fic: Of the Reddest Stolen Cherries (1/3, Sam/Dean)
Fic: Of the Reddest Stolen Cherries
Table/Prompt: 05 The Open Road / Prompt 01 Yosemite 1987 - 10 Appalachia 1993
Word Count: 25,000
Pairings: Sam/Dean, John/Dean
Ratings: PG to NC-17
Warning: Wincest, Weecest, abuse, death, abuse of metaphor, abuse of fruit symbolism, drug use, porn, prostitution, happy ending
Notes: SPN AU full of homages to my favorite artists - Nabokov, Jim Grimsley, JT Leroy, Mark Twain, Dennis Cooper, Bill Henson, Rimbaud, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Scott Heim, David Quammen, Harper Lee, David Wojnarowicz.
One story told in 30 parts, over 30 years for spn_30snapshots. Order goes from 01-30, not chronological. Title from W.B. Yeats.
Summary: "I like true stories," Dean told him. "Where real things happen."
Yosemite 1987
The world stopped, as if frozen in the falling ice. "Shhhh," John whispered, and Dean's heart went blank, as it goes blank at every harsh sound his father makes, would ever make.
Brown forms stood as a blur, then started again, in the yellow headlights, so Dean had to open his eyes wide as could be to see what they were. "Elk," his father spoke, answering his question unasked. "A whole family," he said, hands still gripping the wheel, as if any sudden movement would scatter them. They didn't care either way, loping proudly across the highway up the mountain towards Yosemite. Dean counted one big one with antlers and a beard - kinda ugly and misshapen - and two younger ones - with fur, but skinny. He wanted to turn to the backseat and wake up Sammy, but then the extra blanket he had given him would be wasted, and his brother would have to shiver himself back to sleep again.
The largest elk just stood there with the lights reflecting in his eyes, black they were, like globes. So much of the world didn't care what you were thinking, Dean knew, and some people spent their whole lives imagining feelings where none had ever existed. Sometimes things were that empty and that cold, and it didn't matter what you did, it just was. Sam's imagination was different - his brother had an awareness that he had never seen before, and yet he could speak of the most fantastic things. Dean remembered holding him as a baby and looking to him for answers, though he could not speak in words. Sam was a soul and a comfort, and he wished for him even now, selfishly, though he was peacefully asleep.
Dean sat with his father and watched the frozen ice fall, waited for the world to let them be, and drove up the mountain into the dark of the forest, where the wild things were. It was safe there, quiet, and the monsters would not find them, as long as the headlights would stay on. Dean made a wish in his secret, darkest heart that they would.
*
Big Sur 1988
The fog hid the sun from the cold ground, the seabirds crying, the winding road their father drove them. They've been riding the 1 up the coast from Santa Monica, watching the water change from sun-flecked blue to white-capped gray. It was one of the roads John drove because he liked it, not for reasons of efficiency or reminiscing or work, whatever work was supposed to be this time. He looked over his outstretched arms on the steering wheel and thought of things he never talked about. Dean faced the passenger side window, thinking a clip of thoughts cut with his dreams, his fears, the rocky cliffs and roots poking through, gray slate and rust like blood.
Sam stared out the back, turned around away from his family, the road stretching out behind him shrinking and disappearing behind the rocks. They've been driving for days, stopping at rest stops and the outside of tourist attractions like the Hearst Mansion, high on a hill he would never climb, built with the kinds of plans he could almost understand. The need for a concrete life. He thought they would find no one on the mountain, maybe run out of gas, out of food, out of whatever it was they needed just when they lost it. He always thinks this, no matter how much Dean promises, no matter how much he tries. Dean tries; he always tries. The world is just different.
But there was a man at the one-shack Chevron station, a kind old man, around one more impossible bend through the fog. He shuffled over to the car, waved a hand and asked questions of warmth and no consequence.
"Need a fill-up?"
Sam heard John's muffled answer as he walked away from the car. "Yup. You're the only place we've seen for miles." Sam thought it was so quiet, he could hear everything. He heard the crunch under Dean's soles as he walked the gravel, the metal clang of the gas spout. If he closed he eyes, he thought he might still hear the ocean. Seagulls walked the tree-lined road without feeling out of place among the trees.
"Where you headed?" the old man asked. "It's gonna be dark soon."
