RBB: T Wears a Top Hat
It's RBB time! I don't know how, I don't know when, but sarahtoga and I bravely made it to the posting date in one piece (each), though we both signed up at the worst time possible. But Voldemort can't stop the rock! It's been tons of fun working with her and writing a story for her fantastic art. Go check it out - the girl is a master.
Special thanks to lavishsqualor, who also doesn't have time for anything these days but who found some to beta this fic. If anyone grinds their teeth into fine powder over some questionable use of dashes, she told me so.
Art: Untitled by sarahtoga
Fic: T Wears a Top Hat (AO3)
Beta: lavishsqualor.
Length: 3K
Species: SPN Gen
Summary Sam wears Dean's obsessions and delusions like he wears his old shirts and sneakers. It's not as if ideas are less hygienic than jeans.
Sam didn’t learn the alphabet until he was five. Perhaps that was too late for such a basic skill, but there it was. It’s hard to remember such things when you live on the road, and it wasn’t as though they had a set of alphabet blocks in the trunk under the ammunition. Perhaps other kids learn their ABCs a year or two earlier than Sam did. How should he know? He only had the one childhood, and he hadn’t known many kids as an adult.
Sam was five, and the world was simple. It was intersected with roads, and the roads all lead somewhere: to a diner with a nice waitress, to a strawberry farm where Dad stopped and bought a tray of ripe red berries for Sam and Dean to share in the back of the Impala, to Bobby Singer’s salvage yard. The world could be represented by a two-dimensional map with a multicolored tangle of roads in the center and various destinations around the edges. Sam’s map was a lot more fun than Dad’s boring grown-up ones. There were blank spots on his that Sam imagined he’d fill one day. Here be lions.
The road they took out of the last place - Sa-cra-men-to, Dean taught him to say - was red on his map, a nice, bright, holiday red, and that’s how Sam knew right away that they were going to see Bobby.
And here they were.
“T is for ‘turtle,’” Dean said and pointed at the picture. Sam bit his lip to help his thinking. The letter was tall and plain and, frankly, looked nothing at all like the turtle, which was roundish, with a small bald head and four legs. Sam turned his head sideways and tried to look upside down and stuck out his tongue, but the letter still didn’t resemble the turtle in the least.
“Is not,” he said. Dean sighed.
Downstairs, Daddy was having a fight with Bobby. Sam couldn’t hear everything, just the particularly loud parts, and it was all making him sad. He and Dean lay on their bellies on the floor of one of Bobby’s many empty upstairs rooms, and Sam wanted to close the door, but Dean wouldn’t let him. He said he wanted to keep an eye on things, though how he meant to peek into the kitchen all the way from the second floor Sam had no idea.
“…just slipped your mind to mention that fucking demons are real? My kid almost got eviscerated by one!” Daddy was yelling.
“What do I look like to you, your personal Yoda?”
“Dean.” Sam tugged at his brother’s sleeve. “What’s that word Dad said? Vi-seh-?”
“Don’t know.” Dean absently rubbed at the angry red scratches that Sam knew were hiding under his shirt. That red was very different from the nice holiday red, and it puzzled Sam that one color could mean so many things. “Come on, Sammy, pay attention. So this is T. Like ‘turtle.’”
“Is not.”
“What do you mean ‘is not’?”
Sam poked at the green and yellow cartoon animal on the page. “Doesn’t look like a turtle.” Dean stared at the book and at Sam’s finger with a bitten-down nail. Sam remembered that he wasn’t supposed to bite his nails, so he curled his finger in.
“…when your own goddamn wife gets possessed by one, and you just forget to mention that?”
“Hey Winchester, what did you just call my wife?”
“Yeah,” Dean said. “No, you’re right, squirt, this book is stupid. It’s got it all wrong.”
Sam couldn’t agree more. All the colors were off, too.
