(no subject)
It's been ages since I posted an actual story. And I'm not sure if this counts as such, but. It's a collection of words, anyway, and they're fiction-based, and they kind of came out of nowhere. And it turns out I miss writing, and would like to do it again soon.
Phosphor
by whereupon
Supernatural: preseries, gen, Sam&Dean, R, 5,900 words. It's not the landing that kills, it's the fall.
--
All he'd really meant to do was tell them how to hold the gun right. Jimmy looked stupid standing there like he was gonna shoot himself in the foot (with water, all right, but all the same, you practice the same whether it's live rounds or not), and, yeah, maybe Sam's pretending hard that he doesn't know any better either, that he isn't who he is, doesn't leave school every day and go back to the motel currently masquerading as home and do two hours of guerilla-survivalist-paranoiac training with his weirdo brother, but Jesus Christ, Jimmy looked so goddamn ridiculous and maybe this is what Dean meant when he called Sam a fuckin' know-it-all who can't keep his goddamn mouth shut, but that had been about Sam talking back to Dad and this is totally different.
Really. It is. It's not like Jimmy's gonna threaten to beat his ass, right? Or if he does, he'll mean it in that friendly macho-wannabe hey-we're-all-just-guys-here kind of way.
Which, okay, yeah, Dad's a guy too, and sometimes Dean says it that same way, but they're not, like. Macho wannabe.
Well, maybe Dean, a little. But they've actually done shit, they save lives and sure, Dean swaggers with it where Dad only looks really pissed off and tired, but at least Sam's family's actually been in a fight, you know? Not that Sam's proud of it. At all.
He isn't. He hates it. He hates people pretending that they have been when they haven't, that they're tougher than they are, because if they would fucking stop, maybe Dad and Dean would stop thinking that it's cool what they do, cool to risk their lives and come back bruised and battered and broken, believing they can live forever just 'cause everybody else says it's possible, just 'cause assholes like Jimmy think you can get punched in the face, knocked out hard, and just walk it off like nothing happened.
The last time it happened to Dean, he was out of commission for four whole days, during which he scared the hell out of Sam, what with losing track of his words mid-sentence and one time not even recognizing his own godddamn brother.
It is so fucking far from cool that the kids from school have no idea. And if they would stop saying that they did, if everybody would, then maybe Dean would stop, stop throwing himself into the line of fire like it's nothing, stop taking stupid unnecessary risks just because he can.
Dad, on the other hand -- he's pretty sure Dad has no idea whether or not it's cool and that he wouldn't care one goddamn way if he did, he'd just raise his eyebrows and take another drink and sigh in that way that's like somebody else racking the slide on his gun. Dad doesn't have to do that, it's implied. Which isn't right, either, and isn't fair in the least. Jimmy's dad sells auto insurance in an office downtown, and Joey's dad owns a restaurant, which is how Joey managed to swipe the booze, and James's dad . . . actually, Sam isn't sure about him. James doesn't talk about him much. Or at all. But not in the painful-awkward oh who me? My dad? No, he's totally normal I swear kind of way that Sam doesn't talk about John, it's more like the oh him he cheated on my mom and ran off with his secretary kind of shame.
Vanessa's mom, at least, is in the army, or was. If anybody else here knows what it's like to grow up as a hunter's kid, it's probably Vanessa, who grew up as a soldier's.
On the other hand, Vanessa's mom, like, gardens now, so maybe not. The idea of Dad gardening is enough to make Sam choke, his eyes watering as he bites his lip. Especially since Dean actually saw Vanessa's mom gardening and said she was hot as fuck, which is really not something Sam wants to think about in the context of Dad and which is how Sam knows she gardens in the first place, it's not like he was creeping around Vanessa's house himself, because he's not a creeper, who the fuck goes prowling around for chicks in that big black car like a fucking neon sign, Hi I'm Shady As Fuck, Ask Me How!
It doesn't count if you're just in the passenger seat, it doesn't count the same at all. Because it's not like you can just teleport out, right? Sam's tried. He knows. And it's not like you can reach over and grab the wheel, because then Dean starts shouting about how you're gonna screw with the alignment and wreck the bumper and what the hell are you doing why are you even touching his car except with your ass and if you keep it up it's not even gonna be that.
Not that Sam would complain. He'd wanted to walk home from school, maybe stop by the library on the way. That had been the plan, and then Dean showed up, and it's not like Sam could have just told him to go to hell, really. He's tried it. Dean gets all crestfallen for a second and then his eyes get all flinty and jaded and he spends the rest of the night sulking and stomping around and not talking to Sam. Which would make it a great tactic to use, the nights Sam's got homework to do, except for how, sue him, he still feels kind of guilty when he's the one to crush his brother's world.
It's different when Dad does it, when Dad tells Dean he's too slow or he handled the guns wrong or he doesn't need to play backup on a hunt, he can stay home with Sam, because neither of them should be hunting in the first place; Dean should still be in high school, for Christ's sake. Or college. Something. But when Dean's just being his usual obnoxious asshole self for reasons unrelated to hunting, it -- counts differently.
Somehow.
It does. There's probably a theorem to explain it, or at least some stupid social sciences evo-bio theory. Sam probably even knows it, possibly by heart, it's just that he's kind of having trouble a) remembering and b) focusing because 1) consumption of alcohol by minors, for which he can't remember the consequence here, but it's probably a fine, it's usually a fine, and 2) Jimmy's holding a gun.
Sam's gun.
Never go unarmed, Dad says. A knife's not gonna save your ass no matter how good you can throw it, Sammy, if the other guy pulls a gun on you. You know the one about bringin' a gun to a knife fight, Dean said. And smirked, like he was waiting for Sam to correct him because he had such a fucking brilliant response all planned out, which, knowing him, as Sam does, was probably in the form of a dirty joke, and so Sam had rolled his eyes and pushed his hair out of his face and gone back to studying for the AP History exam; there were some punchlines he was better off not knowing.
Really. There were. So much for never being able to stop asking questions like a fuckin' four-year-old, he thinks, except of course Dean isn't here and even if he were, it's not like he'd be able to tell what Sam's thinking, what with not having telepathy (at least most of the time) and all.
Still. If it hadn't been for Dean, Sam wouldn't have had the gun in the first place. He likes his knife. He knows how to use it. This never happens when he has his knife.
Dean's fault, he decides. When he has to explain this to somebody, he's going with that. Because it is, the way that most things are. All Sam had wanted was a nice quiet night, peace to finish the Chem paper that didn't get finished last week on account of the wendigo hunt and Dean coming back all bloody and unfocused and just lying there while Dad swore and applied pressure like he learned in Vietnam or whatever and Sam stitched and tried not to notice how pale either of them were, how scared Dad was as indicated by the lines around his eyes and how broken Dean'd gotten as indicated by his goddamn unnatural stillness, goddamn it Dean could never just duck, could never just shout a warning and risk the thing getting away, could never let Dad take one for a turn, no.
