The Bridge from Lawrence to Rockford
Title: The Bridge from Lawrence to Rockford
Category: Gen
Characters: Sam, Dean, and Sam’s angst.
Word Count: 5300
Summary: Let us return, gentle reader, to simpler days. Let us return to the days when Sam, though adorable, was a touch bitchy and Dean, though endearing, was a bit overbearing; to the days when the other Special Children were as yet unknown and no one was trafficking in souls; to the days when the boys’ greatest challenge was not driving each other out of their pretty heads. Let us return to the days between ‘Home’ and ‘Asylum.’
Author’s Notes: I started this fic a couple weeks after ‘Asylum’ aired. Ran into a little trouble with the paragraph transitions.
Generic warning on all of my fics: A small number of my stories contain character death. For artistic reasons, I prefer not to disclose it in the headers. If you will not read a story unless you know whether one of the Winchester brothers dies, click here for the spoiler.
Additional Note: This story isn't listed in the " Woods are Lonely" series because it stands on its own. In my mind, though, it's in the same 'verse.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
April 9, 2006
“A commune near Atlanta reports a ‘rash of bizarre accidents’ in their greenhouse,” Dean read aloud from the news story Sam had found. “Huh. Might be a wood sprite.”
“Did you even look at the obituary?” Sam griped, stabbing at the last carrot on his plate. “It’s a ghost.”
“Sixty-year-old hippie dies of a heart attack? The alfalfa sprouts probably got her. Could be a hamadryad.” Dean toggled between the two browser windows. “Hell, it could be nothing.”
“It could be.” Sam clenched a hand around his mug. “And yet, it’s a ghost. An ordinary, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety ghost. Give it up, Dean, I’m sure.”
Dean jerked his head up. “Is that because you had another shining?”
Inhale. Exhale. Count to ten. “It’s because I learned to read on stories of ghosties, ghoulies, and things that go bump in the night, and I knew everything there is to know about them by the time I was seven, except that they’re real.”
“An important detail,” Dean interjected.
Sam ignored him. “I’m a trained hunter, Dean. Not a goddamned EMF reader.”
Dean blinked. “Dude. Chill.”
Sam bit down on his temper and stared at the wall map that the truck stop had provided as décor for long-haulers too worn out or hopped up to remember which side of the Mississippi River Arkansas is on. A thousand miles lay between them and Lawrence. A thousand miles, two jobs, seven nights, twenty hours’ sleep, and an immeasurable amount of denial.
“You sure there’s nothing in Key West?” Dean asked. Again.
“Just the ghost of Ernest Hemingway. Which we are not wasting,” Sam added when Dean pursed his lips thoughtfully. He changed tacks. “They have good peach pie in Georgia, you know.”
Dean swiveled the laptop back around toward him. “You think I’m gonna drive two hundred miles for peach pie?”
“And pecan pie,” Sam cajoled. “C’mon, it’s as good a place to spend the night as any.”
“Hm.” Dean pondered for a minute, then slugged down the rest of his coffee. “If we push it, we can get there before the greenhouse closes,” he announced. “Let’s go.”
Because that’s how these things always ended: Sam wheedled and negotiated; Dean decided.
Sam held out his hand for the keys. “I’m driving.”
Dean jammed his keyring deeper into his pocket with one hand, scooped up the check with the other, and shoved back his chair. “You’re taking a nap.” He strode toward the cash register, tossing over his shoulder, “No pit stops. Hit the little boys’ room now if you need to.”
Inhale. Exhale. Dean was rattled by what happened in Kansas, and when Dean was rattled he turned to the familiar: hunting and big-brothering Sam. The hunting, Sam was coming to understand. The big-brothering thing-it was time to turn the volume down. Preferably to “off.”
“You used to sleep in the car all the time,” Dean reminisced as the truck stop behind them shrank into the distance. “Until you were about three, Dad had me pinch you awake when we were driving during the day, or you’d be up fussing all night.”
Sam contorted himself over the seat to rummage in the back for a blanket when Dean cranked up the A/C. “You had a free pass to pinch me whenever I was in a car seat? No wonder I turned into a biter.”
“Yeah, it explains a lot,” Dean agreed.
“Aren’t you worried I’ll do it again tonight?” Sam asked as he settled back down, trying to think of a story to tell the drycleaner when he went to get the blood out of his jacket.
“You stopped biting when you learned to wrestle. Mostly.” Dean reached over to adjust the blanket in a gesture that Sam managed to accept as endearing rather than annoying through sheer force of will. “C’mon. The nap’ll be good for you.”
Sam counted up the things he could say that wouldn’t make Dean shut up, starting with, ‘Your concern is appreciated, but unnecessary,’ which would be ignored, and building to, ‘Dean, I’m twenty-two. Time to start being my brother and stop being my father,’ which would be resented. Because God forbid that anyone breathe a hint of the truth: the Winchester household needed more of a father than the one it had.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. Come to think of it, the thrumming of the wheels was kind of soothing. And, come to think of it, he felt groggy.
He snapped alert. “Dean, if you put something in my coffee, I will hurt you.”
A good portion of Sam wasn’t kidding about the threat. Aside from the appalling overstepping of boundaries that drugging him would represent, the thought of getting trapped in a nightmare made his stomach churn. He was mostly sure that Dean wouldn’t have pulled something like that, though. Ninety percent sure, maybe as high as ninety-five.
“Sammy, I’m shocked you would accuse me of spiking your drink before I thought of it myself.” Dean checked the side mirror and changed lanes without signaling. “I told the waitress to give you decaf.”
Sam slapped his hand down on the dashboard. “Goddammit, Dean,” he barked. Dean lifted an eyebrow; Sam took a deep breath and modulated his voice. “Dude. You’re my big brother, you’re worried about me, you want to look out for me. Got it. Cut it the fuck out, okay?”
Dean’s hands tightened on the wheel, but he kept his tone light. “Have I ever told you you’re a cranky bitch when you don’t sleep, Sam?”
Inhale. Exhale. Count to ten. Wonder how long it would take to become a textbook example of how the mind deteriorates under sleep deprivation. Give in, because Dean wasn’t going to.
“It’s your funeral if your partner conks out from caffeine deprivation in the middle of a hunt,” Sam warned, curling toward the window and trying to get comfortable. It must have been easier in a kiddy jumpseat.
“At least I’d get to be there.” Dean kept his head steadfastly forward while shooting Sam one of those solicitous sidelong glances that he inexplicably thought were too subtle to be noticed. “Go to sleep, Sam. I’ll wake you if it gets bad.”
There was no fire and blood when he dozed off, just vague images and the smell of phantom smoke, and that was the best Sam could hope for these days. He nodded in and out, letting the smooth motion lull him. When Dean pulled into a rest stop he stayed in the car, dozing fitfully, feeling like they were still moving. Like the road had become so much of his life that it had entered his dreams.
His eyes flickered open-he thought-as they drove back out of the turnout. There was a flash of white in front of him, a slender blonde figure in a long gown...he twisted in his seat to watch it, but it had vanished.
“Dean! Dean, am I awake?”
“Yeah.” The hand that touched his shoulder was too solid to be a dream. “What did you see?”