Dean pushed the book away, and it slid out into the hallway. “Look, it’s like this, alright?” Dean pushed up his sleeve and Sam saw more red scratches from that crazy lady’s nails, scabbed with dried bits of blood. “T is… it’s like this.” He twisted to reach the dusty area of the floor that they hadn’t yet wiped with their fronts, and Sam crawled along his side to see better what he was drawing. “T,” Dean drew a long stick in the dust and put another stick on top of it, “is not a good letter, Sammy. It’s like, you know… It always wears one of those really tall hats, like the Cat-in-the-Hat, only all black, and you can’t trust it. It will trick you.”
The letter T sat on the floor of Bobby’s room, looking all innocent but secretly up to no good. Sam stared it down. Sam wanted to remember it, in case he ever saw it in a person. “I won’t trust it,” he told Dean, once he was sure he would recognize T again. And then he thought Bobby probably wouldn’t want a thing like that on his floor, when he didn’t even know it was there, and what if it got out one day? “Make it go away.”
“Write it, Sammy. Then I’ll make it go away.”
So Sam licked his finger and drew the stick and then another one, like Dean did, and there was another T in front of them. It was the color of Bobby’s floorboards, but deep down, Sam knew it was black.
Dean swiped his sleeve across the floor, chasing the Ts away.
“…keep your goddamn temper in check, you hear?” Bobby’s voice carried up the stairs as he tried to talk over Daddy. “Now, I know a priest up in Minnesota who can teach ya these things…”
Sam nodded. “Okay. Show me the others.”
****
B was a loudmouth. O was motherly and had a nice smile. J was a dreamer with his head in the clouds, but he had a streak for math. K minded his own business, and Dean wasn’t even sure if it was a he or a she. Wednesday was ornery, like an old man in a hospital ward who was made to eat oatmeal all the time. Seven was always full of surprises and too loud, too freaking loud. Sam learned them all, and then he learned too much about the world and mostly forgot their stories, except that he had always known, in his heart, what color they all were.
****
Sam was fourteen, and the world was constantly, infuriatingly out of focus. His arms and legs were growing everywhere, and it felt like his brain couldn’t keep up. Nothing fit. Things broke in his hands. He was in so much pain sometimes that it kept him up all night, and on other nights he had the most embarrassing dreams. People got on his nerves. The torture of teenage years was never going to end.
His brother was eighteen, with yet another almost-hole in his stomach.
“There must be something really awesome inside of you,” Sam said, tying a suture. “Every critter goes straight for your stomach, I swear.”
The doctor stitched Dean up in UCLA’s hospital ER, and then he’d felt better, pulled out his IV and escaped through the back door. Not even God knew how he had made it back home, into the hills thirty miles outside of Los Angeles, but then again, a young man wearing hospital pajama pants and a cut-up shirt was probably pretty far from the weirdest thing to be found wandering those streets on a daily basis. The good thing was, he’d made it home. The bad thing was, he’d ripped out some stitches and showed up at the front door dripping dark blood.
“I dunno, man, I guess I’m just filled with awesome. Like a pie.” He shrugged, and Sam pinched his thigh, hard, to remind him to sit still. Dean only swatted at Sam’s hand.
They gave him morphine down at the hospital. Dean had never done well with morphine.
“Full of shit is more like it.”
“Nah, you’re just jealous. You, dude, they always try to strangle. Only goes to show that you yack too much, and they know it just by looking at your stupid face. How it’s always scrunched up, and you twist your mouth like-”
Sam sighed. “You realize that I have a big needle in my hand that I’m currently jabbing through your stomach?”
“Ja-abbing.” Dean let his head drop back onto the armrest of the couch and opened his eyes wide at the ceiling. “Hey, Sammy, that’s such a weird word. Why is everything so fucking weird? I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Nothing’s going on. It’s the morphine.”
“I hate the goddamn morphine.” He tried to lift himself up to see what Sam’s hands were doing.
“Lie the fuck down!”
“Watch your mouth, squirt.” But he did lie back down.
