(no subject)
Elegy
by whereupon
Sam/ofc. Spoilers through season three, R, 3,520 words.
He sees her the first time at sixteen, though he does not meet her then, nor know her.
For girlmostlikely, with apologetically-belated birthday good wishes.
He sees her the first time at sixteen, though he does not meet her then, nor know her. Having spent the morning ascending though sharp green hills, they have stopped now for lunch at this truckstop with heavy timber walls and a view of dense forest and air awash with sunlight. He sees her across the room; her red hair is braided and tied with black ribbon and she is watching him as she lifts a mug to her mouth. Though he cannot see her mouth, he thinks that she is smiling, and he blushes and ducks his head when he realizes that he's staring. His brother, sitting beside him, says nothing about it, perhaps assuming that the reason Sam does not look up for the rest of the meal is that he is sulking, bitter about once more moving on.
Sam does not look up until their father is paying the check, and he sees, then, that she is gone. As they leave the restaurant, Dean elbows him and says, "Look at it this way, you were always complaining about the cold, anyway. At least now we're headed south, huh?"
"You're the one who hates the cold," Sam says. "I was fine," and Dean's shoulders hunch almost imperceptibly, his smile fading by a degree. For an instant, satisfaction razor-glints cruel and horrible in the pit of Sam's stomach, even as he knows he should feel guilty, even as he does.
So he quickens his pace, leaves Dean to wait for their father or trail behind; by now it has occurred to him that she could just as easily have been watching Dean as watching him, and as always that seems the more likely possibility.
He doesn't talk again until they've stopped for the night, until he's standing in the room he'll be sharing with Dean until their father decides to move them again. There's only one bed, because two bedrooms does not mean enough room for the three of them, and Dean comes up behind him, says, "Coin toss for the couch?"
"Yeah," Sam says. He calls heads, because he always does, and Dean deliberately fumbles the flip, pretends to look surprised when it falls in Sam's favor.
"Guess fate's on your side," he says.
"Guess so," Sam says. He meets Dean's eyes; he doesn't need to say anything. He drops his backpack onto the scarred wooden floor. "Now get outta my room and go sleep on your couch."
"You got lucky," Dean says. "It's not gonna happen again."
"Right," Sam says. "Sure," and he tells himself then that it doesn't matter anyway, that he will never see her again, and that he is a terrible person for resenting Dean when he knows so well that he is half of Dean's entire world.
All the same, she haunts him the rest of the time they are there; it's not until they're on the road once more that she begins to fade.
--
At eighteen, stumbling home drunk from a party he was not allowed to attend (though he is eighteen, legally adult, able to buy cigarettes and die for his country; though he has known death and loss, grief and what it takes to survive in the aftermath, for as long as he can remember and that's a kind of hard-won, bone-wrought maturity that his classmates do not and will never know), he sees her again. She is on the other side of the street, one hand raised as though to shield her eyes from the moonlight.
He blinks and she is gone; he cannot remember if she was actually there or if it was a dream, a memory resurfaced for only a moment.
His elbow collides twice with the front door as he fumbles with the lock; the noise and his subsequent curses are enough to wake Dean, so that when Sam finally makes it inside, he is standing sleep-muzzy in the doorway of the bedroom they share. He stares at Sam, at first, and then laughs at him, and then doesn't say anything at all when Sam says he's leaving (and he doesn't think he has to explain what he means, or to elaborate, so he doesn't; Dean will understand, because Dean always understands. Words are useless and unnecessary and difficult.), and sometime before true dawn, when the sky is only just beginning to lighten, he guides Sam to bed, his hand heavy and warm on the flat of Sam's shoulder as Sam leans into him with eyes already closed, trusting, as he always has, that Dean will be strong enough for the both of them.
Hours later, Sam does not remember having seen her, or having thought he'd seen her. His head pounds dully and the sheets are twisted around him as though nightmare-wracked and in the kitchen Dean is making coffee and frying eggs. Their father will not be home for days.
