Fic :: Supernatural :: A Person as a Boat
A Person as a Boat
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG
Warning: Second-person future tense.
Summary: 5x22 coda. Sam comes back and finds his brother.
*
You will come back. This is a given. You will not crawl out of a shallow grave out of the ground, working your splinters into your fingers and working your nails out of them, and you will not sing Led Zeppelin IV under your breath while you do not do this. You will not wonder if it is all just another trick. This paragraph is someone else’s story.
In your story, you will blink. You will blink and then you will be standing on the ground on grass and the grass will be prickling the soles of your bare feet. You will be standing in the middle of an empty field and although it will be a field you have never stood in before, for a while all you will be able to wonder is how long it has been since you stood on anything at all. You will not know the answer to that question for a few days yet.
But you will come back and you will know that you are not Lucifer, or Michael, or God. You will know that you are no angel, demon, or ghost. You will not quite know whether you are Sam Winchester or not.
So you will pick a direction and you will walk in it. It will take you ten minutes to reach a road and another forty for someone to pull over and offer you a ride. You will whisper please stop and when she does, she will ask you where you want to go and you will say as far as you can take me. She will stare at your bare feet, she will stare at your bare feet the whole ride through. When she drops you off in Tulsa four hours later, she will give you two neatly folded twenty dollar bills and tell you to buy some goddamn shoes.
You will buy some goddamn shoes. You will buy a goddamn burger, too, and eat it in three bites and discover what it feels like to be hungry and then to be full. You will wonder what else has changed. Twenty minutes later, you will feed the last of your change into a payphone and discover that his cell number has changed.
Then you will take your new shoes and walk to the nearest motel and into the first empty room you see, and although it will be a busy night the motel clerk will not give anybody that room’s key. You will stop being honest after that.
The next day, you will walk down to an Apple store, and you will feel your new shoes growing older with every step, and when you reach the store you will Google May 3 2010 on the newest model and you will learn that the world did not end the day before that. Maybe it will turn out that you are Sam Winchester after all.
There will be an error in the security system and the store assistant’s back will be turned when you take the laptop with you as you walk out of the store.
You will test this.
People will not turn around when you tap them on the shoulder. You will take a coin purse from a woman’s bag and then give it back to her and she will not notice either time. The man whose coffee you will drink will buy himself another cup. You will not leave footprints anywhere until you turn around and watch as they creep out of the ground. Nobody will look at you until you tell them to look at you.
It will feel like something is sparking inside of you, and swelling like a balloon.
You will walk into an airport and catch the first flight you can get to Sioux Falls and when you sit in your first class seat and stretch out your legs, you will listen to the flight attendant explaining to the businessman whose seat you are sitting in that it just doesn’t seem to exist. You will spend the flight staring out the window and you will not think about what Lucifer would do to a plane full of people. You will not think about what Lucifer would do to a plane full of people.
You will steal a car to get to Bobby’s. After he opens the door and you tell him to look at you, he will look at you and then say aw hell you better not be Lucifer. You will tell him you don’t know what you are and it will be the truth. He will believe you. He will not try to fight you like your brother told you he tried to fight him, but after you have sat and looked at each for seven long minutes, he will push a bottle of beer towards you. You will take hold of it and look at it, and the bottle will feel too warm or your hand will feel too cold, and you will remember very suddenly the icy way that Lucifer had burned. You will say Bobby I don’t know if I can drink this anymore and he will tell you that there’s only one way to find out and so you will drink it.
You will not want to remember what it feels like.
Afterwards, he will give you the real beer, and after that you will ask him how long you were gone and he’ll tell you. It will be longer than you expected. You will not ask him about your brother.
You will stay a while. Bobby and you will work on the cars or work on the house, which will always need fixing, and neither of you will talk much and you will never tell him to do anything and he will always watch you enter or leave a room. Sometimes he will not notice when you’re standing right in front of him. It will be peaceful and very quiet, but you will feel the balloon stretching thin inside of you and the static electricity on the ends of your hair. One day you will call to Bobby and he will come without question and you will both know, then, that it will be time for you leave.
You will not hunt.
This will not be for lack of trying. But monsters will see you in ways that humans will not, and whatever it is you will be when you come back, the monsters will not like it and they will run. When you come back, they will run. You will rid towns of ghoul infestations, of unwanted spirits, simply by standing in the street and waiting, but you will never get close enough to stop anything. You will never get close enough to anything. When you stand in the street, all the people will leave too. You will begin to notice that when you stand in a crowd, everyone will move away from you without noticing you as if it will be human instinct to be where you are not.
One day you will go to a bar and you will tell a woman to look at you and you will strike up a friendly conversation but you will see all the tiny little muscles in her jaw tensing in ways she won’t even be aware of. You will excuse yourself and walk out of the bar and throw up in the parking lot.
