SPN FIC - I Can't, I Can, I Do
Completing today's fic trifecta, so that I can go do...something else. :) Hope Verse, 2016, in follow-up to Laurie.
"Not gonna work, Sammy," Dean said quietly. "You could throw in a couple front-row tickets for Cirque du Soleil and she still wouldn't buy it. They never do, unless they can see it for themselves. Or unless they're a grade-A nutball."
Characters: Sam and Dean
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG, for language
Spoilers: none
Length: 2102 words
I CAN'T, I CAN, I DO
By Carol Davis
It was downright crazy, Dean thought, giving this much attention to a two-year-old copy of Sports Illustrated - and it wasn't even the Swimsuit Edition. But "crazy" was justified, right, when it was a matter of self-defense?
He'd found the magazine in the trunk of the car, jammed into one of the wheel wells, crumpled and torn and splotched with grease. He didn't remember buying it, so maybe he hadn't bought it - maybe Sam had, or maybe he'd picked it up somewhere, off a recycling pile, out of somebody's mail, who the hell knew. Wherever it'd come from, it was reading material, something to focus on so he didn't have to look at Sam.
He'd tried watching TV, but the sound from the set seemed to flip Sam's "on" switch. Made him talk, about everything, about nothing.
Mostly about nothing. Weather. Bad cable reception.
Sam was in the kitchenette now, washing dishes. He'd pulled every plate, every cup, every piece of flatware out of the cabinets and drawers and was washing them compulsively, holding each piece up to the light periodically as he scrubbed so he could squint at it, apparently daring it to hold on to a fingerprint or a flake of food. When he was done with the kitchen, Dean figured, Sam would go to work on the bathroom. Scrub down the shower. Go after the grout with a toothbrush. With any luck the toothbrush would be his own and not Dean's.
They could use some supplies, but leaving Sam alone seemed like a bad idea. The car needed washing, but Sam was being way too jerky. The kind of jerky that left scratches in the paint job.
"Dude," Dean said finally.
Sam looked at him. Steadily. Waiting, expectant, as if he wanted Dean to point out a spot he'd missed.
"You gonna quiet down any time soon?"
Sam considered his sinkful of soapy water and his collection of dishes.
"Dude, seriously," Dean sighed. "Getting real close to nuts. I just passed the sign that says Nuts, 2 Miles."
"Sorry," Sam muttered.
"Sit down. Okay? Sit your gigantic, twitchy ass down." Dean's tone was firm enough to prompt Sam to put down the cup he'd been holding, but he seemed completely unable to choose a seat. With a sigh, Dean pointed to Sam's bed. "Sit."
"I feel like…I need to keep moving."
"No shit. I noticed."
"I can't sit down, Dean."
"Then we'll go…I don't know. Shoot some hoops or something. Down around back. There's a net, and a bunch of junk for kids to play with. Pretty sure there's a ball. If there's not, I'll go hit the dollar store." That didn't get much of a response out of Sam; he looked around the room like he was considering steaming off the wallpaper. But at least he'd stopped screwing around with the dishes. "Come on," Dean coaxed. "Fresh air? Good for ya."
"I guess."
"Sammy."
Suddenly forlorn, Sam shuffled over to the bed and sat on the spot Dean had indicated, sinking down as if someone had let the air out of his tires. He made a long study of his shoes, then lifted his head and looked at Dean. "I don't know what to do," he said plaintively.
"Yeah. I get that."
"I want -"
"Ain't about what you want, Sammy. Never is. Not for us."
Sam had slouched down enough that they were pretty much eye to eye. He didn't look defeated like this very often - exhausted or pissed or frustrated, yeah, but defeated was rare. Especially since he hadn't even tried to do the thing that was whipping him down, and being smacked down by a concept… well, that was even more unusual than losing an actual fight. But it figured. And maybe going into this thing not expecting to win…
Yeah, that sucked too.
"I could tell her to call Becky," Sam said abruptly. "Becky could convince her."
"Dude. She'll just think Becky's gone off the deep end, too."
"I need to go for a walk."
"You could walk from here to Memphis and back and it's not gonna change anything."
"Then we could take her with us."
"To where?"
"I don't know. Something…not too dangerous."
And slowly, that look crept onto Sam's face - the one that said Fix this. Can't you please fix this for me? It'd been an old standby when Sam was a kid and needed help convincing Dad to let him go somewhere or do something that wasn't on the Automatically Approved list - which had always seemed to be a pretty freakin' short list, where Sam was concerned. Go on an overnight field trip with a bunch of kids from his class? Play soccer? Stay in town until after some Incredibly Important Event had happened? Sam had ended up getting his way more often than not, although usually after a good, hearty round of shouting and sulking and door slamming. But he'd never asked this for particular thing, back then. Never wanted to know, Dad, can I tell somebody about us? About what we do?
Dean had tried that once - telling a civilian.
"Not gonna work, Sammy," he said quietly. "You could throw in a couple front-row tickets for Cirque du Soleil and she still wouldn't buy it. They never do, unless they can see it for themselves. Or unless they're a grade-A nutball."
"Then what do I do?" Sam asked, barely above a murmur.
That there, ladies and gentlemen, was the $64,000 Question.
Dean put down his magazine. He had to look away from Sam for a minute, focus instead on the wallpaper alongside the door to outside.
"Stay," he said finally.
"And -"
"Make a life."
"I can't do that."
"Yeah, you can."
"And what're you gonna do?"