Sam shook his head and said nothing. Maybe the nightmares were bleeding into his waking hours. Maybe he was fading into them. Maybe each one was chipping away another piece of his sanity.
He turned up the cassette player and stared straight forward for the rest of the ride.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“‘For Sale’ sign,” Dean noted as they passed through one of those well-kept but shabby inner suburbs where families live until they can afford to move to well-kept and upscale outer suburbs. He turned down the street from habit more than anything else-even if the house was unoccupied, they’d be noticed in a neighborhood like this. On cue, the woman next door looked up from her landscaping when they stopped. Dean gave her a wave and his brightest smile; she waved back.
Squatting in model homes must have ruined Dean for tract houses, because he muttered between his teeth, “Dude, that’s a shoebox.”
“Not everyone can afford to live in planned communities built over cursed Indian graveyards, Dean.” Sam leaned forward and added his own smile and wave; the woman started and turned back to watering her crocuses. “Huh. Maybe they don’t welcome buyers of any sexual orientation-oh, come on, man, it’s not like she was writing down her number in lipstick for you.”
Dean glowered at him. “They shouldn’t be so picky,” he proclaimed. “How many people are they going to find who want to spend their whole lives in a shoebox?”
“You don’t. It’s a starter home-you live in it for a while, build equity, and trade up,” Sam explained. He refrained from saying aloud that it was a palace compared to everywhere they’d grown up.
“Equity,” Dean over-enunciated, putting the car into gear and pulling out. Sam suspected that ‘equity,’ like ‘mortgage,’ wasn’t in Dean’s lexicon. His brother didn’t like to clutter his brain with things he’d never need. “Can’t believe you wanted to be a homeowner, Sammy.”
Right. Because Dean would rather believe Sam wanted to be a passenger.
Dean gave either the house or the woman who had doubted his heterosexuality a last look in the rearview mirror. “Picket fence, nine-to-five, wife and two kids,” he said, fumbling in the cassette box. “I can’t picture it.”
“You had it, Dean. How can you not picture it every day?”
That wasn’t a ploy to shut Dean up, really, but it did anyway.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Sam had theorized that the members of the ‘Spring Eternal Blooms’ collective had murdered and buried Sister Hibiscus Birch (née Gloria Farkas) somewhere in their nursery in a fertility ritual gone horribly wrong. According to Brother Valerian Poplar (Marvin Eggers on the commune’s business permit), however, Hibiscus had died a natural death and her body had been cremated in full compliance with state health codes before her ashes were scattered near the conservatory she’d once tended. Valerian was smart enough to feign forgetfulness when Sam pushed for the name of the crematorium, but dumb enough to let Dean take a tour of the grounds with Sister Jasmine Eucalyptus (née Sister Jasmine Eucalyptus, a second-generation member of the collective). Dean came back with a pamphlet in his hand, a flower-really-behind his ear, a muttered report of a telltale mound in a pachysandra bed, and EMF evidence that regardless of how the old gal had gotten in there, she hadn’t left. Sam dropped the phrase ‘audit of tax-exempt status’ just to see Eggers squirm, and he and Dean headed out to find a motel and wait for dark.
“C’mon, Sam, it’s just a ghost,” Dean coaxed as he tried to talk Sam into a bar run after the job. “It’ll take us an hour, tops. Plenty of time to meet new people, make some new friends.”
“Pass,” Sam grunted, breaking open the shotgun and checking the shells. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Yeah, and when was the last time you were in the mood?” Dean asked. “Any kind of mood?”
He wasn’t wrong, really. Grief and exhaustion had done a number on Sam’s libido, and once he’d gotten over his surprise that a twenty-two year-old’s sex drive could plummet to almost nil, he’d been relieved. He’d never been one for casual affairs, and that was all this life could offer. Which didn’t mean he was letting Dean get away with a total lack of respect for personal boundaries.
“Dude. Do I keep track of how often you…” Sam waved his hand, hoping to head off an indelicate euphemism.
“Wouldn’t recommend it, Sam. Don’t want to make you feel inadequate.” Dean put on a Serious Face. “Look, I’m not saying you should hook up with someone. It’s just...it’s not good for you to spend so much time alone in Sammyland.”
‘Sammyland’ was what Dean had years ago dubbed the place in a little boy’s imagination that featured regular school days, organized sports, a house instead of a residence hotel, and minimal weapons training. It was a place where no one, not even adored older brothers, came. As Sam grew older Sammyland changed with him, becoming the source of an adolescent’s anger as well as a young man’s dreams, but it always remained a place of secrecy, and often the only privacy Sam had. Dean was right; he’d been there a lot lately, and it had become a grim and unsettling place.
Dean sensed a weakness. “I’m just saying talk to someone else, okay? Company won’t be as charming as mine, but at least it will be different.”
Sam sighed. “Okay, yeah.”
Dean flashed his teeth. “Attaboy,” he said, in a tone smarmy enough to make Sam respond, “You know what I could go for? A coffee.”
Hibiscus, though, didn’t go without a fight. Dean got beaned-‘They were sweet peas, Sam, and it’s not funny’-by a vase in the florist’s workspace, and they both got slashes that stung like a motherfucker with all the salt flying around. After debating the pros and cons of leaving untorched a hothouse full of potentially evil orchids that might wreak havoc come corsage season (‘Dude, that would be the most awesome prom ever!’ ‘Dean!’), they consecrated the irrigation tank and left the decision to Nature. Or whatever.
“Hope you weren’t attached to this shirt,” Dean commented back in the motel room as he took a knife to Sam’s bloody tee.
Sam was, actually. It was a Stanford shirt that he had defiantly bought to replace the ones lost in the fire. Now it was rags for the gun-cleaning kit. He ignored the symbolism as Dean carefully sliced through the soft fabric. He could appreciate irony, but it rarely amused him. Not that anything much amused him these days.
The blade snagged a couple times-it needed...
“Knife needs sharpened,” Dean remarked as he laid it aside and peeled away the T-shirt. He scrutinized the gash beneath it. “This is going to need stitches.”
“Figures.” Sam grabbed the first aid kit. “Shit,” he said when he opened the box.
“What?” Dean asked, turning back from removing his own shirt. “Shit,” he echoed when Sam showed him the nearly empty vial of Lidocaine.
Sam put the little bottle back, weighed the uncertainty of nightmares against the certain pain of getting stitched up without anesthesia, and reached for the bourbon.
Dean’s mouth tightened as he watched Sam measure out a couple shots. “That’s not going to be enough.”
“It’ll take the edge off.” Sam knocked back the booze, wiped his mouth, and picked up the kit. “We can do you while it kicks in,” he said, heading for the bathroom.
A thought struck him as he laid out the bandages. “You know, Dad’ll need to restock too if he’s still hunting,” he called back through the open door. “We should check with some of his contacts. See if they’ve seen him.”
Silence from the other room. Sam wasn’t the only one dealing with things by denial.
“Dean?” he called again.
Dean appeared in the doorway. “Maybe we shouldn’t.” He tossed his T-shirt into the trash; it was a loss too. “Maybe he doesn’t want us to find him.”