You will not feel incredibly, painfully lonely because there will not be room inside of you for that.
Three days after that, you will wake up and Castiel will be there, in the hotel room that nobody will ever remember you’re staying in. He will not be looking at you, but you will feel that he can see you in the same way that you will feel his presence in the room, filling it up like the sun fills up the sky, only so small because it is a long long long way away. You will not need to ask him to know that he is an angel again.
He will say I thought I should come say hi and you will say hi too. Then you will look at each other, and then he will disappear. You will see, for the first time, the way he twists in the air, and it will be like watching the sun set, knowing that although it has disappeared behind the horizon it is just that you are not in the right place to see it and not that it cannot be seen at all. You will know the right place to see it.
And so a month after you come back, you will stand in the hotel room that isn’t really yours and pack up all the stuff you have stolen because nobody will stop you and when you turn around, the sparking, swelling thing inside of you will suddenly become bigger than you are. You will blink. The street lamp over your head will sputter and go out.
Castiel will say I have learned a lot of things since the day I pulled your brother out of Hell. He will say I think the most important thing I have learned is that you are both extremely dense.
You will not answer him. You will never answer him, because you will be watching through the window of the house across the street from where you will be standing. You will be watching your brother. And you will promise yourself that you won’t make him look at you, and you will promise yourself that you won’t tell him to come to you, and you will promise yourself that whatever it is you are for this one day you will not be it. You will feel a pricking in your thumbs.
Through the window, your brother will twirl his car keys around a finger as he walks towards the door.
You will come back. This is a certainty now. You will come back and although you will not claw your way back to your brother, you will feel those splinters under your fingernails all the same. You will not move, you will not move, although the street lamps will flicker up and down the road and the front door of the house you watch will begin to open and the electrical charge, the balloon under your skin will slowly and perfectly burst.
Whatever it is you will be when you come back, he will see you anyway. He will come to you anyway. He will walk across the street to you with a dazed look on his face and you will smell that he has been drinking and you will block the first punch he throws but not the second. You will tell him that you heard everything he said when Lucifer was inside of you. You will tell him it’s okay, I’m here, I’m not going to leave you and then he will stop fighting.
He will hold onto your shoulder and his fingers will dig in, and when he moves his hand to the back of your neck they will dig in even more. You will say Dean and you will touch his hands and you will touch his face. He will tell you to be quiet.
You will be quiet, you will be quiet, you will be quiet.
*
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG
Warning: Second-person future tense.
Summary: 5x22 coda. Sam comes back and finds his brother.
*
You will come back. This is a given. You will not crawl out of a shallow grave out of the ground, working your splinters into your fingers and working your nails out of them, and you will not sing Led Zeppelin IV under your breath while you do not do this. You will not wonder if it is all just another trick. This paragraph is someone else’s story.
In your story, you will blink. You will blink and then you will be standing on the ground on grass and the grass will be prickling the soles of your bare feet. You will be standing in the middle of an empty field and although it will be a field you have never stood in before, for a while all you will be able to wonder is how long it has been since you stood on anything at all. You will not know the answer to that question for a few days yet.
But you will come back and you will know that you are not Lucifer, or Michael, or God. You will know that you are no angel, demon, or ghost. You will not quite know whether you are Sam Winchester or not.
So you will pick a direction and you will walk in it. It will take you ten minutes to reach a road and another forty for someone to pull over and offer you a ride. You will whisper please stop and when she does, she will ask you where you want to go and you will say as far as you can take me. She will stare at your bare feet, she will stare at your bare feet the whole ride through. When she drops you off in Tulsa four hours later, she will give you two neatly folded twenty dollar bills and tell you to buy some goddamn shoes.
You will buy some goddamn shoes. You will buy a goddamn burger, too, and eat it in three bites and discover what it feels like to be hungry and then to be full. You will wonder what else has changed. Twenty minutes later, you will feed the last of your change into a payphone and discover that his cell number has changed.
Then you will take your new shoes and walk to the nearest motel and into the first empty room you see, and although it will be a busy night the motel clerk will not give anybody that room’s key. You will stop being honest after that.
The next day, you will walk down to an Apple store, and you will feel your new shoes growing older with every step, and when you reach the store you will Google May 3 2010 on the newest model and you will learn that the world did not end the day before that. Maybe it will turn out that you are Sam Winchester after all.
There will be an error in the security system and the store assistant’s back will be turned when you take the laptop with you as you walk out of the store.
You will test this.
People will not turn around when you tap them on the shoulder. You will take a coin purse from a woman’s bag and then give it back to her and she will not notice either time. The man whose coffee you will drink will buy himself another cup. You will not leave footprints anywhere until you turn around and watch as they creep out of the ground. Nobody will look at you until you tell them to look at you.
