Fic: By Fingertips 9/9
Title: By Fingertips
Author: AmeliaCareful’sDaughter
Word Count: 1,900
Pairings: none/gen
Rating: R For Language Mostly
Spoilers: none
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: Not mine
Summary: AU: When Dean was 14, he argued irreparably with John. Now he’s 26 and a firefighter when he runs into a 6’4” guy in an abandoned house and recognizes that he’s a hunter and thinks that maybe he knows him. But Sam is nothing like he remembers.
“You came back to Virginia?” Sam said very quietly.
“Yeah, some guy was in your hotel room.” The door opened and some guy with gray and white stubble looked out, heat and cigarette smoke rolling from the dark room. ‘You want to come in?’ the guy had asked and Dean didn’t know to this day if the guy was just offering a phone call or a chance to get out of the cold or something else.
The Impala rumbled and the asphalt hummed. Dean liked driving at night. It was soothing.
“I kept waiting for you to come,” Sam said, looking out the window.
Something in Dean died a little. He tried to say something but couldn’t, cleared his throat but his voice still wouldn’t come.
9/9 Dean drove the few hours into Palo Alto. It was hard to believe that he had a full day tomorrow before Sam would take him to San Francisco and put him on a plane.
“What will you do about the car?” he asked.
“I’ll take it to Bobby Singer,” Sam said.
“Right.” Dean had memories of the salvage yard, of playing among the cars. Of a Ford Torino used as a fort. Bobby Singer talking the rough incomprehensible magic of cars and parts to men who stood with their hands in their pockets looking out at the yard and appraising what they saw. “You know I called him.”
Sam looked over. “Bobby?”
Dean nodded. “Yeah. After I got picked up by CPS they put me in a foster home. I stole a hundred bucks and hitchhiked to Virginia but you and Dad were already gone so I found his number through information and I called him.”
Streetlights would shine in the front of the car and then disappear as they passed over head, eclipsed by the roof. Out of the corner of his eye, Dean could watch Sam’s face in light, then in shadow, then in light again.
“What did he say?” Sam asked after a long while.
“He said that the last time he’d seen Dad it hadn’t gone so well. Which I remembered. That’s when Bobby chased him off with a shotgun.” Dean took a breath. “So they weren’t talking and he didn’t know where Dad was. He had a phone number but Dad didn’t answer. I didn’t know anyone else to ask. I didn’t have a phone then.” Dad didn’t think fourteen year olds should have cell phones in 1992.
“You came back to Virginia?” Sam said very quietly.
“Yeah, some guy was in your hotel room.” The door opened and some guy with gray and white stubble looked out, heat and cigarette smoke rolling from the dark room. ‘You want to come in?’ the guy had asked and Dean didn’t know to this day if the guy was just offering a phone call or a chance to get out of the cold or something else.
The Impala rumbled and the asphalt hummed. Dean liked driving at night. It was soothing.
“I kept waiting for you to come,” Sam said, looking out the window.
Something in Dean died a little. He tried to say something but couldn’t, cleared his throat but his voice still wouldn’t come.
“It’s not your fault,” Sam said to the passenger window.
# They found a little motel. In the morning they had breakfast and Sam said he had to run some errands then he was going to pick Dean up and introduce him to a friend of his. “Um, Sam,” Dean said. “You know, tomorrow you can stay with your friend. I can stay here.”
Sam shrugged. “I can stay here. I’ll stay with her after I drop you off at the airport.”
Dean wanted to make a smart remark about girlfriends or booty call but there was something fragile between them he didn’t want to mess with so he just shut up and watched TV.
Sam came back in a funk, barely spoke. He seemed bigger, broader, less Sam-like and more like someone who would show up on an episode of Cops. More like when Dean had first seen in in Greeley. Dean hoped that this Jess person could get him more human. They checked out and drove into Palo Alto proper.
Dean didn’t expect them to end up in the University area. Jess turned out to be a cute blond with curls in a pretty blue-flowered sundress and when she ran to Sam he thawed instantly. More than thawed, Sam became somebody Dean thought he might have really known instantly was his brother; a guy who smiled, and looked like he had emotions.
“Jess,” he said, “this is my brother, Dean.”