“You think he’s just ignoring our messages?” Sam asked, because neither of them was ready to face the other explanation for Dean’s call going unanswered. “Why?”
“He’ll have his reasons.” Dean winced as Sam started cleaning his cuts. “Not like we don’t have enough to do in the meantime.” You didn’t have to be psychic to know how it would play out if his brother was right: the reason would be plenty good enough for Dean, and nowhere near good enough for Sam.
“I signed on to find Dad,” Sam reminded his brother. “Not restart the family business.”
Dean set his face stolidly and didn’t speak again until Sam finished patching him up. “Not bad,” he allowed as he looked at the bandages in the mirror. “You spend your whole time at school watching ‘General Hospital?’”
It shouldn’t have hit any harder than Dean’s other jabs, but it did. “I got some emergency medical training my freshman year,” Sam responded brusquely.
“Yeah?” Dean peered closer at the dressings. “Learn anything Dad didn’t already teach you?”
Right. Because Dean would never admit that there was something to be learned outside the old man’s tutelage.
Sam focused on putting a roll of gauze away. “Among other things, ambulances have no legroom, and once you’ve witnessed the miracle of birth, you’ll never look at a vagina the same way again.”
Dean reared back in horror. “I thought you were going to chase ambulances, Sammy, not ride in them.”
“Jesus Christ, Dean!”
It was either punch his brother, or get the hell away from him. Sam made it to the motel room door before he remembered he was still shirtless and bloodied. He went for option number three: slapping his open palms against the door and bowing his head against it.
“Sam,” came from behind him.
Sam dug his fingernails into the cheap particleboard. “What?”
“Sam,” Dean repeated, with something close enough to apology to make Sam turn toward him. Dean smiled ingratiatingly. “What’ll it take for you to swear to never tell me about the miracle of birth?”
In other words, it was Sam's own fault for saying 'vagina.' An instant answer to Dean's offer leapt to mind. It was a childish symbol now, but after a few more months on the road-and when the hell did he start thinking in terms of months?-it would become a rankling sore.
“I drive whenever I want, for the next month.” With my own set of keys, Sam didn’t add. You shouldn’t ask for something if you can’t handle being turned down.
“Deal,” Dean agreed.
Anyone else would have seen a concession. Sam knew it for what it was: closing the books on the conversation, going back to pretending that the past three years of Sam’s life hadn’t happened. Defeated, he waved Dean into the bathroom.
“Dude, watch the ’do!” Dean griped when Sam ran his fingers through his hair to check for shards of loose glass.
“You can gel it up yourself in the morning. Fraternal duty only gets you so far,” Sam told him, finding a slight bump where the vase had struck. Nothing to worry about.
“I’d do it for you. If you got a freakin’ haircut.”
“Bite me, Dean.” He nudged Dean’s head forward and leaned in to take a final look.
“Dude, watch the head!” Dean complained when Sam’s fingers tightened involuntarily.
“Sorry.” Sam fought to keep his voice steady long enough to grit out, “You can take it from here.”
Moving jerkily, he stepped out of the small room, shut the door behind him, and slumped back against the wall. He was shaking with anger.
Dean had gray hair.
Dean had gray hair.
It was a stupid thing to worry about. Dean had scars and broken bones, he could have a bleeding ulcer for all Sam knew, but...Dean had gray hair.
Dean had learned to fire a weapon at the age of six, had been dangerously wounded on a hunt when he was thirteen, had driven their father to an emergency room minutes before he bled out when he was fifteen, had spent his eighteenth birthday in a courthouse, scrawling his signature on document after document that gave him power of attorney over Sam when Dad was gone, named him Sam’s guardian if their father died. Now Dean was twenty-seven, and he had gray hair.
Sam hated the old man. Hated him.
“Dude. You okay?” came from behind him.
Sam stalked over to his bed and poured another shot to avoid looking at his brother. “Let’s get it over with,” he said when he had himself back under control.
“Still hurts, huh?” Dean asked, pulling on a fresh T-shirt and joining him on the bed with the kit.
“Something like that,” Sam mumbled, downing the bourbon. “No, save it,” he insisted when Dean pulled out an alcohol swab and the Lidocaine.
“We can get more from Joshua.” Dean measured out a half-dose of the drug, enough to dull the pain the liquor wouldn’t cover. Sam barely felt the needle slide in. Dean was right; their father had taught them more than he’d learn in a course.
“What was it like?” Dean asked abruptly.
It took Sam a second to figure out the question. “The ambulance?” Dean nodded, and Sam could swear he saw a glimpse of real curiosity in his brother’s eyes. “Blood, adrenaline, and you get to run red lights,” he answered. “You’d be good at it, you know.”
Dean shrugged. “Already got a job,” he said.
“Dad’s job.” Dreams of my own, the creature with his brother’s face had said, and this was the first time Sam had seen Dean show interest in something besides the hunt. “Come on, didn’t you ever want to do anything else?”
Dean suddenly decided that cleaning Sam’s cuts required his full attention. “Like what, go to college?”
“Why not?” Sam demanded.
“Dude, I didn’t finish high school.”
“And whose fault is that?” Sam parried. “Don’t tell me you didn’t want to.”
“It’s not Dad’s fault what’s out there.” Dean finished disinfecting Sam’s wounds and concentrated on threading the suture needle. “I didn’t care about some piece of paper.”
Sam might have believed him if he didn’t remember the screaming match he and Dad had at the beginning of his senior year, when Dad announced they were picking up stakes and probably wouldn’t settle back down long enough for Sam to finish school. Dean sat through the fight, one booted heel resting on the edge of the coffee table, cleaning his favorite handgun. He wasn’t ignoring them so much as letting it all flow around and over him like background noise, until their father invoked how easily Dean had passed the battery of GED tests, arguing that Sam could do the same thing.
“Look, it’s no big deal,” he interjected. Sam rounded on him, stung by the betrayal, but Dean was talking to their father. “It’s just a few more months, right?”
Dad set his jaw and met Dean’s eyes. That silent way of communicating passed between them, the way that Dean always knew without asking when to toss Dad rock salt instead of silver, who was flanking left and who was going right, who was going to drop Sam off at school or go to his parent-teacher conference. Dean raised his eyebrow; their father nodded a concession and walked out without a word.
“Thanks,” Sam said into the silence.
Dean returned to his task. “One of us might as well get a real diploma,” he muttered, peering down the bore of his weapon for some last speck. “It’s just a few more months.”
‘A few more months to what?’ Sam didn’t ask. Years later, he realized that moment of support was the moment he and Dean began to grow apart. The difference between eighteen and twenty-two was somehow starker than the one between twelve and sixteen; Dean was a man now and Sam was still a boy, and though under the sibling teasing and banter Sam respected Dean as he didn’t their father, his brother was becoming a symbol of the man Sam didn’t want to be.
Dean’s voice drew him back to the present. “Besides, I didn’t want to go to college.”
That, Sam believed. When Sam said he was applying to universities Dean just looked at him blankly; girls, guns, and catalytic converters Dean knew, but with college Sam wanted something his brother didn’t understand. And when the three of them ended up in the same room, in the same places, arguing about Stanford, it was different. Dean raised his eyebrow occasionally when Sam shouted as loudly as his father, but said nothing. The topography of Sammyland was baffling to him, and in an unknown land, their father led. Sam hated himself for it, but he’d never been able to squelch that last lingering prick of resentment that Dean had sat by and silently watched the exile of the youngest Winchester.