Later, Sam washed the blood from his hands, only they still smelled of iron. He brought Dean his favorite yellow flannel shirt to keep him warm and found a rerun of Star Trek on TV. He was boiling water in the kitchen when he noticed that his hands were shaking, so he had to put them down on the counter and wait for it to pass.
“Dean,” he said, both to check on him and to distract himself. “We’re out of coffee till Dad comes back. You want tea?”
“Don’t like T. It wears a top hat and you can’t trust it.”
It took a minute for Sam to catch up. When he did, the memory tasted like dust and brown sugar on his tongue and smelled like the hair of Bobby Singer’s old dog after it got wet outside and rolled all over the covers. There was a sick lump in his stomach because this was a weird thing for Dean to say, even if he was on morphine. Was he hallucinating now? Was he having a stroke?
Quietly, Sam tiptoed back into the living room and sat on the edge of the couch. Dean gave him a wide, loopy grin that - thank god - was looking even on both sides. Sam checked his pupils, which told him jack squat. He held up three fingers.
“How many am I holding up?”
“Huh?”
“How many, Dean?” To his horror, Sam heard a tremble in his own voice. “How many fingers?”
Dean frowned. “Three.”
Sam dropped his hand, feeling like some enormous weight that had been pressing on his chest just let go. He breathed deep and wondered if he was going to explode right here, in this messy living room. “What the hell are you talking about, ‘top hat’?”
“Like the one Lincoln had. Or the Cat-in-the-Hat, only all black.” Dean gestured over his own head to indicate the height of the hat. “Sammy, are you crying? Why, dude, are you still scared of it or something?”
Sam dreamed of T that night. It sat in the corner in its top hat and breathed, just breathed in and out, and its eyes glowed an unspeakable color on its black body. It smiled at Sam once, slowly stretching its lips wider and wider, only instead of white teeth between its lips was a deeper black.
****
“Top hat - because it starts with a ‘t’? Or ‘t’ like in ‘trust’?”
Dean scowled at him. They were sitting at the wobbly table that came with the kitchen in this place. Now the table was cleared of all the dishes to let them spread out the maps. Dean was wearing his yellow flannel shirt from last night, the one he slept in and which currently smelled faintly of antiseptics.
Sam could wait for his answer. Sam could wait for a long, long time. Dean put another tiny cross on his map of California and glanced up at his brother. “What are you, five again?”
“You brought it up. I forgot all about it years ago, and now you just… Who says that, Dean?” Dean rolled his eyes and turned back to searching the map, but Sam thumped him on the shoulder. “I wanna know.”
“I was high on morphine - what do you want from me?”
****
In his fourteenth year, Sam constantly felt like he was dying of something - of embarrassment, of want, of hunger, of curiosity. Dean didn’t want to talk about it but he still remembered the personalities of all the letters and numbers and days of the week, and if Sam could catch him when he was tired enough and mellow enough, he’d hear the stories again.
Dean knew the personality of every letter, though some seemed more open to him than others. He knew the personalities of all days of the week except Tuesday - from which he figured that Tuesday was a spineless son of a bitch - but only for a few of the numbers. And Dean hated talking about them, from which Sam figured that Dean didn’t actually invent them. He didn’t just believe in those things - he knew them with rock certainty, like Sam himself secretly knew the inherent colors of all the letters.
Sam would forever be the little brother. He wore Dean’s obsessions and delusions like he wore his old shirts and sneakers. It’s not as if ideas were less hygienic than jeans.
****
“T for ‘terror’?”
“No.”
“T for ‘tremor’?”
“No!”
“T for ‘twisted’?”
Dean paused at that one. Sam watched his fingers as they turned a .45 round over a couple of times before pressing it into the clip. They were standing in an empty field with the highway whispering somewhere in the distance and the Impala at their backs. Dad had gone back to pick out a rifle from the trunk to torture Sam with and call it practice.
“Maybe,” Dean said. He slid the clip in, yanked the slide back and took aim. He fired in a rapid sequence, to leave Sam no room in between for any more questions.
