FIC: 31 Years
Title: 31 Years
Author: neros_violin
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1250
Warnings: Implied character death
Summary: They've been driving forever.
Author's Notes: Title from the song "31 Years" by Elliott Brood, which has a line and a tone that reminds me of SamandDean and their fight. I wrote this back in March 2011 for the picture prompt below and forgot to post it here. D'oh! Better late than never, right?
As far back as Dean can remember, they’ve been driving, pushing a hundred on a nameless road running through a nameless desert, surrounded by endless blue sky, worn leather, and hot steel. Wind whips through the open windows and Robert Plant has to scream from the speakers to be heard over the unrelenting roar of it.
Sam is silent, stoic, sweat-glazed suffering in the passenger seat, but his fingers tap a beat on his knee, right above the spot where a rip in his jeans - maybe from a fall during a hunt, maybe over-wear, maybe too many tumbles in shitty washing machines - shows skin.
It feels like they’ve been on this highway for hours, days, weeks. Possibly forever.
*
Sam spots it, late in the day when the shadow of the Impala rides behind them like a ghost car. The landscape hasn’t provided any sign of civilization beyond a few pitiful, isolated, abandoned homesteads, so Dean thinks it’s a hallucination, at first: four buildings packed tight around the cross of an intersection, at least ten miles away. But as the Impala draws closer, heaving and shuddering like a lathered horse, the image stops shimmering, solidifies, becomes real.
Ancient gas pumps stand as sentinels for a service station, a post office, a convenience store, and thank fucking God, a bar. The signs are antiques, relics from another time, advertising liquor and Coors in broken neon that probably hasn’t been lit for ages. Dean doesn’t really care, as long as the beer is cold and the burgers are medium rare.
He parks in front of the windows so he can keep an eye on his baby - some habits die hard - and turns off the engine. They sit in the sudden quiet, listening to the car pop as it cools and the breeze rustle the scrub grass.
"You think there’ll be people in there?" Dean asks, running the flat of his hand along the bumps and ridges on the steering wheel, a smoothing, soothing motion.
Sam sighs, rakes his fingers through his hair. "I think there’ll be whatever we want there to be."
Dean nods. He thinks so, too.
*
The inside of the bar is dark and air-conditioned cool, sun creeping in between the slats of wooden blinds and exposed ducts rattling and hissing with effort. It’s nothing fancy - a few tables here and there with mismatched chairs, and raw pine stools butted up against the long counter at the back - but it looks clean enough.
A woman with dark hair and olive skin is behind the bar polishing pint glasses. Her tank top shows off a full sleeve of tats on her right arm, and she sounds like Pam and Ellen both when she calls out: "Be with you in a second, boys."
*
Dean eyes the plate in front of him - a half pound sirloin burger with bacon, cheddar, the works, surrounded by a mountain of rough cut fries, shiny with grease and salt - and thinks, this isn’t so bad.
Sam’s got a steak and baked potato with all the fixings, which isn’t a surprise at all, and a thirty ounce chocolate milkshake on the side, which is.
When Dean isn’t freaking out about being dead, he enjoys all the new tidbits he’s learning about his brother here. He thought they’d exhausted their supply of secrets, that he knew everything there was to know about Sam, but he was wrong.
Half the time, Sam is more flabbergasted than Dean is by what makes him happy.
By the way Sam sucks down the milkshake, though, the sweet tooth isn’t anything new.
*
The jukebox is full of Zeppelin, Bad Company, AC/DC, blues and cock rock all the way.
Dean smiles. They’ve been sharing all their lives, whether they wanted to or not, and this space is really no different. Sam gives way to Dean on the things that are important to him, and Dean does the same for Sam. Like being on a see-saw, they both get their turn.
*
Sam is kicking Dean’s ass at pool. "Three, corner pocket," he calls, and the cue ball rolls a perfect path across the felt, strikes the three in the sweet spot. It’s still a miss.
Sam grins, and Dean grins back. He bends over the table to frame a shot, and his shirt rides up.
He feels Sam’s fingertips along the soft skin above his waistband an instant later.
"You think the bartender’s watching?" Dean asks, with Sam’s hands curling around his hips.
Sam’s voice is in that register that promises a very, very good time when he answers. "Whatever you want, Dean."