Dean doesn't say anything about what Sam said, and Sam doesn't, either. Instead they eat breakfast and spend what remains of morning watching whatever's on television until Sam falls asleep with his feet in Dean's lap, and in the afternoon they sit on the rusted fire escape and watch the clouds roll in, edged black as rage; later, rain will fall like the hiss of vipers. Dean smokes, which he only ever does when he's nervous or afraid and trying not to be, and as that acrid familiar smell twists up to meet the greying sweep of sky, Sam knows that he'd been right, that Dean had understood. But he doesn't say anything about it, and neither does Dean.
Words are useless, after all.
--
He is twenty when he knows her name. It is night and, having just finished his shift, he is walking home from the Chinese restaurant where he busses tables; she falls into step beside him. He does not stop walking, though he does slow down, at first in surprise and then in recognition. "I know you," he says. She does not appear to be any older than she was the first time he saw her, but he knows that could be a trick of memory.
He knows, too, that it could be true.
"I've seen you around," she says, and if not for the way she tilts her head, it would sound imperious. Instead, though she is not smiling, he thinks that she is laughing, amused. She would not have let herself be caught, would not have been glimpsed twice before had she not wanted him to see her. As though impulsively, she turns to him, holds out her hand, and he takes it. "Ana," she says, and her grasp is strong, her handshake firm.
"Sam," he says. "So have you been following me, or is this coincidence? You happened to be in the neighborhood?"
"You believe in coincidence?" she asks. She smirks and pushes one of her braids back over her shoulder. They pass beneath a streetlight, illuminating the fraying patches of her jacket.
"Okay, so why're you following me?" Sam asks, and he feels the weight of the knife in his boot. A year and a half since he left and he still cannot leave his apartment unless he is armed, he still cannot sleep unless the windows and doors have been lined with salt, he still wakes throughout the night because the sirens and the car doors slamming and the sidewalk chatter are not the right noises, not the noises he is used to hearing as he falls asleep.
A year and a half and he wonders if that will ever change, or if he will forever be aware of what waits in the night, what hides in the spaces between. He cannot imagine ever forgetting, ever losing the memory of the shotgun's kick against bone, of Dean bleeding on the ground beneath a moon's whirl of stars, his face that same blanched shade, of their father waking sweating and death-cold from screams, jungle-heat and fire.
"Can't say," she says.
"Can't, or won't?"
"Bit of both?" she says. "Maybe you should take it as a compliment."
"It could just as easily be a curse."
She laughs at that. "Could be," she says. "We'll find out."
He grins despite himself, and ducks his head. "Is that a threat?"
"I'll tell you something true," she says. "I wouldn't have watched you this long if I wanted to threaten you. There're better ways for that."
"You're not watching me now."
She raises an eyebrow. "I'm not threatening you, either."
"So you say." Having reached his apartment complex, they come to a stop. He swallows, hesitant to go inside, or to reach into his pocket for his key with her here. She regards him for a moment and then steps closer, before he can react; she leans up and her mouth brushes gentle across his cheek.
"See you around," she says, and he is left with the lingering scent of autumn-smoke and fall's first rain beneath the heavy miasma of sauces and spice that he takes home from work. He turns away before he can see whether she keeps walking, disappears around the corner, or whether she merely fades from view.
Safe in his apartment, or as safe as he can allow himself to believe to be, he locks the door behind himself. He thinks briefly of calling Dean, but there would be no point in it; Dean won't be able to help, won't know any more than Sam does, and Sam will not contact him for something so small as this, will not let his father think that he needs their help, will not force himself to say goodbye to Dean once more when the call ends. He takes a shower, and he tosses his shirt, the sleeves of which are smudged the brightly artificial red of sweet and sour sauce, into the laundry basket. Tomorrow after classes he'll lug his dirty clothes down to the bank of washers and dryers in the basement and he'll feed faded quarters into the machines; he'll bring his notes and he'll study there, lulled into something approaching calm by the repetitious sounds and the times with which he associates them.
