These Are All the Reasons for Being [Sam/Dean, R]
Last night, I decided it was time to get back in the game and write something. This isn't exactly what I had in mind, but it's got a beginning and an end and some words in the middle, so I'm going with it. Sam's sixteen, so be warned if that's not your thing. The title's from The Fall of Freddie the Leaf by Leo Buscaglia.
These Are All the Reasons for Being [Sam/Dean, R]
Nothing he wants will fit into a space the size of a few comic books or an old Zeppelin t-shirt. He wants the little pieces of himself that he’s collected and assembled, he wants the blank spaces in between, he wants the chance to finish the puzzle, to let the pieces settle into place, to figure out why every inch he tacks on starts out as an ache in his bones, ends as a hollow emptiness in his chest.
These Are All the Reasons for Being
In Minnesota, a branch hangs low outside of Sam’s window. It’s bent oddly, twisted, stretching for the ground as though it were the sun, and some sympathetic part of Sam follows suit, grasps blindly for something that’s not there, catches only a vague absence that slips through his fingers, settles into his hollowed out corners and aches.
The branch sprouts a leaf in May, and Sam turns sixteen. Dean wakes him up in the middle of the night to shove a Twinkie in his face, and when he leaves, there’s a warm spot on the bed and the room’s too empty for Sam to sleep.
On the last day of school, Sam doesn’t say goodbye. He signs each yearbook that gets waved in front of his face with a different name, Jimmy Page, Richard Starkey, Brian Jones, and no one notices. When he tosses his pen into a trash can on his way out of the building, it doesn’t make a sound.
On his bed, his things are compartmentalized into bags, faded green canvas, shiny black plastic. He throws the green one onto the floor as gracelessly as his father tosses them around the country, but he lingers over the plastic ones, neatly organized piles of him, interlocking pieces that join to reveal fragments of a picture he’s never been still long enough to finish.
Dean passes through around dinnertime, stops in the doorway. Sam follows his gaze from the bag on the floor to the ones on the bed. What his life is, what it isn’t. What it should be, packed away like so much garbage. Most people do it the other way around. He says that, mostly to himself, and Dean doesn’t pretend not to understand, just offers up some extra space in his own bag for whatever Sam wants to hold onto.
Sam shakes his head. Nothing he wants will fit into a space the size of a few comic books or an old Zeppelin t-shirt. He wants the little pieces of himself that he’s collected and assembled, he wants the blank spaces in between, he wants the chance to finish the puzzle, to let the pieces settle into place, to figure out why every inch he tacks on starts out as an ache in his bones, ends as a hollow emptiness in his chest.
Dean lifts his shirt up to his shoulders, billows it out to combat the June heat, says something that Sam doesn’t remember after he’s gone.
In the morning, Dean’s sitting at Sam’s desk, looking out at the leaf. Beyond it, in the driveway, there’s no truck. There’s still no truck in the afternoon, and Sam spends the hours fitting himself into Dean’s silence.
Later, there’s a phone call, and then Dean sprawls out on the couch next to Sam, the weight of his relief measured by creaking springs and trembling hands. He knocks his forehead against Sam’s shoulder, huffs a breath into the base of his neck and it turns into a laugh that burrows into Sam’s empty spaces and curls up tight, replaces hollowness with warmth.
When Dean falls asleep on the couch, Sam falls asleep watching him breathe.
Dean drives two hours south to pick Dad up from Pastor Jim’s and returns with nothing but greetings from the Jolly Green Giant and orders to stay put until Dad’s cracked ribs heal enough to make travel bearable, or maybe even until the cast comes off his leg and he can drive himself back.
Sam unpacks himself piece by piece, assembles the puzzle as best he can and waits for the blank spaces to fill themselves. Later, he wakes to distant thunder and the tree branch scratching at his window like it’s tapping out a secret message. The wind gusts against the house, and he fills in one of his blanks.
It’s too late to call, but he does anyway, leaves a rambling apology on Pastor Jim’s machine. Dean’s in the kitchen when he’s done, and he could lie, he could say anything, but instead he tells the truth, tells Dean that he loves Dad, whispers it like a secret. Dean grunts, hooks an arm around his neck and half drags him back to bed. They don’t have to share a room here, but Sam pulls Dean down onto the bed, and they fit, knee to knee, the same way they always have.
He wakes up alone facing the window, watches the single leaf hanging off the branch for a little while. It’s missing a chunk out of its center point, and he sympathizes. The house is quiet, and he wonders if maybe he fills some of Dean’s empty spaces the way Dean fills his, wonders why the spaces seem bigger when Dean’s not around.
