fic commentary: eurydice
Er. I've become very fascinated by my writing process of late, thanks to remix and stuff. Perhaps it's just my own personal narcissism? But then fleshflutter did an author commentary of 'Dread the Passing...' and I got awfully excited about it. And then someone remixed Eurydice, and I got awfully excited about that too.
Which somehow added up to TELL THE INTERNET YOUR THOUGHTS. Idk. I've never written a commentary from this perspective before, so I had to spend a lot of time mentally stamping on my fingers before I could get started on lexical choice and sentence structure and all those kinds of things that my EngLang teachers loved and everyone else would probably hate.
(I was the English Language master of commentaries, back in college. Never got less than 45/50 in the practise papers. Aw yeah. Which- probably does not equal the master of fanfic commentaries, haha.)
Maybe someone will find this interesting? I'm sure lapifors will, if nobody else.
EURYDICE.
(go get your heart back from the great beyond)
That fullstop is important. ‘Eurydice’ isn’t a title, really; it’s a statement.
+
I got ready to write this knowing only two things for sure. 1, it was going to be about Orpheus and Eurydice; 2, it was going to look good. (We all know how I feel about this, don’t we. I’ll say it all again anyway: the internet is as much a visual medium as it is a text-based one, and I just DON’T UNDERSTAND why people aren’t putting the two together more often. I know I’m not the only artist who writes as well, and I’m not even a very good artist, so why there isn’t this beautiful art/writing movement coming about I just don’t know. Viva la revolution of pretty?) Then I decided that Sam would be driving to meet Dean, and the rest of it just kind of cobwebbed out as my brain disengaged from the map of America I was trying (and failing) to navigate.
PRETTY IMAGE 1: the co-ordinates to the Grand Canyon, roughly. There should be some decimal points, but I didn’t want it to be that precise. It’s not like the texts John sent them, to show them where they should go. I wanted it be like, over the years of them living this life, the numbers had worn down into something more symbolic. Symbolism isn’t about precision, is it. (Obviously, I never actually made any of this clear in the story, and I doubt anyone actually bothered to look the co-ordinates up, but it was something I needed to know.)
I turned to Wikipedia to find out about the roads (I really could not read that map), and by some wonderful twist of fate the first one I clicked on was 89, which takes you down to the Grand Canyon. After discovering that, I knew it was where Sam had to go. Sam goes south on route 89, the long ride down towards home like a freefall, Home is Dean, of course. I had this mental image of them being like two magnets with poles that keep switching, sending them spiralling across the country towards or away from each other, either direction impossible to resist. Constant movement. That’s where the freefalling comes in with all the windows rolled down on his piece-of-junk pickup just not enough to let the heat out. It’s been like this all summer, a tidal wave of heat rolled out across the continent, and it feels good. It feels fanfuckingtastic. This fuck-up is something natural for once, no demons or witches or misplaced curses in sight, and the day that stops being a cause for celebration is the day he might as well just give up.
“At least we can stop demons,” Bobby had muttered darkly, but that was last week and Sam’s gone west hard and fast since. Dean left the co-ordinates with Bobby; maybe I should have mentioned that? It didn’t really seem that important- much as I love the guy, this wasn’t really about what Dean does There’s no time for meandering cross-country voyages these days; no scenic routes, or coffee breaks, or roadside oddities to stop and admire. Journeys are state lines and road signs, Edges and lines and signs. That’s what it’s about, really. Another of those things that I needed to know, even if nobody else did, anyway and Sam comes off of interstate 90 in Wyoming, heads south. He’s freefalling to Dean with sweat dripping into his eyes, everything alive with the motor-engine thrum of soon.
He spends the night in a motel he’s already lost track of, because night-time is a prospect he still can't quite face. There was going to be more about this, about Sam’s aversion to the darkness/night-time. Hell must be dark. It would be for me, anyway. But then I... didn’t, haha. I knew all about it, and that’s enough for me! It’s plain and neon-edged (edges! \o/); the girl at the desk doesn’t even blink when he asks for the yellow pages with his room key, just smiles dully as she passes it over the counter, thankyouhaveanicenight.
There is an almost meditative quality to it as he flips through the pages, folded up on the room’s single queen with the book cradled in his lap, his movements practised, ritualistic. This is the first sense we get, I think, of there being something wrong with this situation. Meditative and practised and ritualistic movements are, to me, the movements you’ve been doing a lot. For a long, long time. (I, for one, go into a trance-like state when I brush my hair.) He calls all the bars listed under W (“Hello, I think a friend of mine passed through here recently. Did anyone leave a message for Floyd Barrett?”); and then he tries D; and then he tries S. I had a lot of fun making up names, by the way.
He doesn’t sleep that night.
“-and the whole damn family is like that, you know. Brother in jail, and his sister probably should be. She’s a real piece of work-”
The barmaid is chatty here. She’s really fucking chatty, which is probably why all the barstools are empty on a busy, Friday night. Sam frowns down into his beer, nods in what he hopes are all the right places, and lets her voice just wash over him. There’s nothing as peaceful as a one-sided conversation, so long as you’re on the right side. He needs some peace.
“-and if I’ve told my sister once, I’ve told her a million times, that guy is nothing but trouble, but does she listen to me? Of course she fucking doesn’t. He pawned off her engagement ring last week, can you believe it. Romance is dead? I said to her, that’s not dead, that’s fucking cremated-” I REALLY LIKE THIS BARMAID, okay. Haha. She was an unexpected entity. Originally Sam was just going to sulk in the bar a bit until he found the envelope (the envelope was always, always planned (and so was what was in it)), but then she started talking and just would not shut up.
It’s the kind of place Dean would like, he knows: smoke-filled and noisy and just this side of hygienic, but not so bad that he’d worry about Sam following him in. The novelty sunglasses perched on the stuffed ‘gator head that hangs over the bar, days away from Florida, are just the cherry on the cake. It screams Dean like a punch to the gut, which is pretty much the only reason Sam set foot inside in the first place, when he’d been eating up the miles like the sun was never going to set. He’s drank too much for that now, even if he were still in the mood for it.
“-people are no good, you know. People just aren’t any good-”
There’s nothing here; no secret messages tucked into an empty bottle, or scratched into the plaster, or left under any of the usual names. The usual names = another implication that this has been going on for a while. Yay! Obviously, people may or may not have interpreted it that way, but it’s what I was thinking when I wrote it. His hands are sticky-tacky against the bar-top, fingertips fusing to wood a few wipe-downs short of tolerable; and the music is obnoxiously loud; and the place stinks of sweat and strangers; and he could just crawl right out of his fucking skin, shout out to the gods ‘okay, you win, I quit, just let me-’
“Sam?”
It’s not Dean, but his heart jolts anyway. Because of course Sam is living his life on the edge of hope that Dean will randomly show up one day and say ‘Sam! It’s me! I have the answer!’ (which, in a way, he probably does. But Sam just can’t face that risk, so he’s waiting hopeless/fully for hard fact instead.)The barmaid is looking at him, frowning, hand still wrapped around the glass she was cleaning a second ago.
“Sorry,” she says. Her voice is a lot pleasanter when it isn’t rallying against her sister’s taste in men. “But it had completely slipped my mind, and then you gave me all these different names, so I never thought about it until I just looked up and saw you. It is Sam, isn’t it? Guy came by here a couple days ago, really hot, said his name was Dean, said you’d be passing through soon enough...”
She smiles a little, like the memory is a good one. Sam’s mouth has gone dry. “He must have a photographic memory or something, the way he rattled off your face. This was another thing that never really made it into the final cut: Dean had a camera. He had a picture of Sam stuck to the dashboard of the Impala and probably he stared at it longingly a lot; so, y’know, not so much a photographic memory as a memory of a photograph. Thought he might’ve been a cop, he’da looked great in the uniform, you know, but then I just completely forgot until now-”
“Did he- did he leave a message?” He coughs, words catching on the air, and rubs his palms against the sticky bar-top. “Anything?”
“Oh, yeah. I stuck it in the register, so it’d be safe. You never know what you’ll lose, if you don’t keep things safe-” This is referenced later. I think that everything that Sam does/thinks/hears comes back to Dean sooner or later. Hell, he only went into this bar in the first place because it reminded him of Dean.
“Can I have it?” The words come out sharper than he means them to, his voice too loud even over the blood-rushing beat of his heart in his eardrums, and she flinches back a half-step. “Please,” he adds, softer. Sam is a bitch.
He can see all the theories forming behind her eyes as she fishes out the key to the cash register: maybe they are cops after all, or secret agents, or mafia crimelords, and her eyes are wide, wide, wide as she leans across the bar to slip him the envelope. There’s a lot of this; people crossing over things to give stuff to Sam, stuff that’ll help him find Dean. Oblivious twat. It’s flat and white, heavy with the weight of something more than paper. She’s close enough he can smell her perfume- something sweet and musky- can almost feel her breath as she whispers, “Good luck.” Could it be a sign? Why, I do believe it could just be.
She’s pretty in the smoke and bar-light, fitting neatly into it like there had been a hole shaped just for her, and Sam wants to ask, before he leaves, if Dean- if his brother- I don’t know how clear that is, but what he was wanting to ask is if Dean fucked her. Or maybe just if he seemed okay.
But he doesn’t.
PRETTY THING 2: Dean had a lot more to say about eggs, in the first drafts. Boy really liked them. (Why is Dean carrying around brightly coloured bits of paper, anyway? I like to think he collects free stationery samples wherever he goes.)
Sam finds this one tucked behind the cistern of the second cubicle, the door with an x-marks-the-spot. O HAY IT’S A SIGN. He follows its advice, because what else is there to do? -and he takes his coffee black. There are smiley faces drawn in the corners of all the menus he can find to look at, like Dean wasn’t sure where Sam would sit. The tiny, anatomically improbable dick is only on this one though, the luckiest of guesses or maybe-
(Maybe Dean was just here, just now, left the drawing and slipped away when Sam was in the bathroom, is still here somewhere, hiding, waiting for the perfect moment, the grand surprise, the ‘I told you I could fix this’ with a big, big grin...)
-just maybe.
The eggs are good, and so is the coffee. The waitress smiles at him like he’s the best thing she’s seen all day as she comes by with the tray, “You give me a shout the second you need anything, you hear?”, and Sam thinks about asking her if she’s seen his brother.