It will feel like something is sparking inside of you, and swelling like a balloon.
You will walk into an airport and catch the first flight you can get to Sioux Falls and when you sit in your first class seat and stretch out your legs, you will listen to the flight attendant explaining to the businessman whose seat you are sitting in that it just doesn’t seem to exist. You will spend the flight staring out the window and you will not think about what Lucifer would do to a plane full of people. You will not think about what Lucifer would do to a plane full of people.
You will steal a car to get to Bobby’s. After he opens the door and you tell him to look at you, he will look at you and then say aw hell you better not be Lucifer. You will tell him you don’t know what you are and it will be the truth. He will believe you. He will not try to fight you like your brother told you he tried to fight him, but after you have sat and looked at each for seven long minutes, he will push a bottle of beer towards you. You will take hold of it and look at it, and the bottle will feel too warm or your hand will feel too cold, and you will remember very suddenly the icy way that Lucifer had burned. You will say Bobby I don’t know if I can drink this anymore and he will tell you that there’s only one way to find out and so you will drink it.
You will not want to remember what it feels like.
Afterwards, he will give you the real beer, and after that you will ask him how long you were gone and he’ll tell you. It will be longer than you expected. You will not ask him about your brother.
You will stay a while. Bobby and you will work on the cars or work on the house, which will always need fixing, and neither of you will talk much and you will never tell him to do anything and he will always watch you enter or leave a room. Sometimes he will not notice when you’re standing right in front of him. It will be peaceful and very quiet, but you will feel the balloon stretching thin inside of you and the static electricity on the ends of your hair. One day you will call to Bobby and he will come without question and you will both know, then, that it will be time for you leave.
You will not hunt.
This will not be for lack of trying. But monsters will see you in ways that humans will not, and whatever it is you will be when you come back, the monsters will not like it and they will run. When you come back, they will run. You will rid towns of ghoul infestations, of unwanted spirits, simply by standing in the street and waiting, but you will never get close enough to stop anything. You will never get close enough to anything. When you stand in the street, all the people will leave too. You will begin to notice that when you stand in a crowd, everyone will move away from you without noticing you as if it will be human instinct to be where you are not.
One day you will go to a bar and you will tell a woman to look at you and you will strike up a friendly conversation but you will see all the tiny little muscles in her jaw tensing in ways she won’t even be aware of. You will excuse yourself and walk out of the bar and throw up in the parking lot.
You will not feel incredibly, painfully lonely because there will not be room inside of you for that.
Three days after that, you will wake up and Castiel will be there, in the hotel room that nobody will ever remember you’re staying in. He will not be looking at you, but you will feel that he can see you in the same way that you will feel his presence in the room, filling it up like the sun fills up the sky, only so small because it is a long long long way away. You will not need to ask him to know that he is an angel again.
He will say I thought I should come say hi and you will say hi too. Then you will look at each other, and then he will disappear. You will see, for the first time, the way he twists in the air, and it will be like watching the sun set, knowing that although it has disappeared behind the horizon it is just that you are not in the right place to see it and not that it cannot be seen at all. You will know the right place to see it.
And so a month after you come back, you will stand in the hotel room that isn’t really yours and pack up all the stuff you have stolen because nobody will stop you and when you turn around, the sparking, swelling thing inside of you will suddenly become bigger than you are. You will blink. The street lamp over your head will sputter and go out.
Castiel will say I have learned a lot of things since the day I pulled your brother out of Hell. He will say I think the most important thing I have learned is that you are both extremely dense.
You will not answer him. You will never answer him, because you will be watching through the window of the house across the street from where you will be standing. You will be watching your brother. And you will promise yourself that you won’t make him look at you, and you will promise yourself that you won’t tell him to come to you, and you will promise yourself that whatever it is you are for this one day you will not be it. You will feel a pricking in your thumbs.
Through the window, your brother will twirl his car keys around a finger as he walks towards the door.
You will come back. This is a certainty now. You will come back and although you will not claw your way back to your brother, you will feel those splinters under your fingernails all the same. You will not move, you will not move, although the street lamps will flicker up and down the road and the front door of the house you watch will begin to open and the electrical charge, the balloon under your skin will slowly and perfectly burst.
Whatever it is you will be when you come back, he will see you anyway. He will come to you anyway. He will walk across the street to you with a dazed look on his face and you will smell that he has been drinking and you will block the first punch he throws but not the second. You will tell him that you heard everything he said when Lucifer was inside of you. You will tell him it’s okay, I’m here, I’m not going to leave you and then he will stop fighting.
He will hold onto your shoulder and his fingers will dig in, and when he moves his hand to the back of your neck they will dig in even more. You will say Dean and you will touch his hands and you will touch his face. He will tell you to be quiet.
You will be quiet, you will be quiet, you will be quiet.
*