"We're headed up to Monterey. Get a place there for the night." Dad always sounded so nice, so calm to strangers. Had to, he figured, otherwise -
Sam could no longer see the road through the insect-and-light-streaked windshield, and he knew Dad would tell Dean to clean it, standing on his toes to reach the middle, making faces at Sam through the glass on all sides. Sam will sink into the seat, poke his bangs and his eyes over the top of the cushion at wherever Dean is, share glances that say nothing more than "I know who you are" in brother code. I know you, even if no one else does. I know. Sam watched his brother walk away, seat of his jeans worn through white, mud caking his boots from the neighboring state, cheap sunglasses from a Florida convenience store. When he returns, he'll toss a bag of M&Ms into the back seat - "Dinner, Sammy" - open a frayed comic book and stare at the pages until he has to take his sunglasses off, has to squint in the half-light, has to dream on his own.
The car will purr through another tank of gas, another dark night in the mountains, another restless sleep on the black leather seat. Sam will awake through the night to see headlights on the ceiling, Dean's head turned towards him from the front seat, finally the fog and mosquitoes of the sunrise at the shore.
*
El Camino Real 1984
Dean didn't know any lullabies then, and so he never would. He'd learned to hold Sammy in his arms, rock him until he couldn't feel his weight anymore, until they were no longer separate. His hands learned that fine baby hair felt like silk, that Sammy's gaze was different for him, that he liked the sound of his voice even if he was just humming and there was no song at all. It was a panicked whine, a higher tone, a sound for a dog. As much for Sammy as for the air itself, for someone out there he just couldn't find, but had to exist somewhere, had to.
Dad was looking too, he thought. Drove the car down to Mexico, where they didn't even check who crossed over, just wanted them to come and try to find a place among the sun and the breeze and the missions of the baja. Dean watched the cacti, like people waving at him, or telling them to stop, stop, turn back, come no further, before it was too late. No going back, no going back. The friendly people of the sun, not the night people of the shadows, come to take them all away one by one, momma, baby, child. His thoughts raced like this, looping like the worn tires of the Impala, burning out on the road.
When Dad stopped, he didn't know why. Sometimes just to piss on the side of the road together, even urine shiny in the sun. Sometimes when Dean told him to stop, didn't know why, because Sammy wouldn't make a sound. He cried when the car stilled, and sometimes Dean needed to hear it. "For me," the baby seemed to cry. "Do this for me," again and again. Then they kept going.
Too often it was for the missions. Dean only saw one before he wanted to leave. The walls were white, like bone like wall like mother, the angels with glassy eyes like death looking down from the place where the corners met, the last place he saw his mother, suspended like them, and Dean waited for the fire.
John got on his knees only once, nails cutting into the waxy wood of the pews, weary bones falling on rock, and Dean railed with his fists at what looked too much like his own doubt and fear and "help me help me" - not like Sammy's demands, not demanding anything at all - just the surrender he couldn't bear to feel. The angels will never have him, Dean thought. The angels will never have any of them, not pushed up into the corners of the walls, not afire and gone to a better place, never giving into anything but each other - flesh to touch on the earth - no knees to the ground, no eyes raised skyward. Here. Here. Here.
John gave into him then, in that moment of grace in the church. Dean remembered how he looked at him and soundlessly got up, seemed to understand what Dean wanted and gave it to him, in the form of escape. Just that one time, got up off his knee and carried his son's violence against his chest - close, close - and felt it and knew it then, all the way back to the car. Dean sat in silence in the shade of the backseat, legs hanging out, and watched the young girl (she was round, like the sun, like the fire had touched her and she knew what it was) give them back the baby. Then held him, back to the border, where an old Marines story gave them passage, where he could tuck Sammy into the floor, feel his soft cotton-covered belly with one hand and sleep, without a lullaby.
*
Mojave Desert 1994
Beyond the suburban lights stretching out from the highway to the horizon, where the truly religious squat in abandoned trailers and harem tents painted with signs meant to be seen from the sky, the Impala stood covered in dust.