He thinks about hot pokers and drills and staring directly into the sun. I’m not sure if this was really clear, either, but I didn’t know how else to word it without just taking a mallet to your faces. He’s thinking about blinding himself. Or at least, how one might go about blinding oneself, if one were so inclined.
I had no idea he was going to go see Jo, but then he did. What a free spirit Sam is! Which came in handy, as I wasn’t sure how to logically get him Dean’s phone number, otherwise. Jo’s got a bar not far out of Salt Lake these days, and she doesn’t look the least bit surprised when Sam ducks through the doorway. That’s what tells him, faster than any secret message ever could, that Dean was here not so long ago.
“It’s all or nothing with you guys, isn’t it,” she says with a smile; it’s wary, but her eyes are as welcoming as the tender of a hunter bar can ever be. “Your good-for-nothing other half says hi.”
He laughs, throws an arm around her shoulders and draws her in close as he says, “Two for joy, you know,” because they’re not- were never- close, but there’s nothing so comforting as being around the people who know. What happened, and why, and what it means now. She saw Dean’s face, and right now that’s better than any amount of shared history could ever be.
A few men look up at the sound of his laughter, all grizzled faces and the easy slouches of regulars. Maybe in another life they’d be the kind of clientele to take offense at some guy getting so close with the pretty, and taken, woman who runs their watering hole of choice, but there’s nobody here who doesn’t know the face of a Winchester anymore. They nod at him from over their beers; Sam nods back from over Jo’s head. I really liked this, but I’m not quite sure why. For all my premonitions of doom and gloom and Demon!Sam destroying the world, I really would like their story to have an ending where they do something good and the rest of- if not the world, then their wacky little community of nutters recognised it. Hooray for mutual respect!
“It’s only joy when the magpies are together,” she points out, not unkindly, as she ducks out from under his arm. She takes a step back, looking up at him with the kind of studying gaze that wouldn’t be out of place on Ellen. She’s looking more like her mother, Sam thinks, with every year that passes. “One’s just for sorrow.”
“Subtle, Jo.”
“You know it.” She turns back to the bar, cloth in hand to clean some glasses or wipe the surface down or maybe just make a show of productivity while she waits for whatever it is she thinks Sam’s going to say next. He doesn’t know when he became so predictable, but it was probably around the same time life became so goddamn tiring. Predictable = practised and ritualistic = apparently Sam’s canonical coping mechanism (I ♥ Mystery Spot). Or something. Sam is very tired with this life (but maybe not tired enough to take risks about it). Back at the beginning is how ‘the day [natural fuck-ups] stop being a cause for celebration is the day he might as well just give up’; he’s forcing himself to celebrate things and live and not be Robo-Sam , because Dean is still alive and he’s just got to be happy with that. But it is hard.
“Look,” he begins. Jo doesn’t look up, busily scrubbing at a stain in the wood like there’s nothing in the world as important as getting it out. It’s quiet for a Saturday night, empty save for the people with nowhere else to go, and they’re not the sort to listen in on conversations; he keeps his voice low anyway, leaning in close. “Is he. How is he?”
“He’s fine, Sam,” she murmurs. She touches his hand with a rueful smile, the dishcloth rubbing across his knuckles. “Fine as he can be. Quiet. Every word out of his mouth was about you, you know. Sam this, Sam that, just wait until I tell Sam about...” Her fingers are tiny, so tiny, next to his, but that was years ago. He’d wanted nothing more, then, than to just sink into the peace and quiet and wait for the world to pass him by. Now, he doesn’t have the time.
She taps his wrist, smile brightening, and jerks her head towards the backroom. “Come on, I’ve got a hunt for you. Could be a banshee.”
“No, I can’t, I’ve got to-”
“Dean wanted you to,” she says doggedly. “He would’ve done it himself, but he wasn’t sure how far behind you were. Didn’t want to risk bumping into you.” Jo totally manipulated that fucker. (Dean probably told her to.)
They’re the magic words.
And then suddenly it’s twenty-something hours later, time spent chasing spirits and burning bones when he should have been driving. He’s lost a whole day, and it’s with shaking hands that he starts the engine, Jo’s voice a blur of white-noise somewhere in the back of his head. Everything pales in comparison to Dean! I really enjoy that it’s white-noise in his head whilst it’s dark outside. Juxtaposition is sexy. Even if it’s the kind of juxtaposition I’m probably the only one to notice/care about.
“It’s not that big of a deal, Sam. It’s just one day.” She tugs at his arm though the truck’s window, grabs at his hands and tries to pull them away. He can’t look at her, but he can’t look anywhere else either; it’s getting dark. Hi, Sam’s aversion to darkness. We barely knew you.
“Sam,” she says, and there’s an edge of pleading to her words as she fights to prise away his fingers from the steering wheel. “Leave it till morning, at least. This is Dean we’re talking about. He’ll wait for you. He’ll always wait.”
“What if he doesn’t?” he grits out. He’s aiming for threatening, but he just sounds like a thing in pain. “What if, this time, he.”
“Sam.”
“I can’t risk it. I just can’t.” He says this again later. Cyclical! Because, obviously, he can’t break this vicious cycle until he takes a damn hint and crosses the line. But he can’t, because he can’t risk it. And so it all begins agaaaain...
She lets him go, smacking her palms against the side of the door, once, twice, three times, hard enough that he can feel it vibrate through him. “Dammit. God fucking dammit,” she exclaims. A fourth time, and she pulls back with a pained hiss, rubbing at her fingers. “When did this all get so fucked up? When the fuck, Sam?” Writing this made me like Jo, by the way. I got over my initial ‘ew, she twirls knives’ a while ago, and then it was just neutrality, until this whole section here with her being all ‘SAM YOU FUCKING IDIOT’. Because he is.
The engine is still rumbling softly in the background, but it feels a hundred miles away. He feels a hundred miles away, flat and tired. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to-”
“Like hell I shouldn’t have to. Come here, give me your hand.” She yanks his wrist through the window before he has a chance to react, tugging the cap off of a pen with her teeth. Look, see, the lowly mortal is actually physically pulling him through the edge of the open window to give him his sign. I’m amazed there isn’t a giant hand of God just reaching down from the sky and whacking him round the head. The nib digs into the flesh of his palm, numbers scratching through at least a half-dozen layers of skin. I liked the idea of this piece of Dean getting under Sam’s skin, the absolute closeness vs the self-imposed distance. “This,” she’s saying, as she writes, “is Dean’s number, okay? Don’t you dare wash it off. And don’t think I won’t call him myself to check, because I will. You know I will.”
It’s numbing, almost. His hand drops like a weight when she lets it go.
“Don’t you dare wash it off,” she says again. Her fingers are cool against his forehead, and then her lips, and when she pulls back her eyes are too bright in the lamplight. “Drive, then.”
He pulls out of the parking lot in a squeal of tyres on gravel, his heart hanging heavy in his throat and Jo wrapping her arms around herself in the rear-view mirror, tiny and angry and already fading away.
Six hours later, the sun begins to rise. The sky creeps into greyish blue, the edges saturated with pink, and Sam lets himself pull over to the side of the road. He twists the key in the ignition, feeling it in the palms of his hands wrapped around the steering wheel as the engine dies with one long, drawn-out rattle. His hands would be shaking, he knows, if they weren’t clenched so tight. He feels like he’s made of nothing but grit and bone. I like this bit. Grit and bone, and earlier on he was crawling out of his skin, and later he’s keeping his bones in his skin. It’s cold and hard and nasty. This isn’t the Sam from Mystery Spot, not by a long shot, but it’s still a Sam in a very fucked-up situation, hardening himself against his brother because it’s all he feels he can do. He’s all caught up in a cycle of his own making. Poor old thing.
He’s alive and the sun is rising and it will never be night again, until the next time it is. The curve of the steering wheel cradles his head easily, and it’s just as easy to let his eyes close and his shoulders heave in relief. Time passes by, probably, but Sam is outside of it.
“Hey.” Something raps against the window. “Hey buddy, you okay?”
He blinks his eyes open, squinting in the daylight. The something is a person, shadowed by the sun as he, she, he- definitely a he- bends down to catch a look at Sam. He knocks on the window again. “You all right in there?”
It’s an effort to sit up, but Sam manages it, rubbing a hand across his face and pushing his hair out of his eyes. “I’m fine,” he says, with a smile and a jaunty wave, and the guy looks sceptical. He must look bad, Sam knows, but he feels worse.
“Really,” he tries again, letting the smile fade into something hopefully a bit more natural. “I’m okay. I just, uh. I lost my brother, and...” He trails off. The guy’s scratching at his beard, still looking worried, but there’s the light of sympathetic understanding in his eyes.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “You take it easy. Rest up in a proper bed instead of in your automobile.”
“Will do.” Sam waves again as the guy walks away, back towards his truck. It’s nearly the truth, anyway. He goes through the motions of being a real boy, tidying himself and the cabin until the truck has pulled out onto the highway and driven away. Then he slumps back in his seat and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. He breathes deep. ‘Lost his brother’. Christ. Should have stuck him in an envelope and put him in the cash register. There we go. Back to the barmaid again. Just in case you were all forgetting about her and her mysterious envelope. Should have kept a better hold of him from the start. Should have...
He pulls out his cell and dials the number as good as carved into his skin. And there’s that number being a part of him I like so much. Gosh, I’m repetitive. It rings, and rings, and Sam rests his head against the sun-warmed glass of the window. It’s all dry earth and scrubby bushes outside; he has no idea where he is anymore, just that he’s pointing in the right direction. And speaking of repetitive, right direction = home = Dean. Pointing is a good verb. It’s very passive, to me. Kind of dehumanising. You point fingers or guns or cars or whatever, but you don’t point people. It’s my wacky irresistibly-moving magnets mental image again.
Something clicks, loud and close into his ear, and then, “This had better be good,” Dean’s voice grumbles. Sam closes his eyes. This is before I’ve let you in on the big secret of what’s going on, isn’t it (unless you caught the title-sized hint, ofc), so Sam closing his eyes just seems like a harmless little detail. Maybe it still seems like a harmless little detail! This is just about what I was thinking as I wrote it.