She turned, eyes big. “Dean the fireman, Dean?”
Sam had told someone he had a brother?
Sam grinned. “Like, how many brothers named Dean do I have?”
“Oh my God I never thought I’d meet you!” Jess said.
Dean said, “I’m glad to, ah, meet you, too.” To Sam, “Two things. First, baby brother, you are way out of your league. And second, you told her about me?”
Jess laughed and she had an infectious laugh. “Oh yeah, Sam’s mysterious past. But he checks your girlfriend’s Facebook page all the time. And yours, too, but you never update yours.”
Lightning bolt of understanding. Roni had set up a Facebook page for him and he’d checked it, like, two times. But he knew it said something about Roni being his girlfriend and they were ‘friends’ or something.
Sam was smiling. Smirking. “She posts a lot about you,” Sam said. “The calendar thing? She had a link where you could buy it. Also, your diet and workout to get ready for it.”
Dean groaned. (Sam checked Roni’s Facebook page? Had for years? It was a warmth better than whisky in his chest.)
But Sam was upset and he seemed unable to hide it from Jess. In front of Jess he was the way he used to be around Dean, all Sammy and feelings. The thing he was upset about was another surprise. “I went to see that prof,” he said, “to see if he would send me the syllabus for that class on Foreign Economic Policy?”
Jess nodded to show she was listening.
“They figured out someone is having people tape seminars.”
Jess covered her mouth with her hand. “What did he say?”
“I can’t do it anymore, Jess, I just can’t,” Sam said.
“It’s…it’s not illegal,” Jess said.
“You’re in college?” Dean said.
Sam shook his head.
“He got a full ride scholarship to Stanford,” Jess said, “but he wouldn’t take it. Because of your stupid family business. Whatever it is.”
“Jess-” Sam said.
“So he finds people who are taking the classes he would have been taking and has them record them,” Jess explained, “and he reads the books on his own and takes the tests on his own if he can get a copy and writes the papers.”
Dean remembered the text books in the motel room in Greeley.
“Don’t start,” Sam said to him.
“What the hell!” Dean said. “You could have gotten out!”
“I have my reasons,” Sam said and the face Dean got was not the Sam that Jess got. It was the cold bastard he’d found in the motel room in Greeley. Not that honestly Dean gave a flying fuck.
“For Dad? Are you doing this for Dad?” Dean laughed. “Oh come on, like Dad ever did what you needed! Get a life, Sam!”
“No, I’m not doing it for him,” Sam said.
Dean looked at Jess. “Excuse me, do you mind if I talk to my brother alone for a minute?”
Jess looked at Sam. He looked at her, nervous, but nodded. “We’ll be back,” he said.
Outside it was clear and sunny, just a bit nippy in Palo Alto. “Are you going to tell me you like this?”
Sam shrugged.
“If you want to go to college, why not just go to college?”
“I’m getting the benefits of college without paying for it,” Sam said.
“Oh right, except for, you know, the degree. The thing that gets you, you know, a job that doesn’t get you killed. A full ride? To a really great school? Stanford is a really great school, right?”
Sam gave him a look that positively dripped with disdain. “Yeah. It’s a great school.” He took a breath. “Okay, I was all set to go. I was going to tell John at the last minute because I knew he would probably disown me the way he did you. We were hunting ghouls and I got hurt pretty bad. Marble mausoleum lid fell on me and then apparently some blood loss I don’t remember. Hospital bad. Bad enough I would have had to defer a semester.”
“So defer a semester,” Dean said.
“After I got out of the hospital, John dropped me at Bobby’s to recover and one night when he was visiting on his way through to some weird lead on a demon thing, while I’m supposed to be doped out of my mind on pain meds I hear him talking to Bobby and he tells Bobby that he’s not sure I’m human.”
Sam was looking at Dean. Like this meant something.
Dean couldn’t help it, he grabbed Sam and shoved him up against a car. The car’s alarm went off but he ignored it. “You didn’t go to college because that ignorant son of bitch said something that stupid?”
Sam didn’t fight back. “Doesn’t it explain a lot?”
Dean almost hit him. “You asshole. I have to tell you, I fed you and took care of you until you were ten years old and your shit sure smelled human to me!”