It'd been sitting there for months, driven only by John when he had to meet with men from the cities. "To make plans," he'd said. Sam had begun to hate John's plans, getting steadily worse - more decadent, more cruel. He didn't know where John picked up his ringmaster persona and ideas, perhaps a dream, a movie he'd seen, too much tequila the men made out in the Mojave. It smelled and tasted like gasoline to Sam, the way John had always begun to smell, just like the engine of the car he hated so much. He watched them make it when the flaps of the tents would fly open, the rotting acid smell of agave hitting him in a wave, and he'd have to spit into the sand, his dry mouth suddenly tasting of sweat.
John's voice for Sam was always harsh. "Someone gotta do something for this family, and your brother's the only one willing to do it. So you do what I tell you to do and think about being nicer to the both of us. We deserve it."
Sam scowled, threw around oiled rags and dragged his feet.
His father pointed a finger in his face. "It's about time. You just think about that, son."
All of Sam's imagination of eleven years had since dried up. He didn't care anymore. He did what he did so he could be there when the end came for Dean, whenever that would be. Dean barely knew he was there in the daytimes; he'd been too far gone too long. Every day John walked out of the tent, one bottle for Dean and one for himself. He got what else he could for Dean when someone would bring it through - the pharmaceutical train out of Cali, because they got whatever the suburbs didn't want, or had too much of.
He'd spent two weeks nursing Dean's bruises on the drive out here from the Badlands. They always seemed to be moving from one dusty stretch of nothing to another. All that changed was the colors on Dean's skin, the look in his eyes as he grew into something Sam knew not what. It scared him and turned him colder.
Every day Sam woke up with narrowed eyes and a curse on his lips. When he walked, leather-skinned and dry, to the edge of the shade, past John, where the tent flap whipped hard enough to cut, the curse would escape, hissing past his lips like a snake. Meant to hear it or made to hear it, John would deliver the same punishment. Sam would spend the day until noon shining the Impala with his spit, the sweat that appeared on his brow, under his arms, down the V-shaped bone on his chest - the only places sweat would appear, evaporating in the heat - the remains of a can of wax, the strength in the arms of his wiry frame. Over the buzz in his ears, the anger and the heat, he would hear them, getting ready for the heat to peak, the show to start.
"Come one, come all!" John would chant, his voice booming as a bear's. Everything about him was grizzled, Sam thought. Hairy, big he was, and flashed of all smiles and violence.
So the people loved him. So they did come, and some stayed for the late show, and some stayed into the night.
First, the drifters from the colonies, as they called it. The squatters in the desert who had come because they were looking to be saved. The ones who had given up liquor and sin in exchange for what God would bring them in the sand and the heat that never stopped. Where the nights were medieval and dark, starry and cold. Their fellow runaways in rectangles painted white, tents that billowed white, houses made of recycled plastic and white plaster. Then, the lost ones from the suburbs, broken down on the side of the highway, mistaken on the way to a tourist trap, saved by the drifters, or confused and choking by the smog and left to wander here. Even the regulars would come, escaping from their tract houses just for a day, lured by word of mouth and promises of something they'd never seen before. They were tourists, gratified by judging what they saw, calling it what they would.
Sam rubbed the wax deeper into the paint, pressing so hard he could barely move, and watched them come.
"Come one, come all!" John would chant in his carnal carny voice, a grin, a hum, on his lips. "Come see the Boy Wonder - the Fantastic Dean!"
Sam rubbed. T-shirt screeching on the paint. Dean's name; he had to use Dean's name. That name would never not be raw to him, would never hurt any less. Then it would be time for Dean to make his entrance, and if Sam didn't know better, he would think that it could never hurt more.
For what Dean was, was an exceptional beauty. Their father, lost in rage and poverty, had become entrepreneurial. Pictures of Dean would eventually make them all famous, in only the way that naked and pink and the Internet can do.
For now, Dean was a showy version of himself. The promise of cotton candy bliss. Painted-on freckles over powdery makeup, under darkened lashes, over stained lips. When all this would end, and the next phase begun, the makeup would be wiped away with heavy cream, when it was the close-up that mattered. Dressed only in black shorts, his skin still white under the desert sun, his legs bent just enough to make his ankles poke out if he stepped on the balls of his feet, his perky adolescent ass high and rounded enough to hold up his jockeys, Dean stepped up to the platform.
