SPN fic: Topeka (Dean, Sam)
Title: Topeka
Characters: Dean, Sam
Summary: post-"Heart," Sam won't speak. Angst, naturally. Spoilers for the episode. Approximately 2200 words.
Note: I don't remember if they said where "Heart" (2.17) took place, but I'm gonna say it was in some large northeastern city. My apologies if I wasn't paying attention and am too lazy to look it up. And hell, by now the story's already written, so just go with it.
Topeka
Sam hasn't said a single word for over fifteen hundred miles. Dean knows: he's counted them. Because they are also the miles to Topeka.
When they got far enough away from the city that Dean needed to stop for gas, Sam wouldn't get out of the car, not even for food. So when Dean slid back behind the wheel, he placed a bottle of water in his hand and squeezed his thigh so hard Sam couldn't ignore him. Sam drank in small sips all the way through Pennsylvania, half the bottle.
For a long time, Dean didn't say anything either, just watched the road stretch on ahead of them. It didn't look like it went anywhere anymore. But Dean knew that feeling would pass. It had already passed for him, in those days after he burned his own father's bones, after he heard the secret, the one he hated and would fight. Finally, maybe, Sam will start to fight, too.
And Sam will never ask him again. That's what he has been doing, sitting there in the passenger seat looking blankly at the horizon: trying to un-ask. He'd shot her with steady hands, but afterward they shook. All the way to Columbus. The tears had stopped sometime after they burned her bones. This girl was not theirs, not like their father was, and it was still too much to bear hearing the echo of her voice, almost worse than that of the gunshot. Sam will never ask him again.
It's not really up to the asker.
*
Somewhere in southern Illinois, Dean began to talk. He didn't even try to get Sam to respond; he just couldn't stand the silence anymore. It was like he had the sudden need to chronicle their whole life to him, as if Sam had lost it somewhere and needed to pick it up in pieces again, fit them back together. Dean repeated stories Sam knew about first their mother then their father and the way their childhood was when it was good, when they laughed a lot and drove each other crazy and when hunting was just this thing their father did that didn't touch them except in his absence. He told him his own stories, too, ones Sam shared with him out here on the open road: asshole professors and insane rommates and that time he tried to smoke pot and it made him sick and the first time Jess kissed him. After a while, he couldn't stop talking. But as they got into traffic in St. Louis, he stopped, falling under that usual spell of welcome concentration on the busy highway, and he didn't start again. When he passed beside the arch, it felt too big, and he felt too small. And Sam had still not said a word.
Somewhere in the backwater of Missouri, Sam merely pointed at an exit sign, so they stopped and got gas. Sam returned to the car with an energy drink and sunglasses darker than the ones he usually wore, despite the fact that the sun was all but down now. Dean was more than a little happy he put them on, although he couldn't help but let his eyes flit over his face, to watch for tears that didn't come.
They traveled the bumpy roads mindlessly, stuck in a rut that should've been normal, but normal usually didn't involve this much anger or despair, more than was manageable, at least for Sam. Dean was almost asleep at the wheel, but he wouldn't ask Sam to drive. He frankly didn't trust Sam to drive right now. Sam lay there, slumped over affecting sleep, eyes probably wide open behind those glasses. This is what he does. Dean remembers it from the days after the funeral they gave their father. Sam wouldn't close his eyes, because to do that meant shutting things out, letting things go, giving up, breaking down, or worse-pretending there was nothing wrong.
As they approached Kansas City, they pulled off at a truck stop so Dean could shower and refuel on coffee-maybe not feel so much like a zombie. If he could just get to Topeka, he thought. He didn't know why it was so important, why he needed to get that extra hour and a half down the road. He just felt it. Usually, he would say to himself if he could only get to the next town, they'd stop. But they rarely did, not until they were falling over with that satisfied tiredness that came from doing something good or at least trying. This time, though, he felt I-70 pulling him along, past places he should've stopped but hadn't yet. He wondered if maybe he was trying to run as far as possible, but that wasn't it; he done enough of that to know. The highway had been pulling since Pittsburg, keeping a tension just as steady and unsteadying as Sam's silence, inviting him all along to a city he'd been a million times as a kid without it ever leaving an impression on him.