Sam swatted at the mosquitoes that kept trying to land on his neck and waited for Dean to run out of bullets.
****
Sam was twenty-nine, and the world, surprisingly, was still there. Go figure. It was still run through with roads, and the roads were of different colors and formed a tangle at the center. Sometimes he and Dean got into the car and just went and didn’t think about where they were going to end up, but Sam knew anyway. He saw the color of the road and knew where it led. He didn’t think about it much.
Dean drove while Sam played with the maps - the ordinary ones that come on paper. When they stopped at the light in some small town that happened along the way, Sam looked up for the first time in what felt like hours and realized with a start that they were in California. The road was lined on both sides with suburban homes, their windows ablaze and their porches decorated with pumpkins.
“Is it Halloween already?”
“Another three days,” Dean said. “Keep up, Sammy.”
“Yeah, Sammy,” said the Devil from the backseat, “you don’t wanna be caught by surprise when the spooky things come, do you?”
Sam flipped him the bird.
“Is he back there?” Dean’s eyes darted for the rearview mirror out of habit, though of course he knew he wouldn’t find anything.
“Yeah.”
“You know what I read the other day?” Sam immediately got the urge to make some joke about Dean’s ability to read but felt it was expected and bit his tongue on sheer principle. "In the Philippines, they believe that when you have nightmares, it’s because the Devil is bothering you.”
“Oh yeah?” Lucifer said it at the same time Sam did, but with more amusement than curiosity.
“So what you do,” Dean said, “is you take a cat to bed with you, and when the Devil comes at night, the cat will make him count the hairs on its tail.”
Sam grinned as Lucifer rolled his eyes. “And why would I do such a ridiculous thing?”
Dean returned the grin - a flash of moist teeth in the dark of the car’s interior. “But when he’s almost done, the cat flicks its tail. The Devil loses count and has to start all over again.”
Sam thought about it and thought about it as the Impala rolled north, leaving behind the town with its pumpkins. “Are you suggesting we get a cat?”
“What? Fuck no. How about we push the beds together, then I stick my leg out and twitch it all night long, and he can count the hairs?”
“Well, Sam, you’re related to a genius,” said the Devil from the back.
Sam shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”
The road rolled on and on, crossed into Oregon and continued without much change. The next time Sam turned around, Lucifer wasn’t there.
“Sam?”
“Hm?”
“Why’d you tell me to turn around back there? I thought you wanted to go to Texas.”
Sam scratched his nose, thinking about how this morning he just told Dean to turn the car around out of the blue and promised to throw all the tapes out the window if he didn’t. He didn’t like to think about how he knew, and he definitely didn’t like to explain.
“There was a T at the end of that road.”
Dean looked confused. “Tea?”
“No, Dean, T. As in ‘it wears a top hat and it can’t be trusted’.”
There was silence. When Sam turned his way, Dean was staring straight ahead with an unreadable expression.
“What? Maybe it was Crowley. He’s still out there somewhere, you know,” Sam said. Dean kept silent. “Oh my god, dude, you keep thinking I’m gonna forget.”
“I don’t know why you have to bring it up all the time.”
“I don’t know why it’s such a big deal. And besides, once every decade is not all the time.”
Dean snorted. They drove in silence for the next ten minutes, and when Sam almost forgot all about it, Dean cleared his throat. “So, what color is this road?”
How the hell did you-? “What?”
“What, you think you’re the only smartass who remembers things? So I think a letter is evil. You think the roads are colored.”
Sam considered denying everything - it was such a small, childish, naïve thing to drag out into the open. He said instead, “Lime green.”
“Is that good?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s good.”
Author's Note: Synesthesia is a neurological condition (non-pathological) that has to do with cross-wiring of random association ares of the cerebral cortex. It comes in different shapes, depending on which areas got cross-linked. As a result of it, when a particular pathway gets triggered (like music recognition) it simultaneously activates an unrelated pathway (like depth perception), and the person perceives the shape of music. It's an involuntary reaction, much like you can't help but see light when it shines into your eye. It goes unreported a lot since it doesn't distress anyone's life, and most people just call it rich imagination and have no idea that their experience has a name.
