SPN Fic: Castor and Pollux
Title: Castor and Pollux
Genre: Gen
Characters: Sam, Dean
Rating: PG
Word-count: 1486
Spoilers: Set late S3; generic season arc spoilers.
Summary: Sam teaches Dean the art of stargazing.
Notes: Written for a prompt from verucasalt123 at spn_rambleon.
“Over there. There. Right where I'm pointing, Dean. See my finger?”
“You see my finger, Sam?”
“Listen, you're the one who wanted to see the archer. If you're just gonna flip me off, I'm not wasting my time…”
“Screw archers. There's a virgin out there, right?”
“Dean.”
“Okay then. Southern Cross.”
“Dude, we're in Iowa.”
“Northern Cross.”
“No such thing. Here, look - if you follow my finger you can see Delphinus, right over the tip of that pine tree.”
“What'm I supposed to be looking for?”
“It's kind of a diamond with a tail sticking out. Delphinus is Latin for dolphin.”
“You're kidding, right? You promised me lions and bears, and we're looking for a friggin' dolphin?”
“You don't see it, do you?”
“Nope.”
“Keep looking.”
* * * * * *
Sam didn't know until the summer he was seven that the stars had names.
It wasn't the kind of thing you expected - tiny specks of white light littering the sky don't exactly scream with personality, and Dad didn't include many astronomy lessons in the official Winchester training regimen. Crossing state lines all night on one of their frequent unexplained road trips, Sam might lean his head against the cool window and stare sideways at the glittering spill of the Milky Way, but it never occurred to him to ask whether anyone had nicknames for the individual pieces of dust that made it up.
He found the book on one of Bobby's shelves. In a house made up almost entirely of Things That Must Not Be Touched, reading was practically the only option, and he'd already worked through The Ghost at Skeleton Rock and the stack of yellowed Highlights magazines someone had left in a corner decades ago. Besides, unlike most of the musty volumes in Bobby's study, this book had pictures of centaurs and scorpions dancing across the leather cover in flaking gold leaf.
At first, he didn't recognize the dark circles full of chicken scratching as pictures of the sky; they looked more like some of Pastor Jim's obscure religious symbols, or petri dishes swarming with exotic microbes. Then he squinted closer at the fussy black text in the margins, and saw the words celestial sphere spinning around the mysterious charts.
All that summer, while Dean charged up and down the rows of the salvage lot and drove Bobby crazy with the constant threat of broken bones and tetanus, Sam sat at the kitchen table bent over ancient star maps, immersed in tales of lonely heroes and beautiful girls, and fantastic creatures chasing each other across the night sky.
* * * * * *
“Fine. What do you want to look at?”
“Where's the dragon?”
“You can't see it right now, Dean. It's under the horizon. We might be able to find Monoceros, though.”
“Wait, there's a star rhino?”
“Monoceros, Dean. It's a unicorn.”
“Right. So is that the virgin right in front of it, or - ow!”
“Enough with the virgins, man. Look, right over there, a little past the Big Dipper?”
“Where?”
“Big W, right in the sky, Dean. See it?”
“Maybe.”
“That's Cassiopeia. Perseus saved her from a sea monster.”
“What's W stand for?”
“It's not actually a W; she's supposed to be tied up. They chained her to a rock as a sacrifice for the monster.”
“Woah, kinky Romans.”
“Greeks, Dean.”
“Same thing.”
* * * * * *
To Dean, the stars always boiled down to one thing: the North Star, which meant no matter how lost you got, you could always figure out the way back just by looking at the sky.
Assuming, that is, that you didn't choose a cloudy night to get lost on.
At some point when they were little, Sam started spouting complicated stories about chicks and goats and people who turned into constellations when they died, but Dean could never see the pictures Sam claimed were there, and he stopped listening after a while. The sky wasn't a freaking connect-the-dots puzzle, and Dean had better things to do than get a crick in his neck looking for imaginary space animals.
So every time they slept out in the open, while Sam gaped up into the blackness above the treetops, Dean kept one eye on him, and one eye on the spaces between the trunks.
And, if the night was cloudy, one hand on the pack holding the compass.
* * * * * *
“Hey, Sam!”
“What?”
“Naw, you missed it.”
“What, again? Where?”
“Right over the barn there, on your left. Even longer than the last one.”
“Man, why do you always see the shooting stars?”
“Guess I've just got eagle eyes.”
“Says the guy who couldn't find Orion's freaking belt.”
“Shut up.”
* * * * * *
Neither of them expected to spend Dean's last Friday night on Earth staring at the constellations.
But then, nothing had been going precisely according to plan lately, and the fact that the every motel in Grinnell (Population: 9,062 citizens, 2 amateur witches) happened to be full of guests for someone's daughter's wedding was just the last item on a very long list of things that nobody had counted on.
Dean rolled his head through the scrubby grass, trying to find a position that wouldn't mean waking up with a stiff neck, and blinked up at the sky. From this angle, the stars seemed to multiply and shrink into the distance, zooming away from the surface of the earth so disconcertingly that Dean felt himself get briefly dizzy.
They lay back in silence, spreadeagled in the open cornfield, caught in the vastness of space. As Dean goggled upwards at the mess of stars, trying to follow the span of the Milky Way, Sam's voice came out of the darkness.
“Did you know, by the time the light reaches us, it's already years old?”
Dean shifted uncomfortably on the hard ground. “You made that up.”
“Nope.” He felt Sam shaking his head against the cornstalks. “Read it in one of Bobby's old astronomy texts. Alpha Centauri's the closest, and it's more than four lightyears away.” He paused, and Dean could hear his brother breathing, light and slow in the warm night air. “For all we know, some of these stars don't even exist anymore. Maybe all we're seeing is dead light.”
“Thanks for the lesson in morbid, college boy.”
“Sorry. I'm just - ” Dean waited for the end of the sentence, searching for the Big Dipper and losing his place in the tangle of nameless constellations. “I'm just saying,” Sam finished finally.
“Well, don't.” Stretching out his legs, Dean folded his arms behind his head. “Show me all those sky bears you were talking about before.”
“You mean the constellations?”
“Whatever.” He choked down the stupid ball of terror fighting up from his gut, and squinted at the dazzling sky. “Where's the dude with the bow and arrows?”
“You mean Sagittarius?”
“You tell me.”
“Okay, fine.” Sam sighed, and lifted an arm to point into the nothingness splayed above them. “Start at the North Star.”
* * * * * *
“You see those two bright stars? Just to the left of Taurus.”
“Yeah.”
“That's Castor and Pollux - they were twins; the constellation's called Gemini.”
“Not seeing it, Sam.”
“The stars are their heads, and their arms - look, I'm not saying it's anatomically accurate; just pretend. You want to hear the story?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“They were brothers, but only Pollux was immortal, because he was Zeus's son.”
“Another one? Shit, dude got around.”
“Shut up and listen. Pollux was immortal, but Castor was just a human, and when he died, he went to Hades. And then the gods gave Pollux a choice: he could stay on Olympus with them, or he could give half his immortality to his brother.”
“How does that even work?”
“Just go with it, Dean. Anyway, Pollux chose to share his immortality with Castor, and after that, they went back and forth between heaven and hell, spending half of every year in each place.”
“So hell was like, their summer home.”
“Something like that.”
“There's no such thing as immortality, anyway.”
“I know, Dean. Just - ”
“What, pretend?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, whatever. I still want to find that damn lion.”
“I told you, Dean. Straight overhead, then move left until you see a really bright one.”
“Show me.”
“All right. Just one more time.”
* * * * * *