Everything, really. In Sam's whole life. Is Dean's fault. With a few things left over that fall on Dad. Like the whole hunting aspect. If not for that, Dean would be fine. Normal, like. And if not for Dean being so . . . Dean, all bravado and overconfidence and hey Sam Sam look up watch me gimme attention I'm bored hey Sam, Sam wouldn't have had to leave the motel room, since he wouldn't have otherwise been given the option of a front-row seat for what the theater across the street, the one with the busted windows, calls a triple-X-er.
Sure, Dean's latest girl's hot, but then, they all are. And Dean has a type, which is cheap and easy and just as desperate as Dean is. And Sam's not, like, blind, and he's not saying that easy is bad, because, yeah, he's a dude and he's seventeen and he knows how these things work, okay, he has personal experience, it's just that if he wanted porn, he'd have looked for it. And he didn't. Thus, no porn. And if he had, it wouldn't have starred Dean's pick of the week, it'd have starred somebody -- else.
Sits-three-seats-behind-him-in-Chemistry, glossy-haired, wears-white-librarian-blouses, laughs-like-a-blues-singer else.
Not that Vanessa's laughing now, exactly. She's more like staring at Jimmy and at the gun in his hand and then at the mustachioed guy behind the counter, the one who had the audacity to not sell Jimmy a pack of cigarettes and who thus became the target of Jimmy's little Pulp Fiction fantasy.
To be fair, of course, maybe Sam should have been keeping a better eye on his gun. He knew better, after all. Jimmy's a civilian, and it's Sam's fucking gun. But he told Jimmy how to hold it, and how not to blow his dick off, and, yeah, he let Jimmy hold it, after that little safety-lesson-cum-hey-Vanessa-look-I-know-cool-gun-stuff-speech, but so do those cops who come to elementary schools, right? Which should be a hell of a lot dangerous than handing a piece to somebody who's like three months away from being able to vote.
That the guns they pass around in elementary schools are usually unloaded is something that comes to mind belatedly, and, yeah, maybe he should have thought about it earlier, but there was the beer and there was Vanessa and then there was Jimmy saying hey guys let's go for a ride and Vanessa piling into the backseat next to Sam so that his elbow brushed her tits and when Jimmy took the curb the way Dean does to show off, she fell across his lap and he smelled jasmine and spilled beer and hot-close-girl and yeah, okay, maybe he was a little distracted. But it's not like this was expected, exactly. Jimmy's a jock, for god's sake. On the track team. Not one of those guys who hang out in the parking lot and who gave Sam shifty looks until he looked back at them and who now leave him the fuck alone.
Jimmy's a good guy, Sam thinks hopelessly, as though that might undo this scene, let them get out of this without somebody calling the cops. Let them get out of this without somebody getting blown away.
He had such a future planned, too. Colleges. Good colleges. Ivy League. California. Stanford, the letter at the bottom of his duffel. He was going to get out, and now he's gonna go down as another fuckin' deadbeat, one more screw-up good for nothing other than flipping burgers or getting himself torn to wet ribbons out in some forest moonlit like a Rorschach test. He was going to--
"You're kidding, right?" the guy behind the counter says, and raises an eyebrow. "Kid, you don't put the gun down now like your mama taught you, I'm gonna put it down for you."
Sam's breath catches. This is it, then. How it ends, his future derailed under the buzzing high-beam lights of a convenience store in Nowhere, Middle America. And he was going to avoid this, that was the whole point. Somebody touches his arm, fingernails gripping tight, and he looks over from the guy's face, guy who looks like he's been on every season of COPS, oh Jesus fuck Jimmy you have luck like Dean, to see Vanessa holding on to him, Vanessa's pearlescent-pink nail polish glinting under the convenience-store lights, and he is probably still going to be shot down like a punk by the Slushy machine, but at least he is going to be shot down like a punk by the Slushy machine along with the girl who he liked and who maybe he'd have gone out with if only he could have made himself ask and that was the whole point of tonight, that was the why of the hanging out and the beer; there was also the promise of dimly-lit corners and the potential of buttons being un-buttoned and Vanessa's tongue in his mouth and catching her eye across the classroom and having her wink at him.
Or, you know, maybe more than that. But he isn't Dean.
The newspapers will probably make up something Romeo and Juliet about it, if he's lucky. He'll be just as dead, but at least he'll look cool to his former peers. Which is what's gotten them here in the first place, because if Jimmy didn't have this idea about how cool it'd look to hold up a stupid second-thought gas-station add-on, and if Sam hadn't had this idea about how cool he would sound if he pointed out that Jimmy was holding his water-pistol like Miss Marple would hold an Uzi, which was to say way the fuck awkwardly and like he was gonna be squashed into old-lady-paste by the recoil, none of them would be here. They'd be back in the basement of Joey's house, listening to the shitty music that Sam has to like because everybody else does and Dean doesn't, and drinking bad beer to the point where it would be easy to do things like ask pretty girls if maybe they wanted to go see a movie sometime.
Or, at least, Sam would have been. The other guys, they could have done whatever the hell they wanted, as long as it didn't lead to this and it didn't involve Vanessa.
Jimmy's face screws up in confusion. Clearly this is not what years of television have taught him to expect. Sam rolls his eyes. "Put down the gun," he says, but quietly. More like a hiss. No way is he going to shout at Jimmy, who is now holding Sam's real live actual gun full of real live actual bullets capable of inflicting severe bodily harm exactly like Sam told him not to, and whose finger is very very tense on the trigger. Vanessa's grip on his arm tightens, her nails biting through the fabric of his shirt, and yes he would very much like to feel that again, but not right now. With witnesses. At least one of whom is armed. He glances down at her.
"What if they shoot him?" she mouths, eyes wide and mascara-smeared and slightly glazed, and from the look she is giving Jimmy, all terror and melting concern, Sam can tell, understanding just as sudden and sharp and way-too-real, sensation like the cold salt sea breaking through the daze of tonight at last, the same way it'll be when Jimmy finally does pull the trigger, that him is most indeed the moron waving around Sam's S&W.
Sam's going to be arrested as an accessory to armed robbery, best case scenario, and Dad's going to kill him for losing the gun, a gun which he can't even remember if it's registered and if it is, who the hell's name it's in, and the girl he's here for doesn't even care.
Dean's fault, he thinks morosely, and when the cops rush in, he raises his hands, Vanessa's hand falling away as somebody, maybe Joey, emits a manly squeak of fear and Jimmy says, all mouth-breathing gee-whiz-sir-no-I-don't-know-how-this-happened, fucking hell Sam hates them all, he is so fucking over the idea of friends, never again, he is gonna be a fucking monk, "I don't know, I think it was Sam's?"
They would have been leaving town anyway, Sam thinks, and at least he doesn't wince when the cuffs click cold around his wrists. He just helped -- expedite the process. He wonders if Dad will buy that, if Dean will buy that, and then he decides to hope that he'll be drunk for awhile longer, because when it stops, the hangover's not gonna compare to the fact that his life is gonna be fucking over.
--
Sam's been in jail before. He has been. He knows what it's like, and he knows that they're not gonna do anything to him, not until they give him a lawyer or until Dad shows up to get him out, in which case they're not going to do anything to him ever because he'll be long gone by the time they get around to it. That's what Dean's said, every single time.