“Dean.”
There’s a pause, the rustle of static and background movement that he can almost see And there’s another significant/insignificant detail for you, it sounds that close: Dean sitting up straighter, maybe brushing a hand through his hair as he licks his lips nervously, compulsively.
“Sam?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” His lips curl upwards of their own accord, some natural, physical reaction to deandeandean. “It’s me. Jo gave me your number.”
“That girl.”
“I know. She, uh. She told me you’d been by. She says hi, by the way. I took care of that hunt for her. Wasn’t a banshee after all, just a really noisy poltergeist. Too much time on its hands, but, uh.” He draws in a slow breath, willing himself to shut up. “Hi. Dean.”
“Hey Sammy,” Dean murmurs. His voice catches on the ‘S’, fractures somewhere on the second syllable.
“Yeah,” Sam says. This bit really upset me! Haha, I’m a lamer. I think the writing maybe suffered for that, a little; it was affected by it, anyway. It was a hard scene to do, and I have this unfortunate, theatre-borne habit of acting out the protagonist as I write them. So, inevitably, things got a little bit Method, and I had to put the pen down for a while, and when I picked it back up again I’m not sure I brought across just how painful it was for Sam. He bites down on his knuckles, feeling every second of every minute of it all harder than he has in months. It’s a physical ache again, going deep, deep, deep, like something new and freshly torn. His skin scrapes against his teeth, and he swallows thickly to the taste of blood. The words choke out of him. “Fuck, Dean. I. Fuck.”
“Hey, hey, easy. Easy, Sam. It’s okay. Breathe. You’re still coming, right?”
“Yeah, I.” He sucks in a breath, steadying himself against his stupid, ugly, piece-of-junk dashboard. No vehicle can truly compare to the awesomeness that is the Impala, alas. Dean’s voice is as soothing as it ever was. “I’m coming.”
“You in your truck?” Dean doesn’t wait for an answer, taking it for granted that if Sam isn’t in it already he will be right the fuck now, no room for argument. “Stick the key in the ignition, give it a turn, let the engine wake up. Easy does it.”
“I know how to drive, asshole.” He rests his free hand against the steering wheel, feeling the engine rumble as he fights down the grin.
“I’m sure you do,” Dean agrees easily and completely disbelievingly. “She woken up now?”
“Yes, Dean, she’s woken up.” He snorts, and Dean’s laughter rattles down the phone line. He could stay here, like this, forever, if only they would let him.
“Gotta treat you girl right, Sammy,” he says once he’s done laughing. His voice has gotten deeper, Sam notices, rougher, since the last time they spoke. Another hint at the length of time! I never really made it clear how long this was (because where’s the fun in that) so it was cool to see my remixer go for five years. I will say that she was kinder to them than I was.“Okay. (Dean says okay a lot when he’s being reasonable/comforting. This is canonical fact, and I love it.) Now, you hang up the phone and put pedal to metal, before I haveta drive out there and do it myself.”
And this is why. This is why they had to get new numbers, after the first few months had crept by, because no matter how often they hang up on each other it never gets any easier. Sam swallows, rubs his hand across his mouth. It never stops feeling like it- like this, right here- is going to be the last damn time they say goodbye.
“Now, Sam.”
“I will, I will. Just- talk.”
Dean doesn’t question it. If anyone is going to understand this it would be him, after all. His voice is bright, somehow cheerful, as he rattles off the first thing that comes into his head: “I’m thinking I might head to Florida next, catch a bit of sun and sand and relaxation. Hot chicks in bikinis. Maybe even go to Disney World. You used to have such a hard-on for Disney, do you remember? Every time we went near the place, it’d be all Dad, Dad, let’s go to Disney World, Dad. And this is when you were in double figures, man. It was fucking embarrassing-” I think there are few things out there more agonising than the moment of silence after you hang up on a person you really don’t want to. If this were a film, here would be the moment where we get a split screen of Dean and Sam staring wretchedly down at the phones in their hands, perhaps lowering them slowly from their ears, Joshua Radin playing something tearjerking in the background...
Sam keeps hold of his cell for a long moment afterwards, letting the silence ring into his ears. The plastic casing is warm, damp, against his cheeks. He’ll scrub the phone number off of his palm, he knows, delete it from his history; and the next time he tries it again, gives up on pretending he didn’t memorise the numbers the second he saw them, it’ll be unrecognised, rubbed out of existence. He wipes his face, tosses the cell phone into the empty seat, and shifts the pickup into gear. No idea where he is means no idea how far he’s got left to go, but he can feel the miles prickling down his spine, and he knows- he knows- it’s not long now. Sam can sense the distance because he is, in fact, a magnet. YES.
It takes him a minute to move again, once he’s stopped by the Impala, pressed a hand to her sun-hot roof.
“Hey, girl,” he whispers. Oh, you all know he calls her girl when Dean isn’t looking. She’s impossibly smooth, and Sam can imagine Dean stood in the parking lot- right in this spot, even- shirt off in the noonlight as he waxes and polishes and makes her completely fucking perfect, an extension of his soul on display. Just ready and waiting for Sam to trail his hands over and rest his face against.
In the end, it takes the latest desk jockey’s watchful, incredulous stare through the window of the motel’s check-in for Sam to tear himself away. The last thing he needs is some overeager teen thinking he’s trying to jack the car- or worse- and calling the cops. But he pats her hood affectionately as he passes her by, just to imagine how smugly vindicated Dean’s expression would have been.
“Hi,” he says, nudging the door closed behind him. The office is sweltering, sweat beading across his forehead within seconds. His mouth is dry. “My friend, Angus, has a room here. Angus Scott? He’s been expecting me.”
Today he is Keith Roger, meeting his buddy for a fishing trip or a family wedding There was a Brokeback joke here. It didn’t really work, key-ring digging into his palm so tight he can feel his pulse beating against it, hard, fast. Angus is expecting him, had even left a message.
PRETTY THING 3: I love this one. It is pink! For that extra little dash of sample-stationery silliness.
It turns out there are two rooms next to his, one on either side, and Sam hadn’t asked the kid at the desk which number ‘Angus’ was in; but it doesn’t exactly take great amounts of genius to figure that the room with the curtains duct-taped shut so tightly he can’t catch a slightest glimpse through the window- that room might just be the one with his brother inside. He lets his hands drift down the wood of the door before rapping it smartly with his knuckles, dot-dot-dot, dot-dash, dash-dash = Sam, by the way. There’s movement from inside, the sound of something being knocked over and hastily righted, and he rests his forehead against the doorframe as he waits.
“Got ‘em shut?” calls Dean from the other side. Sam feels his heart loosen at the sound of it, of him, so close.
“Yeah,” he says, clamping his hands down over his eyes just in case, just to be sure. He feels the click-turn of locks and bolts, the rush of air as the door swings open, and then there are Dean’s hands on him, fingers shaking as they lock around his elbows, smooth up and down the bare skin of his forearms, catch at the edges of his sleeves and lead him through the doorway.
At last, at last, at last is the mantra running through every corner of Sam’s brain, at last, and then it’s tumbling out of his mouth as well. He’s tugged forwards three more steps, and he hears the door slam shut again seconds before he’s being walked backwards into it, pressed up against it as Dean’s hands catch hold of his own and prise them away from his face.
“Let me,” Dean is whispering, “Let me,” and “Sam. Sam. Sam,” and Sam drops his hands and squeezes his eyes shut so tight, the black behind his lids exploding into blue, and Dean’s hands spread across his face, fingers curling under his jaw as his thumbs smooth the hair away from his temples. Sam grabs Dean’s shirt in fistfuls, tugging him in close enough that they’re breathing the same air, and he needs. He runs his hands through Dean’s hair, wonders if it’s greying yet Grey hair! Because time has passed!- knows it would look good- and Dean’s boots are kicking his feet further apart. He spreads his legs and a thigh slots easily between his own I like the slotting. He’s been all grit and bone and out of place, because right there between Dean’s thighs is where he should be, rubbing up against him as their hips slide together and Dean’s hands scrabble for purchase at the wood behind Sam’s head.
“Dean. God, God, Dean.” And Dean’s hips are rocking forwards; and Sam’s hands are at his belt, his skin, just sliding down to palm helplessly at both their cocks, fingers caught between the grind of denim; and his eyes are burning like heartbreak Is that cheesy? It might be cheesy. Maybe I should have said ‘burning like heartburn’, tears slipping down his cheeks, and he can feel Dean’s breath hitching into the hollow of his collarbone; and everything is heat, everything is- and then he’s coming with a sob, he’s reclaiming his place against Dean’s parted lips; welcome home, welcome home.
There we go. Home. (As seen in the beginning, because this is all just a BIG FUCKING CIRCLE.) Our two wayward magnets are finally drawn together again. I wanted this reunion to seem like that, like they really are being drawn together by some irresistible force and the second the obstacle (ie door) is removed from their paths they just immediately have to grab on to each other and touch each other. And Dean is just desperate to see Sam’s face (“Let me”... “Let me”) whilst Sam is doing everything he can to keep himself from looking. There was a whole chunk cut out of here, with happy conversations and happy sex, because it just didn’t fit.
“I don’t know why you love this place so much,” Sam mutters, late afternoon and he's prickling with heat, skin itching under the stupid knit-cap he only wears because it can roll down over his eyes. Blindfolds on a budget. Dean thinks it's hilarious. Dean thinks everything is hilarious. The goddamn fucking hat. Do you know how hard it is to introduce hats neatly into your writing? Hard, is how hard. It was first brought up in there with the deleted happiness, and then when that left I spent about an hour of rewriting this bit and that bit and those bits over there to try and fit the hat in. Bastard.
And Dean’s laughter is close enough to catch on the hair on the back of his neck, his hand a heavy presence between Sam’s shoulder blades. Every couple of seconds, Sam catches a glimpse of movement that just might be his brother at the corners of his vision, and he has to close his eyes tightly and remind himself of just how hard they had to fight to get this far. He can’t throw it all away for a glance at Dean’s elbows.
“It’s big,” is all Dean says.
