.0096 - We've Been Traveling Over Rocky Ground
Dean/Sam
Survival Of The Fittest
1,837 words
Title from Bruce Springsteen
Teaser: The Impala’s finally back again, glistening in the faint light of dawn, a sleek, black beauty on the background of the ashy sky above, full and oiled and polished to perfection...
The decayed leaves rustling quietly beneath his boots, Sam rubs his eye with the sleeve of his shirt and yawns, fighting the drowsiness that is slowly but insistently settling on his brain. The mugs in his hand tilt dangerously to the side with that movement and cling against each other, spilling a few thick drops of coffee that slide down the sides and onto the wet ground.
It’s an early morning, too early to be awake, misty and wet, and toned in all shades of funeral gray. A morning made for sleeping and warm, comfortable beds, not for fighting and war, for dying. But just another live-and-let-die day at the office, another mortal combat. Another sunrise that can be the last.
Sam isn’t scared, not really; he feels like he’s lost the ability to be a long time ago, too numbed and worn by all that’s already happened. There’s only that constant nudging of doubt and the sweet, tempting desire to give it all up. To step back, just for once, and let the world go where it goes, crash and burn and perish, because maybe that’s what’s supposed to happen, what they all deserve. But Dean wouldn’t let him.
Dean, who is, once again, tired to exhaustion, both physical and mental, balancing just at the border of a total breakdown, the final meltdown. Who keeps on moving forward by nothing but pure inertia and obstinacy, determined to fix everything, and more than he actually can.
Watching Dean’s figure crunched at the driver’s side of his car, immersed in the pale sun and striped shade of the trees above that fall into his face, Sam thinks that Dean finally looks his own age. Older. A hundred years old. Gone are the young, boyish handsomeness and softness of his features, the almost feminine attributes, there are just wrinkles now, weary lines and shadows. Sam wouldn’t really be surprised if he started finding silver in those dirty blonde spikes of his.
The Impala’s finally back again, glistening in the faint light of dawn, a sleek, black beauty on the background of the ashy sky above, full and oiled and polished to perfection. She’s gorgeous; Sam can’t and wouldn’t try to argue with that, but there’s more to her than being simply beautiful. She gives Dean strength and the confidence he pretends, but lacks, a piece of home he’s always wanted and had had only with her. She’s like a waft of memories, of their adolescence and childhood, of all the stories and nightmares shared in the cramped space of the backseat, the first tentative touches and kisses John, thankfully, wasn’t there to see. Like a thin, breakable thread that still bides him, them, to their past, to dad, to mom. To what once seemed to be so innocent and sweet, so solid. Seeing her again after all those months spent in unfamiliar, ‘borrowed’ cars, bad and worse, is calming and strangely frightening at once.
Slipping his hand over the cold metal of the hood, through the thin layer of the morning dew, Sam can easily imagine the warmth and the purring ramble of her engine beneath his touch. He thinks she doesn’t deserve to become a kamikaze craft. She’s already been hurt so many times, scratched and crashed, turned upside down, torn to pieces. Just like Dean himself. Sam is sure that none of those injuries wounded her as much as when Dean himself harmed her, drawing a hole into her metal skin, just repaired, in a flood of sheer anger and desperation, and pain he didn’t know how to let out, to ease. Hurting himself ten times more and worse than her.
Dean stands up with a sigh and a painful pop of his knee joints, and wipes his hands into a dirty piece of rug that only yesterday was one of his favorite shirts. There are smears of motor oil and wet dust on his bare forearms, dark smudges on his cheekbone and above his eyebrow, and a fine piece of a spider web in his hair. He looks ridiculous. And happier than Sam has seen him in what feels really way too long. And still so sad. So defeated.
He takes the offered mug from Sam and leans against the side of the hood, stretching his legs in front of him. He winces at the first taste of his coffee, homemade and frankly quite awful, but doesn’t say a word, says nothing for a while.
Sam doesn’t mind the silence, so familiar and so typical for their battles. It’s never really that quiet anyway. It’s full of all the unspoken; words and feelings, worries and memories, soaked up with tension and the fear gurgling underneath that none of them wants to admit, because it weakens, slows them down.
Running his fingers through his cropped, ruffled hair, Dean glances over at Sam sitting on the car hood, and opens his mouth, only to close it again, a few seconds later, without a word. He shakes his head and looks away, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, unsure, undecided. “Did you sleep?” he asks then, finally, voice rough and unused, but Sam’s certain that it’s not what he really meant to say.
“Yeah.” Sam nods, but he doubts that Dean will believe him. None of them slept well tonight, but Dean didn’t even try. “You know… a while.”
“Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter anyway,” Dean murmurs as he looks up, watching the rainy, steel-toned clouds shifting lazily on the horizon.
