Fic: A Rough Guide to Eating Sandwiches
The water has a rusty orange tinge to it, and the sink is crusted with what looks like dried peanut butter. At least you pray it’s peanut butter.
You focus on brushing your teeth, and try desperately not to look any closer. Truck stop bathrooms; what you’d give to never see one again in your life…
As you spit into the sink, your phone vibrates against your thigh, starts to ring. AC/DC: Dean.
It’s been about a week since you saw him, the discomfort of your last conversation still lingering. You wonder if he’ll ever trust you again, if he ever really did. Not that you don’t understand his suspicions. After all, he was dragged out of Hell only to discover it was because an archangel wanted to use his body as a meat-suit, then toss it like a dull razor. People don’t get resurrected so they can have BBQs with long lost cousins and compare noses.
You know this. It keeps you up nights.
“Dean?”
“Sam, it’s Lisa.” The sound of anyone else’s voice on your brother’s phone is never a good thing. You feel your neck stiffen , your eyes dance up to the water-stained ceiling.
“Where’s Dean? He okay?”
“He’s here. Some motel outside of Fort Knox. Sam, he was roughed up pretty badly by some… guys. Or things… I don’t know,” she tells you, like she’s pretty sure you do. “I’m bringing him home.” Home. Right. Dean has a home.
And he called home, not you, who are not his home, not a person to call when in need. What are you to him now? An obligatory relation? A brother he can’t relate to unless you need him to save you? But that job is done, and now… now-
“He was hunting?” you ask her, because as far as you know, he’d decided to stick to playing watchdog.
“Yeah, He’s back on the road. He didn’t tell you?”
You shake the water off your toothbrush, pocket it and head for the parking lot. Tell yourself it’s not that big a deal.
“I… I’ll meet you there.”
It’s pouring rain, so you make a run for it, try make out what Lisa’s saying over the sound of the heavy rain drops hitting the tin roof of the gas station and the gravel lot.
“Look, Sam. I think he’ll be okay. I just thought, you’re his brother, you should know.”
“Lisa, whatever Dean was hunting, I need to get the low-down. Finish the job for him,” you say, raising your voice over the weather, fumbling with your keys.
“Oh… right,” answers Lisa, like she just realized she made the wrong move in a checkers game.
You slide into the driver’s seat, wipe your sleeve across your wet face. “Hey. You not telling me something?”
“It’s just that he doesn’t exactly know I’m calling you. In fact, he asked me not to.”
“Yeah? Well… tell him to suck it. I’m in Chapel Hill, be there in 10 hours.”
You hang up and key the address into your GPS. And maybe you feel an empty pit where your heart used to be. Maybe you can’t tell right from wrong anymore because Lucifer was so beyond evil that now everyone else seems like a saint in comparison. Even Samuel’s noticed something off about you. And so maybe you are fucked up beyond recognition, and Dean doesn’t want to hang out.
But you know what?
Maybe you do still need him. And maybe he needs you.
The door is open, so you just slip up the stairs. You stand there, right outside the open bedroom door like some kid who got home from school a little too early. Or like you’re still just a ghost, like you’ve been all year, watching your brother’s life stagger forward without you. Feeling less and less real every day.
Dean looks like shit. He’s facing away from you, lying awkwardly on his side in a pair of faded black sweatpants, holding a bag of ice to his face with the same hand he’s leaning on, and balancing another pack on his shoulder. Lisa, kneeled on the bed behind him, struggling to tie a sling around his neck. His back is covered in bruises that are only beginning to bloom.
He tenses. “Owe.”
“Sorry. Just… can you just…” Her hands are shaking, just barely. But you notice because you know the position she’s in far to intimately.
“Fuck it,” Dean groans, and rolls onto his back, letting the ice pack on his shoulder fall and spill onto the floor. His eyes close against some unseen pain.
Lisa moves up off the bed, and in doing so, finally catches sight of you in the doorway. “Sam!” She sounds relieved to see you.
Dean’s bruised eyes bat open. “Hey. Welcome to the party,” he mutters.
“Hey, man. Way to belly-flop back into the pool,” you tell him, reciprocating the sarcasm because you know he takes it better than actual concern. The concern slips out anyway, out of habit. “You okay?”
