girl!sam/dean | and in your soul they poked out a million holes
AND IN YOUR SOUL THEY POKED OUT A MILLION HOLES
girl!sam/dean. pg-13. for lucklessforhim at the spn_hetexchange. warnings for incest, mild violence and something like a sex scene. 7,800.
This is not their story.
(c) title from how it ends by devotchka
a/n: for lucklessforhim, based off these prompts: Three years to the day since the last time he'd seen her, and the only thing that changed was the length of her hair and this picture. set in pre-series and Stanford era. i hope you enjoy (and sorry about the length)!
mad props and love to painted_pain and mrs_gregsanders for beta-ing this for me and pointing out all my mistakes and making the editing of this fic not turn into a personal bloodbath ♥
And in your soul they poked out a million holes
She's living in an apartment that's not hers, drinking coffee she didn't pay for, reading words that she thinks could be hers, they sound just right in her head when she says it all out loud. The shirt she's wearing belongs to a girl, a lady, taken from a house she woke up in after a night she can't remember, the shoes swiped from a charity auction, price tag still attached when she shoved them in her backpack, the rubber band in her hair from a store clerk's register, plucked from between paperclips and pens when he had his back turned, while getting a pack of cigarettes she didn't smoke anyway.
She's gone and convinced herself that all these borrowed and stolen things are better than what she had owned before. She's going to ignore the importance in those before things for now, because it's easier to tell lies, that's what she was taught. Sometimes she'll laugh, thinking this is not what they meant.
Of course it isn't.
-
Dean was always good at humouring Sam. She had too many passions, too many wasted talents, too many geniuses, her head couldn't handle it and it would rattle and break, matched to the swell of the sun and tires of the Impala rumbling underneath her bare feet. Something different in each town, across each state line; someone different when she stepped out a front door, stepped into a new world for a few days, a few weeks, bright glimpses of every world possible.
She was nine, she was going to be a doctor. When Dean broke his wrist swinging his fist at a brick wall, he let Sam look at it first, sling made of motel pillow cases and twist ties. John reset it himself later when he found out, made a proper sling of white bandages and gauze-wrapped splints, but Dean told Sam that hers was better.
She was twelve, she was going to be an actress. She wanted a house in Beverly Hills, her name etched into a star, people were going to love her everywhere. Dean lied for her when practices at the school got late and she wandered in the door past their curfew, flustered and pink-cheeked and reciting her lines in whispers to him. They left a day before she got to walk the scuffed black stage as a fairy with no name; she still remembered her lines three states over.
She was fourteen, she was going to be an artist. Dean made her jimmy the classroom window open (good practice; she sneered), found the sketch pads and pencils, charcoals and watercolour paints in the teacher's room, brought them out wrapped in brown paper towel. He let Sam use him as a model and kept all the disfigured portraits she drew for the next month. She ran out of paint, the pencils broke and the charcoal smeared everywhere. She didn't mind.
She was sixteen. She had been thinking of leaving. She was hiding college applications in her duffel, underneath the machete in it's leather cover and .45 pistol, somewhere between newspaper cut-outs and blood-stained t-shirts. She wanted to be a lawyer and she was going to save the world in her own way, without incantations or guns in her jacket pocket. Dean never knew. Sam likes to think, if he knew, he would have signed out law texts from the public library and given them to her to read in the motel room, no intention of giving them back when they left yet another town behind. But she knows better.
-
Once upon a time, he used to slay dragons, just like in those picture books, the ones with the princesses with sun-gold hair and blue dresses and handsome princes on horses, falling in love. But Sam grew up and found out that those were the only monsters that didn't exist in her world. Swords were confused with the smell of gunpowder and Sam just stopped trying to tell the difference. She tried to hold on with that childish naivety, the wonderment and excitement that only forceful ignorance can bring, the thrashing desire to keep everything the same, keep it familiar and safe and clean. Muck it up with stories and scribbled notes and blood under his fingernails. Blood under hers, too, in time.
She stopped reading those books, they were all lies anyway, she wasn't a kid anymore, she had the truth in her father's ferocity, her brother's silence; she had to be that, too. She couldn't make-believe, there was no point, it was all lies, only putting falsities in her heart, always burned from how badly she wanted to believe.
They never meant much, she told herself. After awhile, she believed it. Just a mismatching kind of lie, really; at least she could justify it.
-
In the living room (not hers, no), she hears the bedroom window slide open. Dark hallways, the street lamps outside guiding her, she slides into the doorway, eyes wide and straining, arms out, muscle memory, her own memory. Foot falls, a breathe let out--her elbow twists around her back, turned around, she's slammed up against the wall, face pressed against the uneven textured wallpaper.
They laugh.
He laughs. She knows that laugh.
He lets her go and she spins back, fast, out of breath. She reaches out, hooks her foot behind a knee--he doesn't buckle and she throws her hands, her fists, curled and tight and digging into her palms, and hits skin, slap and hiss and cry, she smiles at the sound.
“Jesus!” he snaps.
Then, she's staring at him in the half-light, deluded yellow and dim blue from the moon, hands still raised. Almost doesn't recognize him, but like she could ever forget, any of it.
“Dean?” She pushes her hair back, both hands, she's shaking. “What the fuck?”
“Hey, Sammy.” Dean steps forward. Hand raised, waits, hesitation in the stutter of his fingers; her eyes fall closed when he pulls a strand of hair, twirls it around his fingers. “Three years and all that's changed is your hair. Growing it long?”
“I hated how Dad always wanted it cut short. Looked like a boy,” she says, comes out without her thinking, like that's all she can say after all this time, like that's all he can say. Yeah, sure, she'll adjust, she'll get used to it, this is how it'll be now. No one needs to know, not even them. They never look out ahead of them for orange warning signs: curve up ahead, detour, dead end, falling rocks, nothing exists past this point, turn around now now now while you still can. “What are you doing here?”
Dean's hand drops. He side steps her and strides into the hallway, through the living room, into the kitchen. She stays by the door, hands on the frame, sound of cupboards opening and late-night movie tangled up with her heart in her chest.
“Got any beer?” he calls.
“No.” She's in the living room, wandering, stranger in this place (finally), her arms at her sides.
He glances back over his shoulder. All the lights are on and he's thrown into harsh glares, stiff shadows, tapering off near the windows, off the walls, on the floor. “Whiskey, scotch, vodka?”
She shakes her head.
“Anything with alcohol?” He's asking it almost desperately. That shift in his voice, it could mean something entirely different, something she could have recognized in a instant, similar and timed heartbeats. Three years, Sam doesn't know him anymore.
“Wine,” she says. “Just wine.”
“Native Californian now, are we?” he mocks, slamming the last cupboard door shut, cups clanging on the hooks. He leans his elbow on the counter, looking at her.
“I hate it,” she says, brutal twitch in her voice. “Won't drink anything else though.”
“Why not?” Eyebrow raised, grin slipping on the side of his lips, God, maybe she does know him still.
She worries her lip, looking down at the floor: pieces of crushed paper, maybe notes for an essay, scattered on the floor, but she can't see, the lights in the kitchen taking all other forms of white and yellow away.
“Okay, keep your secrets.” Intake of air, the room rushes to emptiness. “You always have.”
She looks up, but Dean's turned back to the kitchen, hands on his hips. She's left the kitchen window open and now she can smell the exhaust from the street, the din of strewn voices circling around their own quiet, filling it up to burst. She wants to cover her ears, wants to blink and be gone, but wishing never did much for her, fairytales exist for people who don't want to know better, magic always in the hands of the dark and cruel and unnecessary, the things she had to kill.
She knows better.
“Wine'll have to do, I guess,” Dean says.
-
They always went into it, anything, with a plan.
Hustling cash when Dad didn't leave enough, they would go into the bar alone, Sam first, standing by the pool tables, playing coy and easy, waving Dean over when she found the right one, the one with the right level of self-delusion and an ego to rival Dean's. Sam could get anyone to lay down all they had, distracting them while Dean made the multiple shots, pulled a few bills from the top of the stack. And even if Dean missed the corner shot or if they saw him sneaking a ball closer to the hole, she was quick enough, fast hands that Dean taught her, to grab the stack, his wallet if it was the right moment, and slip out the back door, to wait on the curb for Dean to come stumbling out, laughing, spitting blood onto the pavement by her feet. She'd be counting the bills, shoes toed off and thrown towards the gutter drain, lamp light yellow-white on everything. Those nights, Dean held her close and what she wants to remember is the smell of him, warmth and smoke and cold air.
Sam never said anything. Maybe she worried at first, but Dean never let her. Always told her she enjoyed the rush of it and after awhile, she probably really did.
They used to just steal when they were younger; Dean always said she was the better actor, so she was the one to trip and fall outside the door, skin her knee, twist her fingers, cry out and someone would come running. Dean could fit candy bars and cans of pop in his too-large jacket, lasting them days when they rationed right, always gone before John could see. They didn't need it, always had enough food in the motel room, but something stolen always tasted better. They were still stealing, in a way, but their lies were becoming more than what they could handle, sounding giant and unkind coming off their tongues, containable and trite in their heads. They started justifying it, calling it work and it takes skill and practice, an effort that could lead to broken bones and they know all too well the taste of their own blood.