Tonight, though perhaps it is late enough to already be tomorrow, and that's a construct he's too tired to sort through at the moment, he wants nothing more than to go to bed. So he crawls beneath the covers and pulls the blankets around himself, and he does not wake to the sirens, or the slamming of doors, to chatter or to the absence of other noises; he sleeps soundly, and well. If he dreams, it is of black ribbon, street corners, sunlight fading, and this time, upon waking, he remembers.
--
He half-expects to see her when his world ends at twenty-two for it seems that if she is to witness anything, it's that that would be most important, but it's not until they are months from Stanford that he does. He's left Dean at the bar, and he doubts that his brother will be back until very early morning, at least; he is about to draw the curtains when he looks out the window and sees her on the opposite side of the street.
She comes towards him when he opens the motel room door; there is no traffic at this time of night in a town this small, so she walks across the road. Her hands are tucked into the pockets of her jacket and she keeps her head down until she is a few feet from him.
"Hi," he says.
"Hello," she says. Her accent is stronger than he'd remembered; in fact, he can't remember if she had an accent the last time that he saw her, the only time he's ever spoken to her.
"Do you want to, uh, come in?" he asks, realizing that he is blocking the doorway, realizing that it's colder outside than he'd thought.
"Yes, I'd like that," she says, and he moves out of the way. She stands just inside the doorway and surveys her surroundings; he shoves his hands into his pockets, and then takes them out and crosses his arms. He should not feel this edgy, this unsettled, he thinks; she is not judging him, is not judging this way of life. After all, it's not the first time she's seen it. And when she looks at him once again, he sees that he was right: her expression is merely curious. "Are you all right?" she asks, and the question surprises him.
"Uh, yeah," he says. "I guess. Thanks. I, uh, I don't mean to be rude, but what are you?"
"What do I look like?" she asks.
"That's not an answer," he says.
"Neither was that," she points out.
"Human," he says. "You look human."
"Close enough," she says.
"If I sit down, you're not gonna try to kill me or anything," he says, making it into a question.
"Would you have let me in if you thought I would?" she asks. He raises his eyebrows in acknowledgment and lowers himself onto the edge of his bed. After a moment, she comes to sit beside him. Her thigh touches his and her skin is warm through the denim. He's not sure why he notices this, exactly; he doesn't think he ever really thought that she was anything but alive.
"So you just, uh, came to say hi," he says. "To check up on me."
"It had been awhile," she says.
"Since California," he says, agreeing, though it feels like a lifetime ago.
She shakes her head. "Sometimes you're oblivious."
"Oh," he says. "How many times?"
She shrugs. "Does it matter?"
"Why do you do it?" Sam asks.
"Like I said," she says. "Can't, won't, a bit of both."
"You said I'd find out," he says.
"So I did," she says.
"When?"
"Eventually."
He raises his eyebrows and she grins. "Patience, Sam. It's a virtue."
"So's not being deliberately evasive."
"I don't think that's one of the ten," she says. "Doesn't count."
"Patience isn't, either," he says.
"Really?" she says, sounding genuinely surprised, and shrugs. "I never was good at those. Live and learn."
"So you're alive."
She blinks. "You sound surprised."
"You don't age," he says, explanation enough.
"You're sweet," she says. "Maybe I just age well."
"Very well," he says.
"Like I said, you're sweet," she says, and when she kisses him, though it is as gently as the first time, this time it's his mouth that she kisses. She tastes faintly of molasses, he thinks, and his hand is resting against her cheek, though he does not recall moving, does not recall intending to kiss her back. "You're all right," she says, a question quiet into his ear, more breath across his skin than words pronounced aloud. He nods; he does not trust himself to speak as he recalls the way his face had heated when she saw him staring that first time. She kisses him once more; it's fiercer, this time, rougher though not cruel, and he gives himself equally into it, to her. His fingers knot at the base of her spine; she turns her head and his teeth skim the taut skin of her neck, he leaves kisses that will flower like bruises.