Sam's been in jail before, but never alone. It's always been with Dean one cell over or, if they were out in the middle of nowhere and there was only one cell in the first place, Dean sprawling out on the gross hammocky cot and quoting lines from Patrick Swayze films. Which was annoying as hell, but it helped, because at least it took Sam's mind off of the fact that they were in jail which was one step away from prison which was jumpsuits and monitored showers and no way out ever, and it occurs to him now that maybe that was why Dean did it in the first place.
Whatever. This is still Dean's fault.
He's fairly certain, anyway.
Well, Dean's and Jimmy's. Dean's 'cause he was there in the first place and Jimmy's 'cause the fucking rat bastard motherfucker squealed (opines the voice in Sam's head that sounds like Dean, and he scowls at it out of principle) and told the cops that not only was it Sam's gun, Sam was the one who showed him how to use it, they'd just been playing with water guns until Sam pulled this gun outta nowhere, officer, he's new to the school and we were just trying to be nice.
If Sam ever gets out of here, the way everybody else got to after Officer Scary, who had nothing on Dad, lectured them all about gun safety and how drinking was bad until you turned twenty-one and then it was magically okay, and their parents showed up to get them, he's going to hunt Jimmy down.
He's sitting gingerly on the edge of the cot, mentally constructing a plan for a water gun that'll hold sulfuric acid, when he hears voices. Real voices. Genuine actual person voices, which is excellent, sort of, because he is fucking bored and sure, it's only been forty-five minutes since they locked the door on him and pocketed the key, but when he's had nothing to do but contemplate how fucked he is, contemplate the revenge he will probably never be able to exact due to how he'll be locked up forever, time's gone by like snails dipped in molasses.
God, he's going to suck at prison. Maybe he'll be able to get a job in the library, wheeling those little carts around from cell to cell.
"Yep, that's him," Dean says, draping himself artistically, effortlessly, against the bars and peering in at Sam, his expression all mock solemnity and sorrow. Sam's going to kill him. Once he gets Sam out. Once Sam figures out how he knew how to come here. "Ever since our, uh, grandma died, he's been acting out. He was real close to her, you know. She was teaching him how to knit. And the, uh, other thing with the needles."
"Crochet?" the officer says. Officer Scary, the one with the thick dark brows and the mean-cop sneer, except now he's looking at Dean like he's actually buying this and like he's gonna say a prayer tonight over his own knitting needles for poor old Grandma Winchester.
"That's the one," Dean says. He stares at Sam for a few more seconds, until Sam sees the grin playing at the edges of his mouth and Dean has to bite his lip before turning back to the cop. "If you're sure he's okay to go, officer, I can take him home. Once he, uh, gets through therapy, I'm sure he'll appreciate it. Probably send you some socks. He's real good at socks. Loves yarn. Used to love yarn, I mean. We're working up to that, as part of the therapy. Showed him some, uh, balls of it last week and he about burst into tears. 'Cause of the balls."
Sam glares. Harder.
"Like that, right there, that's what he does right before the waterworks start," Dean says helpfully.
The officer looks fucking chagrined. "I'll be right back with the key, and then you'll just need to sign a few forms," he says. His boots make squeaky sounds on the polished concrete as he speed-walks away, like he wants to be gone before the first tear shows up. Pussy.
"I hate you," Sam says, and gets to his feet. If he leans against the other side of the bars, he won't be touching Dean. Technically.
It shouldn't be comforting, the brush of leather, between the bars, against the faded-soft fabric his shirt. It's not anything like the way Vanessa gripped him, like for a second or for a minute, he doesn't know, not with the way time seemed to stop, she needed him, wanted him. He hardly even feels it.
It helps anyway.
"You're the one who ruined my date," Dean says, voice pitched for Sam alone, quiet like he knows. "And isn't it meant to be the other way around? Me hauled in for bein' drunk and disorderly? You going all self-righteous with the bail money?"
"It's not bail money, it's hustling money. You basically stole it." Sam is seventeen years old. He was, until tonight, going away in the fall, and maybe he still is. He is a hunter, and he is a Winchester. He is not going to reach out for Dean's jacket. They're past the point where that kind of talisman should have an effect.
"But I'm spending it on your bail, Sammy my boy. If you play your cards right. Though, I gotta tell you, just getting to see this's making one hell of a Christmas present."
"It's not even December," Sam says.
Dean grins. "I know."
"I was orderly," Sam says. "I was quiet."
"Yeah, see, that's not what, uh, Officer what's-his-face says. He says you got all surly and refused to talk. Though I guess that's kinda like quiet. He says he only got your name from the other kids, since you weren't carrying any ID, and he had to get some kid called Vanessa to tell him who to call for you. She's the one with the hot mom, right? She hot, too?"
"No," Sam says. "She looks like Dad."
"You always did go for the weird ones." Dean sighs. "You ready to get outta here or did you wanna hang out until Dad gets back?"
"You're an asshole," Sam says. He had a plan. He had his whole life worked out, and it made sense, and then Dean had to bring his girl over, bring some chick back to the room so that Sam had to leave, leave or watch his stupid shameless brother fuck some girl on the bed that they share when Dad's here, and this is what happened.
Luckily, before Sam can turn any of that into something he can say aloud, the cop chooses that moment to return. He very carefully doesn't look at Sam as he unlocks the door. They make a ragged trail out to the counter, where Sam tries hard not to sway or lean against his big brother, who would never let him live it down, especially if Sam let himself rest his head on Dean's shoulder like he did when they were younger, if he were to breathe in deep the leather and salt-sweat and bourbon, scent not at all like Vanessa's, a promise entirely different. The officer won't look at him at all, which is kind of awesome, and also kind of majorly fucked, since it's only 'cause the officer doesn't want to watch him cry, and he's not even close. He's just. Going to kill Dean. Is all. "I sincerely hope therapy goes well for you, Mr. Winchester," the officer says. "The owners aren't pressing charges, even for you, and I don't ever want to see you in here again."
Sam bares his teeth. It doesn't matter, the guy's not even looking, but Dean elbows him hard anyway.
"Thanks," Sam says. "That's great, 'cause I don't ever wanna be in here again."
"He gets cranky when he's up past his bedtime," Dean says smoothly like Sam's a little kid and he's Sam's dad, though not like Dad in the least, and steps on his foot. Bastard. Dean's wearing his boots, and Sam, not being a paranoid lunatic, is wearing sneakers.
Sam does feel kind of bad, though, watching Dean fork over his cash, money earned over hours spent at the pool table in smoky bars across the country, and yeah, Dean likes those places, but Sam knows what it takes to run a good con, and watching the officer count it back for them makes his stomach go leaden. Dean gets a receipt, sure, but he balls it up and tosses it into the trash can as soon as they get out to the parking lot. Perfect shot. Of course. There's a spike of something else in Sam's stomach, something dark as jealousy or guilt. The streetlights are turning the night amber, though it fades into unlit black soon beyond, out by the ragged silhouette-lattice of trees. It's an insomniac hour, the time of the night for hunters to be crouching down in the dark and holding their breath, silver-loaded gun at the ready. Sam's feet are dragging. His eyes hurt, and his head hurts, and he wants to go home.