“All I’m saying is you should have had a choice,” Sam pushed.
“I made my choices, Sam.” Dean’s face shut down, all curiosity hidden, and Sam had blown his chance. Dad and Dean were circling the wagons again, and Sam was left on the outside. Same as always.
Dean tapped Sam’s numb skin to check the anesthesia and pulled the bedside lamp closer. The harsh light revealed premature lines around the corners of his eyes and lips. “So, what was lawyer boy doing in the ambulance anyway?”
“Getting advanced first aid certification,” Sam replied, not sure if his brother really cared, or was just trying to distract his attention from the needle. “I was working as a park guide that summer. Guess I never told you about that-what?” he asked as Dean’s face darkened.
“No, and did you ever think that maybe you should have told us before you went off to play Ranger Rick?” The hard edge on Dean’s voice showed that Sam had somehow stepped into a minefield. “Dad was pissed as hell that he had to track you down. Why didn’t you stay at Stanford?”
Unbelievable, but so typical. “The park had free housing, and I couldn’t afford a real shoebox in Palo Alto on Starbuck’s wages,” Sam defended himself. “What was I supposed to do, scam a place for three months?”
“Why not?” Dean turned his gaze back to the wound. “Or you could have, you know, come home.”
“Come home,” Sam repeated in disbelief. They shouldn’t have this conversation now, not with both of them edgy from sour adrenaline and Sam half-drunk, but damned if he could just let cracks like that slide. “I didn’t have a home, remember? I had orders.” He enunciated the next words cuttingly. “‘Don’t ever come back.’”
“You always could hold a grudge,” Dean said, and the only thing that kept Sam from a full meltdown was the undertone of admiration in his brother’s voice. Maybe being a stubborn bastard had suddenly become a virtue in Dean’s book.
“You think that’s what this is? A grudge?” he snarled. Long-suppressed rage and hurt boiled to the surface, filling Dean’s silence. “He threw me out. I was his son, Dean, and I wasn’t what he wanted, so he threw me out.” Sam forced himself to stop before he said something he couldn’t take back. Dad didn’t want me anymore. He threw me away, and you watched.
“Don’t you ever say that.” Dean’s voice plummeted to the lowest pitch in his register, and he bit out each word as if he were chipping ice. “You are his son, Sammy. Don’t you ever say ‘were,’ because you know damn well that’s not what he meant. And it’d damn well better not be what you want.”
“We’re not talking about this.” Sam threw an arm over his eyes. “And my name is-say it with me-‘Sam.’”
Inhale. Exhale. Don’t think about those last, ugly words he and his father exchanged. Listen to the rattling of the air vent. Ignore the faint tug as Dean, whose hands hadn’t faltered or shaken an iota, finished the last stitch and knotted the thread off.
“Look, Sam.” Dean’s voice was worse than frustrated, it was helpless, and a world where Dean was helpless was a world tilting on its axis. “I don’t know why he didn’t call you or knock on your door. He must have had his reasons. But you have to trust me-he never wanted that.”
Inhale. Exhale. Force himself to believe it, because Dean lied to anyone and everyone, except him and their father.
“Okay,” Sam conceded, lowering his arm.
“Okay.” Dean made quick work of the dressing and sat back. “Done,” he announced. “Need another drink?”
“Nah.” Sam pushed himself into a half-sitting position and watched his brother pack away the medical supplies with the same deft precision he used with his weapons. “Why don’t you hit the bar?” he suggested when Dean sat down and started drumming his fingers on the table, eyes darting around the room like he suspected fanged emotions were lurking in the corners, waiting to strike. “I’m fine.”
Dean’s face brightened. “You sure?” he asked, jumping up and reaching into his duffel bag for another shirt. “What about you?”
“I’ll order in,” Sam told him. Pizza: the dinner and breakfast of champions.
Dean pursed his lips, digging into the bag again. “You’re not going to sleep tonight, are you?”
“Nope.” Sam sat all the way up, wincing as the stitches pulled. He always had metabolized that stuff fast. “Shouldn’t have taken that nap, huh?”
Dean rolled his eyes and tossed Dad’s journal onto the table. “Dad’s contacts are all in there. You want to waste time calling people, I can’t stop you.” He paused, scratching the back of his neck. “Uh, don’t bother Bobby. Dad wouldn’t call him.”
Sam didn’t threaten their fragile truce by asking what happened between their father and one of the few stable, safe presences he remembered from his childhood. “Take the car, okay?” he said instead. “In case the lucky girl doesn’t have a place of her own.”
Dean froze in the act of buttoning his shirt. “The car is for luring chicks, man. It’s not where you reel them in.”
“Oh. Um...oops,” Sam said, groping in his own bag for a pad of paper. He pulled it out and flinched when he saw his sketch of the tree in front of their old house.
Dean was too shocked by the desecration of his car to notice. “Tell me you didn’t...”
“Lose my virginity in that car?” Sam replied mechanically, tearing his eyes from the picture. “Sure. I’ll never breathe a word.”
“Sixteen before you got laid? Some days I can’t believe we’re related.” Dean pulled on his jacket. “It was sixteen, right? Not seventeen? ’Cause you weren’t adopted. I remember Mom being pregnant.”
“Yeah,” Sam murmured, not really hearing the question.
He’d never seen photos of their mother pregnant. He didn’t know if she’d sent Dad on midnight runs for pickles and ice cream, or if Dean had been jealous of the new baby. All he knew was that Mom was beautiful, Dad and Dean loved her, and she died.
And she was sorry.
Sam flipped the pad over so Dean wouldn’t see it and sat down at the table. “The front seat has more room,” he said, forcing the words to sound normal, “but you’ve gotta watch out for the gearshift.”
Shuddering, Dean fled.
Sam ground the heels of his palms against his eyes. Dean had mentioned it only once, when they were driving down a pitch-black stretch of highway two states away from Kansas. ‘She was sorry you never knew her, Sammy,’ he said, and popped a tape into the player before Sam could reply. Right. She’d apologized for dying to the son who didn’t remember her, instead of the one who’d been damaged, maybe irreparably, by her death. Dean wasn’t any more convinced of his explanation than Sam was.
Sam opened Dad’s journal and flipped through the final entries. The last one was dated around the same time his dreams began, just days before the second woman Sam loved died the same way the first had. Real coincidences in their line of work were rare: maybe their father was looking for answers, maybe he had answers he didn’t want them to know.
He reached for his notebook. If Dean was right and Dad didn’t want to be found-well, this wasn’t the first time Sam didn’t care what the old man wanted. He took one last look at his picture, seeing in his mind the soundless, flashing images, the face he’d learned from photographs, and maybe other things too. Things he didn’t want to explore. Sammyland had become uncharted territory; here be dragons.
Sam tore the sketch from the pad and ripped it up.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Various additional author’s notes:
Whew. The boys sure have grown since Season One, haven’t they?