They didn't go into it, this, with a plan (Sam thinks she said it first, Dean followed, and they were blind and stupid and didn't think). That's where they started making all their mistakes stealing away all their time and own simple reasoning.
-
She's sitting on the chair, he's lying on the couch. There's enough wine left in the bottle, but neither of them are going to drink it, this bottle too bitter, Sam can't taste the subtle hints of oak and cherry, like they said. Marketing scam and she falls for it.
“You haven't asked me a thousand times why I'm here yet.” He's slurring and he glances at her with wavering eyes. “You actually surprise me.”
“I'm sure you have a good reason.”
It's not an invitation, not in her head. Maybe it sounded like one, her own mistake--Dean takes it as one.
“There's a job in Sonoma. I thought I'd stop in, say hi.” Dean waggles his fingers at her. She can see him grinning.
“Were you thinking of leaving, too?” Sam asks. She does mean to sound this frustrated, this tired, this cruel.
Dean sits up. The bottle tips, tumbles from his hands, spills across the carpet, and her breath trips in her lungs, she won't stop trying to read his eyes. “I want you to come with me,” he whispers.
She scoffs. “To Sonoma?” Her heart breaks, it falls. “What for?”
“I might need some help on this one.”
Sam licks her lips, tilts her head. “Why didn't Dad come with you?”
Dean shrugs, stands up, arms spread out in front of him. “He's working his own job.”
It takes Sam a minute--“You two are fighting.”
Dean throws back his head, doesn't laugh, sighs and lets a grin slip on, fade away just as fast. “It's like you never left at all.” He walks to the door, Sam stands up quickly. He looks at her, soft and intrigued, and says, “If you change your mind, I'm staying at the motel down the block. I'm leaving around noon.”
The door barely makes a sound when he closes it and it's like he was never there at all.
-
She packs what she needs into a bag. She packs her life into it, she's been able to since she was nine, just turned nine, the cusp and edges of the between-days as she moved through the years. Always tried to take everything with her, keepsakes from every place that could have been something, but soon her pockets and bags became full of rocks and complimentary hotel stationery and postcards. And then all the towns started looking the same, being the same, were the same and, eventually, Sam just stopped caring.
She never had a home, not the right four walls or the right smell or the right colours or the right anything at all. No bed, no things, always just wanted things, plates and closet doors and second-hand kitsch figurines on the television set. Thought she wanted a home, but she would always be running from something: running from the wrong home, running back to it.
She arrives at the motel an hour after her watch hits twelve. He's sitting on the hood of a grey Ford. She smiles behind her hand, pushing her hair over her shoulder, avoiding his gaze when she sits beside him.
“You want it back,” he laughs.
“Want what?” Defensive without a reason, she puts up her guard.
“The life. Hunting. If you didn't, you wouldn't be here.”
She drops her duffel to the ground, the tips of her fingers purple from the twisted straps. “It's just the weekend, right?”
“Yeah.”
She nods. “Okay. Good.”
Dean holds out his hands, palms up. “Into the chariot, fair lady?”
She has her life, this life, and maybe even the one she had thought she left behind, in a bag, and she's dropping her bag in the trunk and her life is unfolding in the throwaway smile on Dean's lips, unravelling in a heat she can't bear and never felt before, breaking apart in her steps, one two three, towards the passenger side door.
-
It takes an hour and a half to drive to Sonoma. She expects detours, but there is only a bridge and land-to-sea highway, not close enough to the cliffs for them to fall if the car were to swerve off the road, but if she leaped far enough--she could, she could, she'd probably drown.
She doesn't want to die and she would never tell Dean, but she's curious. Dean is, too, but in the simple ways. She's curious in the mundane, the ridiculous, the disturbing, the everything. Dean is curious in her, in himself.
Always curious about her.
The air from the open window threads in her hair and the smell of menthols soaks into her clothes from the seats. Dean's wearing sunglasses and he's smiling and she can't see much, she's so blinded by all the sky and the light and the translucent waves from their skin. She has her feet on the dashboard, bare toes curling over the edge of her sandals, toenails painted blue. She rests her elbows on her knees and hums a song she's never heard before.
This could be something like happiness, whatever happens when all the small things fit into the long empty voids, finally.
-
They've stopped outside a resort, the orange brick dividers and pewter gates, Sam covers her eyes from the sun and peers out the window. Dean is standing on the cars tailgate, throwing pebbles at the bars. There is an unsteady clink each time his hand lets go.
“Is there anyone you need to call?” he asks. He leaps down from the tailgate, the car shakes and he's leaning against the back window. She might have been sleeping--his dark glasses are gone.
She leans out the window. “No.”
Dean puts his sunglasses back on. “All right then.”
He drives them back the way they came, slowing up and speeding past, until he comes across a roadside motel and it's home, that home, once home, the four wrong walls. Sam almost can't breathe. Dean's out of the car, slipping cash into his hands from his pocket, magic, and Sam is still smoothing her fingers down the seat belt.
Oh god, how long it should have been, how much longer she should have had to wait, to see this again.
The screen door to the office bangs open. The wind kicks, the sand twists from the parking lot and Sam's closing her eyes.
“Sam, grab the bags!”
It's hot and the smell of sweat and dirt and smoke won't rub from her skin. Dean's collapsed on the bed, toeing off his shoes and she's standing by the door, the bag straps wrapped around her wrists.
“You only got one bed,” she says and she's tired, tired already, before they even started, this is it.
But Dean shrugs and the world clatters to a stop and he grabs the remote. “It's all they had left.”
Yes, yes, of course.
-
John left them in Maryland for a summer. Sam tries to remember the name of the town. She had a job there, a waitress job, short black shirt and pale yellow apron; she dropped a coffee pot on her second day and scalded the feet of the young boy who bumped into her (he cried, she wanted to cry, too, and she did, in the back room during her break, a cup of water in her hands and no one said a word, just looked at her like she was lost and tragic and maybe she was). The diner had the town's name in it: Somewheresville Roadside Diner. Nothing ever came to mind, maybe sun-coloured clapboard siding and bay window shop fronts, lace curtains and the wet smell of summer, that's all.
Something changed there. She was seventeen and, just like it had been for years, she dreamed of different places and a different life and a different name. Dean called her Sammy, her friends called her Sam, her name tag said Samantha. It wasn't wrong, like it didn't fit; it was just a thread, a connection, to all the things that didn't fit. Maybe her name was right for her and it was the only name she could ever wear comfortably, but she didn't want it. Sam, Sammy, Samantha, the girl who hunted demons and ghosts and monsters (like in books and movies and spinning twirling tales). Sam, the girl with the gun collection in a battered briefcase. Sammy, the girl that knew where to cut a witch so they bled faster, died faster. Samantha, the girl that translated her homework into Latin, know it better, learn it quicker, say it louder.
She never did change her name when she got to California. Where no one knew it or what it meant, the sound of someone saying it in her head hurt enough to make her keep it.
-
(Next morning and yellow-blue sky in the window. She slept on the couch; Dean never said a word. She's tying up her shoes, Dean's throwing his lighter above his head, catching it on the way down.
“Are we going to start researching on this hunt or what?”
“Or what.”
“Dean.”
“I already know what's going on. I just have to find the fucker and kill it.”
“Can we kill it then?”
“Blood thirsty, are we?”
“We have a job to do.”
She wants to go--home. Not home, maybe not really a home, it's not. Dean knows that, he can hear it in the way she never says it, how it burns at the edge of her lips, she wants to scream it at him. He knows that.
“Yeah, okay. Can we just take five minutes to do something besides hunting?”)
-
Maryland in March. Repeat, repeat, repeat in her head, so she would know. Maryland in March, something changed. She made it change, Sam remembers that much. She started her job a week after they got there. She did her homework on her supper break, grease-stained Formica table tops, hot cups of coffee she never drank.
Dean was there, too. Sometimes. He would sit in the diner for hours, only ordering coffee, reading through newspapers from dozens of states. He would smile at her when she passed with a tray of food and she would smile back. When he stayed long enough, late enough not waiting for Dad to call to check up, she sat across the table from him during her fifteen minutes off.
She doesn't know what they talked about, if they talked about anything at all, but everything was stilted because they could never say it out loud. They could never touch too much, could never be too close, they might give it all away, this little game they played, this thing only they had, no one else would understand, they'd ruin it, wreck it, tear them apart. So, everything was half-touches, half-words, half-truths; they hid themselves in corners and in broad daylight and in places no one would go looking, go searching for people like them--people like them, unwanted and deep-down ugly, hidden disease and confined in their own freedom.
When things break, it's unintentional and it's someone else's fault.