Sam isn’t surprised by Dean’s mood, his state of mind, he agrees, because he knows what’s coming, but he can’t help the way his insides clench, curling coldly in his stomach at Dean’s words, the resignation in his tone. What he feels now is close to fear… too close. Not of dying, again; he’s fairly sure that death is better, calmer, than this never-ending battle, than all the leaving and resurrecting. All the goodbyes they’ve said, the farewells that meant exactly that - no mores. Certain. He’s scared of losing Dean again, of watching him die, for one time too many, see him slip into the darkness that might have no path leading out this time. That might have an emergency exit heading to something worse. Regular people die once, and they never come back. Death is the one and final frontier for them, then heaven or hell and nothing after. Sam wonders if something like outer limit exists also for the two of them.
Taking a deep, a little shaky breath, Sam touches Dean’s arm, slides his fingers over the soft, slightly chilled skin to his elbow. “Dean, I…” He stops himself before he can finish, realizing he doesn’t know what he wants to, or should say, anyway. ‘Let’s not do this. Let’s give it up. Just once, now. Let’s run. Away, this time, not forward, not towards the ending, the cold embrace of our reapers. Let’s give up the fight. Once and for good…’ Dean’s looking at him, waiting for him to finish, eyes suspiciously narrowed, a frown etched in between his eyebrows. Sam shrugs, offers a small, tight smile. “Just… don’t get yourself killed, alright? Or-or cursed. Or lost. Or… whatever. Just… don’t. Stay with me.”
Dean nods, once, shortly. “Okay.”
The words ‘promise me’ are at the tip of Sam’s tongue, in his eyes, so heavy and painful, and he wants to say them, beg Dean to have him promise that, but he doesn’t. He can’t. He nods, accepting the only promise Dean’s made, and pulls his hand back, shoving it in the pocket of his jeans instead. “I guess I’ll… Go take a look if they’re ready.”
He doesn’t expect anything more from Dean; he certainly doesn’t expect Dean’s fingers to wrap around his hand, halting him in the middle of a step, and turning him back to Dean. “Sammy.” Dean’s thumb runs over the delicate skin of Sam’s inner wrist, almost unnoticeable, innocent, except it’s heating, sparkly. Except almost every touch between them has always had a different flavor.
Sam can hardly remember when his brother and best friend had become his soul mate and lover, when they had started sharing a bed not because John slept in the other, but because they wanted to. He thinks it was after Jessica, but knows better than that. It was before her, before Stanford.
The first kiss was an accident, too much beer and heat and solitude, the first orgasm just a climax of a fight, so much hatred and love they tore each other apart, ripped open to the core. There were finger-shaped bruises on Dean’s slender hips, a bite mark on Sam’s shoulder, the zipper on Dean’s jeans was broken, caught in the denim, and a button on Sam’s shirt was nowhere to be found. There was blood, bruised knuckles. The first sex was nothing that Dean pretends to be, and everything he is: nervous and shy, uncertain, but perfect with all the smaller and bigger imperfections.
Hell’s changed that, Dean, them. It had built a wall between them that neither of them dared to break.
Dean steps closer and leans in, close enough for Sam to taste the bitter tang of coffee on his breath, the heat of his mouth. “You, too, alright?” For a moment, Sam’s sure Dean’s going to kiss him, hopes he is, wishes for it, because it’s always been him, reaching for Dean, taking the first step, but Dean doesn’t. Because he’s Dean, because it’s wrong.
“Alright,” Sam says, giving Dean the same weak, breakable promise he before accepted.
“I’m not kidding, Sam.” Dean’s tone is gravely now, chilling to the bones with its urgency. “You die again, I’m gonna kill you.”
‘You die again,’ Sam thinks, ‘I’m gonna kill myself’.
He doesn’t really think about it, doesn’t think at all, when he reaches for Dean, slipping his hand through the soft strands of his hair to cup the back of his neck, guiding him nearer. Dean is about to protest, tries to pull away even as he’s leaning in, parting his lips, just barely upon Sam’s. He lets out a quiet sigh that sounds like a recognition of defeat and puts his hand on Sam’s hip, curling his fingers in the worn fabric of his shirt. He tastes like bad bitter coffee and cold morning, like all the times he swore he’s not like that, that he doesn’t feel it, like the ‘I love you’ he’ll never say, and which his eyes say every time they meet with Sam’s.
“This isn’t a goodbye,” Dean says, his lips ghosting over Sam’s with each word, smooth, tickling. “I’m done with goodbyes.”
“No goodbyes,” Sam responds.
-/-
Standing in the epicenter of the Leviathans explosion, with Dick’s black goo blood splashed all over the place, trickling down the walls, and Dean’s fading fragrance and presence in the air, with the horrible, heart-stopping realization that Dean’s gone, again, Sam thinks that he should have had him promise.
