Christopher Columbus All Over Again
TITLE: Christopher Columbus All Over Again
CHAR: Sam, Dean
GENRE: Gen, H/C
SPOILERS: Season 4. Set sometime between Wishful Thinking and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
WORDS: 2180
RATING: PG 13, for the usual cussin'.
A/N: This fic was inspired by mad_server, who, on International Read Aloud Day a few weeks ago, pointed out that we need more fic in which Sam reads to Dean. I wholeheartedly agreed, and somehow came up with this. I owe massive thanks to both mad_server and nwspaprtaxis who both gave incredibly helpful betas (a million French bizous, ladies! I finally found the mojo to edit this sucka!). All passages taken from Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. Which you should read, because it's good, but really don't have to in order to understand this fic.
SUMMARY: It's too hard for Dean to recount the awful details of his time in Hell. But now that Sam knows he remembers, he decides to look for answers in some less obvious places.
christopher columbus all over again
The childish sense of accomplishment Sam felt was completely understandable. He’d defeated his brother and it hadn’t been easy. Though to be fair, the flu had done most of the heavy lifting-or dropping, as it were. And Sam could finally say that the Dean Winchester on the other side of this door was finally resigned to the fact that he was sick as a dog. Sam could go inside and proudly set out on the table the supplies he’d managed to gather in the microscopic town of Warsaw, North Dakota, each one with a specific purpose: fever-reduction, relief from nausea and congestion, hydration, nourishment. It gave Sam purpose too, gave him something, finally, that he could help Dean with.
Crossing the threshold into their ash-scented, buckwheat motel room, Sam was relieved to see his brother sleeping. Since his return, Dean had slept less and less. The connection between Dean remembering Hell and his steadily dwindling hours of sleep was obvious to Sam now, but they’d never discussed it. For a time, Dean had at least been stripping down to his boxer-briefs and getting under the covers; putting on a production for Sam’s benefit. But recently, he’d even given up on that much. Since his nightmare-laden nap during that magic coin job in Concrete, Sam hadn’t seen Dean sleep once, not even in the Impala. Which was frankly, unprecedented.
And yet here he lay atop the blankets, fully dressed and in a thick hoodie pillaged from Sam’s own stash. It looked as though he’d been sitting up in bed when he’d finally passed out, judging by the way he was folded over with his torso running sideways along the headboard. It also looked completely awkward and kind of pathetic in a weirdly endearing, Dean-like way.
After setting his bag of supplies aside, Sam headed over for a closer look. Dean’s skin was milk glass pale save for the highest spots of his cheekbones, where the flush of a fever shone through in patches of pink gossamer like stretched cotton candy. Quick breaths through his mouth allowed a thin trail of drool an escape route, and Sam snickered as he watched it pool on the already coffee-stained comforter. Dean wasn’t exactly the most conscientious guest in dive motels like this. Not that Sam blamed him.
There was a paperback held loosely in Dean’s right hand, slack fingers just barely keeping his place marked inside a fan of pulpy, sun-yellowed pages, and Sam stole it away from him easily, bookmarking it with his index finger. On the cover was a cartoonish illustration of a hand holding a fountain pen, blood splattered on the ground with a few books and an approaching pair of boots. At the top, in old-fashioned type reminiscent of a 1950’s pulp fiction magazine, The New York Trilogy was written. The name sounded distantly familiar, and he wondered if it was an old murder mystery that had been turned into a movie with some starlet like Lauren Bacall or Ingrid Bergman. He wouldn’t put it past Dean to read a book just to fuel a fantasy about the hot chick from the movie.
Sam turned the book over, and having kept Dean’s spot, began to read the passage his brother had presumably fallen asleep reading:
Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within…
Not only did the sophistication of the text surprise Sam, but the meaning stung him somehow, as if chiding him for missing some essential part of who Dean was, or worse, ignoring it purposefully, afraid of what it might mean.
Most people took what Dean showed them of himself and never looked beyond, like a flat earth with nothing over the horizon. It was easier that way. But Sam had grown up with Dean, had charted his waters, and he had come to understand what Dean hid, what truly made him who he was. But now it was different. Now Dean had lived a whole other terrible life and Sam hadn’t been there for any of it. He had his brother back, but all of the ways Sam didn’t understand him were underlined and bold-faced, a constant reminder of Sam’s failure to save the one person in the world who meant everything to him. Guilt consumed Sam in these moments when he thought of the years he’d spent trying so hard to break through his brother’s carefully erected façade and how it now seemed rebuilt with even sturdier materials. And Sam on the outside, once again.
He finished the paragraph-
By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.
-and went back to the beginning.
~(O)~
Watching over his sick brother, Sam felt the same alertness he did on hunts, crouched somewhere cold and dark, listening for the crack of twigs or the rustling of leaves. When Dean’s breath came at a different pace, when his foot twitched or his nose sniffed, Sam would look up from the book. A subtle and irrational panic coursed through him when he thought Dean might be waking up, due to a great desire and determination to read up to the same point as Dean. For the book had somehow come to represent something precious and unknowable about his brother. After all, before finding it in Dean’s hand, Sam had generally imagined Dean’s recreational reading as being limited to Penthouse Letters and the back of cereal boxes. They shared a car and a room, even a job. But though they were closer than most siblings, there were sometimes small things they kept from each other. Still things to uncover.
Sam was painfully aware of this, now more than ever.
And so, while Dean slept, Sam read page after page in the same manner a teenager might smoke a cigarette behind their parents’ garage. Quickly. Hungrily. Along with a nagging feeling of betraying an unspoken understanding that respecting each other’s privacy was only the more sacrosanct because of how little of it their lives allowed.