Her jacket is on the floor; she lifts her shirt over her head as he does the same with his own. She is not wearing a bra. There is too much denim between them, there are too many buckles and buttons and zips; it seems possible that he does not breath again until his hands are sliding up her bare thighs, until he is kissing her stomach and lowering his face to the heat of her. Her heels work at his shoulders, and her body tightens, clenches, sighs. It's not a name that she calls, but he thinks it might be an invocation all the same, something wordless, something he understands in only the basest way.
When he pushes into her, later, she is open for him, and she draws him in, her hands behind his neck as she brings him down to kiss her. He sees that her braids have come undone, that her ribbons are loose and trailing; she bites at his lip and he aches within her, her hands on his neck, on his shoulders, her fingernails digging into his back until he catches and breaks and shatters.
She will sit on the edge of the bed and rebraid her hair, and he will watch her do this, watch the nimble working of her fingers; she will dress once more and she will tell him goodbye, though she will not tell him that she will not see him again, and he will think of this with hope. When she has left, he will get out of bed and he will gather his discarded clothing and he will sleep that night, though he will wake when Dean gets back sometime after four in the morning.
Now, though, he pulls her close, and he kisses her; their mouths are rough and worked and her eyes, when she looks at him, are not dreamless, but deep, and though he does not know what she is, he will not again ask her that, nor why.
--
Their father has been dead five months when next he sees her. Coming out of the restaurant with two bags of takeout in hand, he sees her on the bus-stop bench, and he goes towards her. She looks up as he approaches, but she does not smile.
"Hey," he says.
"Hi," she says.
"How, uh, have you been?" he asks.
"Good," she says, but from the pause before she says it, he knows that she's lying.
"I, um," Sam says. "It's good to see you."
"You, too," she says, and her eyes are soft. "You won't see me again. I just, I wanted to tell you."
Sam frowns. "You're leaving? Or, or not coming back? Is it because -- what happened?"
"Nothing's happened yet," she says.
"Okay, what's going to happen?"
She smiles, then, but only a little, and, he thinks, sadly. "A bit of both," she says.
"Look, whatever it is, if it's bad--"
"Your food's getting cold," she interrupts. "And your brother's waiting. Goodbye, Sam." She gets up, that final time, and she touches his hand only briefly as she passes by; she walks away, and he only stares after her. If he were to go after her, he knows, she would disappear, and he is not ready to see that. He does not want to see her run away from him.
He doesn't think he could live with that; how terrible must it be, how much worse than everything that has come before, for her to flee?
He's lost his appetite by the time he gets back to the motel room, and when Dean asks what's wrong, he only says that he's tired. Dean doesn't believe him, but doesn't push the issue.
Sam sleeps well that night, and later he will realize that it was the last night he slept well for a very long time. He will realize, then, that perhaps this was a kind of final gift, and he will feel sick for knowing this, for understanding it, and for doing so only belatedly, when there is nothing he can do to change things, to make them better or take them back.
--
When Sam is twenty-three, he dies. When Sam is twenty-three and will never get any older, Dean goes to unconsecrated ground and, surrounded by gallows-trees, sells his soul to bring Sam back.
When Sam is twenty-three, he finds out.
--
And at twenty-three, in finding out, he realizes that she was wrong, though she would have had no way of knowing. He is looking through a book on death omens, death-spells, death-legends, because in three months Dean's soul will be consigned to hell if Sam does not intervene, and he comes across a painting that he has never seen before of what the text claims is the bean sidhe. He recognizes her instantly, though the text dates the painting to the seventeenth century.
He realizes that he never heard her wail, not the way the stories have it, but he knows well enough that legends do not always get everything right.
He does not say anything to Dean, who's sitting across the table and who has borrowed Sam's laptop, ostensibly for research, though Sam's fairly certain that's not actually what he's doing.
He does not want to know if Dean has seen her, too; if even now, unaware of what she is, and what she means, Dean looks for her during those moments when Sam is not around, or if (and perhaps this is what Sam would fear most of all) Dean sees her, and if he knows, and if still he does not care.
He doesn't say anything, and he turns the page, and when Dean looks over at him a moment later, he pretends not to see; he doesn't dare meet Dean's eyes.