They spend the entire weekend on a Godzilla marathon. Sam shoves his feet into Dean’s lap halfway through the third movie and Dean throws a handful of popcorn at his head, then laughs when Sam pulls a few kernels out of his hair and pops them into his mouth. They fall asleep on the couch again, legs tangled together, and where they overlap, Sam feels Dean like an extension of himself.
Dean fills his time with morning runs and a part-time afternoon shift at a local garage, Sam fills his time waiting for Dean to come home. He arranges and rearranges his books, his notebooks, his clothes, puts his pieces together and tears them apart again. He waits for the blank spaces to fill, for the picture to become whole, and when it doesn’t, he slumps down against his pillow, watches the driveway and the road from underneath his branch and thinks that maybe his missing pieces really are missing, not just trapped in the invisible hurricane that shadows their lives, waiting for a moment of stillness to settle into place.
Later, when Dean comes home with a pizza and Chinese, grease smudged high on his cheek, Sam thinks maybe his empty spots aren’t really missing pieces at all, maybe they’re just spaces left open for Dean to fill.
Dad calls every few days and doesn’t talk about hunting until Sam asks what he’s been researching in Pastor Jim’s library. When Sam volunteers his empty afternoons to find some names to go with Dad’s dates, he finds Katie instead. She wears sweaters and a library volunteer badge and takes down the dates he’s looking for. She calls him Ringo like it’s their own private joke and teaches him to use the town’s local archive system, and she kisses like cotton candy, sugar-sweet and floaty, leaves him emptier than before.
He tucks himself into a corner of the automotive section afterwards, waits to hear the low rumble of the Impala outside. It takes twice as many days as it should to get half the information he promised, but Dad just thanks him all the same and asks how the car’s running, if they've got enough cash.
Dean works mornings for a week, and Sam runs with him at dusk. There’s a trail a quarter mile up the road that dead ends at a river and Dean doesn’t stop, just runs straight in, tears his shirt off and laughs. In the waning sunlight, he’s half golden, edged in jagged lines of shadow, and Sam can see the patterns where Dean’s edges match his own.
When Dean tackles him, drenches him, every place they touch is like a little curl of heat that sinks deep inside and fuses his pieces, makes him whole. Dean flashes a smile, plucks the grass out of Sam’s hair and walks back down the trail. Sam catches his breath, lies flat on his back and lets the world spin around him.
The leaves turn early, yellow blooms to orange outside Sam’s window, then deepens to red, and Sam watches, day after day, wonders how a single leaf can have so many colors, wonders how it knows when to change. When he wakes at dawn to a bare branch and Dean a hundred feet up the road, he has his answer.
At the end of the river trail, Dean’s shoes and shirt are discarded in a messy line; Dean’s standing in water up to his knees and Sam doesn’t stop, just walks into the river until he collides with Dean, chest to chest, mouth to mouth, bodies fused in all the ways they fit. He thinks the world should stop, should pause to reorganize itself around this new alignment of bodies, should acknowledge the places where their pieces are joined, but it doesn’t, so Sam does it instead.
He threads his fingers through Dean’s hair, brings their foreheads together, their noses, locks an arm around Dean’s back until there’s nothing between them and he whispers all the ways Dean makes him whole, little puffs of air that Dean swallows and breathes back into Sam, and it’s just another way their edges melt together.
When Dean’s lips move against his, he pushes forward, presses himself into Dean’s empty spaces, licks his way into Dean’s mouth until he’s panting, exhaling little gasps that have nowhere to go, no empty spaces to hide in.
Dean grabs the back of his neck, pulls him in so they’re forehead to forehead again, breathing the same air, but it’s not enough. Sam twists his body in toward Dean’s, strains for Dean’s warmth against him like the sun, catches his fingers around Dean’s hips and Dean follows suit, pulls him the rest of the way in and keeps pulling until Sam’s cock is filling the empty space in the cut of Dean’s hip, until Sam’s gasping into Dean’s mouth and shuddering against his chest.
When they get back to the house, Dad’s truck is in the driveway. Sam packs his clothes in the green canvas bag, throws everything else haphazardly into trash bags and takes them out to the end of the driveway. Dad locks up the house for the last time while Sam’s out there, gives Dean the itinerary, some cash, a new card.
