dean would do no less for him, and Sam wasn't going to let anything happen to his big brother. Now it was his turn to protect Dean, and give his brother a break. "Hey, Dean?"
A long pause, and Dean finally answered. "What is it, Sammy?"
The nickname made Sam smile, instead of bringing the rush of irritation that it normally did. "Nothing, man. Just making sure."
The End