--
end
by whereupon
Sam/ofc. Spoilers through season three, R, 3,520 words.
He sees her the first time at sixteen, though he does not meet her then, nor know her.
For girlmostlikely, with apologetically-belated birthday good wishes.
He sees her the first time at sixteen, though he does not meet her then, nor know her. Having spent the morning ascending though sharp green hills, they have stopped now for lunch at this truckstop with heavy timber walls and a view of dense forest and air awash with sunlight. He sees her across the room; her red hair is braided and tied with black ribbon and she is watching him as she lifts a mug to her mouth. Though he cannot see her mouth, he thinks that she is smiling, and he blushes and ducks his head when he realizes that he's staring. His brother, sitting beside him, says nothing about it, perhaps assuming that the reason Sam does not look up for the rest of the meal is that he is sulking, bitter about once more moving on.
Sam does not look up until their father is paying the check, and he sees, then, that she is gone. As they leave the restaurant, Dean elbows him and says, "Look at it this way, you were always complaining about the cold, anyway. At least now we're headed south, huh?"
"You're the one who hates the cold," Sam says. "I was fine," and Dean's shoulders hunch almost imperceptibly, his smile fading by a degree. For an instant, satisfaction razor-glints cruel and horrible in the pit of Sam's stomach, even as he knows he should feel guilty, even as he does.
So he quickens his pace, leaves Dean to wait for their father or trail behind; by now it has occurred to him that she could just as easily have been watching Dean as watching him, and as always that seems the more likely possibility.
He doesn't talk again until they've stopped for the night, until he's standing in the room he'll be sharing with Dean until their father decides to move them again. There's only one bed, because two bedrooms does not mean enough room for the three of them, and Dean comes up behind him, says, "Coin toss for the couch?"
"Yeah," Sam says. He calls heads, because he always does, and Dean deliberately fumbles the flip, pretends to look surprised when it falls in Sam's favor.
"Guess fate's on your side," he says.
"Guess so," Sam says. He meets Dean's eyes; he doesn't need to say anything. He drops his backpack onto the scarred wooden floor. "Now get outta my room and go sleep on your couch."
"You got lucky," Dean says. "It's not gonna happen again."
"Right," Sam says. "Sure," and he tells himself then that it doesn't matter anyway, that he will never see her again, and that he is a terrible person for resenting Dean when he knows so well that he is half of Dean's entire world.
All the same, she haunts him the rest of the time they are there; it's not until they're on the road once more that she begins to fade.
--
At eighteen, stumbling home drunk from a party he was not allowed to attend (though he is eighteen, legally adult, able to buy cigarettes and die for his country; though he has known death and loss, grief and what it takes to survive in the aftermath, for as long as he can remember and that's a kind of hard-won, bone-wrought maturity that his classmates do not and will never know), he sees her again. She is on the other side of the street, one hand raised as though to shield her eyes from the moonlight.
He blinks and she is gone; he cannot remember if she was actually there or if it was a dream, a memory resurfaced for only a moment.
His elbow collides twice with the front door as he fumbles with the lock; the noise and his subsequent curses are enough to wake Dean, so that when Sam finally makes it inside, he is standing sleep-muzzy in the doorway of the bedroom they share. He stares at Sam, at first, and then laughs at him, and then doesn't say anything at all when Sam says he's leaving (and he doesn't think he has to explain what he means, or to elaborate, so he doesn't; Dean will understand, because Dean always understands. Words are useless and unnecessary and difficult.), and sometime before true dawn, when the sky is only just beginning to lighten, he guides Sam to bed, his hand heavy and warm on the flat of Sam's shoulder as Sam leans into him with eyes already closed, trusting, as he always has, that Dean will be strong enough for the both of them.
Hours later, Sam does not remember having seen her, or having thought he'd seen her. His head pounds dully and the sheets are twisted around him as though nightmare-wracked and in the kitchen Dean is making coffee and frying eggs. Their father will not be home for days.