Real home. An actual house, with an actual bed. Not yet another goddamn motel room, even if it's the same one he left this morning. And again this evening, before all of this happened. He wants to go somewhere he can stay, somewhere he won't have to pack up in a day or in a week and leave behind.
"All I did was teach Jimmy how to hold a gun right," he says. He sounds sullen, even to his own ears, but he doesn't particularly care. He watches his shoes scuff across the glittering macadam, broken up occasionally by painted yellow lines. Dean parked all the way across the lot, of course. Even though Dad switched out the plates last week, it won't do any good to get noticed.
Which he just did. In a kind of major way.
Dad's going to kill him.
"The fuck'd you even bother for?" Dean says. "Notice how I'm not even touching the fact that you lost one a' the guns. We're gonna have that talk in the morning, and it's gonna be fun, let me tell you."
"I hate you," Sam says again.
"Yeah, I know." Dean unlocks the door, halogen light glinting off the chrome as he swings it open. "C'mon, if you're coming."
Which Sam is. As though there was ever a question. He wonders how long it would have taken Dean to come for him, if Vanessa hadn't given him up. Would Dean have given him the night, been frantic by morning? Would Dean have noticed?
Dean is here now. Sam will not ask. Settling into the shotgun seat, he tries not to notice, not to appreciate, how familiar it is, how much it feels like the closest thing to home he has ever known. The other kids went back to their houses, the quasi-Victorian things Sam walks past every morning on the way to school, with yards and huge sprawling trees and their name on the mailbox. Sam gets to go back to a car, and even if it's driven by his older brother, even if he knows damn well that Dean would die for him, that Dean has in the past taken a blow for him, a bullet, claws, and would gladly do so again, it is not permanent.
Maybe because of that, it is not permanent.
He wills himself not to fall asleep, not to crash out against the window like he did when he was six, though he wonders if Dean would let him. If Dean would brush his hair out of his face, tender for a moment because it didn't count, it was liminal, unreal. If Dean would touch him the way he had the girl in their room, like he saw her, really truly saw her.
Dean would die for him, sure, but he looks at Sam like he did when Sam was twelve; he looks at Sam like nothing has changed and nothing ever will, and Sam's first bullet wound didn't hurt as much as that does.
"It was community service," Sam says. He closes his eyes, just for a second, and sees his gun in Jimmy's hand, Jimmy's broad good-natured face screwed up in honest deadly drunken confusion, Dad bursting in through the motel-room door with Dean draped over his shoulder, Dean's black t-shirt glistening crimson and sodden. "I didn't want him to shoot himself."
"Probably woulda done the gene pool a favor," Dean says. "Makin' sure he couldn't reproduce and all."
Sam snickers. It's late. He's tired, and possibly still drunk. He's allowed. He makes sure to glare at Dean when he's done, though, just in case Dean's looking.
"So I'm guessing she doesn't look like Dad," Dean says. He starts the car. The music starts immediately, another fucking ballad about life on the run, and he turns it down. It's kind of a huge fucking gesture, coming from him, at this time of night. Or it means that he's about to tear into Sam for being so incredibly stupid. Sam looks out the window. If it's the latter, he doesn't want to see it coming. Dean sighs again, and Sam wonders when he started sounding so tired, or if that too is just an artifact of the hour, the marrow-deep night chill. Or maybe he's just exhausted from fucking his girlfriend-of-the-hour. "Okay. Fine. Don't talk to me. It's just my hard-earned cash you blew on whatever you wanna call this clusterfuck. I was getting laid."
"I know," Sam says. "I saw. I was there."
"Oh," Dean says. Sam glances back over in time to see him swallow. "Right. You coulda closed the door. 's there for a reason."
"So could you." Sam wants to put his head down. He wants to not think of some girl's hands all over his brother. "You even know her name?"
"Mindy," Dean says. "Wait. Mandy?"
It's obvious, deliberate, but Sam smirks without thinking. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Dean's crooked grin. He leans back against the seat, leather night-cool against the back of his neck. If he doesn't think about anything, if he doesn't think, it could just be him and Dean, him and his brother, hanging out like they used to. "I wanna go home," he says. Admits. Later, he might blame that on the alcohol in his blood. Or the time of night. The fact that it's been one hell of a long night, and he's tired. He had to get up at five-thirty for classes, and it's almost that time again already.
Dean revs the engine just because he can, slips his arm across the back of the seat as he pulls out. It is not around Sam, he is not pulling Sam close, not slinging his arm around his kid brother's shoulders like he used to, but for a moment, Sam can imagine. Can pretend. "Be there in ten," Dean says. "Or less." He turns the music back on, but keeps the volume low enough for it to be almost-background, not a direct assault. Truce. Peace offering, not that they're arguing, exactly. Maybe it's out of habit. Maybe he didn't even notice. He glances over at Sam, and Sam nods.
It's the least he can do, to not-argue, considering what he just got Dean to do for him. All those hours spent in all those bars, all those lies, blown on this, and Sam wonders if Mandy/Mindy was still there, when the cops called, wonders if Dean had to tell her to go, find her own ride home, he had to go help his brother out of a jam. It's not entirely altruistic, though; Sam doesn't want to have the discussion again, the argument again, either. Soon enough, it won't matter.
The streets are quiet. Small-town America. When he was a kid, he used to want to live here, in any one of these houses. Now, he just wants to get out, somewhere far away. The shorelines are full of ghosts, but the land in between is where the monsters roam. Somewhere out there in the black, down some road choked with scrub and brush, beneath that fucking moonless sky, their dad is hunting something sick and wrong and twisted. It might be hunting their dad right back. They won't know, not until later. Not for hours, until he calls or comes back, or until he doesn't.
If Sam closes his eyes, it might be like when he was a kid. When this was easy. When he didn't know anything else, and couldn't want anything else. When it was just him and Dean and he could trust their dad, wherever he was, to take care of himself and to take care of them, because he was Dad and along with Dean, he was the world.
If Sam closes his eyes, if he holds on to this moment tightly enough, maybe it will last. Maybe he'll get to keep it, get to take it with him. Have it forever, so he can remind himself what he lost. This future traded for that one, the way Dean cannot. The way Dean will not.
He wonders if Dean would wake him up like he used to, nice and gentle, a hand on Sam's shoulder and a word in Sam's ear, Sam's name in his mouth like a folktale between the two of them, or if Dean would smack the doorframe hard so that Sam jumps, startled out of sleep; if Dean would keep an arm around him all the way into the bedroom, let Sam lean against him, as though everything would be all right, as though sleep were safe, if only they were together, as though he could shelter Sam from everything even now, or if Dean would grin down at Sam and say chariot ride's over, princess, get your ass moving, and turn away, hands shoved into his pockets and shoulders hunched against the sky, without waiting for Sam to get out.
Sam stays awake the whole way back, his reflection strange and shadowed in the window like all the dark and unknowable and dirty things in him have been carved out into that form, hollow-eyed ghost of a twin. He stays awake and he doesn't say anything and when Dean parks in front of the two-story motel with the colored lights strung up around the eaves like the washed-out real-life version of a fairytale, like tattered hope, he makes himself move, step out into the night before Dean can say anything either. He doesn't want to know how much things have already changed, how too-late it is to take anything back, even if he could. How too-late it is for anything else, how the world has already shifted and how he's maybe the only one who knows that yet, and how unbelievably lonely that is.