Dean’s breath hitches, and he stares at the ceiling. “I will be once I can figure how to lie down and not feel like I’m snuggled up next to Edward fucking Scissor-hands,” he grumbles, and you wonder if maybe he forgot he didn’t want you here. Or maybe changed his mind.
You inch a little closer to the bed, not sure of what you’re so afraid of anyway.
Lisa frowns, looks down at Dean with her arms folded. “It’s tricky. All the bruises… and his shoulder’s messed up. It was… dislocated,” she says slowly, her lips tight.
You nod, remembering the first time you had to pop it back in for Dean. The sickening feeling, the nauseating wet cracking noise. You really don’t envy Lisa right now.
You hiss a little, stare at your brother’s bare swollen shoulder, because you also remember how loud he screamed when you did it.
“I’m fine,” Dean says, only because he seems to like the way it sounds.
Lisa shakes her head. “Yes you are. But only in one sense of the word,” she tells him, and sits next to him, still trying to get his arm in the damn sling, struggling to slide it down his back. Dean starts to sit up to help her out, but doesn’t manage. His good arm curls instinctively around his bruised ribs, and he lets out a tight-jawed, low humming sound.
“It’s okay. Lie back sweetie,” Lisa tells him, holding his other hand in both solidarity and an attempt to get his arm properly positioned in the sling. Dean’s Adam’s apple bobs and he nods briefly, relaxing back against the pillows she’s piled behind him.
It’s weird, seeing Dean like this with a woman. Hearing someone call him 'sweetie'. You’re pretty sure he’s never been so open with anyone since Mom, and you hate Lisa a little in that moment, hate her for being so close to Dean. Maybe even closer than you were to Jess. But it’s not like you can blame Lisa for that. So you try not to.
“You didn’t need to come, Sam,” he tells you, almost apologetically. It’s strange, and it makes you wonder if it wasn’t really that he didn’t want you on the hunt, but that he was worried he’d be bothering you. Which is… well, pretty damn out of character. Dean usually goes out of his way to bother you. It’s kind of what he lives for.
“Yeah, actually, I did,” you tell him, and he better fucking believe it.
“What the crap for?” he asks you, shooing Lisa away, finally overwhelmed by her (totally reasonable amount of) fussing.
She shakes her head a little and takes it gracefully, with a little smile. “Okay... I guess I’ll let you guys catch up,” she says, and plants a little kiss on Dean’s bad shoulder.
“Thanks, Lis,” Dean says, as their foreheads touch for a moment. She winks, pats his knee, and leaves.
Dean’s not in so much pain that he can’t strain his neck a little to enjoy watching her leave the room. You roll your eyes, even though it’s moments like this, when everything seems just as it was six years ago, that let you believe you can still depend on some things in this messed up world.
With Lisa out of sight, Dean’s back on track. He asks again, “So, tell me why I need you here.”
“Why? If you’re in the middle of a hunt, Dean, someone needs to finish it,” you insist, leaving out the part about being worried about him, about needing to see for yourself that he’s in one piece because ever since you saw him get ripped limb from limb by a pack of Hellhounds you have a bit of a complex about this kind of shit.
“You saying I can’t handle a simple hunt on my own?” Dean asks. Christ. The guy’s ego is more fragile than a Faberge egg-regardless of what he’d have the rest of the world believe.
“No… I don’t know. Is that what this was? What were you hunting anyway?” you ask, deliberately moving the conversation towards straight-forward facts.
“A Rawhead. Except it turned out to be a gang of ‘em. Always been solitary son’s a bitches. Got the jump on me. Fuckers.”
Not for the first time this year, you wonder what the hell is going on so that everything Dad ever taught you about all these things-based on hand’s on experience, no less-is all freakin’ topsy-turvey.
You nod in understanding, and start to feel pretty bad for Dean, who had every right to think he was prepared. Safe.
“Man, you and Rawheads… ”
Dean lets his head tilt back, and stares at the paper lampshade hanging from the ceiling. “I know, right?”