“It was big last time we saw it. Might even be big next time, too.” He folds his arms against the railing, lets his wrists hang loosely over the edge. Freefalling, he thinks. Holy shit, his hands are hanging over the edge of the rather Godly canyon that a fricking sign led him to, whilst he thinks about the freefalling that was initially mentioned right at the beginning, thus continuing the VICIOUS CYCLE. I am as subtle as a mallet. Except that this was all stuff that I was just thinking about as I wrote, not stuff that I was really saying, so perhaps it’s more like I’m malleting myself in the face here.
“Smartass.” Dean sighs, ghosting his thumb across the nape of Sam’s neck, where hat meets skin. His chin jabs against Sam’s shoulder. “I mean, it’s- big. Too big for us to do anything about it, whether we wanna or not. We could blow it up, but that’d just make a bigger hole. We could fill it with dirt, maybe, but that, Sammy- that’d just leave us with another hole to deal with. There’s nothing we can do. ‘Cept try not to fall in it, anyway.” Dean has a poet’s soul. You all know it.
There’s another flash of movement, and Sam closes his eyes. “Dean, are you making a metaphor?”
“Live with it, bitch. Your eyes closed?” Sam jerks his head a fraction in some semblance of a nod, but Dean’s face is pressed close enough that he can feel it. He breathes out “Awesome,” against Sam’s spine This + ‘Dean’s laughter is close enough to catch on the hair at the back of [Sam’s] neck = the numbers in Sam’s skin again. I think I just have a thing for people becoming parts of other people , and his free hand slides up under the hem of Sam’s t-shirt, splays wide-fingered across his stomach. He holds on tight.
Even with his eyes closed, Sam can feel the canyon opening out before them, can feel the edge that they’re standing on and the long, long, drop down. *applies mallet to face* (also, it rather pleases me that this is the only actual mention we get of the fact that they’re at a canyon, and nothing at all that it’s the GRAND Canyon. Could I be the only person to send their protagonist to the Grand fuckin’ Canyon without having a single mention of its epic scenery? Probably not, but still. It’s not about what the Canyon looks like. Of course it’s not. It’s barely even about the Canyon, anymore. See also: Pretty thing 1.)
“I didn’t know,” he says at last, “that it would be this hard.”
“Regret it?”
That’s an easy one. “No.”
Dean sighs again, and Sam feels the hand against his stomach rub in a slow circle. “How much longer we gotta do this, Sammy?” he whispers into Sam’s bones. Hi, it’s the bones again. Grit and bones, keeping his bones inside his skin, and so on and so forth. Initially, he whispered it into Sam’s skin, but that lasted about one second before I realised that was 1, too soft, and 2, just not gone deep enough. I really do like it when people become parts of each other, guys. It is a thing.
(It may excite you to know that in the barest of the first drafts- which was composed basically of the opening paragraphs, a few lines about a bar, Dean’s thoughts on eggs, and that conversation up there- this was the end. (Actually, the very end of that first draft was “Not much longer,” Sam lies.))
Back in the motel parking lot, the sun is still high enough overhead that everything is close and hot, heavy with the scent of baked earth. Dean’s shoulder is against Sam’s shoulder, Dean’s hip against Sam’s hip, as they lean back against the truck together. That’s just more gratuitous slotting together. In my defence, Sam’s been displaced from the world around him throughout this (in the bar- “the place stinks of sweat and strangers”; and with Jo- “He feels a hundred miles away”; and on the road- “Time passes by, probably, but Sam is outside of it”, to name but a few); now he’s back where he belongs, I shall milk it for all it is worth. Sam must look relatively stupid, he knows, with the hat pulled down so far over his face in this weather, but it’s nigh on a decade since he gave up on normal O hay a hint of how long it’s been. The question is, of course, when do you think he gave up on normal?, and it’s getting harder every month to remember what it ever felt like.
Dean shifts in a creak of leather and his boots scuff against the dirt. It was quite tricky, by the way, to keep all this movement as sound and touch. Fuck sake, Sam, just open your eyes and make it easier for me to write. He exhales, inches from Sam’s ear. “I don’t.”
Sam waits, listening to his brother breathe.
“I don’t want to do this for the rest of our lives, Sam,” he says, eventually, slowly, like each word has been carefully measured. “I can’t do that.”
He’s been expecting it really, almost, but that doesn’t make it any better. He tugs the hat down lower over his eyes. “You want to stop?”
“What- no. No. I don’t wanna-” There’s the sound of Dean standing up straighter, his fists knocking against the side of the truck, and then he catches hold of Sam’s elbow and turns him around. It’s an imitation of eye-to-eye. “I wanna fix it.”
“And- what? You think that hadn’t crossed my mind, I dunno, once or twice over the past few years?”
“Don’t be a bitch, Sam. Not about this.”
“Then what do you want me to say? ‘Oh, okay, I’ll just go bargain with the gods, Dean. Thanks for the input, Dean!’” He shrugs Dean’s hands away. He’s got no idea where he is, never does when he’s with Dean, but he starts to walk anyway, just needing to move.
He doesn’t get far before Dean is tugging him back, gently this time, “Hey, hey, stop.” Sam lets him, feels the edge of the pickup against his spine and Dean’s palms against his chest. “I’ve not exactly been jumping for joy at this whole fucking mess, either.” He breathes; Sam doesn’t -and doesn’t that just sum it all up? “Look at me.”
“What?”
There’s a pause, to the soundtrack of distant conversation and the grind of the highway. “I mean it. Look at me. See what happens.”
“We already know what happens.”
“We don’t. I don’t.” Dean’s hands slide down, fingers splaying over his ribs. Somewhere, a door slams. “Not for certain. Come on, try it, find out.”
It takes a drawn-out moment for Sam to process what his brother is saying, to process just how stupid his brother can be, and then he’s shaking his head in disbelief. “Are you completely insane, Dean, or does it just come and go?”
“So you know what a sign from the gods looks like? You familiarised yourself with the divine thumbs-up? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, Sam, I have no fucking clue what I’m looking for here.” It’s light, easy. It’s pleading too, and there are days, even now, when Sam can read Dean’s voice better than he can read his own. “Listen. Listen to me, okay. In all the old stuff, the gods do their prophetic bullshit through the lowly mortals. People like you and me. I’m here, Sam, I'm saying this. Maybe this is your goddamn sign.” (This here upset me a bit too. I’d been planning a much happier ending- even had bits of it written- but about halfway through Dean’s Big Moment I realised that it couldn’t. Awkward.)
He wants to see his brother’s face. God, gods, whatever, he just wants so fucking bad to see his brother’s face.
“Please,” Dean whispers.
It’s an effort for Sam to lift his hands and wrap them around Dean’s wrists and- gently, this time-pull them away; for him to push Dean back. He says, “No.”
He says, “I can’t risk it. I can’t lose you completely.”
He feels cold, and hard, and certain There, see, he repeats the ‘I can’t risk it’, and hardens himself a little bit more. It’s not Mystery Spot!Sam, but he’s not so far off, but Dean just feels tense, his shoulders wound impossibly tight beneath Sam’s hands. It doesn’t matter. He’s there. He’s alive, and that is all the reason Sam will ever need to live this fucked up life.
The night is as dark as it ever is, hanging hot and empty. Sam lies on his bed fully clothed, eyes wide open as he stares up at the shadows. It’s like waiting for the world to fall apart again, and he focuses on breathing, on keeping his bones inside his skin. Everything ends, he knows, in darkness. Keeping his bones inside his skin, as in, not crawling out of it and doing that shouting at the gods thing that’ll ruin it all. Lots of night and darkness and shadows, too. What ends in darkness? Hell or death or the end of the world, or maybe just closing his eyes.
‘My bed’s big enough for two,’ Dean had said, tightly, unhappily, as Sam twisted the handle of Keith Roger’s door. He’d half-turned towards the sound of his voice, and Dean had been standing close enough that he could feel him in the air. It would have been nice to say yes, to throw caution to the wind for just one fucking night.
He’d said nothing, and Dean had said ‘Yeah, I guess not’. And then ‘I’m heading out early tomorrow’. And then ‘Bye, Sam’.
“Just give me the sign,” Sam whispers now, to whatever might be listening. And despite how he’s trying to keep himself hard and inside his skin, he can’t help but shout out to the gods anyway, just a little. “Please, just give me something.” Here was the ending that I had to change. The phone rang. (Dean was on the other end of it. It was beautiful and hopeful and just not right for this story.)
And he waits, and he waits. I never really say it here, but I think it’s not a great leap of interpretive logic to assume that whilst Sam is waiting he isn’t sleeping. Which is what he’s doing right back at the beginning, if you’ll remember? It’s a vicious cyyyyycle.
Thirty minutes after the last rumble of the Impala’s engine has faded away, plus an extra twenty just to be sure, Sam opens his eyes again. There was a goodbye here that I felt I didn’t really need to write, that left Sam sat in his truck for fifty minutes after Dean drove away. Feel free to imagine yourself as happy or sad a one as you fancy. He fumbles the still-sealed envelope out of the glove compartment of his truck, breathes in the scent of smoke still clinging to its edges, and he tears it open across the top. The contents spill out.
He reads the letter, and reads it again, and touches the photograph with the pads of his fingers. They go back in the envelope, which goes back in the glove compartment, and ten minutes later he turns the key in the ignition. I really liked this whole bit. Okay, all you need to do is glance down to see the contents of the envelope, but if we ignore that for a second- not telling you what was in the envelope, and then not telling you Sam’s reaction to it- and that’s a whole ten minutes there; that’s quite a long time, when you’re sat by yourself in a pickup. It’s like the dramatic irony tables have turned. Sam’s thinking something, doing something, but you’re not allowed to see what it is. You’ve just got to guess. SO THERE.
His pickup rumbles into life.
Sam goes north this time, just following road signs. And there he goes again, back in his constant, magnetic motion towards and away from Dean. I can’t for the life of me figure out whether this is a happy ending or a sad one. He’s following a sign. But we don’t know what he’s thinking, and we don’t know what he’s doing, and we don’t know if this sign is the right one.
For the record, I did actually write a few paragraphs of that letter. So yes, I know what it says. But I’m not going to tell you, because that would spoil it. (Initially, it was just going to be the letter in there. But then there came that not-really-touched-upon ‘Dean has a camera’ thought strand, and I had an ‘omg yes that’ll break a few hearts’ style epiphany. And then I had a lot of fun trying and failing to age Jensen Ackles. Tricksy bastard.)