In his hands was a knife - its long blade tilted back and forth to glint in the sun, his chin tilted up in concentration when he threw it from one hand to the other, ready to take on all comers, if he himself weren't the bait. John reached into the pockets of his pin-striped pants, his ugly suits just this side of zoot, and took out a shiny new red apple. "Catch!" He would call, barking his words, and Dean would catch it with his free hand like a ball, bending only at the waist in a bow. As the audience clapped - they always did, Sam knew them too well - Dean placed the apple onto his head, balancing it there, stepping across the stage on the balls of his feet while John collected the money. "It's a show, folks, a real show. People come from miles around, across the great states of this land, across oceans of seawater and desert..." He went on and on. The sound Sam could never drown out. Even if he closed his eyes he could still see his lips move, watch the people slobber into their laps.
Hear Dean's footsteps across the stage - swear he could hear him place the apple on his head, place another between his hard smooth thighs, hold his arms out like a desert saint. Hear the slice of John's blade through the air, through the wooden planks behind his brother's head, through the crisp apples - the crisp, wet sound. Hear the drip of juices on Dean's tongue, down the skin of his legs, bowed together and holding the remains of apples in between. Hear the slurp as he took a bite, heard the buzz of the bees who dared not touch him.
Hear Dean's footsteps across the stage - swear he could hear John take his head in his hand, place another between his hard smooth thighs, hold his arms down like Magdalene. Hear the slide of John's cock through the air, through the parted flanks of his brother's body, through the tight cheeks and through - the crisp, wet sound. Hear the drip of juices on Dean's body, down the skin of his legs, bowed together and holding himself together around his father's belly. Hear the slurp as their thighs slipped together, heard the buzz of the men who would pay to touch him.
Dean was something amazing; he shouldn't have existed. It was clear to anyone who looked that Dean shouldn't have existed, and yet he did. He was some kind of a miracle, so ugly and beautiful, so there and not there; it gave them the out to stop caring, to stop thinking of him as something like them. There were things people could do to drag themselves down to the level where desire would eat itself; where engorged genitals could block out the sun, where bodies tasted of earth and death and cum all at once, where the profane was made holy again, and this was where Dean lived. Sam wished sometimes, far and above all his other deadened wishes, that he could think of Dean that way too - forget all he ever was and let the illusion drag him down. Dean, most of all, wouldn't let him.
At night, in the car where they hid sometimes with nothing but a blanket and Sam's formula bottle, Dean had put baby Sammy's fingers to his lips, kissed them until they tickled. When Sammy had cried, Dean had used his thumb as a pacifier. He still had the scars from Sammy teething in the night, when John couldn't, didn't want to hear.
Now, at night, in the car where they hid sometimes with nothing but a blanket and Dean's emptying bottle of tequila, Dean put Sam's fingers to his lips, his teeth, his tongue, took them inside and let him feel, silently, the way Sam knew him.
Sam wondered if John knew about them. He hoped so; he hoped it made his heart sour as an apple.
*
The Everglades 1991
They drove southeast along the highway 10, through Mobile and Tallahassee, deeper into the muck, until it formed on their skin, the sweat and the dirt and the no-see-ums growing thicker in the air. When Dean and Sam let their hair grow long, they got mistaken for girls and didn't correct anyone.
Sammy's hair grew out faster, curling down over his shoulders in shaggy feathering, like a misplaced Charlie's Angel. He wore plastic heart-shaped sunglasses, pink t-shirt his nipples shone through, jean skirt and alligator boots Dean found for him in Tamiami. He picked up a habit of lolling out his tongue at Dean, hanging out candy-stained red, obscene, like a dog's or a man's, when Sammy was still somewhere in between.
Dean wore a white undershirt, jeans just past his waist, mussed hair just past his chin and cherry lip gloss he carried in a stick in his pocket. His cheeks looked like they've been molded in plastic, not sharp like Sammy's elfin eight-year-old features, but no more real, freckled up high and unaccountable by strangers, allowing him to pass in the daylight, a shocking thing and unmemorable, like the sun.
"What're you?" They would hear drawled out long and slow at the store counters. "A boy? 'R a girl?"
When they walked along the side of the road, drunk teenagers would stretch their arms outside of car windows to burn them with cigarettes as they passed by speeding, laughing.
