how absolutely fascinating, tree.
YEAH I'M PUTTING OFF GOING INTO TOWN. It's all grey and wet and in here it is warm. Who needs food, anyway?
So here, bbs, HERE is the very first SPN fic I ever started writing. Right back in Nov '07, when I hadn't really written any fic in a couple of years and I had no idea how to plan things in that freaky obsessive way I now do. THEY WERE STRANGE, STRANGE DAYS, MY FRIENDS.
The rule is: do unto others all you damn well like, but never do unto your own.
It’s simple, but it works.
+
The Winchester brothers are an unfortunate pair. Of course, unfortunate comes dime a dozen in [x] but two fires- two fatalities- in one family- well, it’s just plain unlucky, isn’t it? It’s almost, one carer whispers to another, like a curse.
And Marjorie’s not one to judge, but if anyone’s cursed it’s those two. Poor little things, the oldest not even eight yet. It does a heart good, to see the way they stick together, especially when she thinks of the way she got on with her brother…
They’re a little odd, though, really, aren’t they?
“Their mom was a strange one, alright,” says Anette in the kitchen, voice an excited hiss of exposition as she scrapes fish sticks off the oven tray. “Stopped going to church after her husband died. They say she was into the Occult.”
Marjorie murmurs in wordless disbelief, hand to her mouth and eyes wide with oh, those poor dears-- and she hears the door creak behind her, maybe feels something prickle down the back of her neck, but it’s an old house, isn’t it?
It’s a funny thing; they never did find the salt again.
+
The home burns down a couple years later, with two boys’ bodies never found. The officials label it a freak accident and bulldoze the charred remains.
+
Everything is pale compared to them. Pale little children and pale little wives in their boring, whitewashed lives, while Sammy and Dean burn technicolour bright, glowing with the truth of this is what the world is like.
Mom taught them how to protect themselves. Dad taught them, just by dying, that they are the most precious things in the whole fucking world. Three years at [x] taught them nothing more than get the hell away. They salt and burn and pack their bags, Dean whispering under his breath in a voice still waiting to break “Let’s blow this popsicle stand”.
They look like runaways, but they’re not.
They’re running-tos.
+
Mostly, they run into trouble.
+
It’s not easy being dead.
Him and Dean, they’re the pretend kind of dead, where their names change on the outside from day to day and their stories change too.
Sometimes Sammy thinks the really dead things, the ghosts they try to find, have it easier than them. Sure, being gross looking and wanting to kill people all the time might be kinda tough, but they never have to worry about the CPS or finding a place to stay each night or having enough money to eat. Ghosts stay still, while Sammy and Dean are never slowing down.
They were always good at stealing things. They’re getting even better, and the hardest thing is persuading folks that two barely teenaged kids are fine and okay and not about to steal the cutlery.
“Look, ma’am,” Dean says with his big, bright smile and his freckles and his honest eyes, “our pa’s gonna come and pick us up in the morning, and I know we’re kinda young but he’d sure appreciate it if you could let us have a room for the night.”
He’s charming in ways Sammy, awkward and pale faced, could never hope to be, and it almost always works. Sometimes it doesn’t, and the lady- it’s almost always a lady, when it doesn’t- gets a worried crease between her eyes and maybe she’ll reach for the phone or maybe she’ll just tell them ‘wait there, and I’ll-‘, but that’s okay. They’re getting real good at disappearing too.
+
The werewolf in [y] is their first one.
[hard, fuck up, run like hell]
And then they break through the trees and out into open parkland, grass and swing sets and empty soda cans. The stars are out, the streets are dark, and the world is suddenly so wide that Sammy can hardly breathe.
Dean grabs his hand and yells “Come on,” wolf crashing through the undergrowth behind them, and that’s when adrenaline flicks that little switch in his brain, the rapid-fire beating of Sammy’s heart crossing that fine line between fear and exhilaration.
They’re always a little afraid, the fear of being young and alone in a world that doesn’t have a fucking clue, but right now he’s laughing and running with the wind in his hair and his brother racing beside him, behind him, back in front again. The wolf howls over Dean’s litany of curses, loud and desperate and so damn close. Sammy closes his eyes and he spreads his hands and he reaches.
The world jolts; something opens inside him, like eyes he never knew he had, and power surges up and out, and it’s everything. And then nothing.