+
So, um. Any questions? Or something? HOW DO YOU END THESE THINGS?
Which somehow added up to TELL THE INTERNET YOUR THOUGHTS. Idk. I've never written a commentary from this perspective before, so I had to spend a lot of time mentally stamping on my fingers before I could get started on lexical choice and sentence structure and all those kinds of things that my EngLang teachers loved and everyone else would probably hate.
(I was the English Language master of commentaries, back in college. Never got less than 45/50 in the practise papers. Aw yeah. Which- probably does not equal the master of fanfic commentaries, haha.)
Maybe someone will find this interesting? I'm sure lapifors will, if nobody else.
EURYDICE.
(go get your heart back from the great beyond)
That fullstop is important. ‘Eurydice’ isn’t a title, really; it’s a statement.
+
I got ready to write this knowing only two things for sure. 1, it was going to be about Orpheus and Eurydice; 2, it was going to look good. (We all know how I feel about this, don’t we. I’ll say it all again anyway: the internet is as much a visual medium as it is a text-based one, and I just DON’T UNDERSTAND why people aren’t putting the two together more often. I know I’m not the only artist who writes as well, and I’m not even a very good artist, so why there isn’t this beautiful art/writing movement coming about I just don’t know. Viva la revolution of pretty?) Then I decided that Sam would be driving to meet Dean, and the rest of it just kind of cobwebbed out as my brain disengaged from the map of America I was trying (and failing) to navigate.
PRETTY IMAGE 1: the co-ordinates to the Grand Canyon, roughly. There should be some decimal points, but I didn’t want it to be that precise. It’s not like the texts John sent them, to show them where they should go. I wanted it be like, over the years of them living this life, the numbers had worn down into something more symbolic. Symbolism isn’t about precision, is it. (Obviously, I never actually made any of this clear in the story, and I doubt anyone actually bothered to look the co-ordinates up, but it was something I needed to know.)
I turned to Wikipedia to find out about the roads (I really could not read that map), and by some wonderful twist of fate the first one I clicked on was 89, which takes you down to the Grand Canyon. After discovering that, I knew it was where Sam had to go. Sam goes south on route 89, the long ride down towards home like a freefall, Home is Dean, of course. I had this mental image of them being like two magnets with poles that keep switching, sending them spiralling across the country towards or away from each other, either direction impossible to resist. Constant movement. That’s where the freefalling comes in with all the windows rolled down on his piece-of-junk pickup just not enough to let the heat out. It’s been like this all summer, a tidal wave of heat rolled out across the continent, and it feels good. It feels fanfuckingtastic. This fuck-up is something natural for once, no demons or witches or misplaced curses in sight, and the day that stops being a cause for celebration is the day he might as well just give up.
“At least we can stop demons,” Bobby had muttered darkly, but that was last week and Sam’s gone west hard and fast since. Dean left the co-ordinates with Bobby; maybe I should have mentioned that? It didn’t really seem that important- much as I love the guy, this wasn’t really about what Dean does There’s no time for meandering cross-country voyages these days; no scenic routes, or coffee breaks, or roadside oddities to stop and admire. Journeys are state lines and road signs, Edges and lines and signs. That’s what it’s about, really. Another of those things that I needed to know, even if nobody else did, anyway and Sam comes off of interstate 90 in Wyoming, heads south. He’s freefalling to Dean with sweat dripping into his eyes, everything alive with the motor-engine thrum of soon.
He spends the night in a motel he’s already lost track of, because night-time is a prospect he still can't quite face. There was going to be more about this, about Sam’s aversion to the darkness/night-time. Hell must be dark. It would be for me, anyway. But then I... didn’t, haha. I knew all about it, and that’s enough for me! It’s plain and neon-edged (edges! \o/); the girl at the desk doesn’t even blink when he asks for the yellow pages with his room key, just smiles dully as she passes it over the counter, thankyouhaveanicenight.
There is an almost meditative quality to it as he flips through the pages, folded up on the room’s single queen with the book cradled in his lap, his movements practised, ritualistic. This is the first sense we get, I think, of there being something wrong with this situation. Meditative and practised and ritualistic movements are, to me, the movements you’ve been doing a lot. For a long, long time. (I, for one, go into a trance-like state when I brush my hair.) He calls all the bars listed under W (“Hello, I think a friend of mine passed through here recently. Did anyone leave a message for Floyd Barrett?”); and then he tries D; and then he tries S. I had a lot of fun making up names, by the way.
He doesn’t sleep that night.
“-and the whole damn family is like that, you know. Brother in jail, and his sister probably should be. She’s a real piece of work-”
The barmaid is chatty here. She’s really fucking chatty, which is probably why all the barstools are empty on a busy, Friday night. Sam frowns down into his beer, nods in what he hopes are all the right places, and lets her voice just wash over him. There’s nothing as peaceful as a one-sided conversation, so long as you’re on the right side. He needs some peace.
“-and if I’ve told my sister once, I’ve told her a million times, that guy is nothing but trouble, but does she listen to me? Of course she fucking doesn’t. He pawned off her engagement ring last week, can you believe it. Romance is dead? I said to her, that’s not dead, that’s fucking cremated-” I REALLY LIKE THIS BARMAID, okay. Haha. She was an unexpected entity. Originally Sam was just going to sulk in the bar a bit until he found the envelope (the envelope was always, always planned (and so was what was in it)), but then she started talking and just would not shut up.
It’s the kind of place Dean would like, he knows: smoke-filled and noisy and just this side of hygienic, but not so bad that he’d worry about Sam following him in. The novelty sunglasses perched on the stuffed ‘gator head that hangs over the bar, days away from Florida, are just the cherry on the cake. It screams Dean like a punch to the gut, which is pretty much the only reason Sam set foot inside in the first place, when he’d been eating up the miles like the sun was never going to set. He’s drank too much for that now, even if he were still in the mood for it.
“-people are no good, you know. People just aren’t any good-”
There’s nothing here; no secret messages tucked into an empty bottle, or scratched into the plaster, or left under any of the usual names. The usual names = another implication that this has been going on for a while. Yay! Obviously, people may or may not have interpreted it that way, but it’s what I was thinking when I wrote it. His hands are sticky-tacky against the bar-top, fingertips fusing to wood a few wipe-downs short of tolerable; and the music is obnoxiously loud; and the place stinks of sweat and strangers; and he could just crawl right out of his fucking skin, shout out to the gods ‘okay, you win, I quit, just let me-’
“Sam?”
It’s not Dean, but his heart jolts anyway. Because of course Sam is living his life on the edge of hope that Dean will randomly show up one day and say ‘Sam! It’s me! I have the answer!’ (which, in a way, he probably does. But Sam just can’t face that risk, so he’s waiting hopeless/fully for hard fact instead.)The barmaid is looking at him, frowning, hand still wrapped around the glass she was cleaning a second ago.
“Sorry,” she says. Her voice is a lot pleasanter when it isn’t rallying against her sister’s taste in men. “But it had completely slipped my mind, and then you gave me all these different names, so I never thought about it until I just looked up and saw you. It is Sam, isn’t it? Guy came by here a couple days ago, really hot, said his name was Dean, said you’d be passing through soon enough...”
She smiles a little, like the memory is a good one. Sam’s mouth has gone dry. “He must have a photographic memory or something, the way he rattled off your face. This was another thing that never really made it into the final cut: Dean had a camera. He had a picture of Sam stuck to the dashboard of the Impala and probably he stared at it longingly a lot; so, y’know, not so much a photographic memory as a memory of a photograph. Thought he might’ve been a cop, he’da looked great in the uniform, you know, but then I just completely forgot until now-”
“Did he- did he leave a message?” He coughs, words catching on the air, and rubs his palms against the sticky bar-top. “Anything?”
“Oh, yeah. I stuck it in the register, so it’d be safe. You never know what you’ll lose, if you don’t keep things safe-” This is referenced later. I think that everything that Sam does/thinks/hears comes back to Dean sooner or later. Hell, he only went into this bar in the first place because it reminded him of Dean.
“Can I have it?” The words come out sharper than he means them to, his voice too loud even over the blood-rushing beat of his heart in his eardrums, and she flinches back a half-step. “Please,” he adds, softer. Sam is a bitch.
He can see all the theories forming behind her eyes as she fishes out the key to the cash register: maybe they are cops after all, or secret agents, or mafia crimelords, and her eyes are wide, wide, wide as she leans across the bar to slip him the envelope. There’s a lot of this; people crossing over things to give stuff to Sam, stuff that’ll help him find Dean. Oblivious twat. It’s flat and white, heavy with the weight of something more than paper. She’s close enough he can smell her perfume- something sweet and musky- can almost feel her breath as she whispers, “Good luck.” Could it be a sign? Why, I do believe it could just be.
She’s pretty in the smoke and bar-light, fitting neatly into it like there had been a hole shaped just for her, and Sam wants to ask, before he leaves, if Dean- if his brother- I don’t know how clear that is, but what he was wanting to ask is if Dean fucked her. Or maybe just if he seemed okay.
But he doesn’t.
PRETTY THING 2: Dean had a lot more to say about eggs, in the first drafts. Boy really liked them. (Why is Dean carrying around brightly coloured bits of paper, anyway? I like to think he collects free stationery samples wherever he goes.)
Sam finds this one tucked behind the cistern of the second cubicle, the door with an x-marks-the-spot. O HAY IT’S A SIGN. He follows its advice, because what else is there to do? -and he takes his coffee black. There are smiley faces drawn in the corners of all the menus he can find to look at, like Dean wasn’t sure where Sam would sit. The tiny, anatomically improbable dick is only on this one though, the luckiest of guesses or maybe-
(Maybe Dean was just here, just now, left the drawing and slipped away when Sam was in the bathroom, is still here somewhere, hiding, waiting for the perfect moment, the grand surprise, the ‘I told you I could fix this’ with a big, big grin...)
-just maybe.
The eggs are good, and so is the coffee. The waitress smiles at him like he’s the best thing she’s seen all day as she comes by with the tray, “You give me a shout the second you need anything, you hear?”, and Sam thinks about asking her if she’s seen his brother.