They were accountable and touchable only to each other, though Dean would know miles of skin, though Sam would travel the whole world, and they would never return here, to this place where Dean learned his shimmy from the snakes, where Sammy learned her high walk from the herons. Where John let them go to a place he almost couldn't get them back from, his jaws opening like a maw to snap the tendons between them. "Creeper John" they called him behind his back already.
At the beach, Sammy wore the suit Dean bought him - little red shorts to match his sunglasses. He body stretched out skinny on all sides of it, dark and lean. The dark round pointed discs of his nipples, the jut of his chin and nose, the barely-there fullness in his shorts, were all things Dean loved to stare at and pinch; tease him just to make him blush.
Sammy made up lyrics to the tunes of songs he knew and hissed them in Dean's ears at the candy counters to make him giggle. He took the monsters from Dean's comic books and painted the faces of John onto their reptilian bodies and monstrous apes with his stories. Dean laughed and laughed with him, but Sammy waited for his brother's stories to come, to do more than just laugh.
Later, Sam would understand how Dean couldn't make fun of the faces that floated above him every night, couldn't pull a story from his breath and beat it out of himself, out of his gut like a drum. He would have heard the sound himself at night by then, known it was there, waiting for him in the future. How the men would be coming from thousands of miles away to hear it, beating with that pulse in their blood. When Dean would let them in, that beat would thrum in him, and Sam would hear it - a deep and constant thrumming like no regular beat, no regular sound he'd ever heard - how it would shake away even the screaming inside of him and even the thoughts that Dean would have in their absence and even the thoughts Dean may have had when they came but no amount of them coming could silence it, no coming they've heard yet. Only the breath of Dean's lungs, in and out, sweat-covered cage expanding each time. Only the breath of Sam, the quiet whisper he heard like a howl. But it was the breeze at night, and all that could comfort his voice and his sweat was that howl.
*
Big Bend 1995
Sam knew these places of absolute darkness existed, the kind where the only thing leading to his next breath was a single electric light, or the short life of a match. The dust-colored plateaus of Texas led to the dust-colored hills of Texas led to the dust-colored valleys, but here in the nighttime, next to their campsite, it was all shades of black. He preferred the stars spotting around up there, above the matte line where the treetops began, far higher than he had ever been. But Dean lived down here where his face floated for three seconds in the darkness, lit by fire and then gone again. He existed for as long as a cigarette.
Sometimes he thought these places of darkness were everywhere they went, a part of himself or John or Dean or all three of them, like his own dark little heart. Sammy's dark little heart - coal covered in soot covered in tar, pumping with oil - pumping for Dean all he did and did not want. He went towards where the light had flashed and knew Dean would still be waiting there, would give him the six minutes it took to bring the cigarette down to the filter, then no more.
"Hey, Sammy," Dean spoke over his shoulder. His voice was thin and cut down by moans when Sam heard him at night. All Sam could see was his moonlit face, mostly in shadow. He always got what was left.
"Dean? When are we getting out of here?" He barely heard his own voice. All it was unsure and halfway to pleading. "You said soon, right? Last time I asked."
Dean huffed out smoke and breath, mingling together. "I know but you just asked me, what was it, a week ago?"
It had been two months. "Yeah. But..." He shuffled dust at his feet. All the land here was dust, surrounded by rocks, covered in rocks, dappled with spines and fangs. "I just wanna know. You always say the same thing, but... I wanna know."
"Soon, Sammy."
"Tell me, Dean. I wanna know."
"Sammy..." Dean huffed.
"I wanna know! And you never say. You just say 'soon' and then forget. Then you say 'soon' again and I never know. I just need to hear something else. Tell me something else." He heard himself beg, but it wasn't, it wasn't, it was just desperation.
Dean sucked smoke in harder, wanting this to be over, but turned to face him anyway. "I'm doing this the best way I know how."
"We need a plan. Just - tell me, do you have a plan? 'Cause I could do something. I'm younger than you, but I could help. He lets me leave. He lets me do stuff."
Dean whipped his head around like a horse, all those horses out here, shaking their manes and flicking their ears like that. They were wild, like them. They had no masters.
Sam never, ever wanted to ask. "Don't you wanna go?"
Dean turned back to walk away, flicked the last bit of tobacco and burned his fingers - "Fuck!" - stumbled over brush, but never stopped.