Sammy opens his eyes to Dean’s broadest grin, and his voice gabbling at what must be ninety miles per hour, “I dunno what you did, Sammy, but wow it was the coolest and you gotta tell me how you did it, man, have you been holding out on me all these years?”
Oh, Sammy thinks, I’m alive. He licks his lips, and it feels like licking a battery. “Is it dead?”
“Completely, dude. You wasted the fucker, and it was like an explosion and I felt it, the whole damn town musta felt it-” Dean’s voice is loud and sudden, washing in and out of Sammy’s ears, but his hands are as gentle as a mother’s as he helps his brother sit up.
Sammy feels like a hair stood on end, a million volts running through him and buzzing in the air. It’s a million extended hands, palms up and fingers out and the skin peeled back to leave the nerves bare and tingling. It’s like there’s nothing in the world Sammy can’t touch.
And there at the centre of it all, surrounded by it and wrapped so close, so tight, is Dean.
+
Sammy kills his first man when he’s thirteen years old, not quite in cold blood and almost entirely out of necessity: some guy a bit too fond of little boys and little girls, with a basement full of little bones and a dozen angry spirits, and Sam reaches out with every fucking hand he’s got. The world tightens, slows, narrowing down to squeezing fingers and the dull, wet thuds of skull meeting floor one, two, three four- -
The guy dies silently, eyes wide and staring in disbelief, like he’s seen a ghost, like he never really believed he could be caught.
“You don’t hurt kids,” Sammy whispers. “Didn’t anybody ever teach you, you don’t hurt kids?”
Dean finds him, minutes later, with his hands still wrapped around the guy’s throat and the air around him electric, prickling. They move the body down to the basement together, red sea parting as watchful spirits decide it’s time to go home.
Sammy knows about fingerprints and forensics from when he goes to school, and from the books Dean makes him read when he doesn’t, but he isn’t worried. It’ll all be ash in the morning.
+
Dean kills his first man two weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday.
“I told you,” he says as he lowers the gun, “not to touch my brother.”
[blah]
“Remember that time you took up soccer for a week?” Dean reminds him sullenly, “Or that time you ran away from home for a whole afternoon?” but he helps Sammy fill in forms and prepare for interviews and flatten his stupid, too-long hair.
Eventually, he helps pack up his things, and he doesn’t mention how five hours after Sammy ran away from home- from Dean, who equals home- he turned up at the motel-room door with a scraped knee and his face crumpled with trying not to cry.
Sammy doesn’t mention how Dean spent those full five hours looking for him.
+
He lasts two months at Stanford, a whim borne of curiosity and what-if and the dreams he sometimes has of a life not quite his own.
[blah]
He never uses his powers on Dean. It’s a matter of honour, yes, of brotherly pride and we are all we have and want.
It’s a matter of he’s never needed to.
+
It’s just some scummy pick-up truck, but Dean’s crowing over it like it’s his firstborn son. “Dude, did you see the look on that guy’s face? Good thing he’s such a lardass, or he’d probably still be chasing us. Lucky I have such quick reflexes, huh?”
“You screamed like a little girl.”
“And punched the motherfucker. Pow! I am awesome.”
Dean’s grin is infectious, and Sammy bites down on his bottom lip to keep from smiling, hands drumming on the steering-wheel. “You’re the man, Dean. I don’t know why you won’t let me just-”
“Yeah, yeah, psychic-boy.” He rolls his eyes, tossing a twinkie at Sammy’s head and watching it bounce away two inches from his face. “Don’t harsh the buzz.”
+
The brain is an incredible thing, Sammy often says, until Dean smacks him over the head and tells him to stop showing off.
[blah]
It’s not hunting, not really. There’s no noble motive or greater cause, except the feeling that it’s what they’ve always done, and with powers like Sammy’s what else would they do? So, no, it’s not hunting. It’s pest control; investigation; the gathering of information.
A man with yellow eyes and the easy kind of grin that’s all sharpness underneath catches up with them in a seedy bar in Wyoming. He’s wearing the wrong kind of suit and the wrong kind of face- very stupid or very clever, it doesn’t matter which because nobody else even looks at him.
A hand flat on the bar, look, ma, no guns, and he says the magic words: “I know something you don’t know.”
Sammy looks at Dean, and Dean looks at Sammy, and they say, together, “We’re listening.”