--
end
Phosphor
by whereupon
Supernatural: preseries, gen, Sam&Dean, R, 5,900 words. It's not the landing that kills, it's the fall.
--
All he'd really meant to do was tell them how to hold the gun right. Jimmy looked stupid standing there like he was gonna shoot himself in the foot (with water, all right, but all the same, you practice the same whether it's live rounds or not), and, yeah, maybe Sam's pretending hard that he doesn't know any better either, that he isn't who he is, doesn't leave school every day and go back to the motel currently masquerading as home and do two hours of guerilla-survivalist-paranoiac training with his weirdo brother, but Jesus Christ, Jimmy looked so goddamn ridiculous and maybe this is what Dean meant when he called Sam a fuckin' know-it-all who can't keep his goddamn mouth shut, but that had been about Sam talking back to Dad and this is totally different.
Really. It is. It's not like Jimmy's gonna threaten to beat his ass, right? Or if he does, he'll mean it in that friendly macho-wannabe hey-we're-all-just-guys-here kind of way.
Which, okay, yeah, Dad's a guy too, and sometimes Dean says it that same way, but they're not, like. Macho wannabe.
Well, maybe Dean, a little. But they've actually done shit, they save lives and sure, Dean swaggers with it where Dad only looks really pissed off and tired, but at least Sam's family's actually been in a fight, you know? Not that Sam's proud of it. At all.
He isn't. He hates it. He hates people pretending that they have been when they haven't, that they're tougher than they are, because if they would fucking stop, maybe Dad and Dean would stop thinking that it's cool what they do, cool to risk their lives and come back bruised and battered and broken, believing they can live forever just 'cause everybody else says it's possible, just 'cause assholes like Jimmy think you can get punched in the face, knocked out hard, and just walk it off like nothing happened.
The last time it happened to Dean, he was out of commission for four whole days, during which he scared the hell out of Sam, what with losing track of his words mid-sentence and one time not even recognizing his own godddamn brother.
It is so fucking far from cool that the kids from school have no idea. And if they would stop saying that they did, if everybody would, then maybe Dean would stop, stop throwing himself into the line of fire like it's nothing, stop taking stupid unnecessary risks just because he can.
Dad, on the other hand -- he's pretty sure Dad has no idea whether or not it's cool and that he wouldn't care one goddamn way if he did, he'd just raise his eyebrows and take another drink and sigh in that way that's like somebody else racking the slide on his gun. Dad doesn't have to do that, it's implied. Which isn't right, either, and isn't fair in the least. Jimmy's dad sells auto insurance in an office downtown, and Joey's dad owns a restaurant, which is how Joey managed to swipe the booze, and James's dad . . . actually, Sam isn't sure about him. James doesn't talk about him much. Or at all. But not in the painful-awkward oh who me? My dad? No, he's totally normal I swear kind of way that Sam doesn't talk about John, it's more like the oh him he cheated on my mom and ran off with his secretary kind of shame.
Vanessa's mom, at least, is in the army, or was. If anybody else here knows what it's like to grow up as a hunter's kid, it's probably Vanessa, who grew up as a soldier's.
On the other hand, Vanessa's mom, like, gardens now, so maybe not. The idea of Dad gardening is enough to make Sam choke, his eyes watering as he bites his lip. Especially since Dean actually saw Vanessa's mom gardening and said she was hot as fuck, which is really not something Sam wants to think about in the context of Dad and which is how Sam knows she gardens in the first place, it's not like he was creeping around Vanessa's house himself, because he's not a creeper, who the fuck goes prowling around for chicks in that big black car like a fucking neon sign, Hi I'm Shady As Fuck, Ask Me How!
It doesn't count if you're just in the passenger seat, it doesn't count the same at all. Because it's not like you can just teleport out, right? Sam's tried. He knows. And it's not like you can reach over and grab the wheel, because then Dean starts shouting about how you're gonna screw with the alignment and wreck the bumper and what the hell are you doing why are you even touching his car except with your ass and if you keep it up it's not even gonna be that.
Not that Sam would complain. He'd wanted to walk home from school, maybe stop by the library on the way. That had been the plan, and then Dean showed up, and it's not like Sam could have just told him to go to hell, really. He's tried it. Dean gets all crestfallen for a second and then his eyes get all flinty and jaded and he spends the rest of the night sulking and stomping around and not talking to Sam. Which would make it a great tactic to use, the nights Sam's got homework to do, except for how, sue him, he still feels kind of guilty when he's the one to crush his brother's world.
It's different when Dad does it, when Dad tells Dean he's too slow or he handled the guns wrong or he doesn't need to play backup on a hunt, he can stay home with Sam, because neither of them should be hunting in the first place; Dean should still be in high school, for Christ's sake. Or college. Something. But when Dean's just being his usual obnoxious asshole self for reasons unrelated to hunting, it -- counts differently.
Somehow.
It does. There's probably a theorem to explain it, or at least some stupid social sciences evo-bio theory. Sam probably even knows it, possibly by heart, it's just that he's kind of having trouble a) remembering and b) focusing because 1) consumption of alcohol by minors, for which he can't remember the consequence here, but it's probably a fine, it's usually a fine, and 2) Jimmy's holding a gun.
Sam's gun.
Never go unarmed, Dad says. A knife's not gonna save your ass no matter how good you can throw it, Sammy, if the other guy pulls a gun on you. You know the one about bringin' a gun to a knife fight, Dean said. And smirked, like he was waiting for Sam to correct him because he had such a fucking brilliant response all planned out, which, knowing him, as Sam does, was probably in the form of a dirty joke, and so Sam had rolled his eyes and pushed his hair out of his face and gone back to studying for the AP History exam; there were some punchlines he was better off not knowing.
Really. There were. So much for never being able to stop asking questions like a fuckin' four-year-old, he thinks, except of course Dean isn't here and even if he were, it's not like he'd be able to tell what Sam's thinking, what with not having telepathy (at least most of the time) and all.
Still. If it hadn't been for Dean, Sam wouldn't have had the gun in the first place. He likes his knife. He knows how to use it. This never happens when he has his knife.
Dean's fault, he decides. When he has to explain this to somebody, he's going with that. Because it is, the way that most things are. All Sam had wanted was a nice quiet night, peace to finish the Chem paper that didn't get finished last week on account of the wendigo hunt and Dean coming back all bloody and unfocused and just lying there while Dad swore and applied pressure like he learned in Vietnam or whatever and Sam stitched and tried not to notice how pale either of them were, how scared Dad was as indicated by the lines around his eyes and how broken Dean'd gotten as indicated by his goddamn unnatural stillness, goddamn it Dean could never just duck, could never just shout a warning and risk the thing getting away, could never let Dad take one for a turn, no.
Everything, really. In Sam's whole life. Is Dean's fault. With a few things left over that fall on Dad. Like the whole hunting aspect. If not for that, Dean would be fine. Normal, like. And if not for Dean being so . . . Dean, all bravado and overconfidence and hey Sam Sam look up watch me gimme attention I'm bored hey Sam, Sam wouldn't have had to leave the motel room, since he wouldn't have otherwise been given the option of a front-row seat for what the theater across the street, the one with the busted windows, calls a triple-X-er.