“Shit, Dean. Why the hell didn’t you just call me?” you ask him, because at this point, you’re pretty damn sure it has nothing to do with Dean not liking you anymore, or whatever childish thoughts you were entertaining a few hours ago. “If you’re back in the game, we should be in it together.”
“Because, Sam, it’s been a year since I’ve put myself out there… And I’m not talking about playing possum for those fucking Djinn, or getting choked by T-2000 out at Camp North Star. I mean a honest to god B-and-E, running-through-the-woods-with-a-machete, blood-under-your-nails, heart-in-your-throat hunt.”
“You ran through the woods with a machete?”
“A portable generator, actually. A hell of a lot bulkier.”
“And why exactly is all of that a good reason for you to not have backup?”
“I just.. I just needed to know… That I still had it. That I didn’t lose my mojo.”
Your brother, having been to hell and back, a witness to the end of days and your own demise, remains somehow, in-fucking-corrigible. “Jesus… Well? What’s the verdict?”
“Honestly? I… kicked their freakin’ asses,” he says smugly, and you can’t help but let out a laugh. “Got all but one out of four of those huge-ass fugly bastards.”
“And got pummeled nearly unconcious in the process…”
“Whatever, man. I’m counting it as a win.”
“Well I’m glad you’re back in it… I mean, if you are, for real.” And you honestly are. Because ever since Dean found out you were alive, you somehow knew it was just a matter of time. And it’s like you’re a kid waiting for Christmas. Or… what you imagine Christmas is like for normal kids.
“Yes, Sam. I’m back in. And you can thank Lisa for that, actually. She is… well… pretty much the awesomest person in the universe.”
You will thank Lisa. Hell, you would kiss her if you knew Dean wouldn’t rip you a new one for it. You probably owe her your life. At least your sanity.
It hasn’t been easy to admit, because it’s damn selfish, but these past few months you’ve been looking for a reason to pull him back in. You’ve need him. You can feel your moral compass starting to spin off its axis. You want to do what’s right. You really do. But lately, you’ve been so damn uncertain of what that is. It’s like those people who have strokes and when they wake up they have to re-learn how to talk and write and eat a goddamn sandwich. You just can’t figure it out sometimes.
But Dean? Dean knows. He’s always known. And he can tell you.
“Right. You’re a lucky guy, Dean,” you tell him, even though you’re thinking it’s the other way around. You’re the lucky one.
He lets out a tight laugh. “Remind me of that when I have to limp over to the bathroom in about two minutes, would ya?”
“Yeah. About that, man. Are you okay? I mean seriously. Looks like a few cracked ribs, at least. Lisa know that?”
“Meh,” Dean shrugs with his good shoulder. “Don’t want to get her too worried. I can handle it.”
Years of experience have taught you that this means absolute squat. You wonder, frequently, if your brother knows just how transparent he is.
“Sure. Just… take it easy, alright? The road ain’t goin nowhere. And neither am I.”
“Thanks, Sammy.”
“Don’t thank me, just let me give you a hand.”
Dean nods and you slide your arm behind his back, help him sit up, and he swings his legs off the bed with a grunt.
“I’m lucky,” he reminds the both of you.
“You are lucky,” you agree, as you pull his good arm over your shoulders, and start to help him to his feet.
It’s tough going; he’s putting more weight on you than you thought he’d need to. But you don’t show any indication of concern. You’ve both been through worse. And if Dean wants to believe that he’s ready for this, he has to think you believe it even more. So it’s fine, you can take the weight. It’s nothing.
As he steadies himself, you can feel him holding his breath, can see his eyes start to cloud up, his jaw tighten like a vice, and you’re suddenly surprised how casual your conversation has been if he’s in this much pain. But then maybe you shouldn’t be. This is Dean, after all.
“Damn it,” he whispers, sounding almost as surprised as you are, but more disappointed.
You feel his fingers cling to a handful of your shirt-sleeve, feel his knees weaken. And you’re glad he needs you in this moment, that you aren’t the only one who’s lacking strength. It makes it easier somehow.
“Woah, hey..." You press a hand to his chest, and he whispers, “Sorry,” and at least you know that this is wrong. That he’s the last person in the world who should be apologizing. And see? He’s already making things clearer.