When he came out of the truck stop, clean but no less used up and tired, the cooling evening wind blowing through his still-wet hair, Sam looked gray under the fluorescent lights. There was still a smudge of dried blood on his arm, near his bicep; Dean saw it as Sam held his hand out for the keys. Dean didn't have the energy to refuse him. Honestly, he didn't know what would happen if he did.
Dean cracked the window, just to be able to breathe a little. His fingers threaded up through the inch of space and lay on the roof. As they crossed over from the Missouri side of Kansas City to the Kansas side, he found that his fingers were digging into that dusty metal, holding on for dear life like he sometimes did when he couldn't be in the driver's seat. And when Sam took the left fork of the split and headed south on I-35, Dean felt his chest tighten up. Wichita, not Topeka.
*
Outside of the metro area, with 1500 miles gone by since they fell into the car at dawn, Dean can see the stars in the sky now through all the smog, but he can also see the moon, too, no longer quite full, out the passenger side window.
Finally, he breaks his own silence and says, "I was planning on going to Topeka."
Sam looks at him for the first time in a couple of hours. He's taken the sunglasses off, but in the dark, Dean can only see the whites of his eyes. Sam turns back to the road, and Dean turns too, fixing his gaze on the underbrush rushing past his eyes on the dark side of the road.
Then Sam speaks his first words in hours: "Not on 70."
"Why?" Dean asks, and he immediately regrets it. Sam's whole face contorts with nameless emotion, and his knuckles go white on the wheel. "Sam…"
He pulls over so fast Dean can almost hear the loose rocks digging into the black paint, how it must be stripping it off down to the metal, how the brakes nearly lock as the Impala comes to unquiet rest. Sam doesn't slam the door as he gets out. He doesn't even close it as he wanders away from the car, leaving it still running.
By the time Dean can pull the keys out of the ignition and make his body lurch out of the passenger seat, Sam is a few paces away, standing near the shoulder, somehow quietly hyperventilating. He should have expected it. Sam did this after their father, too. He just did it more loudly. He didn't stand there pulling his chest tight against the breaths his body was trying to take, bending over, his back heaving silently. That day as they lifted their father's body onto the pyre, Sam audibly gasped for breath-until he got it back, until he cried himself into not breathing again, until he finally forced himself to calm down. It made Dean a little calmer, too, to see it, both the letting go and the pulling back together. But Dean had stood a few paces off then, not knowing what to do. He's just as frozen now.
After their father, Sam cried, but after Jess, Sam broke things, whatever he could get his hands on. That would be preferable to this: his hunched-over back, the way his big shoulders heave, the way he looks like he's trying to destroy himself somehow from the inside. This is different, Dean thinks. He should've seen that, too. It's not like he's insensible to what Sam had to do, but he didn't think about how it was the first time he'd actually done it.
"Sam," he says, but Sam doesn't turn. "Goddamn it, Sam, talk to me."
He wants rage, he expects silence, but he gets a clenched-up whisper: "Why were you driving us to Lawrence?"
"What? I told you we were going to Topeka," he says reflexively. "That's past-" It hits him hard: of course he's not trying to get to Topeka. He's trying to get through Lawrence, through something he doesn't even understand except to know he needs it. "God, Sammy, I didn't even realize I was- Look, I'm not-"
"I killed…a human being," Sam says. Dean feels the anger flare through him, helpless as it pulls his hands into fists. He's about to reply, say things that Sam will never hear, then Sam turns to him, all cold rage on his face but his voice breaks: "How long did dad hunt before he--?"
Then Sam falls to his knees and heaves over the dewy grass.
Dean stands immobile for only a long heartbeat before he sets his jaw and goes back to the car. He pulls out the half-empty bottle of water and finally shuts the driver's side door. Maybe he's collected enough of something to do this, he thinks, out here on the road, even if he didn't drive through Lawrence. Maybe he's enough now. With determined strides, he walks out to him over the dark grass. Sam's eyes take up his form and watch him getting closer and closer as Dean gets closer and closer to something he's terrified of.