Her name was Monica. She had white-blonde hair, sometimes curled, sometimes in braids, sometimes twisted into a messy ponytail, and cherry lips and whenever you mentioned her name, you'd talk about how beautiful she was. Sam knew she was, admired her from afar, and never wanted to stand beside her, people would start comparing them, differences and similarities.
Monica didn't talk to Sam, not regularly. Sometimes, she asked Sam typical, pointless things when they were on break together and Dean wasn't there. What are you doing this weekend, you're in high school, oh, are you going off to university, that sounds like a good plan, good luck.
One day, Monica noticed Dean. She noticed Sam. Dean might have noticed her, too.
When Sam walked back towards the kitchen, Monica was leaning on the counter, dragging her fingernails across her lips “That your boyfriend?”
Sam glanced over her shoulder; Dean was folding up his newspapers, pulling out his wallet, leaving. “My brother.”
Monica raised her eyebrows, sculpted and thin. She smiled. “You two looked friendly.”
Dean had been touching her hands, brushing her knuckles with the tips of his fingers. She had been laughing, she had been in love, she was in love and she'd never say it. Sam looked at her hands and they were stained and ugly, baring her--their--terrible secret. “We're just close,” she whispered, shoving her hands into her apron pockets. “Pretty much grew up in each other's pockets.”
“That's sweet.” Monica snapped her gum. She raised her hand, pale and smooth and clean, when the bell over the door dinged and Dean was gone. “He's a good looking boy.”
Sam was still trying to hide in all this light. “Yeah.”
Monica touched Sam's elbow. “Tell him I say hi.”
-
Picks her up after her shift at the diner; there's a black lace top and shorts on the seat, tossed into a pile.
“What's this?”
Dean grins, puts the car he said he's borrowed into reverse. “Change quick. We're running low on cash.”
The bar is loud and soft and all blue haze. She covers her eyes with her hands, grabs onto the back of Dean's shirt and follows him through the crowd, stragglers, drunks, wry and condemning looks. She turns her back to them and Dean pulls her hand to his mouth, kisses the tips. Quicksilver flood and she's calm, closed look and distant.
Someone got daring, someone was unafraid. Someone had courage. Someone noticed her, liked the lace on her pale skin, and they pushed against her, grabbed her, said, “Come on, baby, come on.”
She got her hands around his wrists, turned, pushed him off. He stumbled, she grinned, he came right back, hands at her shoulders, moving up to her neck. Caught between him and the wall, she can't move, can't get her hands around, can't get her knees up. “Can't say no, baby,” he breathed into her ear.
It was a mild slip and it was Dean screaming, Sam screaming, too; the guy on the floor, Dean crouched over him, no, kneeling, he looked almost gentle, like he could have been kneeling over her. Someone was pulling Sam back, she was pulling forward, Deandeandean.
“Fucker!” Dean's yelling and Sam thinks she hears sirens, sees lights red and blue popping in the windows.
She struggles, rips herself from someone's grasp. She wraps her arms around Dean's shoulders, presses her face into his neck and begs him to stop. She feels his arms move, back forth back forth, she moves with him, too. Deandeandean, she won't let go, she knows this, she never will. She never can.
The lights come on. There's blood on Dean's hands, on his own face. Sam touches the sides of his face and he flinches away.
“We have to go,” she whispers. “We have to leave.”
No one tries to stop them when they go out the back fire exit door. They're all crowding around where they used to be, like they can still see them, their ghosts, imprints and white-ghost outlines, a private telling only they can see in the blood spots on the floor, brightened and sharpened in the light.
And he tried to protect her from too many things, wanted to protect her from her heart breaking by loving her too much for too long and Sam forgot what it was like to love someone else. She made mistakes after that, ones she stopped counting and couldn't forgive, because it was never the same; people came and went, and they were less and the same and, sometimes, more than what she could have wanted, more than him, they were perfect. But they weren't him, they weren't Dean, and in the end, in the end, it always ended.
He tried to protect her and he was right; her heart was never broken. It was always with him, bruised from the games he played and the fault lines in himself, and she never thought of taking it back.
-
They were on the fourth floor of an apartment building, one with white-painted brick and flaking green trim, perched on the corner of the street, loud highway to their right, rows of misshaped houses on their left. The cement pad outside was cracked and cracking, and the foundation shifted, so the doors didn't close properly, they had to slam it closed with their shoulders, heaving into it. They had their bruises to compare.
It wasn't paradise, but it could have been close. The tenants before them had left bed frames and strings of Christmas lights in the storage room, which Sam hooked on nails around the windows and along the short hallway from the living room to the bedroom. Peach coloured walls and sky-grey carpet, warped linoleum and cheap brown cupboards, it was theirs, all theirs. Sam put their names up on the door and Dean had smiled at her. Maybe it was funny. Maybe she was stupid. She didn't care.
The lights flickered when someone stepped too heavily and ants skittered across the moulding and Sam still came home to their three bowls and their half jug of milk and take-out, the yellow-brown water that choked from the taps, to the bed with only a blanket and one pillow. She still came home because Dean would be there and he would wait for her and, day after day, he would hold her, let her touch and breathe and be and nothing ever changed.
Sam didn't have to tell Dean Monica said hi. She did it herself.
The diner apron, matching the sallow light in the entrance, was on the back of a kitchen chair. Four empty beer bottles, one half drank, in the middle of the table. A heady smell of roses, of lilacs, maybe. She hated that smell even then, heady and revolting, it made her sick.
“Dean?” she called.
The lights flickered above her head.
The bedroom door was closed. It was never closed, they had no secrets with from each other. They were the secret, they were the closed door.
“Dean--” The door opened before her. He was adjusting his shorts. Sam faltered, hands on the door frame. She looked inside, into their room, her clothes, his clothes, all their things and she was there, holding the blankets over her skinny, cream-skinned body. She waved at Sam, like she waved at Dean as he left the diner.
“Hi, Sam,” Monica said. She must have been smiling.
Dean's hands on hers, on her arm, across her skin, her lips her hair. Sam pulled back. “Sam, hey. Come on.”
“No.”
Monica threw back the blanket, stepped onto the floor. She was pulled her skirt back up, “I should go.”
“Sammy,” Dean whispered.
(She wasn't going to tell Dean.
She already knew she was going away, she had been planning it for three years; she took the job at the diner to save for a bus ticket, to save for the escape. She never told Dean, it was going to be a surprise. Was going to tell him when she had enough money for both of them, working extra shifts, late shifts, show him the ticket and say, come with me, be with me. They could both change their names, it could just be them, it could work.
She wasn't going to tell Dean. She was going to pretend, an act, as if she never felt this, anything, at all and she was going to be alone.)
“No,” Sam said,
Monica slid past her, an uneven, uneasy smile on her smudged cherry lips, cherry prints on Dean's neck and left. Dean stayed in the doorway, his chest moving, thump thump thump. Like heartbeats. It was done in heartbeats.
“Look at me,” he said. “Sammy, please, you know--”
“Yeah, I do.”
And she closed the door behind her.
-
(She's been looking at her watch. Came up Friday. Saturday. Sunday, they're gone, she can't think of where she's been. The desert is cooling and Dean's not packing, Dean's not moving. Sam sits on the bed.
“There's not a hunt, is there?”
“I've been known to lie.”
“Take me home, Dean.”
And he smiles and she's missed it, she's missed it so fucking much. “You are home.”)
-
She sleeps on the bed this night. It's a start-stop empty sleep, turning in the cold room, across the too hot sheets, to wind away and she can't make up her mind, out of breath and uncomfortable in this place. She keeps her eyes closed until the sun stretches across the room, unwanted, tearing through the thin curtains, and she can't force sleep any longer.
She opens her eyes. There are wild flowers on the pillow beside her. She sits up, running her hands through her hair again, new habit, bad habit, hands in her tangled hair. Dean is drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup.
“You don't sleep well anymore,” he says.
She picks up the flowers, such pale and unsteady colours, stems stripped clean of leaves.
“Never have.”
Dean sets down the cup and walks over to the bed. He leans over her and they wait, suspended, and she feels every part of her body, feels everything touching it, the springs in the mattress, the sheets twisted around her thighs, Dean's shoulder bumping hers when he sways forward, leans down and kisses her.
He doesn't taste like coffee, he tastes like something old and familiar, something that makes her shake, makes her heart run, unleashed and swelling, makes her forget, she's forgetting, she's done and she's gone. She falls back onto the bed, and they're in this again without a plan and it's just as striking and reckless as it was before, suiting them so well. Dean presses up against her, on his knees, hands pushing her arms above her head, fingers twining with hers, thumbs pressing against pulse points. She feels her heart beating in his lips.
He breathes into her and she takes all that tainted air and knots it into her lungs, ties it up and pins it down.
Dean pushes a strand of hair from her face. “You should cut your hair short again. I liked it short.”
“It's better long. Less to remind me.”
He licks his lips. “And you're doing okay?”
“Okay?” She laughs.
“With the whole forgetting thing.”
She sees her heart in his eyes. She doesn't want it back. It's his.