He thinks about hot pokers and drills and staring directly into the sun. I’m not sure if this was really clear, either, but I didn’t know how else to word it without just taking a mallet to your faces. He’s thinking about blinding himself. Or at least, how one might go about blinding oneself, if one were so inclined.
I had no idea he was going to go see Jo, but then he did. What a free spirit Sam is! Which came in handy, as I wasn’t sure how to logically get him Dean’s phone number, otherwise. Jo’s got a bar not far out of Salt Lake these days, and she doesn’t look the least bit surprised when Sam ducks through the doorway. That’s what tells him, faster than any secret message ever could, that Dean was here not so long ago.
“It’s all or nothing with you guys, isn’t it,” she says with a smile; it’s wary, but her eyes are as welcoming as the tender of a hunter bar can ever be. “Your good-for-nothing other half says hi.”
He laughs, throws an arm around her shoulders and draws her in close as he says, “Two for joy, you know,” because they’re not- were never- close, but there’s nothing so comforting as being around the people who know. What happened, and why, and what it means now. She saw Dean’s face, and right now that’s better than any amount of shared history could ever be.
A few men look up at the sound of his laughter, all grizzled faces and the easy slouches of regulars. Maybe in another life they’d be the kind of clientele to take offense at some guy getting so close with the pretty, and taken, woman who runs their watering hole of choice, but there’s nobody here who doesn’t know the face of a Winchester anymore. They nod at him from over their beers; Sam nods back from over Jo’s head. I really liked this, but I’m not quite sure why. For all my premonitions of doom and gloom and Demon!Sam destroying the world, I really would like their story to have an ending where they do something good and the rest of- if not the world, then their wacky little community of nutters recognised it. Hooray for mutual respect!
“It’s only joy when the magpies are together,” she points out, not unkindly, as she ducks out from under his arm. She takes a step back, looking up at him with the kind of studying gaze that wouldn’t be out of place on Ellen. She’s looking more like her mother, Sam thinks, with every year that passes. “One’s just for sorrow.”
“Subtle, Jo.”
“You know it.” She turns back to the bar, cloth in hand to clean some glasses or wipe the surface down or maybe just make a show of productivity while she waits for whatever it is she thinks Sam’s going to say next. He doesn’t know when he became so predictable, but it was probably around the same time life became so goddamn tiring. Predictable = practised and ritualistic = apparently Sam’s canonical coping mechanism (I ♥ Mystery Spot). Or something. Sam is very tired with this life (but maybe not tired enough to take risks about it). Back at the beginning is how ‘the day [natural fuck-ups] stop being a cause for celebration is the day he might as well just give up’; he’s forcing himself to celebrate things and live and not be Robo-Sam , because Dean is still alive and he’s just got to be happy with that. But it is hard.
“Look,” he begins. Jo doesn’t look up, busily scrubbing at a stain in the wood like there’s nothing in the world as important as getting it out. It’s quiet for a Saturday night, empty save for the people with nowhere else to go, and they’re not the sort to listen in on conversations; he keeps his voice low anyway, leaning in close. “Is he. How is he?”
“He’s fine, Sam,” she murmurs. She touches his hand with a rueful smile, the dishcloth rubbing across his knuckles. “Fine as he can be. Quiet. Every word out of his mouth was about you, you know. Sam this, Sam that, just wait until I tell Sam about...” Her fingers are tiny, so tiny, next to his, but that was years ago. He’d wanted nothing more, then, than to just sink into the peace and quiet and wait for the world to pass him by. Now, he doesn’t have the time.
She taps his wrist, smile brightening, and jerks her head towards the backroom. “Come on, I’ve got a hunt for you. Could be a banshee.”
“No, I can’t, I’ve got to-”
“Dean wanted you to,” she says doggedly. “He would’ve done it himself, but he wasn’t sure how far behind you were. Didn’t want to risk bumping into you.” Jo totally manipulated that fucker. (Dean probably told her to.)
They’re the magic words.
And then suddenly it’s twenty-something hours later, time spent chasing spirits and burning bones when he should have been driving. He’s lost a whole day, and it’s with shaking hands that he starts the engine, Jo’s voice a blur of white-noise somewhere in the back of his head. Everything pales in comparison to Dean! I really enjoy that it’s white-noise in his head whilst it’s dark outside. Juxtaposition is sexy. Even if it’s the kind of juxtaposition I’m probably the only one to notice/care about.
“It’s not that big of a deal, Sam. It’s just one day.” She tugs at his arm though the truck’s window, grabs at his hands and tries to pull them away. He can’t look at her, but he can’t look anywhere else either; it’s getting dark. Hi, Sam’s aversion to darkness. We barely knew you.
“Sam,” she says, and there’s an edge of pleading to her words as she fights to prise away his fingers from the steering wheel. “Leave it till morning, at least. This is Dean we’re talking about. He’ll wait for you. He’ll always wait.”
“What if he doesn’t?” he grits out. He’s aiming for threatening, but he just sounds like a thing in pain. “What if, this time, he.”
“Sam.”
“I can’t risk it. I just can’t.” He says this again later. Cyclical! Because, obviously, he can’t break this vicious cycle until he takes a damn hint and crosses the line. But he can’t, because he can’t risk it. And so it all begins agaaaain...
She lets him go, smacking her palms against the side of the door, once, twice, three times, hard enough that he can feel it vibrate through him. “Dammit. God fucking dammit,” she exclaims. A fourth time, and she pulls back with a pained hiss, rubbing at her fingers. “When did this all get so fucked up? When the fuck, Sam?” Writing this made me like Jo, by the way. I got over my initial ‘ew, she twirls knives’ a while ago, and then it was just neutrality, until this whole section here with her being all ‘SAM YOU FUCKING IDIOT’. Because he is.
The engine is still rumbling softly in the background, but it feels a hundred miles away. He feels a hundred miles away, flat and tired. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to-”
“Like hell I shouldn’t have to. Come here, give me your hand.” She yanks his wrist through the window before he has a chance to react, tugging the cap off of a pen with her teeth. Look, see, the lowly mortal is actually physically pulling him through the edge of the open window to give him his sign. I’m amazed there isn’t a giant hand of God just reaching down from the sky and whacking him round the head. The nib digs into the flesh of his palm, numbers scratching through at least a half-dozen layers of skin. I liked the idea of this piece of Dean getting under Sam’s skin, the absolute closeness vs the self-imposed distance. “This,” she’s saying, as she writes, “is Dean’s number, okay? Don’t you dare wash it off. And don’t think I won’t call him myself to check, because I will. You know I will.”
It’s numbing, almost. His hand drops like a weight when she lets it go.
“Don’t you dare wash it off,” she says again. Her fingers are cool against his forehead, and then her lips, and when she pulls back her eyes are too bright in the lamplight. “Drive, then.”
He pulls out of the parking lot in a squeal of tyres on gravel, his heart hanging heavy in his throat and Jo wrapping her arms around herself in the rear-view mirror, tiny and angry and already fading away.
Six hours later, the sun begins to rise. The sky creeps into greyish blue, the edges saturated with pink, and Sam lets himself pull over to the side of the road. He twists the key in the ignition, feeling it in the palms of his hands wrapped around the steering wheel as the engine dies with one long, drawn-out rattle. His hands would be shaking, he knows, if they weren’t clenched so tight. He feels like he’s made of nothing but grit and bone. I like this bit. Grit and bone, and earlier on he was crawling out of his skin, and later he’s keeping his bones in his skin. It’s cold and hard and nasty. This isn’t the Sam from Mystery Spot, not by a long shot, but it’s still a Sam in a very fucked-up situation, hardening himself against his brother because it’s all he feels he can do. He’s all caught up in a cycle of his own making. Poor old thing.
He’s alive and the sun is rising and it will never be night again, until the next time it is. The curve of the steering wheel cradles his head easily, and it’s just as easy to let his eyes close and his shoulders heave in relief. Time passes by, probably, but Sam is outside of it.
“Hey.” Something raps against the window. “Hey buddy, you okay?”
He blinks his eyes open, squinting in the daylight. The something is a person, shadowed by the sun as he, she, he- definitely a he- bends down to catch a look at Sam. He knocks on the window again. “You all right in there?”
It’s an effort to sit up, but Sam manages it, rubbing a hand across his face and pushing his hair out of his eyes. “I’m fine,” he says, with a smile and a jaunty wave, and the guy looks sceptical. He must look bad, Sam knows, but he feels worse.
“Really,” he tries again, letting the smile fade into something hopefully a bit more natural. “I’m okay. I just, uh. I lost my brother, and...” He trails off. The guy’s scratching at his beard, still looking worried, but there’s the light of sympathetic understanding in his eyes.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “You take it easy. Rest up in a proper bed instead of in your automobile.”
“Will do.” Sam waves again as the guy walks away, back towards his truck. It’s nearly the truth, anyway. He goes through the motions of being a real boy, tidying himself and the cabin until the truck has pulled out onto the highway and driven away. Then he slumps back in his seat and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. He breathes deep. ‘Lost his brother’. Christ. Should have stuck him in an envelope and put him in the cash register. There we go. Back to the barmaid again. Just in case you were all forgetting about her and her mysterious envelope. Should have kept a better hold of him from the start. Should have...
He pulls out his cell and dials the number as good as carved into his skin. And there’s that number being a part of him I like so much. Gosh, I’m repetitive. It rings, and rings, and Sam rests his head against the sun-warmed glass of the window. It’s all dry earth and scrubby bushes outside; he has no idea where he is anymore, just that he’s pointing in the right direction. And speaking of repetitive, right direction = home = Dean. Pointing is a good verb. It’s very passive, to me. Kind of dehumanising. You point fingers or guns or cars or whatever, but you don’t point people. It’s my wacky irresistibly-moving magnets mental image again.
Something clicks, loud and close into his ear, and then, “This had better be good,” Dean’s voice grumbles. Sam closes his eyes. This is before I’ve let you in on the big secret of what’s going on, isn’t it (unless you caught the title-sized hint, ofc), so Sam closing his eyes just seems like a harmless little detail. Maybe it still seems like a harmless little detail! This is just about what I was thinking as I wrote it.
“Dean.”
There’s a pause, the rustle of static and background movement that he can almost see And there’s another significant/insignificant detail for you, it sounds that close: Dean sitting up straighter, maybe brushing a hand through his hair as he licks his lips nervously, compulsively.