Any and all feedback is welcome. All my fic may be found here.
Category: Gen
Characters: Sam, Dean, and Sam’s angst.
Word Count: 5300
Summary: Let us return, gentle reader, to simpler days. Let us return to the days when Sam, though adorable, was a touch bitchy and Dean, though endearing, was a bit overbearing; to the days when the other Special Children were as yet unknown and no one was trafficking in souls; to the days when the boys’ greatest challenge was not driving each other out of their pretty heads. Let us return to the days between ‘Home’ and ‘Asylum.’
Author’s Notes: I started this fic a couple weeks after ‘Asylum’ aired. Ran into a little trouble with the paragraph transitions.
Generic warning on all of my fics: A small number of my stories contain character death. For artistic reasons, I prefer not to disclose it in the headers. If you will not read a story unless you know whether one of the Winchester brothers dies, click here for the spoiler.
Additional Note: This story isn't listed in the " Woods are Lonely" series because it stands on its own. In my mind, though, it's in the same 'verse.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
April 9, 2006
“A commune near Atlanta reports a ‘rash of bizarre accidents’ in their greenhouse,” Dean read aloud from the news story Sam had found. “Huh. Might be a wood sprite.”
“Did you even look at the obituary?” Sam griped, stabbing at the last carrot on his plate. “It’s a ghost.”
“Sixty-year-old hippie dies of a heart attack? The alfalfa sprouts probably got her. Could be a hamadryad.” Dean toggled between the two browser windows. “Hell, it could be nothing.”
“It could be.” Sam clenched a hand around his mug. “And yet, it’s a ghost. An ordinary, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety ghost. Give it up, Dean, I’m sure.”
Dean jerked his head up. “Is that because you had another shining?”
Inhale. Exhale. Count to ten. “It’s because I learned to read on stories of ghosties, ghoulies, and things that go bump in the night, and I knew everything there is to know about them by the time I was seven, except that they’re real.”
“An important detail,” Dean interjected.
Sam ignored him. “I’m a trained hunter, Dean. Not a goddamned EMF reader.”
Dean blinked. “Dude. Chill.”
Sam bit down on his temper and stared at the wall map that the truck stop had provided as décor for long-haulers too worn out or hopped up to remember which side of the Mississippi River Arkansas is on. A thousand miles lay between them and Lawrence. A thousand miles, two jobs, seven nights, twenty hours’ sleep, and an immeasurable amount of denial.
“You sure there’s nothing in Key West?” Dean asked. Again.
“Just the ghost of Ernest Hemingway. Which we are not wasting,” Sam added when Dean pursed his lips thoughtfully. He changed tacks. “They have good peach pie in Georgia, you know.”
Dean swiveled the laptop back around toward him. “You think I’m gonna drive two hundred miles for peach pie?”
“And pecan pie,” Sam cajoled. “C’mon, it’s as good a place to spend the night as any.”
“Hm.” Dean pondered for a minute, then slugged down the rest of his coffee. “If we push it, we can get there before the greenhouse closes,” he announced. “Let’s go.”
Because that’s how these things always ended: Sam wheedled and negotiated; Dean decided.
Sam held out his hand for the keys. “I’m driving.”
Dean jammed his keyring deeper into his pocket with one hand, scooped up the check with the other, and shoved back his chair. “You’re taking a nap.” He strode toward the cash register, tossing over his shoulder, “No pit stops. Hit the little boys’ room now if you need to.”
Inhale. Exhale. Dean was rattled by what happened in Kansas, and when Dean was rattled he turned to the familiar: hunting and big-brothering Sam. The hunting, Sam was coming to understand. The big-brothering thing-it was time to turn the volume down. Preferably to “off.”
“You used to sleep in the car all the time,” Dean reminisced as the truck stop behind them shrank into the distance. “Until you were about three, Dad had me pinch you awake when we were driving during the day, or you’d be up fussing all night.”
Sam contorted himself over the seat to rummage in the back for a blanket when Dean cranked up the A/C. “You had a free pass to pinch me whenever I was in a car seat? No wonder I turned into a biter.”
“Yeah, it explains a lot,” Dean agreed.
“Aren’t you worried I’ll do it again tonight?” Sam asked as he settled back down, trying to think of a story to tell the drycleaner when he went to get the blood out of his jacket.
“You stopped biting when you learned to wrestle. Mostly.” Dean reached over to adjust the blanket in a gesture that Sam managed to accept as endearing rather than annoying through sheer force of will. “C’mon. The nap’ll be good for you.”
Sam counted up the things he could say that wouldn’t make Dean shut up, starting with, ‘Your concern is appreciated, but unnecessary,’ which would be ignored, and building to, ‘Dean, I’m twenty-two. Time to start being my brother and stop being my father,’ which would be resented. Because God forbid that anyone breathe a hint of the truth: the Winchester household needed more of a father than the one it had.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. Come to think of it, the thrumming of the wheels was kind of soothing. And, come to think of it, he felt groggy.
He snapped alert. “Dean, if you put something in my coffee, I will hurt you.”
A good portion of Sam wasn’t kidding about the threat. Aside from the appalling overstepping of boundaries that drugging him would represent, the thought of getting trapped in a nightmare made his stomach churn. He was mostly sure that Dean wouldn’t have pulled something like that, though. Ninety percent sure, maybe as high as ninety-five.
“Sammy, I’m shocked you would accuse me of spiking your drink before I thought of it myself.” Dean checked the side mirror and changed lanes without signaling. “I told the waitress to give you decaf.”
Sam slapped his hand down on the dashboard. “Goddammit, Dean,” he barked. Dean lifted an eyebrow; Sam took a deep breath and modulated his voice. “Dude. You’re my big brother, you’re worried about me, you want to look out for me. Got it. Cut it the fuck out, okay?”
Dean’s hands tightened on the wheel, but he kept his tone light. “Have I ever told you you’re a cranky bitch when you don’t sleep, Sam?”
Inhale. Exhale. Count to ten. Wonder how long it would take to become a textbook example of how the mind deteriorates under sleep deprivation. Give in, because Dean wasn’t going to.
“It’s your funeral if your partner conks out from caffeine deprivation in the middle of a hunt,” Sam warned, curling toward the window and trying to get comfortable. It must have been easier in a kiddy jumpseat.
“At least I’d get to be there.” Dean kept his head steadfastly forward while shooting Sam one of those solicitous sidelong glances that he inexplicably thought were too subtle to be noticed. “Go to sleep, Sam. I’ll wake you if it gets bad.”
There was no fire and blood when he dozed off, just vague images and the smell of phantom smoke, and that was the best Sam could hope for these days. He nodded in and out, letting the smooth motion lull him. When Dean pulled into a rest stop he stayed in the car, dozing fitfully, feeling like they were still moving. Like the road had become so much of his life that it had entered his dreams.
His eyes flickered open-he thought-as they drove back out of the turnout. There was a flash of white in front of him, a slender blonde figure in a long gown...he twisted in his seat to watch it, but it had vanished.
“Dean! Dean, am I awake?”
“Yeah.” The hand that touched his shoulder was too solid to be a dream. “What did you see?”