“I thought I was.”
(This is not their story. This is not them. She's wearing the (cherry)red costume, he's wearing the (ghost)white mask, and the words that fall from their lips remain so loud and difficult and strange. She's never said these things, she never will again. Neither has he, neither will he. They never should, they never will, not for years and lifetimes. But for this moment, they'll make them right and, for now, Sam is sure they mean everything they say and they'll speak it with such confidence and passion that others will be sure, too.)
-
The sky is melted ink, spread finger-paint style across the top of the world, smudges of white where hands lifted away. There's stars, paint brush flicker in blue. She's spinning down a road between grape vines in an orchard trapped by brick walls, her hands out at her sides, and Dean's running behind her.
She's leaping over rocks and rivets in the road, stumbling to a halt, hands in front of her at a dead end. They're wine drunk, broke into the small storage shed of the resort they passed days before, bottles on the shelves. They tore off the labels, surprises surprises, they drank them sitting on a stone wall, looking across rows and rows of orchards.
“Can you feel it, Dean?” she's calling. She's hiding behind a tree and she hopes Dean can find her, he always can; she could never win at hide-and-seek when they were kids. Dean could always find her. She believed, still believes, there's part of her in him, there has to be.
He's breathless and laughing and it's beautiful. Sam wants to fill herself overflowing with it. “Feel what?” he asks.
“Everything changing.” She stops to think and she can't change her mind to something new. “Good things and bad things.”
“Bad things?”
“There has to be bad things with good things. Otherwise you wouldn't know if it's good.”
“And what are these bad things?” He's getting closer, she can feel it in the restlessness of her nerves, the breath shadow of a feeling she's always known.
She smiles at the dark and hopes he can see it. “We'll have to find out.”
Sam's crushing grapes in her hands, dizzy and wild, licking the juices from her fingers. Tastes nothing like wine, almost too bitter, used up and not ready. She tosses them behind her, takes handfuls and curls her hands into fists.
When he finds her, hiding, tangled in the vines, she's laughing and there are tears in her eyes. He's not worried, never afraid after slaying all those dragons. He pulls her out and she climbs onto his back, his arms hooked under her knees. They weave down the road, heavy and weighted, stuck firmly to the ground and all she wants is to fly. Sam reaches up, tries to grab the stars, but they just brush under her fingers.
“I missed you,” Sam says, pressing her lips to the top of Dean's head, fingers spreading the grapes along his jaw.
“You forgive me?” And he sounds quiet, unsure, something exposed and cracking.
“If you're all mine.”
He says it so slow and aching and sweet, as if he had always been saying it and she never heard it: “I'm all yours.”
Terracotta walls and a road sign saying Sonoma 12 miles, but they won't leave, won't go back, they're not going back, not just yet. He pushes her down in the back seat of a car that's not his, only in his keeping for the night, but Sam will remember this one, this place, the smell and heat and feel of everything around her. His hands sliding under her shirt, pushing it up, his hands on her breasts, she has her hands around his neck, pulling his lips to hers.
“I'm all yours,” he's saying and she lets him, she lets him, his hands wandering across her bare skin. She shivers and he presses his lips to her stomach, hands framing her hips.
She's got the stars, she has them, they're probably in her eyes, they're filling up all the empty things and they're right beside the taste of his skin and the sound of his voice in her head, his breath on her face.
-
She must have been fifteen, sixteen, a thousand years young to believe that this was everything. The end and beginning of it all, it was changing for her then, it was all going to be hers. It wasn't a lot, she knew that, but it was enough. It, she didn't know what it was, and it was something like picking apart the sun, getting to close so she melted her bones.
I want to take care of you.
He had his hands out and Sam didn't think it looked like surrender at all. A hundred degrees outside. They couldn't find any trees, no cover. It must have been the desert. It might have been Nevada. She remembers her fingers slipping in his, him laughing, a sound like she's never heard. Some days, she hears it and she knows, she knows, it sounds all wrong.
There's no one else I want, I can have.
I don't know how to love anyone else.
I don't know how to love (it sounded like him, it sounded like she could have said it all along, too).
She didn't hear it, not between the whispers across her skin, the fine-thread trickle of dissent carrying across her, away from her, never see it again. His hands on hers, her hands in his, this was it, she thought. The end of time, the end of this and that, the beginning; endings could still lead to beginnings, those fairytale-type lies she was so gullible for.
Now, they were all just endings.
(It could have been hate, maybe. He was young, too. It was just thoughts and timed reactions and irrational words that stumbled across their tongues. It was always heated and it was always loud and they really couldn't tell the difference, couldn't see it coming, it was coming at them, bright red, train-like, barrelling and screaming and smoking, for miles. It was just illusion and child wisdom and harm--they knew nothing. Poor him, poor her, they never could have known.)
-
She was always unnecessarily dramatic. Thought she could still be an actress, her big debut, everyone would see her and adore her, praise her, need and want everything for her sadness and fame: you got away, you did it yourself, you made it, welcome to the rest of the world, Sam, you made it.
She didn't leave a note, the night she stood on the side of the road, waiting for a friend, someone without a name in her memory, to drive her to the bus station. She could have--she had dozens of letters in her backpack, apologies and diatribes and mourning and reasons. But she left nothing, no explanation, no evidence, though she's sure they knew.
She was never here and no one ever asked where she had gone.
-
Sam's pulling petals off a flower. The rest are sitting in her lap, she's sitting in the back seat and Dean is watching her, thin admiration in his stare and a blinded notion of what was to come.
Sam was always planning, one step ahead. She knew.
“Do you remember Monica?”
It's hot out, the windows rolled up. Deep, heavy breaths, chest heaving. Dean looks up. “Who?”
Sam swallows warm air. “No one. Never mind.”
Then, he smiles, like he knows he's done everything wrong, and it's only the guilt, the residual guilt, hand-me-down guilt--he doesn't really know what he's done. “You're okay?”
She pushes the petals off her lap, lets them fall to the floor between her feet. Dean rests his chin back on the seat. “Does Dad know you're here?”
Dean, all of him, every crowded corner and every translucent surface, darkens. “Dad doesn't care.”
“Yeah, he does.”
“He never came looking for you.”
She knows it's supposed to hurt her, make her look away, make something burn, make her yell and try to hurt him back. It does, somewhere, the old her, a different her. Instead, she sighs and says, “You didn't leave him. He needs you.”
“I need you,” he says.
She still wonders at how well he lies and how easily she falls for it.
-
They sold postcards at the bus stop.
She stopped by a display of them, carting through pictures of the Hollywood sign, the ocean, Rodeo Drive, Star Boulevard. She found one she liked, just one, of a stretch of highway, something arid and clean, brown land and blue sky. She bought it with spare change and when she changed herself (kept the same name, a strange new kind of impostor, morphing masks to fit her, identity thief and creator, fifty-one different Sam's to play all across the country), found the apartment, she framed it and hung it up above her bed.
A long-lasting road delving into oblivion, curving off in the horizon, looking like every other road she'd been on, every one they drove, ones Dean so warmly called home and ones she so sickeningly called end of the line, print on the bottom greeting: Welcome home.
-
“I'm done,” she said when he got back into the car.
“Done?”
“With this. Whatever it is.”
Dean's fingers drummed on the steering well. “Oh.”
“Take me home.” She rolled down the window, let her hand glide on air. “Please.”
-
Sam leaves the flowers on the front seat. She grabs her bag from the trunk and stands on the sidewalk. She's counting the steps she made towards him, the steps she's made away, and they're adding up to the same. The car is idling and she finally turns.
“You tricked me.”
He shrugged. “You're deluding yourself. You knew this was going to happen.”
“You're insane.” She pauses and points her finger at him through the window. “You're sick.”
He shrugs and his fingers drag over the leather steering wheel. “It's better with you. It's better with me.” He looks sideways at her and she knows she's lost. “You know that.”
“I don't need you anymore, Dean.” She's lying, she's always lying. If only she would believe it and it would be easier. Maybe he wouldn't be able to read it in her eyes.
He smiles, small and crooked and nothing special. “You might again.”
-
Postcard sign, weather-washed colours, saying, Welcome home.
Drop her bag on the floor, sit on the bed, dragging her bare feet across the rug, the papers scattered there. She thinks, this is what people do, they let go, these pivotal moments, moments defined by running exposition in stories, glaring riffs in songs, sullen music and montages in movies. This is what she's going to do. There's no music playing. She hears the neighbours cat scratching at the thin walls. She doesn't feel better, there's no resolution, she doesn't let go and move on: there is no conclusion and this is how it ends by not ending at all.
There's nothing, only what she's always had before.
(He talked to her in the spaces of time she had forgotten, nothing of monsters and nightmares, just her and memories, and it was worse, so much worse.)
She looks up and catches herself in the mirror. Her hair is tangled, dirty; she tries to pull her fingers through it. She's sure she hears a car idling outside her window, the monster bellowing over the air conditioning, someone running along the hallway, her own movie-music playing somewhere where she can't hear.