Dean doesn't say anything about what Sam said, and Sam doesn't, either. Instead they eat breakfast and spend what remains of morning watching whatever's on television until Sam falls asleep with his feet in Dean's lap, and in the afternoon they sit on the rusted fire escape and watch the clouds roll in, edged black as rage; later, rain will fall like the hiss of vipers. Dean smokes, which he only ever does when he's nervous or afraid and trying not to be, and as that acrid familiar smell twists up to meet the greying sweep of sky, Sam knows that he'd been right, that Dean had understood. But he doesn't say anything about it, and neither does Dean.
Words are useless, after all.
--
He is twenty when he knows her name. It is night and, having just finished his shift, he is walking home from the Chinese restaurant where he busses tables; she falls into step beside him. He does not stop walking, though he does slow down, at first in surprise and then in recognition. "I know you," he says. She does not appear to be any older than she was the first time he saw her, but he knows that could be a trick of memory.
He knows, too, that it could be true.
"I've seen you around," she says, and if not for the way she tilts her head, it would sound imperious. Instead, though she is not smiling, he thinks that she is laughing, amused. She would not have let herself be caught, would not have been glimpsed twice before had she not wanted him to see her. As though impulsively, she turns to him, holds out her hand, and he takes it. "Ana," she says, and her grasp is strong, her handshake firm.
"Sam," he says. "So have you been following me, or is this coincidence? You happened to be in the neighborhood?"
"You believe in coincidence?" she asks. She smirks and pushes one of her braids back over her shoulder. They pass beneath a streetlight, illuminating the fraying patches of her jacket.
"Okay, so why're you following me?" Sam asks, and he feels the weight of the knife in his boot. A year and a half since he left and he still cannot leave his apartment unless he is armed, he still cannot sleep unless the windows and doors have been lined with salt, he still wakes throughout the night because the sirens and the car doors slamming and the sidewalk chatter are not the right noises, not the noises he is used to hearing as he falls asleep.
A year and a half and he wonders if that will ever change, or if he will forever be aware of what waits in the night, what hides in the spaces between. He cannot imagine ever forgetting, ever losing the memory of the shotgun's kick against bone, of Dean bleeding on the ground beneath a moon's whirl of stars, his face that same blanched shade, of their father waking sweating and death-cold from screams, jungle-heat and fire.
"Can't say," she says.
"Can't, or won't?"
"Bit of both?" she says. "Maybe you should take it as a compliment."
"It could just as easily be a curse."
She laughs at that. "Could be," she says. "We'll find out."
He grins despite himself, and ducks his head. "Is that a threat?"
"I'll tell you something true," she says. "I wouldn't have watched you this long if I wanted to threaten you. There're better ways for that."
"You're not watching me now."
She raises an eyebrow. "I'm not threatening you, either."
"So you say." Having reached his apartment complex, they come to a stop. He swallows, hesitant to go inside, or to reach into his pocket for his key with her here. She regards him for a moment and then steps closer, before he can react; she leans up and her mouth brushes gentle across his cheek.
"See you around," she says, and he is left with the lingering scent of autumn-smoke and fall's first rain beneath the heavy miasma of sauces and spice that he takes home from work. He turns away before he can see whether she keeps walking, disappears around the corner, or whether she merely fades from view.
Safe in his apartment, or as safe as he can allow himself to believe to be, he locks the door behind himself. He thinks briefly of calling Dean, but there would be no point in it; Dean won't be able to help, won't know any more than Sam does, and Sam will not contact him for something so small as this, will not let his father think that he needs their help, will not force himself to say goodbye to Dean once more when the call ends. He takes a shower, and he tosses his shirt, the sleeves of which are smudged the brightly artificial red of sweet and sour sauce, into the laundry basket. Tomorrow after classes he'll lug his dirty clothes down to the bank of washers and dryers in the basement and he'll feed faded quarters into the machines; he'll bring his notes and he'll study there, lulled into something approaching calm by the repetitious sounds and the times with which he associates them.