Special thanks to lavishsqualor, who also doesn't have time for anything these days but who found some to beta this fic. If anyone grinds their teeth into fine powder over some questionable use of dashes, she told me so.
Art: Untitled by sarahtoga
Fic: T Wears a Top Hat (AO3)
Beta: lavishsqualor.
Length: 3K
Species: SPN Gen
Summary Sam wears Dean's obsessions and delusions like he wears his old shirts and sneakers. It's not as if ideas are less hygienic than jeans.
Sam didn’t learn the alphabet until he was five. Perhaps that was too late for such a basic skill, but there it was. It’s hard to remember such things when you live on the road, and it wasn’t as though they had a set of alphabet blocks in the trunk under the ammunition. Perhaps other kids learn their ABCs a year or two earlier than Sam did. How should he know? He only had the one childhood, and he hadn’t known many kids as an adult.
Sam was five, and the world was simple. It was intersected with roads, and the roads all lead somewhere: to a diner with a nice waitress, to a strawberry farm where Dad stopped and bought a tray of ripe red berries for Sam and Dean to share in the back of the Impala, to Bobby Singer’s salvage yard. The world could be represented by a two-dimensional map with a multicolored tangle of roads in the center and various destinations around the edges. Sam’s map was a lot more fun than Dad’s boring grown-up ones. There were blank spots on his that Sam imagined he’d fill one day. Here be lions.
The road they took out of the last place - Sa-cra-men-to, Dean taught him to say - was red on his map, a nice, bright, holiday red, and that’s how Sam knew right away that they were going to see Bobby.
And here they were.
“T is for ‘turtle,’” Dean said and pointed at the picture. Sam bit his lip to help his thinking. The letter was tall and plain and, frankly, looked nothing at all like the turtle, which was roundish, with a small bald head and four legs. Sam turned his head sideways and tried to look upside down and stuck out his tongue, but the letter still didn’t resemble the turtle in the least.
“Is not,” he said. Dean sighed.
Downstairs, Daddy was having a fight with Bobby. Sam couldn’t hear everything, just the particularly loud parts, and it was all making him sad. He and Dean lay on their bellies on the floor of one of Bobby’s many empty upstairs rooms, and Sam wanted to close the door, but Dean wouldn’t let him. He said he wanted to keep an eye on things, though how he meant to peek into the kitchen all the way from the second floor Sam had no idea.
“…just slipped your mind to mention that fucking demons are real? My kid almost got eviscerated by one!” Daddy was yelling.
“What do I look like to you, your personal Yoda?”
“Dean.” Sam tugged at his brother’s sleeve. “What’s that word Dad said? Vi-seh-?”
“Don’t know.” Dean absently rubbed at the angry red scratches that Sam knew were hiding under his shirt. That red was very different from the nice holiday red, and it puzzled Sam that one color could mean so many things. “Come on, Sammy, pay attention. So this is T. Like ‘turtle.’”
“Is not.”
“What do you mean ‘is not’?”
Sam poked at the green and yellow cartoon animal on the page. “Doesn’t look like a turtle.” Dean stared at the book and at Sam’s finger with a bitten-down nail. Sam remembered that he wasn’t supposed to bite his nails, so he curled his finger in.
“…when your own goddamn wife gets possessed by one, and you just forget to mention that?”
“Hey Winchester, what did you just call my wife?”
“Yeah,” Dean said. “No, you’re right, squirt, this book is stupid. It’s got it all wrong.”
Sam couldn’t agree more. All the colors were off, too.