*
Sam tastes like beer and steak spice on top, salt and sweet underneath. Dean licks into his mouth slowly, savoring the flavor, feeling the coiling burn of want crawl across his nerves from his spine outward. Sam’s in the same place, their wants aligned, huge hands roving in long, easy strokes, over Dean’s clothes, then under.
There’s plenty of time; nothing but time, and each other.
*
Only Sam would want to cuddle on a pool table in a bar in the middle of nowhere after sex.
This is one of those things Dean is willing to compromise on, because out of everything they’ve been given here, Sam is his favorite.
*
Sam is kicking his ass at darts, too. Apparently Sam has a deep psychological need to beat Dean at bar sports. It’s ridiculous, really.
"You ever think about how we got here?" Sam asks. The dart hits the bullseye for the tenth time in a row, which is also ridiculous. No one is that good, in any dimension.
"Sometimes," Dean says. "Mostly when we’re driving. Yeah, I think about it."
"So?" Sam says, giving up the pretence of darts. Dean reaches for his beer, which is perpetually cool, no matter how long it takes him to drink it.
"Does it really even matter? You know how we went out, how we were always supposed to go out. It was bound to stick sooner or later, right?"
Sam frowns. "It’s just. Sometimes I wonder if you’re really here with me or if I’m here by myself. If I’m making all this up, alone."
Dean rolls his eyes because he’s supposed to, but he’s had the same thoughts. What if he’s dead, and Sam’s alive, and this whole thing with him and Sam on the road, stopping at shitty bars and diners and shittier motels that all seem to have king-only rooms, is just make-believe? Why couldn’t Sam be just as unreal as the bartender, or the highway, or the food?
Dean swallows down the anxiety, chases it with another gulp of beer. "We’d know," he says with a shrug, fully aware that it doesn’t sound like much of a reasoned response, but that’s the conclusion he’s come to. There are some kinds of knowledge that don’t have anything to do with logic and reason and why’s and how’s. There are some things he just knows, with an unwavering, unquestioning certainty that he doesn’t even have to try at.
He can’t explain that to Sam, who always questions and analyzes and asks why, even here, but Dean will do his best to show him.
He’s got an eternity.
Author: neros_violin
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1250
Warnings: Implied character death
Summary: They've been driving forever.
Author's Notes: Title from the song "31 Years" by Elliott Brood, which has a line and a tone that reminds me of SamandDean and their fight. I wrote this back in March 2011 for the picture prompt below and forgot to post it here. D'oh! Better late than never, right?
As far back as Dean can remember, they’ve been driving, pushing a hundred on a nameless road running through a nameless desert, surrounded by endless blue sky, worn leather, and hot steel. Wind whips through the open windows and Robert Plant has to scream from the speakers to be heard over the unrelenting roar of it.
Sam is silent, stoic, sweat-glazed suffering in the passenger seat, but his fingers tap a beat on his knee, right above the spot where a rip in his jeans - maybe from a fall during a hunt, maybe over-wear, maybe too many tumbles in shitty washing machines - shows skin.
It feels like they’ve been on this highway for hours, days, weeks. Possibly forever.
*
Sam spots it, late in the day when the shadow of the Impala rides behind them like a ghost car. The landscape hasn’t provided any sign of civilization beyond a few pitiful, isolated, abandoned homesteads, so Dean thinks it’s a hallucination, at first: four buildings packed tight around the cross of an intersection, at least ten miles away. But as the Impala draws closer, heaving and shuddering like a lathered horse, the image stops shimmering, solidifies, becomes real.
Ancient gas pumps stand as sentinels for a service station, a post office, a convenience store, and thank fucking God, a bar. The signs are antiques, relics from another time, advertising liquor and Coors in broken neon that probably hasn’t been lit for ages. Dean doesn’t really care, as long as the beer is cold and the burgers are medium rare.
He parks in front of the windows so he can keep an eye on his baby - some habits die hard - and turns off the engine. They sit in the sudden quiet, listening to the car pop as it cools and the breeze rustle the scrub grass.
"You think there’ll be people in there?" Dean asks, running the flat of his hand along the bumps and ridges on the steering wheel, a smoothing, soothing motion.
Sam sighs, rakes his fingers through his hair. "I think there’ll be whatever we want there to be."