Sure, Dean's latest girl's hot, but then, they all are. And Dean has a type, which is cheap and easy and just as desperate as Dean is. And Sam's not, like, blind, and he's not saying that easy is bad, because, yeah, he's a dude and he's seventeen and he knows how these things work, okay, he has personal experience, it's just that if he wanted porn, he'd have looked for it. And he didn't. Thus, no porn. And if he had, it wouldn't have starred Dean's pick of the week, it'd have starred somebody -- else.
Sits-three-seats-behind-him-in-Chemistry, glossy-haired, wears-white-librarian-blouses, laughs-like-a-blues-singer else.
Not that Vanessa's laughing now, exactly. She's more like staring at Jimmy and at the gun in his hand and then at the mustachioed guy behind the counter, the one who had the audacity to not sell Jimmy a pack of cigarettes and who thus became the target of Jimmy's little Pulp Fiction fantasy.
To be fair, of course, maybe Sam should have been keeping a better eye on his gun. He knew better, after all. Jimmy's a civilian, and it's Sam's fucking gun. But he told Jimmy how to hold it, and how not to blow his dick off, and, yeah, he let Jimmy hold it, after that little safety-lesson-cum-hey-Vanessa-look-I-know-cool-gun-stuff-speech, but so do those cops who come to elementary schools, right? Which should be a hell of a lot dangerous than handing a piece to somebody who's like three months away from being able to vote.
That the guns they pass around in elementary schools are usually unloaded is something that comes to mind belatedly, and, yeah, maybe he should have thought about it earlier, but there was the beer and there was Vanessa and then there was Jimmy saying hey guys let's go for a ride and Vanessa piling into the backseat next to Sam so that his elbow brushed her tits and when Jimmy took the curb the way Dean does to show off, she fell across his lap and he smelled jasmine and spilled beer and hot-close-girl and yeah, okay, maybe he was a little distracted. But it's not like this was expected, exactly. Jimmy's a jock, for god's sake. On the track team. Not one of those guys who hang out in the parking lot and who gave Sam shifty looks until he looked back at them and who now leave him the fuck alone.
Jimmy's a good guy, Sam thinks hopelessly, as though that might undo this scene, let them get out of this without somebody calling the cops. Let them get out of this without somebody getting blown away.
He had such a future planned, too. Colleges. Good colleges. Ivy League. California. Stanford, the letter at the bottom of his duffel. He was going to get out, and now he's gonna go down as another fuckin' deadbeat, one more screw-up good for nothing other than flipping burgers or getting himself torn to wet ribbons out in some forest moonlit like a Rorschach test. He was going to--
"You're kidding, right?" the guy behind the counter says, and raises an eyebrow. "Kid, you don't put the gun down now like your mama taught you, I'm gonna put it down for you."
Sam's breath catches. This is it, then. How it ends, his future derailed under the buzzing high-beam lights of a convenience store in Nowhere, Middle America. And he was going to avoid this, that was the whole point. Somebody touches his arm, fingernails gripping tight, and he looks over from the guy's face, guy who looks like he's been on every season of COPS, oh Jesus fuck Jimmy you have luck like Dean, to see Vanessa holding on to him, Vanessa's pearlescent-pink nail polish glinting under the convenience-store lights, and he is probably still going to be shot down like a punk by the Slushy machine, but at least he is going to be shot down like a punk by the Slushy machine along with the girl who he liked and who maybe he'd have gone out with if only he could have made himself ask and that was the whole point of tonight, that was the why of the hanging out and the beer; there was also the promise of dimly-lit corners and the potential of buttons being un-buttoned and Vanessa's tongue in his mouth and catching her eye across the classroom and having her wink at him.
Or, you know, maybe more than that. But he isn't Dean.
The newspapers will probably make up something Romeo and Juliet about it, if he's lucky. He'll be just as dead, but at least he'll look cool to his former peers. Which is what's gotten them here in the first place, because if Jimmy didn't have this idea about how cool it'd look to hold up a stupid second-thought gas-station add-on, and if Sam hadn't had this idea about how cool he would sound if he pointed out that Jimmy was holding his water-pistol like Miss Marple would hold an Uzi, which was to say way the fuck awkwardly and like he was gonna be squashed into old-lady-paste by the recoil, none of them would be here. They'd be back in the basement of Joey's house, listening to the shitty music that Sam has to like because everybody else does and Dean doesn't, and drinking bad beer to the point where it would be easy to do things like ask pretty girls if maybe they wanted to go see a movie sometime.
Or, at least, Sam would have been. The other guys, they could have done whatever the hell they wanted, as long as it didn't lead to this and it didn't involve Vanessa.
Jimmy's face screws up in confusion. Clearly this is not what years of television have taught him to expect. Sam rolls his eyes. "Put down the gun," he says, but quietly. More like a hiss. No way is he going to shout at Jimmy, who is now holding Sam's real live actual gun full of real live actual bullets capable of inflicting severe bodily harm exactly like Sam told him not to, and whose finger is very very tense on the trigger. Vanessa's grip on his arm tightens, her nails biting through the fabric of his shirt, and yes he would very much like to feel that again, but not right now. With witnesses. At least one of whom is armed. He glances down at her.
"What if they shoot him?" she mouths, eyes wide and mascara-smeared and slightly glazed, and from the look she is giving Jimmy, all terror and melting concern, Sam can tell, understanding just as sudden and sharp and way-too-real, sensation like the cold salt sea breaking through the daze of tonight at last, the same way it'll be when Jimmy finally does pull the trigger, that him is most indeed the moron waving around Sam's S&W.
Sam's going to be arrested as an accessory to armed robbery, best case scenario, and Dad's going to kill him for losing the gun, a gun which he can't even remember if it's registered and if it is, who the hell's name it's in, and the girl he's here for doesn't even care.
Dean's fault, he thinks morosely, and when the cops rush in, he raises his hands, Vanessa's hand falling away as somebody, maybe Joey, emits a manly squeak of fear and Jimmy says, all mouth-breathing gee-whiz-sir-no-I-don't-know-how-this-happened, fucking hell Sam hates them all, he is so fucking over the idea of friends, never again, he is gonna be a fucking monk, "I don't know, I think it was Sam's?"
They would have been leaving town anyway, Sam thinks, and at least he doesn't wince when the cuffs click cold around his wrists. He just helped -- expedite the process. He wonders if Dad will buy that, if Dean will buy that, and then he decides to hope that he'll be drunk for awhile longer, because when it stops, the hangover's not gonna compare to the fact that his life is gonna be fucking over.
--
Sam's been in jail before. He has been. He knows what it's like, and he knows that they're not gonna do anything to him, not until they give him a lawyer or until Dad shows up to get him out, in which case they're not going to do anything to him ever because he'll be long gone by the time they get around to it. That's what Dean's said, every single time.
Sam's been in jail before, but never alone. It's always been with Dean one cell over or, if they were out in the middle of nowhere and there was only one cell in the first place, Dean sprawling out on the gross hammocky cot and quoting lines from Patrick Swayze films. Which was annoying as hell, but it helped, because at least it took Sam's mind off of the fact that they were in jail which was one step away from prison which was jumpsuits and monitored showers and no way out ever, and it occurs to him now that maybe that was why Dean did it in the first place.