“It’s cool. We can do this. Together,” you assure him, and he nods slowly and takes a careful step forward.
fin.
You focus on brushing your teeth, and try desperately not to look any closer. Truck stop bathrooms; what you’d give to never see one again in your life…
As you spit into the sink, your phone vibrates against your thigh, starts to ring. AC/DC: Dean.
It’s been about a week since you saw him, the discomfort of your last conversation still lingering. You wonder if he’ll ever trust you again, if he ever really did. Not that you don’t understand his suspicions. After all, he was dragged out of Hell only to discover it was because an archangel wanted to use his body as a meat-suit, then toss it like a dull razor. People don’t get resurrected so they can have BBQs with long lost cousins and compare noses.
You know this. It keeps you up nights.
“Dean?”
“Sam, it’s Lisa.” The sound of anyone else’s voice on your brother’s phone is never a good thing. You feel your neck stiffen , your eyes dance up to the water-stained ceiling.
“Where’s Dean? He okay?”
“He’s here. Some motel outside of Fort Knox. Sam, he was roughed up pretty badly by some… guys. Or things… I don’t know,” she tells you, like she’s pretty sure you do. “I’m bringing him home.” Home. Right. Dean has a home.
And he called home, not you, who are not his home, not a person to call when in need. What are you to him now? An obligatory relation? A brother he can’t relate to unless you need him to save you? But that job is done, and now… now-
“He was hunting?” you ask her, because as far as you know, he’d decided to stick to playing watchdog.
“Yeah, He’s back on the road. He didn’t tell you?”
You shake the water off your toothbrush, pocket it and head for the parking lot. Tell yourself it’s not that big a deal.
“I… I’ll meet you there.”
It’s pouring rain, so you make a run for it, try make out what Lisa’s saying over the sound of the heavy rain drops hitting the tin roof of the gas station and the gravel lot.
“Look, Sam. I think he’ll be okay. I just thought, you’re his brother, you should know.”
“Lisa, whatever Dean was hunting, I need to get the low-down. Finish the job for him,” you say, raising your voice over the weather, fumbling with your keys.
“Oh… right,” answers Lisa, like she just realized she made the wrong move in a checkers game.
You slide into the driver’s seat, wipe your sleeve across your wet face. “Hey. You not telling me something?”
“It’s just that he doesn’t exactly know I’m calling you. In fact, he asked me not to.”
“Yeah? Well… tell him to suck it. I’m in Chapel Hill, be there in 10 hours.”
You hang up and key the address into your GPS. And maybe you feel an empty pit where your heart used to be. Maybe you can’t tell right from wrong anymore because Lucifer was so beyond evil that now everyone else seems like a saint in comparison. Even Samuel’s noticed something off about you. And so maybe you are fucked up beyond recognition, and Dean doesn’t want to hang out.
But you know what?
Maybe you do still need him. And maybe he needs you.
The door is open, so you just slip up the stairs. You stand there, right outside the open bedroom door like some kid who got home from school a little too early. Or like you’re still just a ghost, like you’ve been all year, watching your brother’s life stagger forward without you. Feeling less and less real every day.
Dean looks like shit. He’s facing away from you, lying awkwardly on his side in a pair of faded black sweatpants, holding a bag of ice to his face with the same hand he’s leaning on, and balancing another pack on his shoulder. Lisa, kneeled on the bed behind him, struggling to tie a sling around his neck. His back is covered in bruises that are only beginning to bloom.
He tenses. “Owe.”
“Sorry. Just… can you just…” Her hands are shaking, just barely. But you notice because you know the position she’s in far to intimately.
“Fuck it,” Dean groans, and rolls onto his back, letting the ice pack on his shoulder fall and spill onto the floor. His eyes close against some unseen pain.
Lisa moves up off the bed, and in doing so, finally catches sight of you in the doorway. “Sam!” She sounds relieved to see you.
Dean’s bruised eyes bat open. “Hey. Welcome to the party,” he mutters.
“Hey, man. Way to belly-flop back into the pool,” you tell him, reciprocating the sarcasm because you know he takes it better than actual concern. The concern slips out anyway, out of habit. “You okay?”