Dean nods. He thinks so, too.
*
The inside of the bar is dark and air-conditioned cool, sun creeping in between the slats of wooden blinds and exposed ducts rattling and hissing with effort. It’s nothing fancy - a few tables here and there with mismatched chairs, and raw pine stools butted up against the long counter at the back - but it looks clean enough.
A woman with dark hair and olive skin is behind the bar polishing pint glasses. Her tank top shows off a full sleeve of tats on her right arm, and she sounds like Pam and Ellen both when she calls out: "Be with you in a second, boys."
*
Dean eyes the plate in front of him - a half pound sirloin burger with bacon, cheddar, the works, surrounded by a mountain of rough cut fries, shiny with grease and salt - and thinks, this isn’t so bad.
Sam’s got a steak and baked potato with all the fixings, which isn’t a surprise at all, and a thirty ounce chocolate milkshake on the side, which is.
When Dean isn’t freaking out about being dead, he enjoys all the new tidbits he’s learning about his brother here. He thought they’d exhausted their supply of secrets, that he knew everything there was to know about Sam, but he was wrong.
Half the time, Sam is more flabbergasted than Dean is by what makes him happy.
By the way Sam sucks down the milkshake, though, the sweet tooth isn’t anything new.
*
The jukebox is full of Zeppelin, Bad Company, AC/DC, blues and cock rock all the way.
Dean smiles. They’ve been sharing all their lives, whether they wanted to or not, and this space is really no different. Sam gives way to Dean on the things that are important to him, and Dean does the same for Sam. Like being on a see-saw, they both get their turn.
*
Sam is kicking Dean’s ass at pool. "Three, corner pocket," he calls, and the cue ball rolls a perfect path across the felt, strikes the three in the sweet spot. It’s still a miss.
Sam grins, and Dean grins back. He bends over the table to frame a shot, and his shirt rides up.
He feels Sam’s fingertips along the soft skin above his waistband an instant later.
"You think the bartender’s watching?" Dean asks, with Sam’s hands curling around his hips.
Sam’s voice is in that register that promises a very, very good time when he answers. "Whatever you want, Dean."
*
Sam tastes like beer and steak spice on top, salt and sweet underneath. Dean licks into his mouth slowly, savoring the flavor, feeling the coiling burn of want crawl across his nerves from his spine outward. Sam’s in the same place, their wants aligned, huge hands roving in long, easy strokes, over Dean’s clothes, then under.
There’s plenty of time; nothing but time, and each other.
*
Only Sam would want to cuddle on a pool table in a bar in the middle of nowhere after sex.
This is one of those things Dean is willing to compromise on, because out of everything they’ve been given here, Sam is his favorite.
*
Sam is kicking his ass at darts, too. Apparently Sam has a deep psychological need to beat Dean at bar sports. It’s ridiculous, really.
"You ever think about how we got here?" Sam asks. The dart hits the bullseye for the tenth time in a row, which is also ridiculous. No one is that good, in any dimension.
"Sometimes," Dean says. "Mostly when we’re driving. Yeah, I think about it."
"So?" Sam says, giving up the pretence of darts. Dean reaches for his beer, which is perpetually cool, no matter how long it takes him to drink it.
"Does it really even matter? You know how we went out, how we were always supposed to go out. It was bound to stick sooner or later, right?"
Sam frowns. "It’s just. Sometimes I wonder if you’re really here with me or if I’m here by myself. If I’m making all this up, alone."
Dean rolls his eyes because he’s supposed to, but he’s had the same thoughts. What if he’s dead, and Sam’s alive, and this whole thing with him and Sam on the road, stopping at shitty bars and diners and shittier motels that all seem to have king-only rooms, is just make-believe? Why couldn’t Sam be just as unreal as the bartender, or the highway, or the food?
Dean swallows down the anxiety, chases it with another gulp of beer. "We’d know," he says with a shrug, fully aware that it doesn’t sound like much of a reasoned response, but that’s the conclusion he’s come to. There are some kinds of knowledge that don’t have anything to do with logic and reason and why’s and how’s. There are some things he just knows, with an unwavering, unquestioning certainty that he doesn’t even have to try at.
He can’t explain that to Sam, who always questions and analyzes and asks why, even here, but Dean will do his best to show him.
He’s got an eternity.