"Dean! Dean!" Sam would never know what he was swearing at. He always figured it was him. But he was the last one Dean should be angry at, the one who never used him, and the only one he loved. He guessed sometimes that Dean had the choice to love everything there was to hate around him, or to love Sam back. It would have been an easy choice to make; Dean's whole life had given him that one simple choice. Yet he never made it. He took what else was offered, took John's constant presence, took the men on the flat roll-out beds - took their sweat and mouths and seed, took their hands to mark his skin, took their insults just as well - and their alcohol and promises, took his possessions from gas stations, all that was cheap and free.
Taking Sam meant being something else entirely. He didn't know what Dean would be when it was just Dean. Would the panic set in after a matter of days? Would the whole world scare him and make him alone in it, some place Sam could never reach? Would things get all turned around, Sam's fault for leading him away, and the heart that Dean could have had come crashing down on them in a fury, some time bomb in his chest, breaking for all it could not hold? Dean was a mystery. But then Sam knew he was too. They were hollow things made of oil and skin and smoke, not real yet, not fully made. All the parts they were missing we scattered in the deserts and the night sky, tattered things for coyotes and wolves to find. If they took all of Dean away, would Sam even find him again? Would he see it and notice, Dean breathing smoke in and out, eyes dry and dull?
Dean might be grateful for Sam being gone. He could smoke in peace, have nothing more to think about, let them take the rest of himself away. Dean lived for Sammy, making it so much harder. Because Dean's life was a hole he was digging in the desert that something had to end up inside. Every breath he took, at least it's me, and every choice he did not make, me, not Sammy. If Sam had given him any choices, he had only give him two - Dean or Sammy. Everything else there never was, never would be - just a binary life, alively robotic. Dean Sammy. Sammy Dean.
He wanted a tunnel out of the absolute darkness. Sam needed a way up. The way back was slowly through the brush, cracking branches following his footsteps home. He would break them all and keep on going, finding himself in the morning at Dean's, asleep.
*
Niagara Falls, late 1980s
The first time he gave him a ring, Sammy was just a baby.
"You want it?" Dean held it out in front of him between his thumb and fingers, sugar-candy pink shining in the sun.
Sammy took the ring between his lips and tried to bite.
"Ew, you slobber!" Dean wiped his hand on his jeans and then pushed the ring at Sammy's chest. "It's plastic - you can't eat it. Here, put it on your finger," but there was space showing on all sides. "Never mind - use your thumb." He placed it there himself, used to doing everything for his baby brother. The yellow plastic just fit, but the pink plastic heart with "Niagara Falls" written on it jutted off the side of his hand. He wore it until the words disappeared, worn down by chlorine of hotel pools that summer.
The second time, Sammy was older, so Dean tried again.
He had irony on his side. "Sammy, will you marry me?" He even got down on one knee, held those awkwardly long teenage hands in his own and put the ring on himself. This time, the shiny pink plastic clashed with Sammy's painted fingernails, but it fit. Sammy's skin was tanned and beautiful, more olive than it had ever been, even though they were in New York and it was cold, even though the hair at Sam's brow and his green-flecked eyes seemed to burn with a kind of heat Dean never remembered having when he was his age. But he remembered very little of how time passed, their years together one clump of shared memory where nothing ever seemed separate and alone.
"Yes, Dean," Sammy put his hands on his shoulders and leaned down, nose to nose. "I will."
Dean felt his own eyes cross, watched his brother's, felt his long brown hair fall against his chest, and didn't quite know what was going on, but knew something about it was trouble.
Then Sam had the ring and was running through the tourists again, waiting for Dean to catch up.
They had nothing else to do after seeing the falls, except to see them again.
"Who cares about some falling water? We've all seen rain, right?" Dean would joke. Then they spent the rest of that week inside watching TV while John wandered the streets looking for something neither of them knew what. TV was full of normal people doing normal things, not fathers and their sons lost on the road.
*
Bible Belt 1993
By the time they got to Nashville, John had been saved.
It started long before, in between the Pledge of Allegiance before the blackboard and the heft of his rifle in Echo company, in the red flare glow over the canopy, the bullets over his head and the promises he made to Mary to return home. It called to him across the world and back again, said there would always be something more waiting for him. He never believed in God until he learned of the demons; he never saw the demons until his sons were born; then, he saw them all around, creeping in the shadows and the faces of the ordinary people who called themselves his neighbors; saw them even in Mary, pulling them behind her like a ghost rattling the chains of their precious, precarious fortune. She promised him, she promised.