Sam shook his head and said nothing. Maybe the nightmares were bleeding into his waking hours. Maybe he was fading into them. Maybe each one was chipping away another piece of his sanity.
He turned up the cassette player and stared straight forward for the rest of the ride.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“‘For Sale’ sign,” Dean noted as they passed through one of those well-kept but shabby inner suburbs where families live until they can afford to move to well-kept and upscale outer suburbs. He turned down the street from habit more than anything else-even if the house was unoccupied, they’d be noticed in a neighborhood like this. On cue, the woman next door looked up from her landscaping when they stopped. Dean gave her a wave and his brightest smile; she waved back.
Squatting in model homes must have ruined Dean for tract houses, because he muttered between his teeth, “Dude, that’s a shoebox.”
“Not everyone can afford to live in planned communities built over cursed Indian graveyards, Dean.” Sam leaned forward and added his own smile and wave; the woman started and turned back to watering her crocuses. “Huh. Maybe they don’t welcome buyers of any sexual orientation-oh, come on, man, it’s not like she was writing down her number in lipstick for you.”
Dean glowered at him. “They shouldn’t be so picky,” he proclaimed. “How many people are they going to find who want to spend their whole lives in a shoebox?”
“You don’t. It’s a starter home-you live in it for a while, build equity, and trade up,” Sam explained. He refrained from saying aloud that it was a palace compared to everywhere they’d grown up.
“Equity,” Dean over-enunciated, putting the car into gear and pulling out. Sam suspected that ‘equity,’ like ‘mortgage,’ wasn’t in Dean’s lexicon. His brother didn’t like to clutter his brain with things he’d never need. “Can’t believe you wanted to be a homeowner, Sammy.”
Right. Because Dean would rather believe Sam wanted to be a passenger.
Dean gave either the house or the woman who had doubted his heterosexuality a last look in the rearview mirror. “Picket fence, nine-to-five, wife and two kids,” he said, fumbling in the cassette box. “I can’t picture it.”
“You had it, Dean. How can you not picture it every day?”
That wasn’t a ploy to shut Dean up, really, but it did anyway.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Sam had theorized that the members of the ‘Spring Eternal Blooms’ collective had murdered and buried Sister Hibiscus Birch (née Gloria Farkas) somewhere in their nursery in a fertility ritual gone horribly wrong. According to Brother Valerian Poplar (Marvin Eggers on the commune’s business permit), however, Hibiscus had died a natural death and her body had been cremated in full compliance with state health codes before her ashes were scattered near the conservatory she’d once tended. Valerian was smart enough to feign forgetfulness when Sam pushed for the name of the crematorium, but dumb enough to let Dean take a tour of the grounds with Sister Jasmine Eucalyptus (née Sister Jasmine Eucalyptus, a second-generation member of the collective). Dean came back with a pamphlet in his hand, a flower-really-behind his ear, a muttered report of a telltale mound in a pachysandra bed, and EMF evidence that regardless of how the old gal had gotten in there, she hadn’t left. Sam dropped the phrase ‘audit of tax-exempt status’ just to see Eggers squirm, and he and Dean headed out to find a motel and wait for dark.
“C’mon, Sam, it’s just a ghost,” Dean coaxed as he tried to talk Sam into a bar run after the job. “It’ll take us an hour, tops. Plenty of time to meet new people, make some new friends.”
“Pass,” Sam grunted, breaking open the shotgun and checking the shells. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Yeah, and when was the last time you were in the mood?” Dean asked. “Any kind of mood?”
He wasn’t wrong, really. Grief and exhaustion had done a number on Sam’s libido, and once he’d gotten over his surprise that a twenty-two year-old’s sex drive could plummet to almost nil, he’d been relieved. He’d never been one for casual affairs, and that was all this life could offer. Which didn’t mean he was letting Dean get away with a total lack of respect for personal boundaries.
“Dude. Do I keep track of how often you…” Sam waved his hand, hoping to head off an indelicate euphemism.
“Wouldn’t recommend it, Sam. Don’t want to make you feel inadequate.” Dean put on a Serious Face. “Look, I’m not saying you should hook up with someone. It’s just...it’s not good for you to spend so much time alone in Sammyland.”
‘Sammyland’ was what Dean had years ago dubbed the place in a little boy’s imagination that featured regular school days, organized sports, a house instead of a residence hotel, and minimal weapons training. It was a place where no one, not even adored older brothers, came. As Sam grew older Sammyland changed with him, becoming the source of an adolescent’s anger as well as a young man’s dreams, but it always remained a place of secrecy, and often the only privacy Sam had. Dean was right; he’d been there a lot lately, and it had become a grim and unsettling place.
Dean sensed a weakness. “I’m just saying talk to someone else, okay? Company won’t be as charming as mine, but at least it will be different.”
Sam sighed. “Okay, yeah.”
Dean flashed his teeth. “Attaboy,” he said, in a tone smarmy enough to make Sam respond, “You know what I could go for? A coffee.”
Hibiscus, though, didn’t go without a fight. Dean got beaned-‘They were sweet peas, Sam, and it’s not funny’-by a vase in the florist’s workspace, and they both got slashes that stung like a motherfucker with all the salt flying around. After debating the pros and cons of leaving untorched a hothouse full of potentially evil orchids that might wreak havoc come corsage season (‘Dude, that would be the most awesome prom ever!’ ‘Dean!’), they consecrated the irrigation tank and left the decision to Nature. Or whatever.
“Hope you weren’t attached to this shirt,” Dean commented back in the motel room as he took a knife to Sam’s bloody tee.
Sam was, actually. It was a Stanford shirt that he had defiantly bought to replace the ones lost in the fire. Now it was rags for the gun-cleaning kit. He ignored the symbolism as Dean carefully sliced through the soft fabric. He could appreciate irony, but it rarely amused him. Not that anything much amused him these days.
The blade snagged a couple times-it needed...
“Knife needs sharpened,” Dean remarked as he laid it aside and peeled away the T-shirt. He scrutinized the gash beneath it. “This is going to need stitches.”
“Figures.” Sam grabbed the first aid kit. “Shit,” he said when he opened the box.
“What?” Dean asked, turning back from removing his own shirt. “Shit,” he echoed when Sam showed him the nearly empty vial of Lidocaine.
Sam put the little bottle back, weighed the uncertainty of nightmares against the certain pain of getting stitched up without anesthesia, and reached for the bourbon.
Dean’s mouth tightened as he watched Sam measure out a couple shots. “That’s not going to be enough.”
“It’ll take the edge off.” Sam knocked back the booze, wiped his mouth, and picked up the kit. “We can do you while it kicks in,” he said, heading for the bathroom.
A thought struck him as he laid out the bandages. “You know, Dad’ll need to restock too if he’s still hunting,” he called back through the open door. “We should check with some of his contacts. See if they’ve seen him.”
Silence from the other room. Sam wasn’t the only one dealing with things by denial.
“Dean?” he called again.
Dean appeared in the doorway. “Maybe we shouldn’t.” He tossed his T-shirt into the trash; it was a loss too. “Maybe he doesn’t want us to find him.”
“You think he’s just ignoring our messages?” Sam asked, because neither of them was ready to face the other explanation for Dean’s call going unanswered. “Why?”