Whatever. This is still Dean's fault.
He's fairly certain, anyway.
Well, Dean's and Jimmy's. Dean's 'cause he was there in the first place and Jimmy's 'cause the fucking rat bastard motherfucker squealed (opines the voice in Sam's head that sounds like Dean, and he scowls at it out of principle) and told the cops that not only was it Sam's gun, Sam was the one who showed him how to use it, they'd just been playing with water guns until Sam pulled this gun outta nowhere, officer, he's new to the school and we were just trying to be nice.
If Sam ever gets out of here, the way everybody else got to after Officer Scary, who had nothing on Dad, lectured them all about gun safety and how drinking was bad until you turned twenty-one and then it was magically okay, and their parents showed up to get them, he's going to hunt Jimmy down.
He's sitting gingerly on the edge of the cot, mentally constructing a plan for a water gun that'll hold sulfuric acid, when he hears voices. Real voices. Genuine actual person voices, which is excellent, sort of, because he is fucking bored and sure, it's only been forty-five minutes since they locked the door on him and pocketed the key, but when he's had nothing to do but contemplate how fucked he is, contemplate the revenge he will probably never be able to exact due to how he'll be locked up forever, time's gone by like snails dipped in molasses.
God, he's going to suck at prison. Maybe he'll be able to get a job in the library, wheeling those little carts around from cell to cell.
"Yep, that's him," Dean says, draping himself artistically, effortlessly, against the bars and peering in at Sam, his expression all mock solemnity and sorrow. Sam's going to kill him. Once he gets Sam out. Once Sam figures out how he knew how to come here. "Ever since our, uh, grandma died, he's been acting out. He was real close to her, you know. She was teaching him how to knit. And the, uh, other thing with the needles."
"Crochet?" the officer says. Officer Scary, the one with the thick dark brows and the mean-cop sneer, except now he's looking at Dean like he's actually buying this and like he's gonna say a prayer tonight over his own knitting needles for poor old Grandma Winchester.
"That's the one," Dean says. He stares at Sam for a few more seconds, until Sam sees the grin playing at the edges of his mouth and Dean has to bite his lip before turning back to the cop. "If you're sure he's okay to go, officer, I can take him home. Once he, uh, gets through therapy, I'm sure he'll appreciate it. Probably send you some socks. He's real good at socks. Loves yarn. Used to love yarn, I mean. We're working up to that, as part of the therapy. Showed him some, uh, balls of it last week and he about burst into tears. 'Cause of the balls."
Sam glares. Harder.
"Like that, right there, that's what he does right before the waterworks start," Dean says helpfully.
The officer looks fucking chagrined. "I'll be right back with the key, and then you'll just need to sign a few forms," he says. His boots make squeaky sounds on the polished concrete as he speed-walks away, like he wants to be gone before the first tear shows up. Pussy.
"I hate you," Sam says, and gets to his feet. If he leans against the other side of the bars, he won't be touching Dean. Technically.
It shouldn't be comforting, the brush of leather, between the bars, against the faded-soft fabric his shirt. It's not anything like the way Vanessa gripped him, like for a second or for a minute, he doesn't know, not with the way time seemed to stop, she needed him, wanted him. He hardly even feels it.
It helps anyway.
"You're the one who ruined my date," Dean says, voice pitched for Sam alone, quiet like he knows. "And isn't it meant to be the other way around? Me hauled in for bein' drunk and disorderly? You going all self-righteous with the bail money?"
"It's not bail money, it's hustling money. You basically stole it." Sam is seventeen years old. He was, until tonight, going away in the fall, and maybe he still is. He is a hunter, and he is a Winchester. He is not going to reach out for Dean's jacket. They're past the point where that kind of talisman should have an effect.
"But I'm spending it on your bail, Sammy my boy. If you play your cards right. Though, I gotta tell you, just getting to see this's making one hell of a Christmas present."
"It's not even December," Sam says.
Dean grins. "I know."
"I was orderly," Sam says. "I was quiet."
"Yeah, see, that's not what, uh, Officer what's-his-face says. He says you got all surly and refused to talk. Though I guess that's kinda like quiet. He says he only got your name from the other kids, since you weren't carrying any ID, and he had to get some kid called Vanessa to tell him who to call for you. She's the one with the hot mom, right? She hot, too?"
"No," Sam says. "She looks like Dad."
"You always did go for the weird ones." Dean sighs. "You ready to get outta here or did you wanna hang out until Dad gets back?"
"You're an asshole," Sam says. He had a plan. He had his whole life worked out, and it made sense, and then Dean had to bring his girl over, bring some chick back to the room so that Sam had to leave, leave or watch his stupid shameless brother fuck some girl on the bed that they share when Dad's here, and this is what happened.
Luckily, before Sam can turn any of that into something he can say aloud, the cop chooses that moment to return. He very carefully doesn't look at Sam as he unlocks the door. They make a ragged trail out to the counter, where Sam tries hard not to sway or lean against his big brother, who would never let him live it down, especially if Sam let himself rest his head on Dean's shoulder like he did when they were younger, if he were to breathe in deep the leather and salt-sweat and bourbon, scent not at all like Vanessa's, a promise entirely different. The officer won't look at him at all, which is kind of awesome, and also kind of majorly fucked, since it's only 'cause the officer doesn't want to watch him cry, and he's not even close. He's just. Going to kill Dean. Is all. "I sincerely hope therapy goes well for you, Mr. Winchester," the officer says. "The owners aren't pressing charges, even for you, and I don't ever want to see you in here again."
Sam bares his teeth. It doesn't matter, the guy's not even looking, but Dean elbows him hard anyway.
"Thanks," Sam says. "That's great, 'cause I don't ever wanna be in here again."
"He gets cranky when he's up past his bedtime," Dean says smoothly like Sam's a little kid and he's Sam's dad, though not like Dad in the least, and steps on his foot. Bastard. Dean's wearing his boots, and Sam, not being a paranoid lunatic, is wearing sneakers.
Sam does feel kind of bad, though, watching Dean fork over his cash, money earned over hours spent at the pool table in smoky bars across the country, and yeah, Dean likes those places, but Sam knows what it takes to run a good con, and watching the officer count it back for them makes his stomach go leaden. Dean gets a receipt, sure, but he balls it up and tosses it into the trash can as soon as they get out to the parking lot. Perfect shot. Of course. There's a spike of something else in Sam's stomach, something dark as jealousy or guilt. The streetlights are turning the night amber, though it fades into unlit black soon beyond, out by the ragged silhouette-lattice of trees. It's an insomniac hour, the time of the night for hunters to be crouching down in the dark and holding their breath, silver-loaded gun at the ready. Sam's feet are dragging. His eyes hurt, and his head hurts, and he wants to go home.
Real home. An actual house, with an actual bed. Not yet another goddamn motel room, even if it's the same one he left this morning. And again this evening, before all of this happened. He wants to go somewhere he can stay, somewhere he won't have to pack up in a day or in a week and leave behind.