The farms stood still by the roadside near Waco. As he drove, he listened to country stations and Christian radio; sometimes both, it was hard to tell the difference anymore. He expected things to sound different than they did. This was close to Kansas, close to home. The farms spoke of nothing, but the landowners shared their philosophies in makeshift billboards, paint fading but not cheap:
"Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell." (Proverbs 23:13-14)
John stopped the car after midnight near Refinery Road, just off the Interstate. All day they'd been in Texas, and they weren't going to get out tomorrow, driving east. The street looked gray in the headlights; orange lights dotted the night from far away; the rest was black. Spotlights meant refineries, bright enough lights to catch the fan of smog in the air and show the silvery metal almost white. Sam would think they looked like sentient robots, planning in the night to take over in our sleep. John would have to laugh at such paranoia; monsters never revealed themselves so clearly, not even in Texas. Even at night the sky looked blue against the silver. There had to be at least five stations, modern tan rectangle buildings, water from the dam, wide flat silos, tall thin stacks, metal infrastructure supporting hovering white lights.
This was not monstrous - instead, progress. This is what it came to. He knew the meaning; he worked his life for it; he was just never meant to find a way in. He knew that now; the culmination of Mary's death, no work, no lies, no way in. It reminded him of when he heard about the moon landing; he had been knee-deep in paddies that felt like mud puddles in Kansas, only on some alien world, so far away he could never explain, barely on the edge of 19, and some other guy was in a space suit on the bone-dry lunar plains; he thought of the conversation they could try to have, to try to suck meaning out of their shoes like so much mud and dust. He started to laugh, the kind of belly laugh he would be known for later, born that day, and it wouldn't let go of him for long stretches of time, until his buddies would threaten to pull out their guns, long-since driven mad by the inexplicable sound of it, by the juxtaposition.
Juxtaposition, John thought. That's it - juxtaposition. The meaning of things lay in between them. He'd have to dig.
Dallas looked no different. It was an orange-green dome on the horizon, criss-crossed by overpasses like dead tentacles; it was as if the refineries had grown and supported whole suburban blocks, then spread out some more, dotted with shacks and taco huts and electric wires. There were no people out for scale, no sense of size of things; wood looked like metal looked like rust looked like light; a telephone pole was a dead tree, smog was a fire; yes, that's it.
Past the city, he saw devils in the orange glow of the tumbleweeds. "Come stand with me boys. Look at it - all of it. D'you see?" It was all fire, so many shades of fire. The tops of the thin gap pipes flared like torches, the refinery spotlights shone, the streetlamps buzzed, and the whole of the city was covered in a halo of smog, beige-blue and green like dirty cotton.
Dean rubbed his eyes and squinted, hugged his arms and tried not to shake. "Yeah, Dad. I see it. 's Dallas, right? Said on the map. What're we doin' up? We gonna stop for awhile?" His speech was slurred, eyes tired, jaw sore from sleep and yawning.
"We're just stopping for a minute," John touched Dean's shoulder and looked behind him. "Just wanted you to see it."
Sam stood there half-awake in the street lights, undershirt flimsy, frayed, and filled with holes. His hair hung to his shoulders and his nose stuck out sharply from the black shadows of his face. He didn't look or dress like a girl anymore; not since he was nine. John felt his eyes, felt the deliberate sag of his arms and the sure square of his shoulders, all blank with anger, directed towards him like patience's gun. Sam was ten; Dean was fourteen. It was all gonna happen so fast now.
Their money went missing outside of Texarkana.
They'd been sleeping in the car, John in front, his boys in the back, belongings stuffed between the seats and blankets covering all. He woke up from dreams he couldn't remember and checked his pockets. He'd had a thick wad of twenties in his pocket, another in his boot. Twenty-four twenties from hustling pool. Twelve in each. What he'd left in his pocket, what he swore he'd left, wasn't there. He opened all the car doors so Sam and Dean fell out with aluminum cans and candy bar wrappers, strung all the clothes out in the dirt, shook the blankets out, the one remaining floor mat, the tools and the bottles clanging against each other as they flew out of the trunk.