“Sam?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” His lips curl upwards of their own accord, some natural, physical reaction to deandeandean. “It’s me. Jo gave me your number.”
“That girl.”
“I know. She, uh. She told me you’d been by. She says hi, by the way. I took care of that hunt for her. Wasn’t a banshee after all, just a really noisy poltergeist. Too much time on its hands, but, uh.” He draws in a slow breath, willing himself to shut up. “Hi. Dean.”
“Hey Sammy,” Dean murmurs. His voice catches on the ‘S’, fractures somewhere on the second syllable.
“Yeah,” Sam says. This bit really upset me! Haha, I’m a lamer. I think the writing maybe suffered for that, a little; it was affected by it, anyway. It was a hard scene to do, and I have this unfortunate, theatre-borne habit of acting out the protagonist as I write them. So, inevitably, things got a little bit Method, and I had to put the pen down for a while, and when I picked it back up again I’m not sure I brought across just how painful it was for Sam. He bites down on his knuckles, feeling every second of every minute of it all harder than he has in months. It’s a physical ache again, going deep, deep, deep, like something new and freshly torn. His skin scrapes against his teeth, and he swallows thickly to the taste of blood. The words choke out of him. “Fuck, Dean. I. Fuck.”
“Hey, hey, easy. Easy, Sam. It’s okay. Breathe. You’re still coming, right?”
“Yeah, I.” He sucks in a breath, steadying himself against his stupid, ugly, piece-of-junk dashboard. No vehicle can truly compare to the awesomeness that is the Impala, alas. Dean’s voice is as soothing as it ever was. “I’m coming.”
“You in your truck?” Dean doesn’t wait for an answer, taking it for granted that if Sam isn’t in it already he will be right the fuck now, no room for argument. “Stick the key in the ignition, give it a turn, let the engine wake up. Easy does it.”
“I know how to drive, asshole.” He rests his free hand against the steering wheel, feeling the engine rumble as he fights down the grin.
“I’m sure you do,” Dean agrees easily and completely disbelievingly. “She woken up now?”
“Yes, Dean, she’s woken up.” He snorts, and Dean’s laughter rattles down the phone line. He could stay here, like this, forever, if only they would let him.
“Gotta treat you girl right, Sammy,” he says once he’s done laughing. His voice has gotten deeper, Sam notices, rougher, since the last time they spoke. Another hint at the length of time! I never really made it clear how long this was (because where’s the fun in that) so it was cool to see my remixer go for five years. I will say that she was kinder to them than I was.“Okay. (Dean says okay a lot when he’s being reasonable/comforting. This is canonical fact, and I love it.) Now, you hang up the phone and put pedal to metal, before I haveta drive out there and do it myself.”
And this is why. This is why they had to get new numbers, after the first few months had crept by, because no matter how often they hang up on each other it never gets any easier. Sam swallows, rubs his hand across his mouth. It never stops feeling like it- like this, right here- is going to be the last damn time they say goodbye.
“Now, Sam.”
“I will, I will. Just- talk.”
Dean doesn’t question it. If anyone is going to understand this it would be him, after all. His voice is bright, somehow cheerful, as he rattles off the first thing that comes into his head: “I’m thinking I might head to Florida next, catch a bit of sun and sand and relaxation. Hot chicks in bikinis. Maybe even go to Disney World. You used to have such a hard-on for Disney, do you remember? Every time we went near the place, it’d be all Dad, Dad, let’s go to Disney World, Dad. And this is when you were in double figures, man. It was fucking embarrassing-” I think there are few things out there more agonising than the moment of silence after you hang up on a person you really don’t want to. If this were a film, here would be the moment where we get a split screen of Dean and Sam staring wretchedly down at the phones in their hands, perhaps lowering them slowly from their ears, Joshua Radin playing something tearjerking in the background...
Sam keeps hold of his cell for a long moment afterwards, letting the silence ring into his ears. The plastic casing is warm, damp, against his cheeks. He’ll scrub the phone number off of his palm, he knows, delete it from his history; and the next time he tries it again, gives up on pretending he didn’t memorise the numbers the second he saw them, it’ll be unrecognised, rubbed out of existence. He wipes his face, tosses the cell phone into the empty seat, and shifts the pickup into gear. No idea where he is means no idea how far he’s got left to go, but he can feel the miles prickling down his spine, and he knows- he knows- it’s not long now. Sam can sense the distance because he is, in fact, a magnet. YES.
It takes him a minute to move again, once he’s stopped by the Impala, pressed a hand to her sun-hot roof.
“Hey, girl,” he whispers. Oh, you all know he calls her girl when Dean isn’t looking. She’s impossibly smooth, and Sam can imagine Dean stood in the parking lot- right in this spot, even- shirt off in the noonlight as he waxes and polishes and makes her completely fucking perfect, an extension of his soul on display. Just ready and waiting for Sam to trail his hands over and rest his face against.
In the end, it takes the latest desk jockey’s watchful, incredulous stare through the window of the motel’s check-in for Sam to tear himself away. The last thing he needs is some overeager teen thinking he’s trying to jack the car- or worse- and calling the cops. But he pats her hood affectionately as he passes her by, just to imagine how smugly vindicated Dean’s expression would have been.
“Hi,” he says, nudging the door closed behind him. The office is sweltering, sweat beading across his forehead within seconds. His mouth is dry. “My friend, Angus, has a room here. Angus Scott? He’s been expecting me.”
Today he is Keith Roger, meeting his buddy for a fishing trip or a family wedding There was a Brokeback joke here. It didn’t really work, key-ring digging into his palm so tight he can feel his pulse beating against it, hard, fast. Angus is expecting him, had even left a message.
PRETTY THING 3: I love this one. It is pink! For that extra little dash of sample-stationery silliness.
It turns out there are two rooms next to his, one on either side, and Sam hadn’t asked the kid at the desk which number ‘Angus’ was in; but it doesn’t exactly take great amounts of genius to figure that the room with the curtains duct-taped shut so tightly he can’t catch a slightest glimpse through the window- that room might just be the one with his brother inside. He lets his hands drift down the wood of the door before rapping it smartly with his knuckles, dot-dot-dot, dot-dash, dash-dash = Sam, by the way. There’s movement from inside, the sound of something being knocked over and hastily righted, and he rests his forehead against the doorframe as he waits.
“Got ‘em shut?” calls Dean from the other side. Sam feels his heart loosen at the sound of it, of him, so close.
“Yeah,” he says, clamping his hands down over his eyes just in case, just to be sure. He feels the click-turn of locks and bolts, the rush of air as the door swings open, and then there are Dean’s hands on him, fingers shaking as they lock around his elbows, smooth up and down the bare skin of his forearms, catch at the edges of his sleeves and lead him through the doorway.
At last, at last, at last is the mantra running through every corner of Sam’s brain, at last, and then it’s tumbling out of his mouth as well. He’s tugged forwards three more steps, and he hears the door slam shut again seconds before he’s being walked backwards into it, pressed up against it as Dean’s hands catch hold of his own and prise them away from his face.
“Let me,” Dean is whispering, “Let me,” and “Sam. Sam. Sam,” and Sam drops his hands and squeezes his eyes shut so tight, the black behind his lids exploding into blue, and Dean’s hands spread across his face, fingers curling under his jaw as his thumbs smooth the hair away from his temples. Sam grabs Dean’s shirt in fistfuls, tugging him in close enough that they’re breathing the same air, and he needs. He runs his hands through Dean’s hair, wonders if it’s greying yet Grey hair! Because time has passed!- knows it would look good- and Dean’s boots are kicking his feet further apart. He spreads his legs and a thigh slots easily between his own I like the slotting. He’s been all grit and bone and out of place, because right there between Dean’s thighs is where he should be, rubbing up against him as their hips slide together and Dean’s hands scrabble for purchase at the wood behind Sam’s head.
“Dean. God, God, Dean.” And Dean’s hips are rocking forwards; and Sam’s hands are at his belt, his skin, just sliding down to palm helplessly at both their cocks, fingers caught between the grind of denim; and his eyes are burning like heartbreak Is that cheesy? It might be cheesy. Maybe I should have said ‘burning like heartburn’, tears slipping down his cheeks, and he can feel Dean’s breath hitching into the hollow of his collarbone; and everything is heat, everything is- and then he’s coming with a sob, he’s reclaiming his place against Dean’s parted lips; welcome home, welcome home.
There we go. Home. (As seen in the beginning, because this is all just a BIG FUCKING CIRCLE.) Our two wayward magnets are finally drawn together again. I wanted this reunion to seem like that, like they really are being drawn together by some irresistible force and the second the obstacle (ie door) is removed from their paths they just immediately have to grab on to each other and touch each other. And Dean is just desperate to see Sam’s face (“Let me”... “Let me”) whilst Sam is doing everything he can to keep himself from looking. There was a whole chunk cut out of here, with happy conversations and happy sex, because it just didn’t fit.
“I don’t know why you love this place so much,” Sam mutters, late afternoon and he's prickling with heat, skin itching under the stupid knit-cap he only wears because it can roll down over his eyes. Blindfolds on a budget. Dean thinks it's hilarious. Dean thinks everything is hilarious. The goddamn fucking hat. Do you know how hard it is to introduce hats neatly into your writing? Hard, is how hard. It was first brought up in there with the deleted happiness, and then when that left I spent about an hour of rewriting this bit and that bit and those bits over there to try and fit the hat in. Bastard.
And Dean’s laughter is close enough to catch on the hair on the back of his neck, his hand a heavy presence between Sam’s shoulder blades. Every couple of seconds, Sam catches a glimpse of movement that just might be his brother at the corners of his vision, and he has to close his eyes tightly and remind himself of just how hard they had to fight to get this far. He can’t throw it all away for a glance at Dean’s elbows.
“It’s big,” is all Dean says.
“It was big last time we saw it. Might even be big next time, too.” He folds his arms against the railing, lets his wrists hang loosely over the edge. Freefalling, he thinks. Holy shit, his hands are hanging over the edge of the rather Godly canyon that a fricking sign led him to, whilst he thinks about the freefalling that was initially mentioned right at the beginning, thus continuing the VICIOUS CYCLE. I am as subtle as a mallet. Except that this was all stuff that I was just thinking about as I wrote, not stuff that I was really saying, so perhaps it’s more like I’m malleting myself in the face here.