“He’ll have his reasons.” Dean winced as Sam started cleaning his cuts. “Not like we don’t have enough to do in the meantime.” You didn’t have to be psychic to know how it would play out if his brother was right: the reason would be plenty good enough for Dean, and nowhere near good enough for Sam.
“I signed on to find Dad,” Sam reminded his brother. “Not restart the family business.”
Dean set his face stolidly and didn’t speak again until Sam finished patching him up. “Not bad,” he allowed as he looked at the bandages in the mirror. “You spend your whole time at school watching ‘General Hospital?’”
It shouldn’t have hit any harder than Dean’s other jabs, but it did. “I got some emergency medical training my freshman year,” Sam responded brusquely.
“Yeah?” Dean peered closer at the dressings. “Learn anything Dad didn’t already teach you?”
Right. Because Dean would never admit that there was something to be learned outside the old man’s tutelage.
Sam focused on putting a roll of gauze away. “Among other things, ambulances have no legroom, and once you’ve witnessed the miracle of birth, you’ll never look at a vagina the same way again.”
Dean reared back in horror. “I thought you were going to chase ambulances, Sammy, not ride in them.”
“Jesus Christ, Dean!”
It was either punch his brother, or get the hell away from him. Sam made it to the motel room door before he remembered he was still shirtless and bloodied. He went for option number three: slapping his open palms against the door and bowing his head against it.
“Sam,” came from behind him.
Sam dug his fingernails into the cheap particleboard. “What?”
“Sam,” Dean repeated, with something close enough to apology to make Sam turn toward him. Dean smiled ingratiatingly. “What’ll it take for you to swear to never tell me about the miracle of birth?”
In other words, it was Sam's own fault for saying 'vagina.' An instant answer to Dean's offer leapt to mind. It was a childish symbol now, but after a few more months on the road-and when the hell did he start thinking in terms of months?-it would become a rankling sore.
“I drive whenever I want, for the next month.” With my own set of keys, Sam didn’t add. You shouldn’t ask for something if you can’t handle being turned down.
“Deal,” Dean agreed.
Anyone else would have seen a concession. Sam knew it for what it was: closing the books on the conversation, going back to pretending that the past three years of Sam’s life hadn’t happened. Defeated, he waved Dean into the bathroom.
“Dude, watch the ’do!” Dean griped when Sam ran his fingers through his hair to check for shards of loose glass.
“You can gel it up yourself in the morning. Fraternal duty only gets you so far,” Sam told him, finding a slight bump where the vase had struck. Nothing to worry about.
“I’d do it for you. If you got a freakin’ haircut.”
“Bite me, Dean.” He nudged Dean’s head forward and leaned in to take a final look.
“Dude, watch the head!” Dean complained when Sam’s fingers tightened involuntarily.
“Sorry.” Sam fought to keep his voice steady long enough to grit out, “You can take it from here.”
Moving jerkily, he stepped out of the small room, shut the door behind him, and slumped back against the wall. He was shaking with anger.
Dean had gray hair.
Dean had gray hair.
It was a stupid thing to worry about. Dean had scars and broken bones, he could have a bleeding ulcer for all Sam knew, but...Dean had gray hair.
Dean had learned to fire a weapon at the age of six, had been dangerously wounded on a hunt when he was thirteen, had driven their father to an emergency room minutes before he bled out when he was fifteen, had spent his eighteenth birthday in a courthouse, scrawling his signature on document after document that gave him power of attorney over Sam when Dad was gone, named him Sam’s guardian if their father died. Now Dean was twenty-seven, and he had gray hair.
Sam hated the old man. Hated him.
“Dude. You okay?” came from behind him.
Sam stalked over to his bed and poured another shot to avoid looking at his brother. “Let’s get it over with,” he said when he had himself back under control.
“Still hurts, huh?” Dean asked, pulling on a fresh T-shirt and joining him on the bed with the kit.
“Something like that,” Sam mumbled, downing the bourbon. “No, save it,” he insisted when Dean pulled out an alcohol swab and the Lidocaine.
“We can get more from Joshua.” Dean measured out a half-dose of the drug, enough to dull the pain the liquor wouldn’t cover. Sam barely felt the needle slide in. Dean was right; their father had taught them more than he’d learn in a course.
“What was it like?” Dean asked abruptly.
It took Sam a second to figure out the question. “The ambulance?” Dean nodded, and Sam could swear he saw a glimpse of real curiosity in his brother’s eyes. “Blood, adrenaline, and you get to run red lights,” he answered. “You’d be good at it, you know.”
Dean shrugged. “Already got a job,” he said.
“Dad’s job.” Dreams of my own, the creature with his brother’s face had said, and this was the first time Sam had seen Dean show interest in something besides the hunt. “Come on, didn’t you ever want to do anything else?”
Dean suddenly decided that cleaning Sam’s cuts required his full attention. “Like what, go to college?”
“Why not?” Sam demanded.
“Dude, I didn’t finish high school.”
“And whose fault is that?” Sam parried. “Don’t tell me you didn’t want to.”
“It’s not Dad’s fault what’s out there.” Dean finished disinfecting Sam’s wounds and concentrated on threading the suture needle. “I didn’t care about some piece of paper.”
Sam might have believed him if he didn’t remember the screaming match he and Dad had at the beginning of his senior year, when Dad announced they were picking up stakes and probably wouldn’t settle back down long enough for Sam to finish school. Dean sat through the fight, one booted heel resting on the edge of the coffee table, cleaning his favorite handgun. He wasn’t ignoring them so much as letting it all flow around and over him like background noise, until their father invoked how easily Dean had passed the battery of GED tests, arguing that Sam could do the same thing.
“Look, it’s no big deal,” he interjected. Sam rounded on him, stung by the betrayal, but Dean was talking to their father. “It’s just a few more months, right?”
Dad set his jaw and met Dean’s eyes. That silent way of communicating passed between them, the way that Dean always knew without asking when to toss Dad rock salt instead of silver, who was flanking left and who was going right, who was going to drop Sam off at school or go to his parent-teacher conference. Dean raised his eyebrow; their father nodded a concession and walked out without a word.
“Thanks,” Sam said into the silence.
Dean returned to his task. “One of us might as well get a real diploma,” he muttered, peering down the bore of his weapon for some last speck. “It’s just a few more months.”
‘A few more months to what?’ Sam didn’t ask. Years later, he realized that moment of support was the moment he and Dean began to grow apart. The difference between eighteen and twenty-two was somehow starker than the one between twelve and sixteen; Dean was a man now and Sam was still a boy, and though under the sibling teasing and banter Sam respected Dean as he didn’t their father, his brother was becoming a symbol of the man Sam didn’t want to be.
Dean’s voice drew him back to the present. “Besides, I didn’t want to go to college.”
That, Sam believed. When Sam said he was applying to universities Dean just looked at him blankly; girls, guns, and catalytic converters Dean knew, but with college Sam wanted something his brother didn’t understand. And when the three of them ended up in the same room, in the same places, arguing about Stanford, it was different. Dean raised his eyebrow occasionally when Sam shouted as loudly as his father, but said nothing. The topography of Sammyland was baffling to him, and in an unknown land, their father led. Sam hated himself for it, but he’d never been able to squelch that last lingering prick of resentment that Dean had sat by and silently watched the exile of the youngest Winchester.