Dean pushed the book away, and it slid out into the hallway. “Look, it’s like this, alright?” Dean pushed up his sleeve and Sam saw more red scratches from that crazy lady’s nails, scabbed with dried bits of blood. “T is… it’s like this.” He twisted to reach the dusty area of the floor that they hadn’t yet wiped with their fronts, and Sam crawled along his side to see better what he was drawing. “T,” Dean drew a long stick in the dust and put another stick on top of it, “is not a good letter, Sammy. It’s like, you know… It always wears one of those really tall hats, like the Cat-in-the-Hat, only all black, and you can’t trust it. It will trick you.”
The letter T sat on the floor of Bobby’s room, looking all innocent but secretly up to no good. Sam stared it down. Sam wanted to remember it, in case he ever saw it in a person. “I won’t trust it,” he told Dean, once he was sure he would recognize T again. And then he thought Bobby probably wouldn’t want a thing like that on his floor, when he didn’t even know it was there, and what if it got out one day? “Make it go away.”
“Write it, Sammy. Then I’ll make it go away.”
So Sam licked his finger and drew the stick and then another one, like Dean did, and there was another T in front of them. It was the color of Bobby’s floorboards, but deep down, Sam knew it was black.
Dean swiped his sleeve across the floor, chasing the Ts away.
“…keep your goddamn temper in check, you hear?” Bobby’s voice carried up the stairs as he tried to talk over Daddy. “Now, I know a priest up in Minnesota who can teach ya these things…”
Sam nodded. “Okay. Show me the others.”
****
B was a loudmouth. O was motherly and had a nice smile. J was a dreamer with his head in the clouds, but he had a streak for math. K minded his own business, and Dean wasn’t even sure if it was a he or a she. Wednesday was ornery, like an old man in a hospital ward who was made to eat oatmeal all the time. Seven was always full of surprises and too loud, too freaking loud. Sam learned them all, and then he learned too much about the world and mostly forgot their stories, except that he had always known, in his heart, what color they all were.
****
Sam was fourteen, and the world was constantly, infuriatingly out of focus. His arms and legs were growing everywhere, and it felt like his brain couldn’t keep up. Nothing fit. Things broke in his hands. He was in so much pain sometimes that it kept him up all night, and on other nights he had the most embarrassing dreams. People got on his nerves. The torture of teenage years was never going to end.
His brother was eighteen, with yet another almost-hole in his stomach.
“There must be something really awesome inside of you,” Sam said, tying a suture. “Every critter goes straight for your stomach, I swear.”
The doctor stitched Dean up in UCLA’s hospital ER, and then he’d felt better, pulled out his IV and escaped through the back door. Not even God knew how he had made it back home, into the hills thirty miles outside of Los Angeles, but then again, a young man wearing hospital pajama pants and a cut-up shirt was probably pretty far from the weirdest thing to be found wandering those streets on a daily basis. The good thing was, he’d made it home. The bad thing was, he’d ripped out some stitches and showed up at the front door dripping dark blood.
“I dunno, man, I guess I’m just filled with awesome. Like a pie.” He shrugged, and Sam pinched his thigh, hard, to remind him to sit still. Dean only swatted at Sam’s hand.
They gave him morphine down at the hospital. Dean had never done well with morphine.
“Full of shit is more like it.”
“Nah, you’re just jealous. You, dude, they always try to strangle. Only goes to show that you yack too much, and they know it just by looking at your stupid face. How it’s always scrunched up, and you twist your mouth like-”
Sam sighed. “You realize that I have a big needle in my hand that I’m currently jabbing through your stomach?”
“Ja-abbing.” Dean let his head drop back onto the armrest of the couch and opened his eyes wide at the ceiling. “Hey, Sammy, that’s such a weird word. Why is everything so fucking weird? I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Nothing’s going on. It’s the morphine.”
“I hate the goddamn morphine.” He tried to lift himself up to see what Sam’s hands were doing.
“Lie the fuck down!”
“Watch your mouth, squirt.” But he did lie back down.
Later, Sam washed the blood from his hands, only they still smelled of iron. He brought Dean his favorite yellow flannel shirt to keep him warm and found a rerun of Star Trek on TV. He was boiling water in the kitchen when he noticed that his hands were shaking, so he had to put them down on the counter and wait for it to pass.