Dean falls into place behind him, crouched there with his hand on his neck, and Sam retches again. Dean knows Sam's throwing up nothing but bile, and it will just burn and burn. Holding his own stomach in, Dean rubs one hand into the tight muscles in his neck and lays his other flat on his back until he stops heaving. Sam's too warm, damp with sweat, almost shaking as if fevered. Dean passes the bottle to him and makes him drink so there will at least be something to throw up. But Sam's body no longer shudders and tries to expel anything. He just gets quiet again, a quiet Dean doesn't like but he can't do anything about. Yet he can't take his hand off his neck, and Sam doesn't rise from his hands and knees.
Dean says, "Do you need me to say you did the right thing?"
"No," Sam says. When he bows his head again, he's crying.
Dean sits back on his heels as he watches Sam bend lower and lower to the earth, swaying toward it with each tremor of his long frame. For all the crying he does in front of Dean, he hates for him to see it, so much that he lets the tears stream but he doesn't dare sob. It had been like that as he walked into that room to put a bullet through Madison's heart, stop her from becoming something dangerous. Stopped her while she was good and real and alive and nothing but pleading brown eyes.
"You are the strongest person I know," Dean finds his voice saying over the sound of the wind in the trees and the occasional cars speeding by, ignoring them in this world that is only theirs.
"Fuck you," Sam snarls, but that's when the sobs start. He's gasping for air even as he clutches the ground, until he's lying flat and practically digging himself into the unyielding dirt, and it's still not enough.
Dean doesn't know why he's doing it, only that he's crawling on top of Sam, lying there with his stomach to Sam's heaving back. He's trying to press him closer and closer to ground that is cold and hard and can't offer either of them anything. Sam doesn't say anything, but he isn't quiet anymore. He just sobs and tries to push Dean's heavy weight up and off him. That just makes Dean hold him harder. Over and over, Dean says against his back, We won't go to Topeka. I promise, Sam.
Sam cries so long and hard he throws up again, finally, water now and not bile, and that seems to bring him some measure of peace, or at least signifies some temporary ending. Dean wonders how many times this will happen, how he will wait out time until he stops feeling this way with every breath.
Sam doesn't let him help him to the car. He slouches in the passenger seat again, restless and exhausted, head against the half-open window, sunglasses over his red, puffy eyes. Dean clings to the wheel. The car smells like warm bodies and dirt and grass. Thankfully, the moon is too high overhead to see.
Wichita is farther than Topeka would've been.
Characters: Dean, Sam
Summary: post-"Heart," Sam won't speak. Angst, naturally. Spoilers for the episode. Approximately 2200 words.
Note: I don't remember if they said where "Heart" (2.17) took place, but I'm gonna say it was in some large northeastern city. My apologies if I wasn't paying attention and am too lazy to look it up. And hell, by now the story's already written, so just go with it.
Topeka
Sam hasn't said a single word for over fifteen hundred miles. Dean knows: he's counted them. Because they are also the miles to Topeka.
When they got far enough away from the city that Dean needed to stop for gas, Sam wouldn't get out of the car, not even for food. So when Dean slid back behind the wheel, he placed a bottle of water in his hand and squeezed his thigh so hard Sam couldn't ignore him. Sam drank in small sips all the way through Pennsylvania, half the bottle.
For a long time, Dean didn't say anything either, just watched the road stretch on ahead of them. It didn't look like it went anywhere anymore. But Dean knew that feeling would pass. It had already passed for him, in those days after he burned his own father's bones, after he heard the secret, the one he hated and would fight. Finally, maybe, Sam will start to fight, too.
And Sam will never ask him again. That's what he has been doing, sitting there in the passenger seat looking blankly at the horizon: trying to un-ask. He'd shot her with steady hands, but afterward they shook. All the way to Columbus. The tears had stopped sometime after they burned her bones. This girl was not theirs, not like their father was, and it was still too much to bear hearing the echo of her voice, almost worse than that of the gunshot. Sam will never ask him again.
It's not really up to the asker.
*
Somewhere in southern Illinois, Dean began to talk. He didn't even try to get Sam to respond; he just couldn't stand the silence anymore. It was like he had the sudden need to chronicle their whole life to him, as if Sam had lost it somewhere and needed to pick it up in pieces again, fit them back together. Dean repeated stories Sam knew about first their mother then their father and the way their childhood was when it was good, when they laughed a lot and drove each other crazy and when hunting was just this thing their father did that didn't touch them except in his absence. He told him his own stories, too, ones Sam shared with him out here on the open road: asshole professors and insane rommates and that time he tried to smoke pot and it made him sick and the first time Jess kissed him. After a while, he couldn't stop talking. But as they got into traffic in St. Louis, he stopped, falling under that usual spell of welcome concentration on the busy highway, and he didn't start again. When he passed beside the arch, it felt too big, and he felt too small. And Sam had still not said a word.