“All I’m saying is you should have had a choice,” Sam pushed.
“I made my choices, Sam.” Dean’s face shut down, all curiosity hidden, and Sam had blown his chance. Dad and Dean were circling the wagons again, and Sam was left on the outside. Same as always.
Dean tapped Sam’s numb skin to check the anesthesia and pulled the bedside lamp closer. The harsh light revealed premature lines around the corners of his eyes and lips. “So, what was lawyer boy doing in the ambulance anyway?”
“Getting advanced first aid certification,” Sam replied, not sure if his brother really cared, or was just trying to distract his attention from the needle. “I was working as a park guide that summer. Guess I never told you about that-what?” he asked as Dean’s face darkened.
“No, and did you ever think that maybe you should have told us before you went off to play Ranger Rick?” The hard edge on Dean’s voice showed that Sam had somehow stepped into a minefield. “Dad was pissed as hell that he had to track you down. Why didn’t you stay at Stanford?”
Unbelievable, but so typical. “The park had free housing, and I couldn’t afford a real shoebox in Palo Alto on Starbuck’s wages,” Sam defended himself. “What was I supposed to do, scam a place for three months?”
“Why not?” Dean turned his gaze back to the wound. “Or you could have, you know, come home.”
“Come home,” Sam repeated in disbelief. They shouldn’t have this conversation now, not with both of them edgy from sour adrenaline and Sam half-drunk, but damned if he could just let cracks like that slide. “I didn’t have a home, remember? I had orders.” He enunciated the next words cuttingly. “‘Don’t ever come back.’”
“You always could hold a grudge,” Dean said, and the only thing that kept Sam from a full meltdown was the undertone of admiration in his brother’s voice. Maybe being a stubborn bastard had suddenly become a virtue in Dean’s book.
“You think that’s what this is? A grudge?” he snarled. Long-suppressed rage and hurt boiled to the surface, filling Dean’s silence. “He threw me out. I was his son, Dean, and I wasn’t what he wanted, so he threw me out.” Sam forced himself to stop before he said something he couldn’t take back. Dad didn’t want me anymore. He threw me away, and you watched.
“Don’t you ever say that.” Dean’s voice plummeted to the lowest pitch in his register, and he bit out each word as if he were chipping ice. “You are his son, Sammy. Don’t you ever say ‘were,’ because you know damn well that’s not what he meant. And it’d damn well better not be what you want.”
“We’re not talking about this.” Sam threw an arm over his eyes. “And my name is-say it with me-‘Sam.’”
Inhale. Exhale. Don’t think about those last, ugly words he and his father exchanged. Listen to the rattling of the air vent. Ignore the faint tug as Dean, whose hands hadn’t faltered or shaken an iota, finished the last stitch and knotted the thread off.
“Look, Sam.” Dean’s voice was worse than frustrated, it was helpless, and a world where Dean was helpless was a world tilting on its axis. “I don’t know why he didn’t call you or knock on your door. He must have had his reasons. But you have to trust me-he never wanted that.”
Inhale. Exhale. Force himself to believe it, because Dean lied to anyone and everyone, except him and their father.
“Okay,” Sam conceded, lowering his arm.
“Okay.” Dean made quick work of the dressing and sat back. “Done,” he announced. “Need another drink?”
“Nah.” Sam pushed himself into a half-sitting position and watched his brother pack away the medical supplies with the same deft precision he used with his weapons. “Why don’t you hit the bar?” he suggested when Dean sat down and started drumming his fingers on the table, eyes darting around the room like he suspected fanged emotions were lurking in the corners, waiting to strike. “I’m fine.”
Dean’s face brightened. “You sure?” he asked, jumping up and reaching into his duffel bag for another shirt. “What about you?”
“I’ll order in,” Sam told him. Pizza: the dinner and breakfast of champions.
Dean pursed his lips, digging into the bag again. “You’re not going to sleep tonight, are you?”
“Nope.” Sam sat all the way up, wincing as the stitches pulled. He always had metabolized that stuff fast. “Shouldn’t have taken that nap, huh?”
Dean rolled his eyes and tossed Dad’s journal onto the table. “Dad’s contacts are all in there. You want to waste time calling people, I can’t stop you.” He paused, scratching the back of his neck. “Uh, don’t bother Bobby. Dad wouldn’t call him.”
Sam didn’t threaten their fragile truce by asking what happened between their father and one of the few stable, safe presences he remembered from his childhood. “Take the car, okay?” he said instead. “In case the lucky girl doesn’t have a place of her own.”
Dean froze in the act of buttoning his shirt. “The car is for luring chicks, man. It’s not where you reel them in.”
“Oh. Um...oops,” Sam said, groping in his own bag for a pad of paper. He pulled it out and flinched when he saw his sketch of the tree in front of their old house.
Dean was too shocked by the desecration of his car to notice. “Tell me you didn’t...”
“Lose my virginity in that car?” Sam replied mechanically, tearing his eyes from the picture. “Sure. I’ll never breathe a word.”
“Sixteen before you got laid? Some days I can’t believe we’re related.” Dean pulled on his jacket. “It was sixteen, right? Not seventeen? ’Cause you weren’t adopted. I remember Mom being pregnant.”
“Yeah,” Sam murmured, not really hearing the question.
He’d never seen photos of their mother pregnant. He didn’t know if she’d sent Dad on midnight runs for pickles and ice cream, or if Dean had been jealous of the new baby. All he knew was that Mom was beautiful, Dad and Dean loved her, and she died.
And she was sorry.
Sam flipped the pad over so Dean wouldn’t see it and sat down at the table. “The front seat has more room,” he said, forcing the words to sound normal, “but you’ve gotta watch out for the gearshift.”
Shuddering, Dean fled.
Sam ground the heels of his palms against his eyes. Dean had mentioned it only once, when they were driving down a pitch-black stretch of highway two states away from Kansas. ‘She was sorry you never knew her, Sammy,’ he said, and popped a tape into the player before Sam could reply. Right. She’d apologized for dying to the son who didn’t remember her, instead of the one who’d been damaged, maybe irreparably, by her death. Dean wasn’t any more convinced of his explanation than Sam was.
Sam opened Dad’s journal and flipped through the final entries. The last one was dated around the same time his dreams began, just days before the second woman Sam loved died the same way the first had. Real coincidences in their line of work were rare: maybe their father was looking for answers, maybe he had answers he didn’t want them to know.
He reached for his notebook. If Dean was right and Dad didn’t want to be found-well, this wasn’t the first time Sam didn’t care what the old man wanted. He took one last look at his picture, seeing in his mind the soundless, flashing images, the face he’d learned from photographs, and maybe other things too. Things he didn’t want to explore. Sammyland had become uncharted territory; here be dragons.
Sam tore the sketch from the pad and ripped it up.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Various additional author’s notes:
Whew. The boys sure have grown since Season One, haven’t they?
Any and all feedback is welcome. All my fic may be found here.