And, she might cut her hair again, she thinks.
end.
girl!sam/dean. pg-13. for lucklessforhim at the spn_hetexchange. warnings for incest, mild violence and something like a sex scene. 7,800.
This is not their story.
(c) title from how it ends by devotchka
a/n: for lucklessforhim, based off these prompts: Three years to the day since the last time he'd seen her, and the only thing that changed was the length of her hair and this picture. set in pre-series and Stanford era. i hope you enjoy (and sorry about the length)!
mad props and love to painted_pain and mrs_gregsanders for beta-ing this for me and pointing out all my mistakes and making the editing of this fic not turn into a personal bloodbath ♥
And in your soul they poked out a million holes
She's living in an apartment that's not hers, drinking coffee she didn't pay for, reading words that she thinks could be hers, they sound just right in her head when she says it all out loud. The shirt she's wearing belongs to a girl, a lady, taken from a house she woke up in after a night she can't remember, the shoes swiped from a charity auction, price tag still attached when she shoved them in her backpack, the rubber band in her hair from a store clerk's register, plucked from between paperclips and pens when he had his back turned, while getting a pack of cigarettes she didn't smoke anyway.
She's gone and convinced herself that all these borrowed and stolen things are better than what she had owned before. She's going to ignore the importance in those before things for now, because it's easier to tell lies, that's what she was taught. Sometimes she'll laugh, thinking this is not what they meant.
Of course it isn't.
-
Dean was always good at humouring Sam. She had too many passions, too many wasted talents, too many geniuses, her head couldn't handle it and it would rattle and break, matched to the swell of the sun and tires of the Impala rumbling underneath her bare feet. Something different in each town, across each state line; someone different when she stepped out a front door, stepped into a new world for a few days, a few weeks, bright glimpses of every world possible.
She was nine, she was going to be a doctor. When Dean broke his wrist swinging his fist at a brick wall, he let Sam look at it first, sling made of motel pillow cases and twist ties. John reset it himself later when he found out, made a proper sling of white bandages and gauze-wrapped splints, but Dean told Sam that hers was better.
She was twelve, she was going to be an actress. She wanted a house in Beverly Hills, her name etched into a star, people were going to love her everywhere. Dean lied for her when practices at the school got late and she wandered in the door past their curfew, flustered and pink-cheeked and reciting her lines in whispers to him. They left a day before she got to walk the scuffed black stage as a fairy with no name; she still remembered her lines three states over.
She was fourteen, she was going to be an artist. Dean made her jimmy the classroom window open (good practice; she sneered), found the sketch pads and pencils, charcoals and watercolour paints in the teacher's room, brought them out wrapped in brown paper towel. He let Sam use him as a model and kept all the disfigured portraits she drew for the next month. She ran out of paint, the pencils broke and the charcoal smeared everywhere. She didn't mind.
She was sixteen. She had been thinking of leaving. She was hiding college applications in her duffel, underneath the machete in it's leather cover and .45 pistol, somewhere between newspaper cut-outs and blood-stained t-shirts. She wanted to be a lawyer and she was going to save the world in her own way, without incantations or guns in her jacket pocket. Dean never knew. Sam likes to think, if he knew, he would have signed out law texts from the public library and given them to her to read in the motel room, no intention of giving them back when they left yet another town behind. But she knows better.
-
Once upon a time, he used to slay dragons, just like in those picture books, the ones with the princesses with sun-gold hair and blue dresses and handsome princes on horses, falling in love. But Sam grew up and found out that those were the only monsters that didn't exist in her world. Swords were confused with the smell of gunpowder and Sam just stopped trying to tell the difference. She tried to hold on with that childish naivety, the wonderment and excitement that only forceful ignorance can bring, the thrashing desire to keep everything the same, keep it familiar and safe and clean. Muck it up with stories and scribbled notes and blood under his fingernails. Blood under hers, too, in time.
She stopped reading those books, they were all lies anyway, she wasn't a kid anymore, she had the truth in her father's ferocity, her brother's silence; she had to be that, too. She couldn't make-believe, there was no point, it was all lies, only putting falsities in her heart, always burned from how badly she wanted to believe.
They never meant much, she told herself. After awhile, she believed it. Just a mismatching kind of lie, really; at least she could justify it.
-
In the living room (not hers, no), she hears the bedroom window slide open. Dark hallways, the street lamps outside guiding her, she slides into the doorway, eyes wide and straining, arms out, muscle memory, her own memory. Foot falls, a breathe let out--her elbow twists around her back, turned around, she's slammed up against the wall, face pressed against the uneven textured wallpaper.
They laugh.
He laughs. She knows that laugh.
He lets her go and she spins back, fast, out of breath. She reaches out, hooks her foot behind a knee--he doesn't buckle and she throws her hands, her fists, curled and tight and digging into her palms, and hits skin, slap and hiss and cry, she smiles at the sound.
“Jesus!” he snaps.
Then, she's staring at him in the half-light, deluded yellow and dim blue from the moon, hands still raised. Almost doesn't recognize him, but like she could ever forget, any of it.
“Dean?” She pushes her hair back, both hands, she's shaking. “What the fuck?”
“Hey, Sammy.” Dean steps forward. Hand raised, waits, hesitation in the stutter of his fingers; her eyes fall closed when he pulls a strand of hair, twirls it around his fingers. “Three years and all that's changed is your hair. Growing it long?”
“I hated how Dad always wanted it cut short. Looked like a boy,” she says, comes out without her thinking, like that's all she can say after all this time, like that's all he can say. Yeah, sure, she'll adjust, she'll get used to it, this is how it'll be now. No one needs to know, not even them. They never look out ahead of them for orange warning signs: curve up ahead, detour, dead end, falling rocks, nothing exists past this point, turn around now now now while you still can. “What are you doing here?”
Dean's hand drops. He side steps her and strides into the hallway, through the living room, into the kitchen. She stays by the door, hands on the frame, sound of cupboards opening and late-night movie tangled up with her heart in her chest.
“Got any beer?” he calls.
“No.” She's in the living room, wandering, stranger in this place (finally), her arms at her sides.
He glances back over his shoulder. All the lights are on and he's thrown into harsh glares, stiff shadows, tapering off near the windows, off the walls, on the floor. “Whiskey, scotch, vodka?”
She shakes her head.
“Anything with alcohol?” He's asking it almost desperately. That shift in his voice, it could mean something entirely different, something she could have recognized in a instant, similar and timed heartbeats. Three years, Sam doesn't know him anymore.
“Wine,” she says. “Just wine.”
“Native Californian now, are we?” he mocks, slamming the last cupboard door shut, cups clanging on the hooks. He leans his elbow on the counter, looking at her.
“I hate it,” she says, brutal twitch in her voice. “Won't drink anything else though.”
“Why not?” Eyebrow raised, grin slipping on the side of his lips, God, maybe she does know him still.
She worries her lip, looking down at the floor: pieces of crushed paper, maybe notes for an essay, scattered on the floor, but she can't see, the lights in the kitchen taking all other forms of white and yellow away.
“Okay, keep your secrets.” Intake of air, the room rushes to emptiness. “You always have.”
She looks up, but Dean's turned back to the kitchen, hands on his hips. She's left the kitchen window open and now she can smell the exhaust from the street, the din of strewn voices circling around their own quiet, filling it up to burst. She wants to cover her ears, wants to blink and be gone, but wishing never did much for her, fairytales exist for people who don't want to know better, magic always in the hands of the dark and cruel and unnecessary, the things she had to kill.
She knows better.
“Wine'll have to do, I guess,” Dean says.
-
They always went into it, anything, with a plan.
Hustling cash when Dad didn't leave enough, they would go into the bar alone, Sam first, standing by the pool tables, playing coy and easy, waving Dean over when she found the right one, the one with the right level of self-delusion and an ego to rival Dean's. Sam could get anyone to lay down all they had, distracting them while Dean made the multiple shots, pulled a few bills from the top of the stack. And even if Dean missed the corner shot or if they saw him sneaking a ball closer to the hole, she was quick enough, fast hands that Dean taught her, to grab the stack, his wallet if it was the right moment, and slip out the back door, to wait on the curb for Dean to come stumbling out, laughing, spitting blood onto the pavement by her feet. She'd be counting the bills, shoes toed off and thrown towards the gutter drain, lamp light yellow-white on everything. Those nights, Dean held her close and what she wants to remember is the smell of him, warmth and smoke and cold air.
Sam never said anything. Maybe she worried at first, but Dean never let her. Always told her she enjoyed the rush of it and after awhile, she probably really did.
They used to just steal when they were younger; Dean always said she was the better actor, so she was the one to trip and fall outside the door, skin her knee, twist her fingers, cry out and someone would come running. Dean could fit candy bars and cans of pop in his too-large jacket, lasting them days when they rationed right, always gone before John could see. They didn't need it, always had enough food in the motel room, but something stolen always tasted better. They were still stealing, in a way, but their lies were becoming more than what they could handle, sounding giant and unkind coming off their tongues, containable and trite in their heads. They started justifying it, calling it work and it takes skill and practice, an effort that could lead to broken bones and they know all too well the taste of their own blood.