Survival Of The Fittest
1,837 words
Title from Bruce Springsteen
Teaser: The Impala’s finally back again, glistening in the faint light of dawn, a sleek, black beauty on the background of the ashy sky above, full and oiled and polished to perfection...
The decayed leaves rustling quietly beneath his boots, Sam rubs his eye with the sleeve of his shirt and yawns, fighting the drowsiness that is slowly but insistently settling on his brain. The mugs in his hand tilt dangerously to the side with that movement and cling against each other, spilling a few thick drops of coffee that slide down the sides and onto the wet ground.
It’s an early morning, too early to be awake, misty and wet, and toned in all shades of funeral gray. A morning made for sleeping and warm, comfortable beds, not for fighting and war, for dying. But just another live-and-let-die day at the office, another mortal combat. Another sunrise that can be the last.
Sam isn’t scared, not really; he feels like he’s lost the ability to be a long time ago, too numbed and worn by all that’s already happened. There’s only that constant nudging of doubt and the sweet, tempting desire to give it all up. To step back, just for once, and let the world go where it goes, crash and burn and perish, because maybe that’s what’s supposed to happen, what they all deserve. But Dean wouldn’t let him.
Dean, who is, once again, tired to exhaustion, both physical and mental, balancing just at the border of a total breakdown, the final meltdown. Who keeps on moving forward by nothing but pure inertia and obstinacy, determined to fix everything, and more than he actually can.
Watching Dean’s figure crunched at the driver’s side of his car, immersed in the pale sun and striped shade of the trees above that fall into his face, Sam thinks that Dean finally looks his own age. Older. A hundred years old. Gone are the young, boyish handsomeness and softness of his features, the almost feminine attributes, there are just wrinkles now, weary lines and shadows. Sam wouldn’t really be surprised if he started finding silver in those dirty blonde spikes of his.
The Impala’s finally back again, glistening in the faint light of dawn, a sleek, black beauty on the background of the ashy sky above, full and oiled and polished to perfection. She’s gorgeous; Sam can’t and wouldn’t try to argue with that, but there’s more to her than being simply beautiful. She gives Dean strength and the confidence he pretends, but lacks, a piece of home he’s always wanted and had had only with her. She’s like a waft of memories, of their adolescence and childhood, of all the stories and nightmares shared in the cramped space of the backseat, the first tentative touches and kisses John, thankfully, wasn’t there to see. Like a thin, breakable thread that still bides him, them, to their past, to dad, to mom. To what once seemed to be so innocent and sweet, so solid. Seeing her again after all those months spent in unfamiliar, ‘borrowed’ cars, bad and worse, is calming and strangely frightening at once.
Slipping his hand over the cold metal of the hood, through the thin layer of the morning dew, Sam can easily imagine the warmth and the purring ramble of her engine beneath his touch. He thinks she doesn’t deserve to become a kamikaze craft. She’s already been hurt so many times, scratched and crashed, turned upside down, torn to pieces. Just like Dean himself. Sam is sure that none of those injuries wounded her as much as when Dean himself harmed her, drawing a hole into her metal skin, just repaired, in a flood of sheer anger and desperation, and pain he didn’t know how to let out, to ease. Hurting himself ten times more and worse than her.
Dean stands up with a sigh and a painful pop of his knee joints, and wipes his hands into a dirty piece of rug that only yesterday was one of his favorite shirts. There are smears of motor oil and wet dust on his bare forearms, dark smudges on his cheekbone and above his eyebrow, and a fine piece of a spider web in his hair. He looks ridiculous. And happier than Sam has seen him in what feels really way too long. And still so sad. So defeated.
He takes the offered mug from Sam and leans against the side of the hood, stretching his legs in front of him. He winces at the first taste of his coffee, homemade and frankly quite awful, but doesn’t say a word, says nothing for a while.
Sam doesn’t mind the silence, so familiar and so typical for their battles. It’s never really that quiet anyway. It’s full of all the unspoken; words and feelings, worries and memories, soaked up with tension and the fear gurgling underneath that none of them wants to admit, because it weakens, slows them down.
Running his fingers through his cropped, ruffled hair, Dean glances over at Sam sitting on the car hood, and opens his mouth, only to close it again, a few seconds later, without a word. He shakes his head and looks away, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, unsure, undecided. “Did you sleep?” he asks then, finally, voice rough and unused, but Sam’s certain that it’s not what he really meant to say.
“Yeah.” Sam nods, but he doubts that Dean will believe him. None of them slept well tonight, but Dean didn’t even try. “You know… a while.”
“Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter anyway,” Dean murmurs as he looks up, watching the rainy, steel-toned clouds shifting lazily on the horizon.
