Short!fic - You Look From Your Direction
Title: You Look From Your Direction
Author: Ry (curseangel / dreamsforlease)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Obscure spoilers for 4x01 "Lazarus Rising".
Characters/Pairings: Sam and Dean Winchester
Summary: "Close to the middle of the network, it seems we're looking for a center; what if it turns out to be hollow? We could be fixing what is broken." Snippit piece; Sam watches Dean trying or not trying, moving from day to day. Heavily inspired by Suzanne Vega's "Big Space".
Dean wakes up and that's never a slow process, very quickly alert and pulling himself together, the cold of morning shocking him up, all the angles of his dreams turning into twisted wire in the stark light of day creeping in through the motel room curtains. The nightmares he had, waking, sound like a bad movie, the twisted wires like coathangers all bent up, distorting the images, still haunting but somehow less so when there's daylight, when he can ignore it.
He pretends like he's dealing with it, and sometimes it almost looks like he is, when he shoves the tangles under his metaphorical bed, grins when he wakes Sam up at whatever obscene hour he happens to have gotten up at, and asks what they're doing for breakfast, where are they driving today. And you can't even see the ends of the wires sticking out, sensitive points that make him flinch when someone says 'go to hell', and Sam pretends not to notice, but it's pretty hard not to.
There are days when he doesn't deal with it, though, when he can't. On those mornings, all the little bits, the tangled wires like bits of string all tied together and roundabout, with no discernible end, are exposed like bone that breaks right through the skin. Sam has to wake himself up, to his brother sitting quiet on his own bed staring at nothing or a point of light on red, motionless until summoned to move. He tries to push past it, but Sam won't have any of that, forcing him to accept comfort like a gift shoved into his hands. He's worse on those days, trying to shock himself into wakefulness with strong black coffee and little else, forgetting or not wanting to eat or do much else, just forget and drive, oh god, drive like there's something chasing him, they'd cover whole states in a day, hardly stopping. Sam tries to help and he gets caught up in the wires, trying to reach through their delicate lines like nerve-endings to find his brother at their center.
Author: Ry (curseangel / dreamsforlease)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Obscure spoilers for 4x01 "Lazarus Rising".
Characters/Pairings: Sam and Dean Winchester
Summary: "Close to the middle of the network, it seems we're looking for a center; what if it turns out to be hollow? We could be fixing what is broken." Snippit piece; Sam watches Dean trying or not trying, moving from day to day. Heavily inspired by Suzanne Vega's "Big Space".
Dean wakes up and that's never a slow process, very quickly alert and pulling himself together, the cold of morning shocking him up, all the angles of his dreams turning into twisted wire in the stark light of day creeping in through the motel room curtains. The nightmares he had, waking, sound like a bad movie, the twisted wires like coathangers all bent up, distorting the images, still haunting but somehow less so when there's daylight, when he can ignore it.
He pretends like he's dealing with it, and sometimes it almost looks like he is, when he shoves the tangles under his metaphorical bed, grins when he wakes Sam up at whatever obscene hour he happens to have gotten up at, and asks what they're doing for breakfast, where are they driving today. And you can't even see the ends of the wires sticking out, sensitive points that make him flinch when someone says 'go to hell', and Sam pretends not to notice, but it's pretty hard not to.
There are days when he doesn't deal with it, though, when he can't. On those mornings, all the little bits, the tangled wires like bits of string all tied together and roundabout, with no discernible end, are exposed like bone that breaks right through the skin. Sam has to wake himself up, to his brother sitting quiet on his own bed staring at nothing or a point of light on red, motionless until summoned to move. He tries to push past it, but Sam won't have any of that, forcing him to accept comfort like a gift shoved into his hands. He's worse on those days, trying to shock himself into wakefulness with strong black coffee and little else, forgetting or not wanting to eat or do much else, just forget and drive, oh god, drive like there's something chasing him, they'd cover whole states in a day, hardly stopping. Sam tries to help and he gets caught up in the wires, trying to reach through their delicate lines like nerve-endings to find his brother at their center.