Somewhere in the backwater of Missouri, Sam merely pointed at an exit sign, so they stopped and got gas. Sam returned to the car with an energy drink and sunglasses darker than the ones he usually wore, despite the fact that the sun was all but down now. Dean was more than a little happy he put them on, although he couldn't help but let his eyes flit over his face, to watch for tears that didn't come.
They traveled the bumpy roads mindlessly, stuck in a rut that should've been normal, but normal usually didn't involve this much anger or despair, more than was manageable, at least for Sam. Dean was almost asleep at the wheel, but he wouldn't ask Sam to drive. He frankly didn't trust Sam to drive right now. Sam lay there, slumped over affecting sleep, eyes probably wide open behind those glasses. This is what he does. Dean remembers it from the days after the funeral they gave their father. Sam wouldn't close his eyes, because to do that meant shutting things out, letting things go, giving up, breaking down, or worse-pretending there was nothing wrong.
As they approached Kansas City, they pulled off at a truck stop so Dean could shower and refuel on coffee-maybe not feel so much like a zombie. If he could just get to Topeka, he thought. He didn't know why it was so important, why he needed to get that extra hour and a half down the road. He just felt it. Usually, he would say to himself if he could only get to the next town, they'd stop. But they rarely did, not until they were falling over with that satisfied tiredness that came from doing something good or at least trying. This time, though, he felt I-70 pulling him along, past places he should've stopped but hadn't yet. He wondered if maybe he was trying to run as far as possible, but that wasn't it; he done enough of that to know. The highway had been pulling since Pittsburg, keeping a tension just as steady and unsteadying as Sam's silence, inviting him all along to a city he'd been a million times as a kid without it ever leaving an impression on him.
When he came out of the truck stop, clean but no less used up and tired, the cooling evening wind blowing through his still-wet hair, Sam looked gray under the fluorescent lights. There was still a smudge of dried blood on his arm, near his bicep; Dean saw it as Sam held his hand out for the keys. Dean didn't have the energy to refuse him. Honestly, he didn't know what would happen if he did.
Dean cracked the window, just to be able to breathe a little. His fingers threaded up through the inch of space and lay on the roof. As they crossed over from the Missouri side of Kansas City to the Kansas side, he found that his fingers were digging into that dusty metal, holding on for dear life like he sometimes did when he couldn't be in the driver's seat. And when Sam took the left fork of the split and headed south on I-35, Dean felt his chest tighten up. Wichita, not Topeka.
*
Outside of the metro area, with 1500 miles gone by since they fell into the car at dawn, Dean can see the stars in the sky now through all the smog, but he can also see the moon, too, no longer quite full, out the passenger side window.
Finally, he breaks his own silence and says, "I was planning on going to Topeka."
Sam looks at him for the first time in a couple of hours. He's taken the sunglasses off, but in the dark, Dean can only see the whites of his eyes. Sam turns back to the road, and Dean turns too, fixing his gaze on the underbrush rushing past his eyes on the dark side of the road.
Then Sam speaks his first words in hours: "Not on 70."
"Why?" Dean asks, and he immediately regrets it. Sam's whole face contorts with nameless emotion, and his knuckles go white on the wheel. "Sam…"
He pulls over so fast Dean can almost hear the loose rocks digging into the black paint, how it must be stripping it off down to the metal, how the brakes nearly lock as the Impala comes to unquiet rest. Sam doesn't slam the door as he gets out. He doesn't even close it as he wanders away from the car, leaving it still running.
By the time Dean can pull the keys out of the ignition and make his body lurch out of the passenger seat, Sam is a few paces away, standing near the shoulder, somehow quietly hyperventilating. He should have expected it. Sam did this after their father, too. He just did it more loudly. He didn't stand there pulling his chest tight against the breaths his body was trying to take, bending over, his back heaving silently. That day as they lifted their father's body onto the pyre, Sam audibly gasped for breath-until he got it back, until he cried himself into not breathing again, until he finally forced himself to calm down. It made Dean a little calmer, too, to see it, both the letting go and the pulling back together. But Dean had stood a few paces off then, not knowing what to do. He's just as frozen now.