They didn't go into it, this, with a plan (Sam thinks she said it first, Dean followed, and they were blind and stupid and didn't think). That's where they started making all their mistakes stealing away all their time and own simple reasoning.
-
She's sitting on the chair, he's lying on the couch. There's enough wine left in the bottle, but neither of them are going to drink it, this bottle too bitter, Sam can't taste the subtle hints of oak and cherry, like they said. Marketing scam and she falls for it.
“You haven't asked me a thousand times why I'm here yet.” He's slurring and he glances at her with wavering eyes. “You actually surprise me.”
“I'm sure you have a good reason.”
It's not an invitation, not in her head. Maybe it sounded like one, her own mistake--Dean takes it as one.
“There's a job in Sonoma. I thought I'd stop in, say hi.” Dean waggles his fingers at her. She can see him grinning.
“Were you thinking of leaving, too?” Sam asks. She does mean to sound this frustrated, this tired, this cruel.
Dean sits up. The bottle tips, tumbles from his hands, spills across the carpet, and her breath trips in her lungs, she won't stop trying to read his eyes. “I want you to come with me,” he whispers.
She scoffs. “To Sonoma?” Her heart breaks, it falls. “What for?”
“I might need some help on this one.”
Sam licks her lips, tilts her head. “Why didn't Dad come with you?”
Dean shrugs, stands up, arms spread out in front of him. “He's working his own job.”
It takes Sam a minute--“You two are fighting.”
Dean throws back his head, doesn't laugh, sighs and lets a grin slip on, fade away just as fast. “It's like you never left at all.” He walks to the door, Sam stands up quickly. He looks at her, soft and intrigued, and says, “If you change your mind, I'm staying at the motel down the block. I'm leaving around noon.”
The door barely makes a sound when he closes it and it's like he was never there at all.
-
She packs what she needs into a bag. She packs her life into it, she's been able to since she was nine, just turned nine, the cusp and edges of the between-days as she moved through the years. Always tried to take everything with her, keepsakes from every place that could have been something, but soon her pockets and bags became full of rocks and complimentary hotel stationery and postcards. And then all the towns started looking the same, being the same, were the same and, eventually, Sam just stopped caring.
She never had a home, not the right four walls or the right smell or the right colours or the right anything at all. No bed, no things, always just wanted things, plates and closet doors and second-hand kitsch figurines on the television set. Thought she wanted a home, but she would always be running from something: running from the wrong home, running back to it.
She arrives at the motel an hour after her watch hits twelve. He's sitting on the hood of a grey Ford. She smiles behind her hand, pushing her hair over her shoulder, avoiding his gaze when she sits beside him.
“You want it back,” he laughs.
“Want what?” Defensive without a reason, she puts up her guard.
“The life. Hunting. If you didn't, you wouldn't be here.”
She drops her duffel to the ground, the tips of her fingers purple from the twisted straps. “It's just the weekend, right?”
“Yeah.”
She nods. “Okay. Good.”
Dean holds out his hands, palms up. “Into the chariot, fair lady?”
She has her life, this life, and maybe even the one she had thought she left behind, in a bag, and she's dropping her bag in the trunk and her life is unfolding in the throwaway smile on Dean's lips, unravelling in a heat she can't bear and never felt before, breaking apart in her steps, one two three, towards the passenger side door.
-
It takes an hour and a half to drive to Sonoma. She expects detours, but there is only a bridge and land-to-sea highway, not close enough to the cliffs for them to fall if the car were to swerve off the road, but if she leaped far enough--she could, she could, she'd probably drown.
She doesn't want to die and she would never tell Dean, but she's curious. Dean is, too, but in the simple ways. She's curious in the mundane, the ridiculous, the disturbing, the everything. Dean is curious in her, in himself.
Always curious about her.
The air from the open window threads in her hair and the smell of menthols soaks into her clothes from the seats. Dean's wearing sunglasses and he's smiling and she can't see much, she's so blinded by all the sky and the light and the translucent waves from their skin. She has her feet on the dashboard, bare toes curling over the edge of her sandals, toenails painted blue. She rests her elbows on her knees and hums a song she's never heard before.
This could be something like happiness, whatever happens when all the small things fit into the long empty voids, finally.
-
They've stopped outside a resort, the orange brick dividers and pewter gates, Sam covers her eyes from the sun and peers out the window. Dean is standing on the cars tailgate, throwing pebbles at the bars. There is an unsteady clink each time his hand lets go.
“Is there anyone you need to call?” he asks. He leaps down from the tailgate, the car shakes and he's leaning against the back window. She might have been sleeping--his dark glasses are gone.
She leans out the window. “No.”
Dean puts his sunglasses back on. “All right then.”
He drives them back the way they came, slowing up and speeding past, until he comes across a roadside motel and it's home, that home, once home, the four wrong walls. Sam almost can't breathe. Dean's out of the car, slipping cash into his hands from his pocket, magic, and Sam is still smoothing her fingers down the seat belt.
Oh god, how long it should have been, how much longer she should have had to wait, to see this again.
The screen door to the office bangs open. The wind kicks, the sand twists from the parking lot and Sam's closing her eyes.
“Sam, grab the bags!”
It's hot and the smell of sweat and dirt and smoke won't rub from her skin. Dean's collapsed on the bed, toeing off his shoes and she's standing by the door, the bag straps wrapped around her wrists.
“You only got one bed,” she says and she's tired, tired already, before they even started, this is it.
But Dean shrugs and the world clatters to a stop and he grabs the remote. “It's all they had left.”
Yes, yes, of course.
-
John left them in Maryland for a summer. Sam tries to remember the name of the town. She had a job there, a waitress job, short black shirt and pale yellow apron; she dropped a coffee pot on her second day and scalded the feet of the young boy who bumped into her (he cried, she wanted to cry, too, and she did, in the back room during her break, a cup of water in her hands and no one said a word, just looked at her like she was lost and tragic and maybe she was). The diner had the town's name in it: Somewheresville Roadside Diner. Nothing ever came to mind, maybe sun-coloured clapboard siding and bay window shop fronts, lace curtains and the wet smell of summer, that's all.
Something changed there. She was seventeen and, just like it had been for years, she dreamed of different places and a different life and a different name. Dean called her Sammy, her friends called her Sam, her name tag said Samantha. It wasn't wrong, like it didn't fit; it was just a thread, a connection, to all the things that didn't fit. Maybe her name was right for her and it was the only name she could ever wear comfortably, but she didn't want it. Sam, Sammy, Samantha, the girl who hunted demons and ghosts and monsters (like in books and movies and spinning twirling tales). Sam, the girl with the gun collection in a battered briefcase. Sammy, the girl that knew where to cut a witch so they bled faster, died faster. Samantha, the girl that translated her homework into Latin, know it better, learn it quicker, say it louder.
She never did change her name when she got to California. Where no one knew it or what it meant, the sound of someone saying it in her head hurt enough to make her keep it.
-
(Next morning and yellow-blue sky in the window. She slept on the couch; Dean never said a word. She's tying up her shoes, Dean's throwing his lighter above his head, catching it on the way down.
“Are we going to start researching on this hunt or what?”
“Or what.”
“Dean.”
“I already know what's going on. I just have to find the fucker and kill it.”
“Can we kill it then?”
“Blood thirsty, are we?”
“We have a job to do.”
She wants to go--home. Not home, maybe not really a home, it's not. Dean knows that, he can hear it in the way she never says it, how it burns at the edge of her lips, she wants to scream it at him. He knows that.
“Yeah, okay. Can we just take five minutes to do something besides hunting?”)
-
Maryland in March. Repeat, repeat, repeat in her head, so she would know. Maryland in March, something changed. She made it change, Sam remembers that much. She started her job a week after they got there. She did her homework on her supper break, grease-stained Formica table tops, hot cups of coffee she never drank.
Dean was there, too. Sometimes. He would sit in the diner for hours, only ordering coffee, reading through newspapers from dozens of states. He would smile at her when she passed with a tray of food and she would smile back. When he stayed long enough, late enough not waiting for Dad to call to check up, she sat across the table from him during her fifteen minutes off.
She doesn't know what they talked about, if they talked about anything at all, but everything was stilted because they could never say it out loud. They could never touch too much, could never be too close, they might give it all away, this little game they played, this thing only they had, no one else would understand, they'd ruin it, wreck it, tear them apart. So, everything was half-touches, half-words, half-truths; they hid themselves in corners and in broad daylight and in places no one would go looking, go searching for people like them--people like them, unwanted and deep-down ugly, hidden disease and confined in their own freedom.
When things break, it's unintentional and it's someone else's fault.
Her name was Monica. She had white-blonde hair, sometimes curled, sometimes in braids, sometimes twisted into a messy ponytail, and cherry lips and whenever you mentioned her name, you'd talk about how beautiful she was. Sam knew she was, admired her from afar, and never wanted to stand beside her, people would start comparing them, differences and similarities.