“Dean,” he said, both to check on him and to distract himself. “We’re out of coffee till Dad comes back. You want tea?”
“Don’t like T. It wears a top hat and you can’t trust it.”
It took a minute for Sam to catch up. When he did, the memory tasted like dust and brown sugar on his tongue and smelled like the hair of Bobby Singer’s old dog after it got wet outside and rolled all over the covers. There was a sick lump in his stomach because this was a weird thing for Dean to say, even if he was on morphine. Was he hallucinating now? Was he having a stroke?
Quietly, Sam tiptoed back into the living room and sat on the edge of the couch. Dean gave him a wide, loopy grin that - thank god - was looking even on both sides. Sam checked his pupils, which told him jack squat. He held up three fingers.
“How many am I holding up?”
“Huh?”
“How many, Dean?” To his horror, Sam heard a tremble in his own voice. “How many fingers?”
Dean frowned. “Three.”
Sam dropped his hand, feeling like some enormous weight that had been pressing on his chest just let go. He breathed deep and wondered if he was going to explode right here, in this messy living room. “What the hell are you talking about, ‘top hat’?”
“Like the one Lincoln had. Or the Cat-in-the-Hat, only all black.” Dean gestured over his own head to indicate the height of the hat. “Sammy, are you crying? Why, dude, are you still scared of it or something?”
Sam dreamed of T that night. It sat in the corner in its top hat and breathed, just breathed in and out, and its eyes glowed an unspeakable color on its black body. It smiled at Sam once, slowly stretching its lips wider and wider, only instead of white teeth between its lips was a deeper black.
****
“Top hat - because it starts with a ‘t’? Or ‘t’ like in ‘trust’?”
Dean scowled at him. They were sitting at the wobbly table that came with the kitchen in this place. Now the table was cleared of all the dishes to let them spread out the maps. Dean was wearing his yellow flannel shirt from last night, the one he slept in and which currently smelled faintly of antiseptics.
Sam could wait for his answer. Sam could wait for a long, long time. Dean put another tiny cross on his map of California and glanced up at his brother. “What are you, five again?”
“You brought it up. I forgot all about it years ago, and now you just… Who says that, Dean?” Dean rolled his eyes and turned back to searching the map, but Sam thumped him on the shoulder. “I wanna know.”
“I was high on morphine - what do you want from me?”
****
In his fourteenth year, Sam constantly felt like he was dying of something - of embarrassment, of want, of hunger, of curiosity. Dean didn’t want to talk about it but he still remembered the personalities of all the letters and numbers and days of the week, and if Sam could catch him when he was tired enough and mellow enough, he’d hear the stories again.
Dean knew the personality of every letter, though some seemed more open to him than others. He knew the personalities of all days of the week except Tuesday - from which he figured that Tuesday was a spineless son of a bitch - but only for a few of the numbers. And Dean hated talking about them, from which Sam figured that Dean didn’t actually invent them. He didn’t just believe in those things - he knew them with rock certainty, like Sam himself secretly knew the inherent colors of all the letters.
Sam would forever be the little brother. He wore Dean’s obsessions and delusions like he wore his old shirts and sneakers. It’s not as if ideas were less hygienic than jeans.
****
“T for ‘terror’?”
“No.”
“T for ‘tremor’?”
“No!”
“T for ‘twisted’?”
Dean paused at that one. Sam watched his fingers as they turned a .45 round over a couple of times before pressing it into the clip. They were standing in an empty field with the highway whispering somewhere in the distance and the Impala at their backs. Dad had gone back to pick out a rifle from the trunk to torture Sam with and call it practice.
“Maybe,” Dean said. He slid the clip in, yanked the slide back and took aim. He fired in a rapid sequence, to leave Sam no room in between for any more questions.
Sam swatted at the mosquitoes that kept trying to land on his neck and waited for Dean to run out of bullets.