“Smartass.” Dean sighs, ghosting his thumb across the nape of Sam’s neck, where hat meets skin. His chin jabs against Sam’s shoulder. “I mean, it’s- big. Too big for us to do anything about it, whether we wanna or not. We could blow it up, but that’d just make a bigger hole. We could fill it with dirt, maybe, but that, Sammy- that’d just leave us with another hole to deal with. There’s nothing we can do. ‘Cept try not to fall in it, anyway.” Dean has a poet’s soul. You all know it.
There’s another flash of movement, and Sam closes his eyes. “Dean, are you making a metaphor?”
“Live with it, bitch. Your eyes closed?” Sam jerks his head a fraction in some semblance of a nod, but Dean’s face is pressed close enough that he can feel it. He breathes out “Awesome,” against Sam’s spine This + ‘Dean’s laughter is close enough to catch on the hair at the back of [Sam’s] neck = the numbers in Sam’s skin again. I think I just have a thing for people becoming parts of other people , and his free hand slides up under the hem of Sam’s t-shirt, splays wide-fingered across his stomach. He holds on tight.
Even with his eyes closed, Sam can feel the canyon opening out before them, can feel the edge that they’re standing on and the long, long, drop down. *applies mallet to face* (also, it rather pleases me that this is the only actual mention we get of the fact that they’re at a canyon, and nothing at all that it’s the GRAND Canyon. Could I be the only person to send their protagonist to the Grand fuckin’ Canyon without having a single mention of its epic scenery? Probably not, but still. It’s not about what the Canyon looks like. Of course it’s not. It’s barely even about the Canyon, anymore. See also: Pretty thing 1.)
“I didn’t know,” he says at last, “that it would be this hard.”
“Regret it?”
That’s an easy one. “No.”
Dean sighs again, and Sam feels the hand against his stomach rub in a slow circle. “How much longer we gotta do this, Sammy?” he whispers into Sam’s bones. Hi, it’s the bones again. Grit and bones, keeping his bones inside his skin, and so on and so forth. Initially, he whispered it into Sam’s skin, but that lasted about one second before I realised that was 1, too soft, and 2, just not gone deep enough. I really do like it when people become parts of each other, guys. It is a thing.
(It may excite you to know that in the barest of the first drafts- which was composed basically of the opening paragraphs, a few lines about a bar, Dean’s thoughts on eggs, and that conversation up there- this was the end. (Actually, the very end of that first draft was “Not much longer,” Sam lies.))
Back in the motel parking lot, the sun is still high enough overhead that everything is close and hot, heavy with the scent of baked earth. Dean’s shoulder is against Sam’s shoulder, Dean’s hip against Sam’s hip, as they lean back against the truck together. That’s just more gratuitous slotting together. In my defence, Sam’s been displaced from the world around him throughout this (in the bar- “the place stinks of sweat and strangers”; and with Jo- “He feels a hundred miles away”; and on the road- “Time passes by, probably, but Sam is outside of it”, to name but a few); now he’s back where he belongs, I shall milk it for all it is worth. Sam must look relatively stupid, he knows, with the hat pulled down so far over his face in this weather, but it’s nigh on a decade since he gave up on normal O hay a hint of how long it’s been. The question is, of course, when do you think he gave up on normal?, and it’s getting harder every month to remember what it ever felt like.
Dean shifts in a creak of leather and his boots scuff against the dirt. It was quite tricky, by the way, to keep all this movement as sound and touch. Fuck sake, Sam, just open your eyes and make it easier for me to write. He exhales, inches from Sam’s ear. “I don’t.”
Sam waits, listening to his brother breathe.
“I don’t want to do this for the rest of our lives, Sam,” he says, eventually, slowly, like each word has been carefully measured. “I can’t do that.”
He’s been expecting it really, almost, but that doesn’t make it any better. He tugs the hat down lower over his eyes. “You want to stop?”
“What- no. No. I don’t wanna-” There’s the sound of Dean standing up straighter, his fists knocking against the side of the truck, and then he catches hold of Sam’s elbow and turns him around. It’s an imitation of eye-to-eye. “I wanna fix it.”
“And- what? You think that hadn’t crossed my mind, I dunno, once or twice over the past few years?”
“Don’t be a bitch, Sam. Not about this.”
“Then what do you want me to say? ‘Oh, okay, I’ll just go bargain with the gods, Dean. Thanks for the input, Dean!’” He shrugs Dean’s hands away. He’s got no idea where he is, never does when he’s with Dean, but he starts to walk anyway, just needing to move.
He doesn’t get far before Dean is tugging him back, gently this time, “Hey, hey, stop.” Sam lets him, feels the edge of the pickup against his spine and Dean’s palms against his chest. “I’ve not exactly been jumping for joy at this whole fucking mess, either.” He breathes; Sam doesn’t -and doesn’t that just sum it all up? “Look at me.”
“What?”
There’s a pause, to the soundtrack of distant conversation and the grind of the highway. “I mean it. Look at me. See what happens.”
“We already know what happens.”
“We don’t. I don’t.” Dean’s hands slide down, fingers splaying over his ribs. Somewhere, a door slams. “Not for certain. Come on, try it, find out.”
It takes a drawn-out moment for Sam to process what his brother is saying, to process just how stupid his brother can be, and then he’s shaking his head in disbelief. “Are you completely insane, Dean, or does it just come and go?”
“So you know what a sign from the gods looks like? You familiarised yourself with the divine thumbs-up? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, Sam, I have no fucking clue what I’m looking for here.” It’s light, easy. It’s pleading too, and there are days, even now, when Sam can read Dean’s voice better than he can read his own. “Listen. Listen to me, okay. In all the old stuff, the gods do their prophetic bullshit through the lowly mortals. People like you and me. I’m here, Sam, I'm saying this. Maybe this is your goddamn sign.” (This here upset me a bit too. I’d been planning a much happier ending- even had bits of it written- but about halfway through Dean’s Big Moment I realised that it couldn’t. Awkward.)
He wants to see his brother’s face. God, gods, whatever, he just wants so fucking bad to see his brother’s face.
“Please,” Dean whispers.
It’s an effort for Sam to lift his hands and wrap them around Dean’s wrists and- gently, this time-pull them away; for him to push Dean back. He says, “No.”
He says, “I can’t risk it. I can’t lose you completely.”
He feels cold, and hard, and certain There, see, he repeats the ‘I can’t risk it’, and hardens himself a little bit more. It’s not Mystery Spot!Sam, but he’s not so far off, but Dean just feels tense, his shoulders wound impossibly tight beneath Sam’s hands. It doesn’t matter. He’s there. He’s alive, and that is all the reason Sam will ever need to live this fucked up life.
The night is as dark as it ever is, hanging hot and empty. Sam lies on his bed fully clothed, eyes wide open as he stares up at the shadows. It’s like waiting for the world to fall apart again, and he focuses on breathing, on keeping his bones inside his skin. Everything ends, he knows, in darkness. Keeping his bones inside his skin, as in, not crawling out of it and doing that shouting at the gods thing that’ll ruin it all. Lots of night and darkness and shadows, too. What ends in darkness? Hell or death or the end of the world, or maybe just closing his eyes.
‘My bed’s big enough for two,’ Dean had said, tightly, unhappily, as Sam twisted the handle of Keith Roger’s door. He’d half-turned towards the sound of his voice, and Dean had been standing close enough that he could feel him in the air. It would have been nice to say yes, to throw caution to the wind for just one fucking night.
He’d said nothing, and Dean had said ‘Yeah, I guess not’. And then ‘I’m heading out early tomorrow’. And then ‘Bye, Sam’.
“Just give me the sign,” Sam whispers now, to whatever might be listening. And despite how he’s trying to keep himself hard and inside his skin, he can’t help but shout out to the gods anyway, just a little. “Please, just give me something.” Here was the ending that I had to change. The phone rang. (Dean was on the other end of it. It was beautiful and hopeful and just not right for this story.)
And he waits, and he waits. I never really say it here, but I think it’s not a great leap of interpretive logic to assume that whilst Sam is waiting he isn’t sleeping. Which is what he’s doing right back at the beginning, if you’ll remember? It’s a vicious cyyyyycle.
Thirty minutes after the last rumble of the Impala’s engine has faded away, plus an extra twenty just to be sure, Sam opens his eyes again. There was a goodbye here that I felt I didn’t really need to write, that left Sam sat in his truck for fifty minutes after Dean drove away. Feel free to imagine yourself as happy or sad a one as you fancy. He fumbles the still-sealed envelope out of the glove compartment of his truck, breathes in the scent of smoke still clinging to its edges, and he tears it open across the top. The contents spill out.
He reads the letter, and reads it again, and touches the photograph with the pads of his fingers. They go back in the envelope, which goes back in the glove compartment, and ten minutes later he turns the key in the ignition. I really liked this whole bit. Okay, all you need to do is glance down to see the contents of the envelope, but if we ignore that for a second- not telling you what was in the envelope, and then not telling you Sam’s reaction to it- and that’s a whole ten minutes there; that’s quite a long time, when you’re sat by yourself in a pickup. It’s like the dramatic irony tables have turned. Sam’s thinking something, doing something, but you’re not allowed to see what it is. You’ve just got to guess. SO THERE.
His pickup rumbles into life.
Sam goes north this time, just following road signs. And there he goes again, back in his constant, magnetic motion towards and away from Dean. I can’t for the life of me figure out whether this is a happy ending or a sad one. He’s following a sign. But we don’t know what he’s thinking, and we don’t know what he’s doing, and we don’t know if this sign is the right one.
For the record, I did actually write a few paragraphs of that letter. So yes, I know what it says. But I’m not going to tell you, because that would spoil it. (Initially, it was just going to be the letter in there. But then there came that not-really-touched-upon ‘Dean has a camera’ thought strand, and I had an ‘omg yes that’ll break a few hearts’ style epiphany. And then I had a lot of fun trying and failing to age Jensen Ackles. Tricksy bastard.)
+
So, um. Any questions? Or something? HOW DO YOU END THESE THINGS?