There was more yelling and a lot more arguing. Dean never got why that meant that Sam couldn’t go to college except it had something to do with Sam not being a person who would have a normal life.
Dean was so enraged he finally said, “Fuck it. Get me a cab, I’m going back to the motel. You should stay with Jess tonight, I can’t hear any more of this.”
They walked back in silence.
At the front of the apartment Sam said, “I’ll get a cab.”
“Maybe dinner later,” Dean said.
Sam didn’t bother to answer.
Dean knew he was going to regret this. Knew he shouldn’t have allowed himself to get so angry. Fuck John Winchester for the number he’d done on Sam. Fuck Sam for being so fucked up. Fuck him for thinking he could do anything about it.
Three days with Sam and he was already back in the crazy. The whole family dysfunctional crazy. It was a crazy violent life and it brought out the violent crazy in the people who lived it. He thought about the bridge and the house and the Woman in White. His Dad dragging them across country. He was still wearing a fucking unlicensed handgun.
I waited for you to come back, Sam had said.
Okay. Suck it up, he thought. You’ve got a temper. Get over it. He turned around and that’s when he smelled smoke.
It was November 2, the day his mother had died.
He ran into the house to get his brother.
Again.
# He called the job and told them there had been a death in the family and he wouldn’t be in.
He called Roni. “Baby,” he said.
“Dean, oh my God, what’s wrong?” she said.
“There was a fire,” he said. “Sam’s girlfriend was killed.”
“Are you,” Roni said. “Is he…”
“We’re not injured. But,” he was sitting on one bed in a hotel room and on the other bed his brother sat, methodically stripping and cleaning guns. At least his hands were. Otherwise, there was no one inside there, just an empty space. “I can’t leave him right now.”
“Of course,” Roni said.
“I can’t leave him again,” he said.
“When are you coming home?” Roni said.
He watched his brother reassemble a gun. “I’ll call you soon,” Dean said. And ended the call.
Sam. He was going to stay, just until Sam was okay again.
When are you coming home?
What did that even mean anymore?
Fin
Part Eight
Author: AmeliaCareful’sDaughter
Word Count: 1,900
Pairings: none/gen
Rating: R For Language Mostly
Spoilers: none
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: Not mine
Summary: AU: When Dean was 14, he argued irreparably with John. Now he’s 26 and a firefighter when he runs into a 6’4” guy in an abandoned house and recognizes that he’s a hunter and thinks that maybe he knows him. But Sam is nothing like he remembers.
“You came back to Virginia?” Sam said very quietly.
“Yeah, some guy was in your hotel room.” The door opened and some guy with gray and white stubble looked out, heat and cigarette smoke rolling from the dark room. ‘You want to come in?’ the guy had asked and Dean didn’t know to this day if the guy was just offering a phone call or a chance to get out of the cold or something else.
The Impala rumbled and the asphalt hummed. Dean liked driving at night. It was soothing.
“I kept waiting for you to come,” Sam said, looking out the window.
Something in Dean died a little. He tried to say something but couldn’t, cleared his throat but his voice still wouldn’t come.
9/9 Dean drove the few hours into Palo Alto. It was hard to believe that he had a full day tomorrow before Sam would take him to San Francisco and put him on a plane.
“What will you do about the car?” he asked.
“I’ll take it to Bobby Singer,” Sam said.
“Right.” Dean had memories of the salvage yard, of playing among the cars. Of a Ford Torino used as a fort. Bobby Singer talking the rough incomprehensible magic of cars and parts to men who stood with their hands in their pockets looking out at the yard and appraising what they saw. “You know I called him.”
Sam looked over. “Bobby?”
Dean nodded. “Yeah. After I got picked up by CPS they put me in a foster home. I stole a hundred bucks and hitchhiked to Virginia but you and Dad were already gone so I found his number through information and I called him.”
Streetlights would shine in the front of the car and then disappear as they passed over head, eclipsed by the roof. Out of the corner of his eye, Dean could watch Sam’s face in light, then in shadow, then in light again.
“What did he say?” Sam asked after a long while.