After their father, Sam cried, but after Jess, Sam broke things, whatever he could get his hands on. That would be preferable to this: his hunched-over back, the way his big shoulders heave, the way he looks like he's trying to destroy himself somehow from the inside. This is different, Dean thinks. He should've seen that, too. It's not like he's insensible to what Sam had to do, but he didn't think about how it was the first time he'd actually done it.
"Sam," he says, but Sam doesn't turn. "Goddamn it, Sam, talk to me."
He wants rage, he expects silence, but he gets a clenched-up whisper: "Why were you driving us to Lawrence?"
"What? I told you we were going to Topeka," he says reflexively. "That's past-" It hits him hard: of course he's not trying to get to Topeka. He's trying to get through Lawrence, through something he doesn't even understand except to know he needs it. "God, Sammy, I didn't even realize I was- Look, I'm not-"
"I killed…a human being," Sam says. Dean feels the anger flare through him, helpless as it pulls his hands into fists. He's about to reply, say things that Sam will never hear, then Sam turns to him, all cold rage on his face but his voice breaks: "How long did dad hunt before he--?"
Then Sam falls to his knees and heaves over the dewy grass.
Dean stands immobile for only a long heartbeat before he sets his jaw and goes back to the car. He pulls out the half-empty bottle of water and finally shuts the driver's side door. Maybe he's collected enough of something to do this, he thinks, out here on the road, even if he didn't drive through Lawrence. Maybe he's enough now. With determined strides, he walks out to him over the dark grass. Sam's eyes take up his form and watch him getting closer and closer as Dean gets closer and closer to something he's terrified of.
Dean falls into place behind him, crouched there with his hand on his neck, and Sam retches again. Dean knows Sam's throwing up nothing but bile, and it will just burn and burn. Holding his own stomach in, Dean rubs one hand into the tight muscles in his neck and lays his other flat on his back until he stops heaving. Sam's too warm, damp with sweat, almost shaking as if fevered. Dean passes the bottle to him and makes him drink so there will at least be something to throw up. But Sam's body no longer shudders and tries to expel anything. He just gets quiet again, a quiet Dean doesn't like but he can't do anything about. Yet he can't take his hand off his neck, and Sam doesn't rise from his hands and knees.
Dean says, "Do you need me to say you did the right thing?"
"No," Sam says. When he bows his head again, he's crying.
Dean sits back on his heels as he watches Sam bend lower and lower to the earth, swaying toward it with each tremor of his long frame. For all the crying he does in front of Dean, he hates for him to see it, so much that he lets the tears stream but he doesn't dare sob. It had been like that as he walked into that room to put a bullet through Madison's heart, stop her from becoming something dangerous. Stopped her while she was good and real and alive and nothing but pleading brown eyes.
"You are the strongest person I know," Dean finds his voice saying over the sound of the wind in the trees and the occasional cars speeding by, ignoring them in this world that is only theirs.
"Fuck you," Sam snarls, but that's when the sobs start. He's gasping for air even as he clutches the ground, until he's lying flat and practically digging himself into the unyielding dirt, and it's still not enough.
Dean doesn't know why he's doing it, only that he's crawling on top of Sam, lying there with his stomach to Sam's heaving back. He's trying to press him closer and closer to ground that is cold and hard and can't offer either of them anything. Sam doesn't say anything, but he isn't quiet anymore. He just sobs and tries to push Dean's heavy weight up and off him. That just makes Dean hold him harder. Over and over, Dean says against his back, We won't go to Topeka. I promise, Sam.
Sam cries so long and hard he throws up again, finally, water now and not bile, and that seems to bring him some measure of peace, or at least signifies some temporary ending. Dean wonders how many times this will happen, how he will wait out time until he stops feeling this way with every breath.
Sam doesn't let him help him to the car. He slouches in the passenger seat again, restless and exhausted, head against the half-open window, sunglasses over his red, puffy eyes. Dean clings to the wheel. The car smells like warm bodies and dirt and grass. Thankfully, the moon is too high overhead to see.
Wichita is farther than Topeka would've been.