Dean’s breath hitches, and he stares at the ceiling. “I will be once I can figure how to lie down and not feel like I’m snuggled up next to Edward fucking Scissor-hands,” he grumbles, and you wonder if maybe he forgot he didn’t want you here. Or maybe changed his mind.
You inch a little closer to the bed, not sure of what you’re so afraid of anyway.
Lisa frowns, looks down at Dean with her arms folded. “It’s tricky. All the bruises… and his shoulder’s messed up. It was… dislocated,” she says slowly, her lips tight.
You nod, remembering the first time you had to pop it back in for Dean. The sickening feeling, the nauseating wet cracking noise. You really don’t envy Lisa right now.
You hiss a little, stare at your brother’s bare swollen shoulder, because you also remember how loud he screamed when you did it.
“I’m fine,” Dean says, only because he seems to like the way it sounds.
Lisa shakes her head. “Yes you are. But only in one sense of the word,” she tells him, and sits next to him, still trying to get his arm in the damn sling, struggling to slide it down his back. Dean starts to sit up to help her out, but doesn’t manage. His good arm curls instinctively around his bruised ribs, and he lets out a tight-jawed, low humming sound.
“It’s okay. Lie back sweetie,” Lisa tells him, holding his other hand in both solidarity and an attempt to get his arm properly positioned in the sling. Dean’s Adam’s apple bobs and he nods briefly, relaxing back against the pillows she’s piled behind him.
It’s weird, seeing Dean like this with a woman. Hearing someone call him 'sweetie'. You’re pretty sure he’s never been so open with anyone since Mom, and you hate Lisa a little in that moment, hate her for being so close to Dean. Maybe even closer than you were to Jess. But it’s not like you can blame Lisa for that. So you try not to.
“You didn’t need to come, Sam,” he tells you, almost apologetically. It’s strange, and it makes you wonder if it wasn’t really that he didn’t want you on the hunt, but that he was worried he’d be bothering you. Which is… well, pretty damn out of character. Dean usually goes out of his way to bother you. It’s kind of what he lives for.
“Yeah, actually, I did,” you tell him, and he better fucking believe it.
“What the crap for?” he asks you, shooing Lisa away, finally overwhelmed by her (totally reasonable amount of) fussing.
She shakes her head a little and takes it gracefully, with a little smile. “Okay... I guess I’ll let you guys catch up,” she says, and plants a little kiss on Dean’s bad shoulder.
“Thanks, Lis,” Dean says, as their foreheads touch for a moment. She winks, pats his knee, and leaves.
Dean’s not in so much pain that he can’t strain his neck a little to enjoy watching her leave the room. You roll your eyes, even though it’s moments like this, when everything seems just as it was six years ago, that let you believe you can still depend on some things in this messed up world.
With Lisa out of sight, Dean’s back on track. He asks again, “So, tell me why I need you here.”
“Why? If you’re in the middle of a hunt, Dean, someone needs to finish it,” you insist, leaving out the part about being worried about him, about needing to see for yourself that he’s in one piece because ever since you saw him get ripped limb from limb by a pack of Hellhounds you have a bit of a complex about this kind of shit.
“You saying I can’t handle a simple hunt on my own?” Dean asks. Christ. The guy’s ego is more fragile than a Faberge egg-regardless of what he’d have the rest of the world believe.
“No… I don’t know. Is that what this was? What were you hunting anyway?” you ask, deliberately moving the conversation towards straight-forward facts.
“A Rawhead. Except it turned out to be a gang of ‘em. Always been solitary son’s a bitches. Got the jump on me. Fuckers.”
Not for the first time this year, you wonder what the hell is going on so that everything Dad ever taught you about all these things-based on hand’s on experience, no less-is all freakin’ topsy-turvey.
You nod in understanding, and start to feel pretty bad for Dean, who had every right to think he was prepared. Safe.
“Man, you and Rawheads… ”
Dean lets his head tilt back, and stares at the paper lampshade hanging from the ceiling. “I know, right?”
“Shit, Dean. Why the hell didn’t you just call me?” you ask him, because at this point, you’re pretty damn sure it has nothing to do with Dean not liking you anymore, or whatever childish thoughts you were entertaining a few hours ago. “If you’re back in the game, we should be in it together.”