He told himself it was ridiculous. That it wasn’t like he was reading Dean’s diary. It was just a novel. And his intentions mattered more than anything. Maybe Dean was right and he could never understand, but he could at least try. Because he had to help somehow.
He only wanted to help.
~(O)~
Sam emerged from the bathroom to find Dean pushing himself into a sitting position, wiping his sleeve across his wet chin.
“Hey. How’s it goin’?”
A hand flung itself onto a box of tissues that Dean seemed to sense had been placed on his bedside table.
Sam had put it there less than ten minutes ago, placing the book next to it with Dean’s page casually dog-eared.
Cradling the box to his chest and swiping no less than five tissues from it, Dean glared at him.
“Don’t talk to me all breathe-y,” he mumbled, and released a small plague into his fistful of Kleenexes. “ ‘S rude.”
“Breathe-y?” Sam asked, stepping back to the bathroom sink.
“Not everyone’s so lucky.”
Sam peered out at Dean through the open doorway, and marveled at his ability to still be totally ridiculous in the face of everything he’d been through. “What do you want me to do? Stick my fingers up my nose?”
“For a start.”
Sam laughed and brought Dean a glass of water.
~(O)~
Perched on the side of Dean’s bed, watching him swallow a dose of his medicine, Sam tried to sound casual. “Whatcha readin’?”
Dean’s wet gaze followed Sam’s onto the table. “A book.”
“How sophisticated.”
“Yeah. You know they made me take an English lit class down there? Now that’s torture.”
“Dean…”
Dean turned his head away, pinched the arch of his nose. “Whatever.”
“It seems like a cool book,” Sam said lamely, on the very unlikely, and nearly absurd chance of striking up a conversation about it, and what it meant to Dean. At the very least it might distract him from continuing to make defensive and totally inappropriate jokes.
Dean blinked at him and started coughing. “You’ve read it?”
Sam shrugged. “Part of it… uh… earlier.”
“Don’t you have your own nerd books to read?”
“Sorry. I was just curious.”
“Jesus, Sammy.” The way Dean said it, lowering his eyes and shaking his head, Sam knew; Dean had him completely figured out.
It was so fucking unfair.
“It’s just a stupid book,” Dean said tiredly, already fed up with the conversation.
“Since when do you even read?”
“Fuck you, I read.”
Sam got up and began moving around the room aimlessly. “Yeah. Research. Chinese take-out menus. American Rifleman. Not fucking Paul Auster.”
“Get over it, Sam. Like you heard of the guy before today anyway. What’d you do? Google him or somethin’?”
“No,” Sam fibbed.
Dean glared at him, rubbing a fist over his chest uncomfortably. “And what, you think reading the same book as me is going to solve some great mystery?”
“I don’t know. At least it’s something,” he admitted. “I mean, you tell me I can’t possibly understand. And I get that. I mean it. But there are some things I can still try to. You’re my brother.” Sam stopped moving and made a point of looking Dean straight in the eyes. “I’m not ever going to stop trying. So sue me if I’m grasping at straws here.”
Dean’s expression turned pinched and restrained. “Sam… don’t,” he said, directing the quiet words to his knees as they moved towards his chest.
“Dean. I’m not trying to guilt you into talking about it. I’m not pushing you,” Sam assured him quickly. “I just…”
Dean swallowed. “I can’t. I can’t.” He kneaded forcefully at his thighs, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.
Sam dropped back down on the bed, splayed a hand over Dean’s socked foot. “Hey. I know. It’s okay,” he said.
Dean didn’t look at him, didn’t move or speak for a long moment, until he said softly, “When I read… sometimes I f-forget.”
Sam nodded. Suddenly Dean looked incredibly worn-out; his eyes were unfocused and his arms were wrapped around his chest, keeping a shiver under control. Sam lay his hand on Dean’s forehead.
“Your fever’s up. Come on,” he said, and pressing firmly on Dean’s shoulder, coaxed him to slide down the bed. Dean acquiesced more docilely than Sam had expected, groaning as he put his sore muscles to use, and lay back on the pillows that Sam stacked behind him.
Swiftly, Sam fetched a washcloth and doused it in cool tap water. He sat on the side of the bed where Dean’s partly bent elbow pressed into his thigh, creating both a buffer and a source of contact. Dean avoided eye-contact, his gaze fixed on the door to the room as if part of him longed to leave. But he lay still as Sam hesitantly molded the small towel to his forehead. Sam watched his eyes close and his Adam’s apple jounce, and he knew this Dean. Knew how badly he needed the attention, and how much it hurt him when he got it, like a starved body would always struggle terribly to process the very food it needed to survive.
“Better?”
“Mmm.”
“Good,” Sam said. He moved to the other bed, sat watching as Dean flirted with sleep, his eyes blinking up at the ceiling just when Sam thought he’d succumbed. Meanwhile, Sam’s gaze fell to the book once again, and he reached for it slowly.
“If yer gonna read it… might as well do it out loud,” Dean said wearily.
And that’s just what Sam did.
“…On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere…”
Sam read steadily and with the same cadence he would read aloud newspaper articles and snippets of myths and legends gleaned from internet sites. It lacked drama-Sam had always been a terrible actor-but he didn’t stumble, and Dean listened attentively for a short time, until he fell into a dreamless sleep. And when Sam saw this, he didn’t continue. He folded the corner of the page and replaced it on the table. The book had revealed its secrets to him already.
~(O)~
He was there for you, and yet at the same time he was inaccessible. You felt there was a secret core in him that could never be penetrated, a mysterious center of hiddenness. To imitate him was somehow to participate in that mystery, but it was also to understand that you could never really know him.
The End.