"All I did was teach Jimmy how to hold a gun right," he says. He sounds sullen, even to his own ears, but he doesn't particularly care. He watches his shoes scuff across the glittering macadam, broken up occasionally by painted yellow lines. Dean parked all the way across the lot, of course. Even though Dad switched out the plates last week, it won't do any good to get noticed.
Which he just did. In a kind of major way.
Dad's going to kill him.
"The fuck'd you even bother for?" Dean says. "Notice how I'm not even touching the fact that you lost one a' the guns. We're gonna have that talk in the morning, and it's gonna be fun, let me tell you."
"I hate you," Sam says again.
"Yeah, I know." Dean unlocks the door, halogen light glinting off the chrome as he swings it open. "C'mon, if you're coming."
Which Sam is. As though there was ever a question. He wonders how long it would have taken Dean to come for him, if Vanessa hadn't given him up. Would Dean have given him the night, been frantic by morning? Would Dean have noticed?
Dean is here now. Sam will not ask. Settling into the shotgun seat, he tries not to notice, not to appreciate, how familiar it is, how much it feels like the closest thing to home he has ever known. The other kids went back to their houses, the quasi-Victorian things Sam walks past every morning on the way to school, with yards and huge sprawling trees and their name on the mailbox. Sam gets to go back to a car, and even if it's driven by his older brother, even if he knows damn well that Dean would die for him, that Dean has in the past taken a blow for him, a bullet, claws, and would gladly do so again, it is not permanent.
Maybe because of that, it is not permanent.
He wills himself not to fall asleep, not to crash out against the window like he did when he was six, though he wonders if Dean would let him. If Dean would brush his hair out of his face, tender for a moment because it didn't count, it was liminal, unreal. If Dean would touch him the way he had the girl in their room, like he saw her, really truly saw her.
Dean would die for him, sure, but he looks at Sam like he did when Sam was twelve; he looks at Sam like nothing has changed and nothing ever will, and Sam's first bullet wound didn't hurt as much as that does.
"It was community service," Sam says. He closes his eyes, just for a second, and sees his gun in Jimmy's hand, Jimmy's broad good-natured face screwed up in honest deadly drunken confusion, Dad bursting in through the motel-room door with Dean draped over his shoulder, Dean's black t-shirt glistening crimson and sodden. "I didn't want him to shoot himself."
"Probably woulda done the gene pool a favor," Dean says. "Makin' sure he couldn't reproduce and all."
Sam snickers. It's late. He's tired, and possibly still drunk. He's allowed. He makes sure to glare at Dean when he's done, though, just in case Dean's looking.
"So I'm guessing she doesn't look like Dad," Dean says. He starts the car. The music starts immediately, another fucking ballad about life on the run, and he turns it down. It's kind of a huge fucking gesture, coming from him, at this time of night. Or it means that he's about to tear into Sam for being so incredibly stupid. Sam looks out the window. If it's the latter, he doesn't want to see it coming. Dean sighs again, and Sam wonders when he started sounding so tired, or if that too is just an artifact of the hour, the marrow-deep night chill. Or maybe he's just exhausted from fucking his girlfriend-of-the-hour. "Okay. Fine. Don't talk to me. It's just my hard-earned cash you blew on whatever you wanna call this clusterfuck. I was getting laid."
"I know," Sam says. "I saw. I was there."
"Oh," Dean says. Sam glances back over in time to see him swallow. "Right. You coulda closed the door. 's there for a reason."
"So could you." Sam wants to put his head down. He wants to not think of some girl's hands all over his brother. "You even know her name?"
"Mindy," Dean says. "Wait. Mandy?"
It's obvious, deliberate, but Sam smirks without thinking. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Dean's crooked grin. He leans back against the seat, leather night-cool against the back of his neck. If he doesn't think about anything, if he doesn't think, it could just be him and Dean, him and his brother, hanging out like they used to. "I wanna go home," he says. Admits. Later, he might blame that on the alcohol in his blood. Or the time of night. The fact that it's been one hell of a long night, and he's tired. He had to get up at five-thirty for classes, and it's almost that time again already.
Dean revs the engine just because he can, slips his arm across the back of the seat as he pulls out. It is not around Sam, he is not pulling Sam close, not slinging his arm around his kid brother's shoulders like he used to, but for a moment, Sam can imagine. Can pretend. "Be there in ten," Dean says. "Or less." He turns the music back on, but keeps the volume low enough for it to be almost-background, not a direct assault. Truce. Peace offering, not that they're arguing, exactly. Maybe it's out of habit. Maybe he didn't even notice. He glances over at Sam, and Sam nods.
It's the least he can do, to not-argue, considering what he just got Dean to do for him. All those hours spent in all those bars, all those lies, blown on this, and Sam wonders if Mandy/Mindy was still there, when the cops called, wonders if Dean had to tell her to go, find her own ride home, he had to go help his brother out of a jam. It's not entirely altruistic, though; Sam doesn't want to have the discussion again, the argument again, either. Soon enough, it won't matter.
The streets are quiet. Small-town America. When he was a kid, he used to want to live here, in any one of these houses. Now, he just wants to get out, somewhere far away. The shorelines are full of ghosts, but the land in between is where the monsters roam. Somewhere out there in the black, down some road choked with scrub and brush, beneath that fucking moonless sky, their dad is hunting something sick and wrong and twisted. It might be hunting their dad right back. They won't know, not until later. Not for hours, until he calls or comes back, or until he doesn't.
If Sam closes his eyes, it might be like when he was a kid. When this was easy. When he didn't know anything else, and couldn't want anything else. When it was just him and Dean and he could trust their dad, wherever he was, to take care of himself and to take care of them, because he was Dad and along with Dean, he was the world.
If Sam closes his eyes, if he holds on to this moment tightly enough, maybe it will last. Maybe he'll get to keep it, get to take it with him. Have it forever, so he can remind himself what he lost. This future traded for that one, the way Dean cannot. The way Dean will not.
He wonders if Dean would wake him up like he used to, nice and gentle, a hand on Sam's shoulder and a word in Sam's ear, Sam's name in his mouth like a folktale between the two of them, or if Dean would smack the doorframe hard so that Sam jumps, startled out of sleep; if Dean would keep an arm around him all the way into the bedroom, let Sam lean against him, as though everything would be all right, as though sleep were safe, if only they were together, as though he could shelter Sam from everything even now, or if Dean would grin down at Sam and say chariot ride's over, princess, get your ass moving, and turn away, hands shoved into his pockets and shoulders hunched against the sky, without waiting for Sam to get out.
Sam stays awake the whole way back, his reflection strange and shadowed in the window like all the dark and unknowable and dirty things in him have been carved out into that form, hollow-eyed ghost of a twin. He stays awake and he doesn't say anything and when Dean parks in front of the two-story motel with the colored lights strung up around the eaves like the washed-out real-life version of a fairytale, like tattered hope, he makes himself move, step out into the night before Dean can say anything either. He doesn't want to know how much things have already changed, how too-late it is to take anything back, even if he could. How too-late it is for anything else, how the world has already shifted and how he's maybe the only one who knows that yet, and how unbelievably lonely that is.
--
end