“He said that the last time he’d seen Dad it hadn’t gone so well. Which I remembered. That’s when Bobby chased him off with a shotgun.” Dean took a breath. “So they weren’t talking and he didn’t know where Dad was. He had a phone number but Dad didn’t answer. I didn’t know anyone else to ask. I didn’t have a phone then.” Dad didn’t think fourteen year olds should have cell phones in 1992.
“You came back to Virginia?” Sam said very quietly.
“Yeah, some guy was in your hotel room.” The door opened and some guy with gray and white stubble looked out, heat and cigarette smoke rolling from the dark room. ‘You want to come in?’ the guy had asked and Dean didn’t know to this day if the guy was just offering a phone call or a chance to get out of the cold or something else.
The Impala rumbled and the asphalt hummed. Dean liked driving at night. It was soothing.
“I kept waiting for you to come,” Sam said, looking out the window.
Something in Dean died a little. He tried to say something but couldn’t, cleared his throat but his voice still wouldn’t come.
“It’s not your fault,” Sam said to the passenger window.
# They found a little motel. In the morning they had breakfast and Sam said he had to run some errands then he was going to pick Dean up and introduce him to a friend of his. “Um, Sam,” Dean said. “You know, tomorrow you can stay with your friend. I can stay here.”
Sam shrugged. “I can stay here. I’ll stay with her after I drop you off at the airport.”
Dean wanted to make a smart remark about girlfriends or booty call but there was something fragile between them he didn’t want to mess with so he just shut up and watched TV.
Sam came back in a funk, barely spoke. He seemed bigger, broader, less Sam-like and more like someone who would show up on an episode of Cops. More like when Dean had first seen in in Greeley. Dean hoped that this Jess person could get him more human. They checked out and drove into Palo Alto proper.
Dean didn’t expect them to end up in the University area. Jess turned out to be a cute blond with curls in a pretty blue-flowered sundress and when she ran to Sam he thawed instantly. More than thawed, Sam became somebody Dean thought he might have really known instantly was his brother; a guy who smiled, and looked like he had emotions.
“Jess,” he said, “this is my brother, Dean.”
She turned, eyes big. “Dean the fireman, Dean?”
Sam had told someone he had a brother?
Sam grinned. “Like, how many brothers named Dean do I have?”
“Oh my God I never thought I’d meet you!” Jess said.
Dean said, “I’m glad to, ah, meet you, too.” To Sam, “Two things. First, baby brother, you are way out of your league. And second, you told her about me?”
Jess laughed and she had an infectious laugh. “Oh yeah, Sam’s mysterious past. But he checks your girlfriend’s Facebook page all the time. And yours, too, but you never update yours.”
Lightning bolt of understanding. Roni had set up a Facebook page for him and he’d checked it, like, two times. But he knew it said something about Roni being his girlfriend and they were ‘friends’ or something.
Sam was smiling. Smirking. “She posts a lot about you,” Sam said. “The calendar thing? She had a link where you could buy it. Also, your diet and workout to get ready for it.”
Dean groaned. (Sam checked Roni’s Facebook page? Had for years? It was a warmth better than whisky in his chest.)
But Sam was upset and he seemed unable to hide it from Jess. In front of Jess he was the way he used to be around Dean, all Sammy and feelings. The thing he was upset about was another surprise. “I went to see that prof,” he said, “to see if he would send me the syllabus for that class on Foreign Economic Policy?”
Jess nodded to show she was listening.
“They figured out someone is having people tape seminars.”
Jess covered her mouth with her hand. “What did he say?”
“I can’t do it anymore, Jess, I just can’t,” Sam said.
“It’s…it’s not illegal,” Jess said.
“You’re in college?” Dean said.
Sam shook his head.
“He got a full ride scholarship to Stanford,” Jess said, “but he wouldn’t take it. Because of your stupid family business. Whatever it is.”
“Jess-” Sam said.
“So he finds people who are taking the classes he would have been taking and has them record them,” Jess explained, “and he reads the books on his own and takes the tests on his own if he can get a copy and writes the papers.”
Dean remembered the text books in the motel room in Greeley.
“Don’t start,” Sam said to him.
“What the hell!” Dean said. “You could have gotten out!”