Sam isn’t surprised by Dean’s mood, his state of mind, he agrees, because he knows what’s coming, but he can’t help the way his insides clench, curling coldly in his stomach at Dean’s words, the resignation in his tone. What he feels now is close to fear… too close. Not of dying, again; he’s fairly sure that death is better, calmer, than this never-ending battle, than all the leaving and resurrecting. All the goodbyes they’ve said, the farewells that meant exactly that - no mores. Certain. He’s scared of losing Dean again, of watching him die, for one time too many, see him slip into the darkness that might have no path leading out this time. That might have an emergency exit heading to something worse. Regular people die once, and they never come back. Death is the one and final frontier for them, then heaven or hell and nothing after. Sam wonders if something like outer limit exists also for the two of them.
Taking a deep, a little shaky breath, Sam touches Dean’s arm, slides his fingers over the soft, slightly chilled skin to his elbow. “Dean, I…” He stops himself before he can finish, realizing he doesn’t know what he wants to, or should say, anyway. ‘Let’s not do this. Let’s give it up. Just once, now. Let’s run. Away, this time, not forward, not towards the ending, the cold embrace of our reapers. Let’s give up the fight. Once and for good…’ Dean’s looking at him, waiting for him to finish, eyes suspiciously narrowed, a frown etched in between his eyebrows. Sam shrugs, offers a small, tight smile. “Just… don’t get yourself killed, alright? Or-or cursed. Or lost. Or… whatever. Just… don’t. Stay with me.”
Dean nods, once, shortly. “Okay.”
The words ‘promise me’ are at the tip of Sam’s tongue, in his eyes, so heavy and painful, and he wants to say them, beg Dean to have him promise that, but he doesn’t. He can’t. He nods, accepting the only promise Dean’s made, and pulls his hand back, shoving it in the pocket of his jeans instead. “I guess I’ll… Go take a look if they’re ready.”
He doesn’t expect anything more from Dean; he certainly doesn’t expect Dean’s fingers to wrap around his hand, halting him in the middle of a step, and turning him back to Dean. “Sammy.” Dean’s thumb runs over the delicate skin of Sam’s inner wrist, almost unnoticeable, innocent, except it’s heating, sparkly. Except almost every touch between them has always had a different flavor.
Sam can hardly remember when his brother and best friend had become his soul mate and lover, when they had started sharing a bed not because John slept in the other, but because they wanted to. He thinks it was after Jessica, but knows better than that. It was before her, before Stanford.
The first kiss was an accident, too much beer and heat and solitude, the first orgasm just a climax of a fight, so much hatred and love they tore each other apart, ripped open to the core. There were finger-shaped bruises on Dean’s slender hips, a bite mark on Sam’s shoulder, the zipper on Dean’s jeans was broken, caught in the denim, and a button on Sam’s shirt was nowhere to be found. There was blood, bruised knuckles. The first sex was nothing that Dean pretends to be, and everything he is: nervous and shy, uncertain, but perfect with all the smaller and bigger imperfections.
Hell’s changed that, Dean, them. It had built a wall between them that neither of them dared to break.
Dean steps closer and leans in, close enough for Sam to taste the bitter tang of coffee on his breath, the heat of his mouth. “You, too, alright?” For a moment, Sam’s sure Dean’s going to kiss him, hopes he is, wishes for it, because it’s always been him, reaching for Dean, taking the first step, but Dean doesn’t. Because he’s Dean, because it’s wrong.
“Alright,” Sam says, giving Dean the same weak, breakable promise he before accepted.
“I’m not kidding, Sam.” Dean’s tone is gravely now, chilling to the bones with its urgency. “You die again, I’m gonna kill you.”
‘You die again,’ Sam thinks, ‘I’m gonna kill myself’.
He doesn’t really think about it, doesn’t think at all, when he reaches for Dean, slipping his hand through the soft strands of his hair to cup the back of his neck, guiding him nearer. Dean is about to protest, tries to pull away even as he’s leaning in, parting his lips, just barely upon Sam’s. He lets out a quiet sigh that sounds like a recognition of defeat and puts his hand on Sam’s hip, curling his fingers in the worn fabric of his shirt. He tastes like bad bitter coffee and cold morning, like all the times he swore he’s not like that, that he doesn’t feel it, like the ‘I love you’ he’ll never say, and which his eyes say every time they meet with Sam’s.
“This isn’t a goodbye,” Dean says, his lips ghosting over Sam’s with each word, smooth, tickling. “I’m done with goodbyes.”
“No goodbyes,” Sam responds.
-/-
Standing in the epicenter of the Leviathans explosion, with Dick’s black goo blood splashed all over the place, trickling down the walls, and Dean’s fading fragrance and presence in the air, with the horrible, heart-stopping realization that Dean’s gone, again, Sam thinks that he should have had him promise.