From across the lawn, a flash of color under Sam’s bedroom window catches his attention. He knows what it is before he reaches it, a five-pointed leaf, red and orange and gold with a little hole in the center that Sam covers with his thumb. When they pull out of the driveway, out of Minnesota, it’s the only thing he hasn’t left behind.
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These Are All the Reasons for Being [Sam/Dean, R]
Nothing he wants will fit into a space the size of a few comic books or an old Zeppelin t-shirt. He wants the little pieces of himself that he’s collected and assembled, he wants the blank spaces in between, he wants the chance to finish the puzzle, to let the pieces settle into place, to figure out why every inch he tacks on starts out as an ache in his bones, ends as a hollow emptiness in his chest.
These Are All the Reasons for Being
In Minnesota, a branch hangs low outside of Sam’s window. It’s bent oddly, twisted, stretching for the ground as though it were the sun, and some sympathetic part of Sam follows suit, grasps blindly for something that’s not there, catches only a vague absence that slips through his fingers, settles into his hollowed out corners and aches.
The branch sprouts a leaf in May, and Sam turns sixteen. Dean wakes him up in the middle of the night to shove a Twinkie in his face, and when he leaves, there’s a warm spot on the bed and the room’s too empty for Sam to sleep.
On the last day of school, Sam doesn’t say goodbye. He signs each yearbook that gets waved in front of his face with a different name, Jimmy Page, Richard Starkey, Brian Jones, and no one notices. When he tosses his pen into a trash can on his way out of the building, it doesn’t make a sound.
On his bed, his things are compartmentalized into bags, faded green canvas, shiny black plastic. He throws the green one onto the floor as gracelessly as his father tosses them around the country, but he lingers over the plastic ones, neatly organized piles of him, interlocking pieces that join to reveal fragments of a picture he’s never been still long enough to finish.
Dean passes through around dinnertime, stops in the doorway. Sam follows his gaze from the bag on the floor to the ones on the bed. What his life is, what it isn’t. What it should be, packed away like so much garbage. Most people do it the other way around. He says that, mostly to himself, and Dean doesn’t pretend not to understand, just offers up some extra space in his own bag for whatever Sam wants to hold onto.
Sam shakes his head. Nothing he wants will fit into a space the size of a few comic books or an old Zeppelin t-shirt. He wants the little pieces of himself that he’s collected and assembled, he wants the blank spaces in between, he wants the chance to finish the puzzle, to let the pieces settle into place, to figure out why every inch he tacks on starts out as an ache in his bones, ends as a hollow emptiness in his chest.
Dean lifts his shirt up to his shoulders, billows it out to combat the June heat, says something that Sam doesn’t remember after he’s gone.
In the morning, Dean’s sitting at Sam’s desk, looking out at the leaf. Beyond it, in the driveway, there’s no truck. There’s still no truck in the afternoon, and Sam spends the hours fitting himself into Dean’s silence.
Later, there’s a phone call, and then Dean sprawls out on the couch next to Sam, the weight of his relief measured by creaking springs and trembling hands. He knocks his forehead against Sam’s shoulder, huffs a breath into the base of his neck and it turns into a laugh that burrows into Sam’s empty spaces and curls up tight, replaces hollowness with warmth.
When Dean falls asleep on the couch, Sam falls asleep watching him breathe.
Dean drives two hours south to pick Dad up from Pastor Jim’s and returns with nothing but greetings from the Jolly Green Giant and orders to stay put until Dad’s cracked ribs heal enough to make travel bearable, or maybe even until the cast comes off his leg and he can drive himself back.
Sam unpacks himself piece by piece, assembles the puzzle as best he can and waits for the blank spaces to fill themselves. Later, he wakes to distant thunder and the tree branch scratching at his window like it’s tapping out a secret message. The wind gusts against the house, and he fills in one of his blanks.
It’s too late to call, but he does anyway, leaves a rambling apology on Pastor Jim’s machine. Dean’s in the kitchen when he’s done, and he could lie, he could say anything, but instead he tells the truth, tells Dean that he loves Dad, whispers it like a secret. Dean grunts, hooks an arm around his neck and half drags him back to bed. They don’t have to share a room here, but Sam pulls Dean down onto the bed, and they fit, knee to knee, the same way they always have.
He wakes up alone facing the window, watches the single leaf hanging off the branch for a little while. It’s missing a chunk out of its center point, and he sympathizes. The house is quiet, and he wonders if maybe he fills some of Dean’s empty spaces the way Dean fills his, wonders why the spaces seem bigger when Dean’s not around.