****
Sam was twenty-nine, and the world, surprisingly, was still there. Go figure. It was still run through with roads, and the roads were of different colors and formed a tangle at the center. Sometimes he and Dean got into the car and just went and didn’t think about where they were going to end up, but Sam knew anyway. He saw the color of the road and knew where it led. He didn’t think about it much.
Dean drove while Sam played with the maps - the ordinary ones that come on paper. When they stopped at the light in some small town that happened along the way, Sam looked up for the first time in what felt like hours and realized with a start that they were in California. The road was lined on both sides with suburban homes, their windows ablaze and their porches decorated with pumpkins.
“Is it Halloween already?”
“Another three days,” Dean said. “Keep up, Sammy.”
“Yeah, Sammy,” said the Devil from the backseat, “you don’t wanna be caught by surprise when the spooky things come, do you?”
Sam flipped him the bird.
“Is he back there?” Dean’s eyes darted for the rearview mirror out of habit, though of course he knew he wouldn’t find anything.
“Yeah.”
“You know what I read the other day?” Sam immediately got the urge to make some joke about Dean’s ability to read but felt it was expected and bit his tongue on sheer principle. "In the Philippines, they believe that when you have nightmares, it’s because the Devil is bothering you.”
“Oh yeah?” Lucifer said it at the same time Sam did, but with more amusement than curiosity.
“So what you do,” Dean said, “is you take a cat to bed with you, and when the Devil comes at night, the cat will make him count the hairs on its tail.”
Sam grinned as Lucifer rolled his eyes. “And why would I do such a ridiculous thing?”
Dean returned the grin - a flash of moist teeth in the dark of the car’s interior. “But when he’s almost done, the cat flicks its tail. The Devil loses count and has to start all over again.”
Sam thought about it and thought about it as the Impala rolled north, leaving behind the town with its pumpkins. “Are you suggesting we get a cat?”
“What? Fuck no. How about we push the beds together, then I stick my leg out and twitch it all night long, and he can count the hairs?”
“Well, Sam, you’re related to a genius,” said the Devil from the back.
Sam shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”
The road rolled on and on, crossed into Oregon and continued without much change. The next time Sam turned around, Lucifer wasn’t there.
“Sam?”
“Hm?”
“Why’d you tell me to turn around back there? I thought you wanted to go to Texas.”
Sam scratched his nose, thinking about how this morning he just told Dean to turn the car around out of the blue and promised to throw all the tapes out the window if he didn’t. He didn’t like to think about how he knew, and he definitely didn’t like to explain.
“There was a T at the end of that road.”
Dean looked confused. “Tea?”
“No, Dean, T. As in ‘it wears a top hat and it can’t be trusted’.”
There was silence. When Sam turned his way, Dean was staring straight ahead with an unreadable expression.
“What? Maybe it was Crowley. He’s still out there somewhere, you know,” Sam said. Dean kept silent. “Oh my god, dude, you keep thinking I’m gonna forget.”
“I don’t know why you have to bring it up all the time.”
“I don’t know why it’s such a big deal. And besides, once every decade is not all the time.”
Dean snorted. They drove in silence for the next ten minutes, and when Sam almost forgot all about it, Dean cleared his throat. “So, what color is this road?”
How the hell did you-? “What?”
“What, you think you’re the only smartass who remembers things? So I think a letter is evil. You think the roads are colored.”
Sam considered denying everything - it was such a small, childish, naïve thing to drag out into the open. He said instead, “Lime green.”
“Is that good?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s good.”
Author's Note: Synesthesia is a neurological condition (non-pathological) that has to do with cross-wiring of random association ares of the cerebral cortex. It comes in different shapes, depending on which areas got cross-linked. As a result of it, when a particular pathway gets triggered (like music recognition) it simultaneously activates an unrelated pathway (like depth perception), and the person perceives the shape of music. It's an involuntary reaction, much like you can't help but see light when it shines into your eye. It goes unreported a lot since it doesn't distress anyone's life, and most people just call it rich imagination and have no idea that their experience has a name.