“Because, Sam, it’s been a year since I’ve put myself out there… And I’m not talking about playing possum for those fucking Djinn, or getting choked by T-2000 out at Camp North Star. I mean a honest to god B-and-E, running-through-the-woods-with-a-machete, blood-under-your-nails, heart-in-your-throat hunt.”
“You ran through the woods with a machete?”
“A portable generator, actually. A hell of a lot bulkier.”
“And why exactly is all of that a good reason for you to not have backup?”
“I just.. I just needed to know… That I still had it. That I didn’t lose my mojo.”
Your brother, having been to hell and back, a witness to the end of days and your own demise, remains somehow, in-fucking-corrigible. “Jesus… Well? What’s the verdict?”
“Honestly? I… kicked their freakin’ asses,” he says smugly, and you can’t help but let out a laugh. “Got all but one out of four of those huge-ass fugly bastards.”
“And got pummeled nearly unconcious in the process…”
“Whatever, man. I’m counting it as a win.”
“Well I’m glad you’re back in it… I mean, if you are, for real.” And you honestly are. Because ever since Dean found out you were alive, you somehow knew it was just a matter of time. And it’s like you’re a kid waiting for Christmas. Or… what you imagine Christmas is like for normal kids.
“Yes, Sam. I’m back in. And you can thank Lisa for that, actually. She is… well… pretty much the awesomest person in the universe.”
You will thank Lisa. Hell, you would kiss her if you knew Dean wouldn’t rip you a new one for it. You probably owe her your life. At least your sanity.
It hasn’t been easy to admit, because it’s damn selfish, but these past few months you’ve been looking for a reason to pull him back in. You’ve need him. You can feel your moral compass starting to spin off its axis. You want to do what’s right. You really do. But lately, you’ve been so damn uncertain of what that is. It’s like those people who have strokes and when they wake up they have to re-learn how to talk and write and eat a goddamn sandwich. You just can’t figure it out sometimes.
But Dean? Dean knows. He’s always known. And he can tell you.
“Right. You’re a lucky guy, Dean,” you tell him, even though you’re thinking it’s the other way around. You’re the lucky one.
He lets out a tight laugh. “Remind me of that when I have to limp over to the bathroom in about two minutes, would ya?”
“Yeah. About that, man. Are you okay? I mean seriously. Looks like a few cracked ribs, at least. Lisa know that?”
“Meh,” Dean shrugs with his good shoulder. “Don’t want to get her too worried. I can handle it.”
Years of experience have taught you that this means absolute squat. You wonder, frequently, if your brother knows just how transparent he is.
“Sure. Just… take it easy, alright? The road ain’t goin nowhere. And neither am I.”
“Thanks, Sammy.”
“Don’t thank me, just let me give you a hand.”
Dean nods and you slide your arm behind his back, help him sit up, and he swings his legs off the bed with a grunt.
“I’m lucky,” he reminds the both of you.
“You are lucky,” you agree, as you pull his good arm over your shoulders, and start to help him to his feet.
It’s tough going; he’s putting more weight on you than you thought he’d need to. But you don’t show any indication of concern. You’ve both been through worse. And if Dean wants to believe that he’s ready for this, he has to think you believe it even more. So it’s fine, you can take the weight. It’s nothing.
As he steadies himself, you can feel him holding his breath, can see his eyes start to cloud up, his jaw tighten like a vice, and you’re suddenly surprised how casual your conversation has been if he’s in this much pain. But then maybe you shouldn’t be. This is Dean, after all.
“Damn it,” he whispers, sounding almost as surprised as you are, but more disappointed.
You feel his fingers cling to a handful of your shirt-sleeve, feel his knees weaken. And you’re glad he needs you in this moment, that you aren’t the only one who’s lacking strength. It makes it easier somehow.
“Woah, hey..." You press a hand to his chest, and he whispers, “Sorry,” and at least you know that this is wrong. That he’s the last person in the world who should be apologizing. And see? He’s already making things clearer.
“It’s cool. We can do this. Together,” you assure him, and he nods slowly and takes a careful step forward.
fin.