“I have my reasons,” Sam said and the face Dean got was not the Sam that Jess got. It was the cold bastard he’d found in the motel room in Greeley. Not that honestly Dean gave a flying fuck.
“For Dad? Are you doing this for Dad?” Dean laughed. “Oh come on, like Dad ever did what you needed! Get a life, Sam!”
“No, I’m not doing it for him,” Sam said.
Dean looked at Jess. “Excuse me, do you mind if I talk to my brother alone for a minute?”
Jess looked at Sam. He looked at her, nervous, but nodded. “We’ll be back,” he said.
Outside it was clear and sunny, just a bit nippy in Palo Alto. “Are you going to tell me you like this?”
Sam shrugged.
“If you want to go to college, why not just go to college?”
“I’m getting the benefits of college without paying for it,” Sam said.
“Oh right, except for, you know, the degree. The thing that gets you, you know, a job that doesn’t get you killed. A full ride? To a really great school? Stanford is a really great school, right?”
Sam gave him a look that positively dripped with disdain. “Yeah. It’s a great school.” He took a breath. “Okay, I was all set to go. I was going to tell John at the last minute because I knew he would probably disown me the way he did you. We were hunting ghouls and I got hurt pretty bad. Marble mausoleum lid fell on me and then apparently some blood loss I don’t remember. Hospital bad. Bad enough I would have had to defer a semester.”
“So defer a semester,” Dean said.
“After I got out of the hospital, John dropped me at Bobby’s to recover and one night when he was visiting on his way through to some weird lead on a demon thing, while I’m supposed to be doped out of my mind on pain meds I hear him talking to Bobby and he tells Bobby that he’s not sure I’m human.”
Sam was looking at Dean. Like this meant something.
Dean couldn’t help it, he grabbed Sam and shoved him up against a car. The car’s alarm went off but he ignored it. “You didn’t go to college because that ignorant son of bitch said something that stupid?”
Sam didn’t fight back. “Doesn’t it explain a lot?”
Dean almost hit him. “You asshole. I have to tell you, I fed you and took care of you until you were ten years old and your shit sure smelled human to me!”
There was more yelling and a lot more arguing. Dean never got why that meant that Sam couldn’t go to college except it had something to do with Sam not being a person who would have a normal life.
Dean was so enraged he finally said, “Fuck it. Get me a cab, I’m going back to the motel. You should stay with Jess tonight, I can’t hear any more of this.”
They walked back in silence.
At the front of the apartment Sam said, “I’ll get a cab.”
“Maybe dinner later,” Dean said.
Sam didn’t bother to answer.
Dean knew he was going to regret this. Knew he shouldn’t have allowed himself to get so angry. Fuck John Winchester for the number he’d done on Sam. Fuck Sam for being so fucked up. Fuck him for thinking he could do anything about it.
Three days with Sam and he was already back in the crazy. The whole family dysfunctional crazy. It was a crazy violent life and it brought out the violent crazy in the people who lived it. He thought about the bridge and the house and the Woman in White. His Dad dragging them across country. He was still wearing a fucking unlicensed handgun.
I waited for you to come back, Sam had said.
Okay. Suck it up, he thought. You’ve got a temper. Get over it. He turned around and that’s when he smelled smoke.
It was November 2, the day his mother had died.
He ran into the house to get his brother.
Again.
# He called the job and told them there had been a death in the family and he wouldn’t be in.
He called Roni. “Baby,” he said.
“Dean, oh my God, what’s wrong?” she said.
“There was a fire,” he said. “Sam’s girlfriend was killed.”
“Are you,” Roni said. “Is he…”
“We’re not injured. But,” he was sitting on one bed in a hotel room and on the other bed his brother sat, methodically stripping and cleaning guns. At least his hands were. Otherwise, there was no one inside there, just an empty space. “I can’t leave him right now.”
“Of course,” Roni said.
“I can’t leave him again,” he said.
“When are you coming home?” Roni said.
He watched his brother reassemble a gun. “I’ll call you soon,” Dean said. And ended the call.
Sam. He was going to stay, just until Sam was okay again.
When are you coming home?
What did that even mean anymore?
Fin
Part Eight