Tonight, though perhaps it is late enough to already be tomorrow, and that's a construct he's too tired to sort through at the moment, he wants nothing more than to go to bed. So he crawls beneath the covers and pulls the blankets around himself, and he does not wake to the sirens, or the slamming of doors, to chatter or to the absence of other noises; he sleeps soundly, and well. If he dreams, it is of black ribbon, street corners, sunlight fading, and this time, upon waking, he remembers.
--
He half-expects to see her when his world ends at twenty-two for it seems that if she is to witness anything, it's that that would be most important, but it's not until they are months from Stanford that he does. He's left Dean at the bar, and he doubts that his brother will be back until very early morning, at least; he is about to draw the curtains when he looks out the window and sees her on the opposite side of the street.
She comes towards him when he opens the motel room door; there is no traffic at this time of night in a town this small, so she walks across the road. Her hands are tucked into the pockets of her jacket and she keeps her head down until she is a few feet from him.
"Hi," he says.
"Hello," she says. Her accent is stronger than he'd remembered; in fact, he can't remember if she had an accent the last time that he saw her, the only time he's ever spoken to her.
"Do you want to, uh, come in?" he asks, realizing that he is blocking the doorway, realizing that it's colder outside than he'd thought.
"Yes, I'd like that," she says, and he moves out of the way. She stands just inside the doorway and surveys her surroundings; he shoves his hands into his pockets, and then takes them out and crosses his arms. He should not feel this edgy, this unsettled, he thinks; she is not judging him, is not judging this way of life. After all, it's not the first time she's seen it. And when she looks at him once again, he sees that he was right: her expression is merely curious. "Are you all right?" she asks, and the question surprises him.
"Uh, yeah," he says. "I guess. Thanks. I, uh, I don't mean to be rude, but what are you?"
"What do I look like?" she asks.
"That's not an answer," he says.
"Neither was that," she points out.
"Human," he says. "You look human."
"Close enough," she says.
"If I sit down, you're not gonna try to kill me or anything," he says, making it into a question.
"Would you have let me in if you thought I would?" she asks. He raises his eyebrows in acknowledgment and lowers himself onto the edge of his bed. After a moment, she comes to sit beside him. Her thigh touches his and her skin is warm through the denim. He's not sure why he notices this, exactly; he doesn't think he ever really thought that she was anything but alive.
"So you just, uh, came to say hi," he says. "To check up on me."
"It had been awhile," she says.
"Since California," he says, agreeing, though it feels like a lifetime ago.
She shakes her head. "Sometimes you're oblivious."
"Oh," he says. "How many times?"
She shrugs. "Does it matter?"
"Why do you do it?" Sam asks.
"Like I said," she says. "Can't, won't, a bit of both."
"You said I'd find out," he says.
"So I did," she says.
"When?"
"Eventually."
He raises his eyebrows and she grins. "Patience, Sam. It's a virtue."
"So's not being deliberately evasive."
"I don't think that's one of the ten," she says. "Doesn't count."
"Patience isn't, either," he says.
"Really?" she says, sounding genuinely surprised, and shrugs. "I never was good at those. Live and learn."
"So you're alive."
She blinks. "You sound surprised."
"You don't age," he says, explanation enough.
"You're sweet," she says. "Maybe I just age well."
"Very well," he says.
"Like I said, you're sweet," she says, and when she kisses him, though it is as gently as the first time, this time it's his mouth that she kisses. She tastes faintly of molasses, he thinks, and his hand is resting against her cheek, though he does not recall moving, does not recall intending to kiss her back. "You're all right," she says, a question quiet into his ear, more breath across his skin than words pronounced aloud. He nods; he does not trust himself to speak as he recalls the way his face had heated when she saw him staring that first time. She kisses him once more; it's fiercer, this time, rougher though not cruel, and he gives himself equally into it, to her. His fingers knot at the base of her spine; she turns her head and his teeth skim the taut skin of her neck, he leaves kisses that will flower like bruises.