Monica didn't talk to Sam, not regularly. Sometimes, she asked Sam typical, pointless things when they were on break together and Dean wasn't there. What are you doing this weekend, you're in high school, oh, are you going off to university, that sounds like a good plan, good luck.
One day, Monica noticed Dean. She noticed Sam. Dean might have noticed her, too.
When Sam walked back towards the kitchen, Monica was leaning on the counter, dragging her fingernails across her lips “That your boyfriend?”
Sam glanced over her shoulder; Dean was folding up his newspapers, pulling out his wallet, leaving. “My brother.”
Monica raised her eyebrows, sculpted and thin. She smiled. “You two looked friendly.”
Dean had been touching her hands, brushing her knuckles with the tips of his fingers. She had been laughing, she had been in love, she was in love and she'd never say it. Sam looked at her hands and they were stained and ugly, baring her--their--terrible secret. “We're just close,” she whispered, shoving her hands into her apron pockets. “Pretty much grew up in each other's pockets.”
“That's sweet.” Monica snapped her gum. She raised her hand, pale and smooth and clean, when the bell over the door dinged and Dean was gone. “He's a good looking boy.”
Sam was still trying to hide in all this light. “Yeah.”
Monica touched Sam's elbow. “Tell him I say hi.”
-
Picks her up after her shift at the diner; there's a black lace top and shorts on the seat, tossed into a pile.
“What's this?”
Dean grins, puts the car he said he's borrowed into reverse. “Change quick. We're running low on cash.”
The bar is loud and soft and all blue haze. She covers her eyes with her hands, grabs onto the back of Dean's shirt and follows him through the crowd, stragglers, drunks, wry and condemning looks. She turns her back to them and Dean pulls her hand to his mouth, kisses the tips. Quicksilver flood and she's calm, closed look and distant.
Someone got daring, someone was unafraid. Someone had courage. Someone noticed her, liked the lace on her pale skin, and they pushed against her, grabbed her, said, “Come on, baby, come on.”
She got her hands around his wrists, turned, pushed him off. He stumbled, she grinned, he came right back, hands at her shoulders, moving up to her neck. Caught between him and the wall, she can't move, can't get her hands around, can't get her knees up. “Can't say no, baby,” he breathed into her ear.
It was a mild slip and it was Dean screaming, Sam screaming, too; the guy on the floor, Dean crouched over him, no, kneeling, he looked almost gentle, like he could have been kneeling over her. Someone was pulling Sam back, she was pulling forward, Deandeandean.
“Fucker!” Dean's yelling and Sam thinks she hears sirens, sees lights red and blue popping in the windows.
She struggles, rips herself from someone's grasp. She wraps her arms around Dean's shoulders, presses her face into his neck and begs him to stop. She feels his arms move, back forth back forth, she moves with him, too. Deandeandean, she won't let go, she knows this, she never will. She never can.
The lights come on. There's blood on Dean's hands, on his own face. Sam touches the sides of his face and he flinches away.
“We have to go,” she whispers. “We have to leave.”
No one tries to stop them when they go out the back fire exit door. They're all crowding around where they used to be, like they can still see them, their ghosts, imprints and white-ghost outlines, a private telling only they can see in the blood spots on the floor, brightened and sharpened in the light.
And he tried to protect her from too many things, wanted to protect her from her heart breaking by loving her too much for too long and Sam forgot what it was like to love someone else. She made mistakes after that, ones she stopped counting and couldn't forgive, because it was never the same; people came and went, and they were less and the same and, sometimes, more than what she could have wanted, more than him, they were perfect. But they weren't him, they weren't Dean, and in the end, in the end, it always ended.
He tried to protect her and he was right; her heart was never broken. It was always with him, bruised from the games he played and the fault lines in himself, and she never thought of taking it back.
-
They were on the fourth floor of an apartment building, one with white-painted brick and flaking green trim, perched on the corner of the street, loud highway to their right, rows of misshaped houses on their left. The cement pad outside was cracked and cracking, and the foundation shifted, so the doors didn't close properly, they had to slam it closed with their shoulders, heaving into it. They had their bruises to compare.
It wasn't paradise, but it could have been close. The tenants before them had left bed frames and strings of Christmas lights in the storage room, which Sam hooked on nails around the windows and along the short hallway from the living room to the bedroom. Peach coloured walls and sky-grey carpet, warped linoleum and cheap brown cupboards, it was theirs, all theirs. Sam put their names up on the door and Dean had smiled at her. Maybe it was funny. Maybe she was stupid. She didn't care.
The lights flickered when someone stepped too heavily and ants skittered across the moulding and Sam still came home to their three bowls and their half jug of milk and take-out, the yellow-brown water that choked from the taps, to the bed with only a blanket and one pillow. She still came home because Dean would be there and he would wait for her and, day after day, he would hold her, let her touch and breathe and be and nothing ever changed.
Sam didn't have to tell Dean Monica said hi. She did it herself.
The diner apron, matching the sallow light in the entrance, was on the back of a kitchen chair. Four empty beer bottles, one half drank, in the middle of the table. A heady smell of roses, of lilacs, maybe. She hated that smell even then, heady and revolting, it made her sick.
“Dean?” she called.
The lights flickered above her head.
The bedroom door was closed. It was never closed, they had no secrets with from each other. They were the secret, they were the closed door.
“Dean--” The door opened before her. He was adjusting his shorts. Sam faltered, hands on the door frame. She looked inside, into their room, her clothes, his clothes, all their things and she was there, holding the blankets over her skinny, cream-skinned body. She waved at Sam, like she waved at Dean as he left the diner.
“Hi, Sam,” Monica said. She must have been smiling.
Dean's hands on hers, on her arm, across her skin, her lips her hair. Sam pulled back. “Sam, hey. Come on.”
“No.”
Monica threw back the blanket, stepped onto the floor. She was pulled her skirt back up, “I should go.”
“Sammy,” Dean whispered.
(She wasn't going to tell Dean.
She already knew she was going away, she had been planning it for three years; she took the job at the diner to save for a bus ticket, to save for the escape. She never told Dean, it was going to be a surprise. Was going to tell him when she had enough money for both of them, working extra shifts, late shifts, show him the ticket and say, come with me, be with me. They could both change their names, it could just be them, it could work.
She wasn't going to tell Dean. She was going to pretend, an act, as if she never felt this, anything, at all and she was going to be alone.)
“No,” Sam said,
Monica slid past her, an uneven, uneasy smile on her smudged cherry lips, cherry prints on Dean's neck and left. Dean stayed in the doorway, his chest moving, thump thump thump. Like heartbeats. It was done in heartbeats.
“Look at me,” he said. “Sammy, please, you know--”
“Yeah, I do.”
And she closed the door behind her.
-
(She's been looking at her watch. Came up Friday. Saturday. Sunday, they're gone, she can't think of where she's been. The desert is cooling and Dean's not packing, Dean's not moving. Sam sits on the bed.
“There's not a hunt, is there?”
“I've been known to lie.”
“Take me home, Dean.”
And he smiles and she's missed it, she's missed it so fucking much. “You are home.”)
-
She sleeps on the bed this night. It's a start-stop empty sleep, turning in the cold room, across the too hot sheets, to wind away and she can't make up her mind, out of breath and uncomfortable in this place. She keeps her eyes closed until the sun stretches across the room, unwanted, tearing through the thin curtains, and she can't force sleep any longer.
She opens her eyes. There are wild flowers on the pillow beside her. She sits up, running her hands through her hair again, new habit, bad habit, hands in her tangled hair. Dean is drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup.
“You don't sleep well anymore,” he says.
She picks up the flowers, such pale and unsteady colours, stems stripped clean of leaves.
“Never have.”
Dean sets down the cup and walks over to the bed. He leans over her and they wait, suspended, and she feels every part of her body, feels everything touching it, the springs in the mattress, the sheets twisted around her thighs, Dean's shoulder bumping hers when he sways forward, leans down and kisses her.
He doesn't taste like coffee, he tastes like something old and familiar, something that makes her shake, makes her heart run, unleashed and swelling, makes her forget, she's forgetting, she's done and she's gone. She falls back onto the bed, and they're in this again without a plan and it's just as striking and reckless as it was before, suiting them so well. Dean presses up against her, on his knees, hands pushing her arms above her head, fingers twining with hers, thumbs pressing against pulse points. She feels her heart beating in his lips.
He breathes into her and she takes all that tainted air and knots it into her lungs, ties it up and pins it down.
Dean pushes a strand of hair from her face. “You should cut your hair short again. I liked it short.”
“It's better long. Less to remind me.”
He licks his lips. “And you're doing okay?”
“Okay?” She laughs.
“With the whole forgetting thing.”
She sees her heart in his eyes. She doesn't want it back. It's his.
“I thought I was.”