"Got a place I can go. Look, Sammy - people do this all the time. Move around. They get split up."
"You're telling me you're gonna go to New York."
"They want me to."
"You want me to stay here in Atlanta."
"I want you to do whatever you need to do. To make this work. If you love her, and she loves you, and that's what you need to do. Atlanta's as good a place as any. Ain't like it's Mozambique. Takes a while to drive here, but it's doable."
"You want me to give up the job."
"If that's what you want."
"I don't know what I want, Dean."
Fix this - that was still all over Sam's face. I need you to fix it. Getting Dad to cave to what Sam wanted, way back when, had never been simple - and in fact, Dean's involvement had usually upped the amount of shouting and sulking and door slamming that went on - but this thing made manipulating Dad seem like a cakewalk. Lower lip caught between his teeth, Dean reached out and fussed with the cover of his Sports Illustrated, which had been crumpled up in the wheel well of the car for so long that it refused to lie flat. "We could bring her a…you know, remains," he suggested. "Dig up that gremlin, maybe - they take a bitch of a long time to decompose, so it's probably still kinda intact. Maybe that'd help. If she could see something that's not in…I don't know, wherever you find pictures of animals and shit."
"You want me to bring Laurie a dead gremlin with its head bashed in."
"Give me an alternative, dude. I'm runnin' dry, here."
"Maybe Bobby would talk to her."
"Yeah, he'd like that," Dean said dryly.
As if a rubber band inside him had snapped, Sam popped up off the bed and began to pace the length of the room. Dean let him do it for a couple of minutes, just so he could burn off some steam, until the pacing seemed to make Sam feel worse instead of better.
"Sammy," he said then.
"Shut up," Sam muttered.
"I figure you got three choices. You can try to tell her, in which case she's gonna think you're some variety of insane, and throw you the hell out. We can take her along somewhere and show her something that's so damn weird she's gotta believe it, in which case she'll probably be so freaked out that she never wants to see you again. Or you can do what you started out to do when you hit the road for Stanford. You can make yourself a life."
"Sarah didn't freak out."
"Who?"
"Sarah Blake. Remember?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"We've met any number of people who didn't freak out. Women. Lots of them."
"I guess."
"What you're saying is, you want me to stay in Atlanta. While you go somewhere else. You want me to quit."
"I want you to do whatever you want to do, Sam."
"In Atlanta."
"Or Rio. Or the freakin' North Pole. It doesn't matter."
Sam stood where he was for a moment, his mouth a thin line, breath huffing in and out of flared nostrils. Then, abruptly, he strode across the room, yanked the door open and went outside, thumping the door shut behind him.
Twenty minutes later, Dean found him perched at the foot end of a lounge chair alongside the motel's pool, which by the look of it hadn't contained water in three or four years.
"You want some dinner?" Dean asked.
Sam gaped at him. "You know what? Fuck you, Dean. Jesus."
"Why? Because there's only one good answer to this?"
"That's a good answer? That's your version of a good answer? Just give up on the whole thing? Wow. That's an awesomely perfect answer. Thank you for that."
"Do you love her?"
Sam didn't answer.
"Does she love you?" Dean pressed.
"There's a way."
"Well, then, feel free to draw me a map, Sammy, because the GPS ain't worth half a good goddamn for something like this."
"Not everybody's gonna do what Cassie did, Dean."
"I'm well aware."
"Are you? Because you're not acting like you are."
"Sammy -" Dean said heavily, and raked a hand back through his hair. "I want you to be happy. That's all."
"Then come with me. To talk to Laurie."
That made Dean snort, a little more loudly than he'd intended. "I'm not the one who's good with the earnest stuff, Sammy. Remember? Workin' the puppy-dog eyes? That's your field of expertise. I go in with guns blazing and make people street my ass."
"Lizzie," Sam said.
"What?"
"You're the one who told her the bad things are real."
"Dude. She was seven. Laurie's not seven."
"So, she's a harder sell."
Dean opened his mouth, then closed it again. From the other end of the parking lot, the breeze brought with it the aroma of donuts. Funny, he thought, since the donut shop had been closed for a couple of hours. The shop's coffee had been what had attracted him to this particular motel, which had little else going for it. But then, he thought, it was simply the latest in a long line of places that hadn't had much going for them.
"Come with me," Sam pressed.
"We're not joined at the hip, dude. You can do it on your own. Less embarrassing."
"For me, or you?"
"Whatever."
It took Dean a moment to do the math - figure out the number of years it had been since the last time Sam had asked him to throw some weight around on his behalf. Stanford, he thought; had to be something to do with Stanford, although his testimony on that particular subject had been a lot less than heartfelt. Sam and Dad had fought for the best part of three months over that situation, and really? No one had come out a winner. This, right now, didn't seem to promise any better of a result.
And Laurie seemed just as likely to say, "Don't come back."
But still, there it was: the Fix this, laid out with a big bow on it, and decorated with the puppy-dog eyes.
Sam was 33 years old, for God's sake. He really needed to give up that shit.
He might, one day, if it ever stopped working.
"Come with me," Sam said.
There was nothing to do but cave.
"Okay," Dean told his brother, who was perched on a rusty, beat-up lounge chair that seemed likely to collapse under Sam's weight at any moment.
"Yeah?"
Freakin' puppy-dog eyes. They'd be the death of him, Dean thought. But at least he'd have a bunch of company on that particular bus. "Yeah," he said again. "All right. We'll go talk to her. And we'll see what happens."
~~~~~~~~~~~~