OKAY I GUESS I'LL GO BUY FOOD NOW.
So here, bbs, HERE is the very first SPN fic I ever started writing. Right back in Nov '07, when I hadn't really written any fic in a couple of years and I had no idea how to plan things in that freaky obsessive way I now do. THEY WERE STRANGE, STRANGE DAYS, MY FRIENDS.
The rule is: do unto others all you damn well like, but never do unto your own.
It’s simple, but it works.
+
The Winchester brothers are an unfortunate pair. Of course, unfortunate comes dime a dozen in [x] but two fires- two fatalities- in one family- well, it’s just plain unlucky, isn’t it? It’s almost, one carer whispers to another, like a curse.
And Marjorie’s not one to judge, but if anyone’s cursed it’s those two. Poor little things, the oldest not even eight yet. It does a heart good, to see the way they stick together, especially when she thinks of the way she got on with her brother…
They’re a little odd, though, really, aren’t they?
“Their mom was a strange one, alright,” says Anette in the kitchen, voice an excited hiss of exposition as she scrapes fish sticks off the oven tray. “Stopped going to church after her husband died. They say she was into the Occult.”
Marjorie murmurs in wordless disbelief, hand to her mouth and eyes wide with oh, those poor dears-- and she hears the door creak behind her, maybe feels something prickle down the back of her neck, but it’s an old house, isn’t it?
It’s a funny thing; they never did find the salt again.
+
The home burns down a couple years later, with two boys’ bodies never found. The officials label it a freak accident and bulldoze the charred remains.
+
Everything is pale compared to them. Pale little children and pale little wives in their boring, whitewashed lives, while Sammy and Dean burn technicolour bright, glowing with the truth of this is what the world is like.
Mom taught them how to protect themselves. Dad taught them, just by dying, that they are the most precious things in the whole fucking world. Three years at [x] taught them nothing more than get the hell away. They salt and burn and pack their bags, Dean whispering under his breath in a voice still waiting to break “Let’s blow this popsicle stand”.
They look like runaways, but they’re not.
They’re running-tos.
+
Mostly, they run into trouble.
+
It’s not easy being dead.
Him and Dean, they’re the pretend kind of dead, where their names change on the outside from day to day and their stories change too.
Sometimes Sammy thinks the really dead things, the ghosts they try to find, have it easier than them. Sure, being gross looking and wanting to kill people all the time might be kinda tough, but they never have to worry about the CPS or finding a place to stay each night or having enough money to eat. Ghosts stay still, while Sammy and Dean are never slowing down.
They were always good at stealing things. They’re getting even better, and the hardest thing is persuading folks that two barely teenaged kids are fine and okay and not about to steal the cutlery.
“Look, ma’am,” Dean says with his big, bright smile and his freckles and his honest eyes, “our pa’s gonna come and pick us up in the morning, and I know we’re kinda young but he’d sure appreciate it if you could let us have a room for the night.”
He’s charming in ways Sammy, awkward and pale faced, could never hope to be, and it almost always works. Sometimes it doesn’t, and the lady- it’s almost always a lady, when it doesn’t- gets a worried crease between her eyes and maybe she’ll reach for the phone or maybe she’ll just tell them ‘wait there, and I’ll-‘, but that’s okay. They’re getting real good at disappearing too.
+
The werewolf in [y] is their first one.
[hard, fuck up, run like hell]
And then they break through the trees and out into open parkland, grass and swing sets and empty soda cans. The stars are out, the streets are dark, and the world is suddenly so wide that Sammy can hardly breathe.
Dean grabs his hand and yells “Come on,” wolf crashing through the undergrowth behind them, and that’s when adrenaline flicks that little switch in his brain, the rapid-fire beating of Sammy’s heart crossing that fine line between fear and exhilaration.
They’re always a little afraid, the fear of being young and alone in a world that doesn’t have a fucking clue, but right now he’s laughing and running with the wind in his hair and his brother racing beside him, behind him, back in front again. The wolf howls over Dean’s litany of curses, loud and desperate and so damn close. Sammy closes his eyes and he spreads his hands and he reaches.
The world jolts; something opens inside him, like eyes he never knew he had, and power surges up and out, and it’s everything. And then nothing.