(This is not their story. This is not them. She's wearing the (cherry)red costume, he's wearing the (ghost)white mask, and the words that fall from their lips remain so loud and difficult and strange. She's never said these things, she never will again. Neither has he, neither will he. They never should, they never will, not for years and lifetimes. But for this moment, they'll make them right and, for now, Sam is sure they mean everything they say and they'll speak it with such confidence and passion that others will be sure, too.)
-
The sky is melted ink, spread finger-paint style across the top of the world, smudges of white where hands lifted away. There's stars, paint brush flicker in blue. She's spinning down a road between grape vines in an orchard trapped by brick walls, her hands out at her sides, and Dean's running behind her.
She's leaping over rocks and rivets in the road, stumbling to a halt, hands in front of her at a dead end. They're wine drunk, broke into the small storage shed of the resort they passed days before, bottles on the shelves. They tore off the labels, surprises surprises, they drank them sitting on a stone wall, looking across rows and rows of orchards.
“Can you feel it, Dean?” she's calling. She's hiding behind a tree and she hopes Dean can find her, he always can; she could never win at hide-and-seek when they were kids. Dean could always find her. She believed, still believes, there's part of her in him, there has to be.
He's breathless and laughing and it's beautiful. Sam wants to fill herself overflowing with it. “Feel what?” he asks.
“Everything changing.” She stops to think and she can't change her mind to something new. “Good things and bad things.”
“Bad things?”
“There has to be bad things with good things. Otherwise you wouldn't know if it's good.”
“And what are these bad things?” He's getting closer, she can feel it in the restlessness of her nerves, the breath shadow of a feeling she's always known.
She smiles at the dark and hopes he can see it. “We'll have to find out.”
Sam's crushing grapes in her hands, dizzy and wild, licking the juices from her fingers. Tastes nothing like wine, almost too bitter, used up and not ready. She tosses them behind her, takes handfuls and curls her hands into fists.
When he finds her, hiding, tangled in the vines, she's laughing and there are tears in her eyes. He's not worried, never afraid after slaying all those dragons. He pulls her out and she climbs onto his back, his arms hooked under her knees. They weave down the road, heavy and weighted, stuck firmly to the ground and all she wants is to fly. Sam reaches up, tries to grab the stars, but they just brush under her fingers.
“I missed you,” Sam says, pressing her lips to the top of Dean's head, fingers spreading the grapes along his jaw.
“You forgive me?” And he sounds quiet, unsure, something exposed and cracking.
“If you're all mine.”
He says it so slow and aching and sweet, as if he had always been saying it and she never heard it: “I'm all yours.”
Terracotta walls and a road sign saying Sonoma 12 miles, but they won't leave, won't go back, they're not going back, not just yet. He pushes her down in the back seat of a car that's not his, only in his keeping for the night, but Sam will remember this one, this place, the smell and heat and feel of everything around her. His hands sliding under her shirt, pushing it up, his hands on her breasts, she has her hands around his neck, pulling his lips to hers.
“I'm all yours,” he's saying and she lets him, she lets him, his hands wandering across her bare skin. She shivers and he presses his lips to her stomach, hands framing her hips.
She's got the stars, she has them, they're probably in her eyes, they're filling up all the empty things and they're right beside the taste of his skin and the sound of his voice in her head, his breath on her face.
-
She must have been fifteen, sixteen, a thousand years young to believe that this was everything. The end and beginning of it all, it was changing for her then, it was all going to be hers. It wasn't a lot, she knew that, but it was enough. It, she didn't know what it was, and it was something like picking apart the sun, getting to close so she melted her bones.
I want to take care of you.
He had his hands out and Sam didn't think it looked like surrender at all. A hundred degrees outside. They couldn't find any trees, no cover. It must have been the desert. It might have been Nevada. She remembers her fingers slipping in his, him laughing, a sound like she's never heard. Some days, she hears it and she knows, she knows, it sounds all wrong.
There's no one else I want, I can have.
I don't know how to love anyone else.
I don't know how to love (it sounded like him, it sounded like she could have said it all along, too).
She didn't hear it, not between the whispers across her skin, the fine-thread trickle of dissent carrying across her, away from her, never see it again. His hands on hers, her hands in his, this was it, she thought. The end of time, the end of this and that, the beginning; endings could still lead to beginnings, those fairytale-type lies she was so gullible for.
Now, they were all just endings.
(It could have been hate, maybe. He was young, too. It was just thoughts and timed reactions and irrational words that stumbled across their tongues. It was always heated and it was always loud and they really couldn't tell the difference, couldn't see it coming, it was coming at them, bright red, train-like, barrelling and screaming and smoking, for miles. It was just illusion and child wisdom and harm--they knew nothing. Poor him, poor her, they never could have known.)
-
She was always unnecessarily dramatic. Thought she could still be an actress, her big debut, everyone would see her and adore her, praise her, need and want everything for her sadness and fame: you got away, you did it yourself, you made it, welcome to the rest of the world, Sam, you made it.
She didn't leave a note, the night she stood on the side of the road, waiting for a friend, someone without a name in her memory, to drive her to the bus station. She could have--she had dozens of letters in her backpack, apologies and diatribes and mourning and reasons. But she left nothing, no explanation, no evidence, though she's sure they knew.
She was never here and no one ever asked where she had gone.
-
Sam's pulling petals off a flower. The rest are sitting in her lap, she's sitting in the back seat and Dean is watching her, thin admiration in his stare and a blinded notion of what was to come.
Sam was always planning, one step ahead. She knew.
“Do you remember Monica?”
It's hot out, the windows rolled up. Deep, heavy breaths, chest heaving. Dean looks up. “Who?”
Sam swallows warm air. “No one. Never mind.”
Then, he smiles, like he knows he's done everything wrong, and it's only the guilt, the residual guilt, hand-me-down guilt--he doesn't really know what he's done. “You're okay?”
She pushes the petals off her lap, lets them fall to the floor between her feet. Dean rests his chin back on the seat. “Does Dad know you're here?”
Dean, all of him, every crowded corner and every translucent surface, darkens. “Dad doesn't care.”
“Yeah, he does.”
“He never came looking for you.”
She knows it's supposed to hurt her, make her look away, make something burn, make her yell and try to hurt him back. It does, somewhere, the old her, a different her. Instead, she sighs and says, “You didn't leave him. He needs you.”
“I need you,” he says.
She still wonders at how well he lies and how easily she falls for it.
-
They sold postcards at the bus stop.
She stopped by a display of them, carting through pictures of the Hollywood sign, the ocean, Rodeo Drive, Star Boulevard. She found one she liked, just one, of a stretch of highway, something arid and clean, brown land and blue sky. She bought it with spare change and when she changed herself (kept the same name, a strange new kind of impostor, morphing masks to fit her, identity thief and creator, fifty-one different Sam's to play all across the country), found the apartment, she framed it and hung it up above her bed.
A long-lasting road delving into oblivion, curving off in the horizon, looking like every other road she'd been on, every one they drove, ones Dean so warmly called home and ones she so sickeningly called end of the line, print on the bottom greeting: Welcome home.
-
“I'm done,” she said when he got back into the car.
“Done?”
“With this. Whatever it is.”
Dean's fingers drummed on the steering well. “Oh.”
“Take me home.” She rolled down the window, let her hand glide on air. “Please.”
-
Sam leaves the flowers on the front seat. She grabs her bag from the trunk and stands on the sidewalk. She's counting the steps she made towards him, the steps she's made away, and they're adding up to the same. The car is idling and she finally turns.
“You tricked me.”
He shrugged. “You're deluding yourself. You knew this was going to happen.”
“You're insane.” She pauses and points her finger at him through the window. “You're sick.”
He shrugs and his fingers drag over the leather steering wheel. “It's better with you. It's better with me.” He looks sideways at her and she knows she's lost. “You know that.”
“I don't need you anymore, Dean.” She's lying, she's always lying. If only she would believe it and it would be easier. Maybe he wouldn't be able to read it in her eyes.
He smiles, small and crooked and nothing special. “You might again.”
-
Postcard sign, weather-washed colours, saying, Welcome home.
Drop her bag on the floor, sit on the bed, dragging her bare feet across the rug, the papers scattered there. She thinks, this is what people do, they let go, these pivotal moments, moments defined by running exposition in stories, glaring riffs in songs, sullen music and montages in movies. This is what she's going to do. There's no music playing. She hears the neighbours cat scratching at the thin walls. She doesn't feel better, there's no resolution, she doesn't let go and move on: there is no conclusion and this is how it ends by not ending at all.
There's nothing, only what she's always had before.
(He talked to her in the spaces of time she had forgotten, nothing of monsters and nightmares, just her and memories, and it was worse, so much worse.)
She looks up and catches herself in the mirror. Her hair is tangled, dirty; she tries to pull her fingers through it. She's sure she hears a car idling outside her window, the monster bellowing over the air conditioning, someone running along the hallway, her own movie-music playing somewhere where she can't hear.
And, she might cut her hair again, she thinks.
end.