They spend the entire weekend on a Godzilla marathon. Sam shoves his feet into Dean’s lap halfway through the third movie and Dean throws a handful of popcorn at his head, then laughs when Sam pulls a few kernels out of his hair and pops them into his mouth. They fall asleep on the couch again, legs tangled together, and where they overlap, Sam feels Dean like an extension of himself.
Dean fills his time with morning runs and a part-time afternoon shift at a local garage, Sam fills his time waiting for Dean to come home. He arranges and rearranges his books, his notebooks, his clothes, puts his pieces together and tears them apart again. He waits for the blank spaces to fill, for the picture to become whole, and when it doesn’t, he slumps down against his pillow, watches the driveway and the road from underneath his branch and thinks that maybe his missing pieces really are missing, not just trapped in the invisible hurricane that shadows their lives, waiting for a moment of stillness to settle into place.
Later, when Dean comes home with a pizza and Chinese, grease smudged high on his cheek, Sam thinks maybe his empty spots aren’t really missing pieces at all, maybe they’re just spaces left open for Dean to fill.
Dad calls every few days and doesn’t talk about hunting until Sam asks what he’s been researching in Pastor Jim’s library. When Sam volunteers his empty afternoons to find some names to go with Dad’s dates, he finds Katie instead. She wears sweaters and a library volunteer badge and takes down the dates he’s looking for. She calls him Ringo like it’s their own private joke and teaches him to use the town’s local archive system, and she kisses like cotton candy, sugar-sweet and floaty, leaves him emptier than before.
He tucks himself into a corner of the automotive section afterwards, waits to hear the low rumble of the Impala outside. It takes twice as many days as it should to get half the information he promised, but Dad just thanks him all the same and asks how the car’s running, if they've got enough cash.
Dean works mornings for a week, and Sam runs with him at dusk. There’s a trail a quarter mile up the road that dead ends at a river and Dean doesn’t stop, just runs straight in, tears his shirt off and laughs. In the waning sunlight, he’s half golden, edged in jagged lines of shadow, and Sam can see the patterns where Dean’s edges match his own.
When Dean tackles him, drenches him, every place they touch is like a little curl of heat that sinks deep inside and fuses his pieces, makes him whole. Dean flashes a smile, plucks the grass out of Sam’s hair and walks back down the trail. Sam catches his breath, lies flat on his back and lets the world spin around him.
The leaves turn early, yellow blooms to orange outside Sam’s window, then deepens to red, and Sam watches, day after day, wonders how a single leaf can have so many colors, wonders how it knows when to change. When he wakes at dawn to a bare branch and Dean a hundred feet up the road, he has his answer.
At the end of the river trail, Dean’s shoes and shirt are discarded in a messy line; Dean’s standing in water up to his knees and Sam doesn’t stop, just walks into the river until he collides with Dean, chest to chest, mouth to mouth, bodies fused in all the ways they fit. He thinks the world should stop, should pause to reorganize itself around this new alignment of bodies, should acknowledge the places where their pieces are joined, but it doesn’t, so Sam does it instead.
He threads his fingers through Dean’s hair, brings their foreheads together, their noses, locks an arm around Dean’s back until there’s nothing between them and he whispers all the ways Dean makes him whole, little puffs of air that Dean swallows and breathes back into Sam, and it’s just another way their edges melt together.
When Dean’s lips move against his, he pushes forward, presses himself into Dean’s empty spaces, licks his way into Dean’s mouth until he’s panting, exhaling little gasps that have nowhere to go, no empty spaces to hide in.
Dean grabs the back of his neck, pulls him in so they’re forehead to forehead again, breathing the same air, but it’s not enough. Sam twists his body in toward Dean’s, strains for Dean’s warmth against him like the sun, catches his fingers around Dean’s hips and Dean follows suit, pulls him the rest of the way in and keeps pulling until Sam’s cock is filling the empty space in the cut of Dean’s hip, until Sam’s gasping into Dean’s mouth and shuddering against his chest.
When they get back to the house, Dad’s truck is in the driveway. Sam packs his clothes in the green canvas bag, throws everything else haphazardly into trash bags and takes them out to the end of the driveway. Dad locks up the house for the last time while Sam’s out there, gives Dean the itinerary, some cash, a new card.
From across the lawn, a flash of color under Sam’s bedroom window catches his attention. He knows what it is before he reaches it, a five-pointed leaf, red and orange and gold with a little hole in the center that Sam covers with his thumb. When they pull out of the driveway, out of Minnesota, it’s the only thing he hasn’t left behind.
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