Her jacket is on the floor; she lifts her shirt over her head as he does the same with his own. She is not wearing a bra. There is too much denim between them, there are too many buckles and buttons and zips; it seems possible that he does not breath again until his hands are sliding up her bare thighs, until he is kissing her stomach and lowering his face to the heat of her. Her heels work at his shoulders, and her body tightens, clenches, sighs. It's not a name that she calls, but he thinks it might be an invocation all the same, something wordless, something he understands in only the basest way.
When he pushes into her, later, she is open for him, and she draws him in, her hands behind his neck as she brings him down to kiss her. He sees that her braids have come undone, that her ribbons are loose and trailing; she bites at his lip and he aches within her, her hands on his neck, on his shoulders, her fingernails digging into his back until he catches and breaks and shatters.
She will sit on the edge of the bed and rebraid her hair, and he will watch her do this, watch the nimble working of her fingers; she will dress once more and she will tell him goodbye, though she will not tell him that she will not see him again, and he will think of this with hope. When she has left, he will get out of bed and he will gather his discarded clothing and he will sleep that night, though he will wake when Dean gets back sometime after four in the morning.
Now, though, he pulls her close, and he kisses her; their mouths are rough and worked and her eyes, when she looks at him, are not dreamless, but deep, and though he does not know what she is, he will not again ask her that, nor why.
--
Their father has been dead five months when next he sees her. Coming out of the restaurant with two bags of takeout in hand, he sees her on the bus-stop bench, and he goes towards her. She looks up as he approaches, but she does not smile.
"Hey," he says.
"Hi," she says.
"How, uh, have you been?" he asks.
"Good," she says, but from the pause before she says it, he knows that she's lying.
"I, um," Sam says. "It's good to see you."
"You, too," she says, and her eyes are soft. "You won't see me again. I just, I wanted to tell you."
Sam frowns. "You're leaving? Or, or not coming back? Is it because -- what happened?"
"Nothing's happened yet," she says.
"Okay, what's going to happen?"
She smiles, then, but only a little, and, he thinks, sadly. "A bit of both," she says.
"Look, whatever it is, if it's bad--"
"Your food's getting cold," she interrupts. "And your brother's waiting. Goodbye, Sam." She gets up, that final time, and she touches his hand only briefly as she passes by; she walks away, and he only stares after her. If he were to go after her, he knows, she would disappear, and he is not ready to see that. He does not want to see her run away from him.
He doesn't think he could live with that; how terrible must it be, how much worse than everything that has come before, for her to flee?
He's lost his appetite by the time he gets back to the motel room, and when Dean asks what's wrong, he only says that he's tired. Dean doesn't believe him, but doesn't push the issue.
Sam sleeps well that night, and later he will realize that it was the last night he slept well for a very long time. He will realize, then, that perhaps this was a kind of final gift, and he will feel sick for knowing this, for understanding it, and for doing so only belatedly, when there is nothing he can do to change things, to make them better or take them back.
--
When Sam is twenty-three, he dies. When Sam is twenty-three and will never get any older, Dean goes to unconsecrated ground and, surrounded by gallows-trees, sells his soul to bring Sam back.
When Sam is twenty-three, he finds out.
--
And at twenty-three, in finding out, he realizes that she was wrong, though she would have had no way of knowing. He is looking through a book on death omens, death-spells, death-legends, because in three months Dean's soul will be consigned to hell if Sam does not intervene, and he comes across a painting that he has never seen before of what the text claims is the bean sidhe. He recognizes her instantly, though the text dates the painting to the seventeenth century.
He realizes that he never heard her wail, not the way the stories have it, but he knows well enough that legends do not always get everything right.
He does not say anything to Dean, who's sitting across the table and who has borrowed Sam's laptop, ostensibly for research, though Sam's fairly certain that's not actually what he's doing.
He does not want to know if Dean has seen her, too; if even now, unaware of what she is, and what she means, Dean looks for her during those moments when Sam is not around, or if (and perhaps this is what Sam would fear most of all) Dean sees her, and if he knows, and if still he does not care.
He doesn't say anything, and he turns the page, and when Dean looks over at him a moment later, he pretends not to see; he doesn't dare meet Dean's eyes.
--
end