Sammy opens his eyes to Dean’s broadest grin, and his voice gabbling at what must be ninety miles per hour, “I dunno what you did, Sammy, but wow it was the coolest and you gotta tell me how you did it, man, have you been holding out on me all these years?”
Oh, Sammy thinks, I’m alive. He licks his lips, and it feels like licking a battery. “Is it dead?”
“Completely, dude. You wasted the fucker, and it was like an explosion and I felt it, the whole damn town musta felt it-” Dean’s voice is loud and sudden, washing in and out of Sammy’s ears, but his hands are as gentle as a mother’s as he helps his brother sit up.
Sammy feels like a hair stood on end, a million volts running through him and buzzing in the air. It’s a million extended hands, palms up and fingers out and the skin peeled back to leave the nerves bare and tingling. It’s like there’s nothing in the world Sammy can’t touch.
And there at the centre of it all, surrounded by it and wrapped so close, so tight, is Dean.
+
Sammy kills his first man when he’s thirteen years old, not quite in cold blood and almost entirely out of necessity: some guy a bit too fond of little boys and little girls, with a basement full of little bones and a dozen angry spirits, and Sam reaches out with every fucking hand he’s got. The world tightens, slows, narrowing down to squeezing fingers and the dull, wet thuds of skull meeting floor one, two, three four- -
The guy dies silently, eyes wide and staring in disbelief, like he’s seen a ghost, like he never really believed he could be caught.
“You don’t hurt kids,” Sammy whispers. “Didn’t anybody ever teach you, you don’t hurt kids?”
Dean finds him, minutes later, with his hands still wrapped around the guy’s throat and the air around him electric, prickling. They move the body down to the basement together, red sea parting as watchful spirits decide it’s time to go home.
Sammy knows about fingerprints and forensics from when he goes to school, and from the books Dean makes him read when he doesn’t, but he isn’t worried. It’ll all be ash in the morning.
+
Dean kills his first man two weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday.
“I told you,” he says as he lowers the gun, “not to touch my brother.”
[blah]
“Remember that time you took up soccer for a week?” Dean reminds him sullenly, “Or that time you ran away from home for a whole afternoon?” but he helps Sammy fill in forms and prepare for interviews and flatten his stupid, too-long hair.
Eventually, he helps pack up his things, and he doesn’t mention how five hours after Sammy ran away from home- from Dean, who equals home- he turned up at the motel-room door with a scraped knee and his face crumpled with trying not to cry.
Sammy doesn’t mention how Dean spent those full five hours looking for him.
+
He lasts two months at Stanford, a whim borne of curiosity and what-if and the dreams he sometimes has of a life not quite his own.
[blah]
He never uses his powers on Dean. It’s a matter of honour, yes, of brotherly pride and we are all we have and want.
It’s a matter of he’s never needed to.
+
It’s just some scummy pick-up truck, but Dean’s crowing over it like it’s his firstborn son. “Dude, did you see the look on that guy’s face? Good thing he’s such a lardass, or he’d probably still be chasing us. Lucky I have such quick reflexes, huh?”
“You screamed like a little girl.”
“And punched the motherfucker. Pow! I am awesome.”
Dean’s grin is infectious, and Sammy bites down on his bottom lip to keep from smiling, hands drumming on the steering-wheel. “You’re the man, Dean. I don’t know why you won’t let me just-”
“Yeah, yeah, psychic-boy.” He rolls his eyes, tossing a twinkie at Sammy’s head and watching it bounce away two inches from his face. “Don’t harsh the buzz.”
+
The brain is an incredible thing, Sammy often says, until Dean smacks him over the head and tells him to stop showing off.
[blah]
It’s not hunting, not really. There’s no noble motive or greater cause, except the feeling that it’s what they’ve always done, and with powers like Sammy’s what else would they do? So, no, it’s not hunting. It’s pest control; investigation; the gathering of information.
A man with yellow eyes and the easy kind of grin that’s all sharpness underneath catches up with them in a seedy bar in Wyoming. He’s wearing the wrong kind of suit and the wrong kind of face- very stupid or very clever, it doesn’t matter which because nobody else even looks at him.
A hand flat on the bar, look, ma, no guns, and he says the magic words: “I know something you don’t know.”
Sammy looks at Dean, and Dean looks at Sammy, and they say, together, “We’re listening.”
OKAY I GUESS I'LL GO BUY FOOD NOW.