The dirt from under the scrub was blown all over the road they parked beside. It was quiet enough to hear the water from the brook, just beyond the trees. It was calming and constant, like Sam's blood was straining to be, as he listened to his father's breathing, like he could feel it hot on his face already. "Look! Look, dammit!" John's voice was loud and shaky, the worse after a night of drinking. Sam recognized it, but he didn't think about what it could mean. It just was, to him.
When John grabbed his arm, he wasn't even paying attention, just staring at the mess on the ground, at what was and wasn't his - an old pair of Converse sneakers that used to belong to Dean and that he'd grown out of two months ago, refilled plastic bottles now empty, torn bags of Doritos, guns'n'ammo magazines, dirty tube socks - the stuff of his life, and he didn't even understand half of it. John grabbed his arm and pulled. "Tell me what happened!"
Tell him what? What happened to the money? What happened last night? What was happening now? Sam didn't have an answer for any of it. "Dean," he called. "Dean..."
Dean got up off his knees, came running, and moved his fists to John's chest, not pressing or beating, just holding there with his will, "Not Sam." He said, "Not Sam," and looked at John until John heard him. "Not Sam, not Sam, not Sam."
Why, not Sam? Sam thought, his arm still in John's fist, fingers wrapped all around and then some. Not Sam, what? John let go of his arm, pushed past Dean, pushed down in the dirt, and walked out to the edge of the water. Fists at his sides, he just stared out as they silently counted the rise and fall of his chest, his breaths slowing down.
Afterwards, they piled what they wanted to keep back in the car and John just started driving. Dean stayed in the back and kept Sam's head in his lap and covered the whole back seat in a blanket, letting his brother sleep past the dawn. Silence had a way of multiplying his fears into possibilities that felt as if they were happening even if they weren't. This one, John wouldn't stop until they were out of gas, ditch the car and keep on walking. This one, John would accuse them of stealing and raise his hand against the truth. This one, he would steal a bottle and draw this out until the next day. This one, Dean would have to steal candy bars instead. This one, John would smile out of the corner of his mouth and forget.
Finally, it was a shared hot dog with every free topping bought with change and split into threes. "I'm doing the best I can. It's the best I know how. So you take it, and eat it."
Dean gave his to Sammy, who was too sleepy to notice.
*
Graceland 1993
Across the border of Tennessee, at the edge of Memphis, the bridge was a half-moon on the water. This bridge was spokes of steel over their first glimpse of the Mississippi in two pairs of sneakers ago, twelve states.
"Don't you want something, Dean? What do you wanna be, when we're all grown up?"
Dean shrugged. "I'm gonna be just like Dad. I mean, I already am, right?"
Sam didn't say anything.
Dean punched his shoulder. "Hey, what do you want to be then? What's wrong with what you've got? You've got us, right?"
"Yeah. I guess I do. It's just... Don't you ever want to choose something? Do decide, instead of just what you've got?"
"I dunno. You've only got what you got, right? Can't make it any different. So? Sometimes I want to eat until I get full and sometimes I want to sleep without you pokin' into me all the time and sometimes I want to know what everyone else is thinking of, but I'm not gonna know it. So."
"What's wrong with wanting stuff?"
"Makes you unhappy, that's what. You're a sourpuss, Sam. Always have been. Suck it up sometimes. You wanna be a man, right? Like Dad?"
"Not really."
"Yeah. Well. Wait until you're older." Dean lived for the promise of older.
Instead, John took them to Graceland later, or let them wander around the front gates while he sneaked on the tour, flirted with a tour guide who looked like a stewardess in a polyester pink uniform. Dean hoped he'd stay away for a few hours. Long enough to charm an old couple into buying them ice cream cones, to charm a guy in front of the hotel to bum him a cigarette. He didn't care about some stupid house, another one he couldn't live in. Like a tourist trap was any good use for a house that people could actually be living in.
He waited with Sam at the front gates, curved and painted with musical notes like a song he couldn't read. "What's 'Graceland'?" Sam asked, his chin still sticky. Dean wiped it with the edge of his shirt. "Beats me," he said. "Grace is a girl's name."
Their gas ran out in Nashville, but John knew strangers in Nashville, and Tennessee was just that way about wild-eyed strangers and their bleary-eyed sons in the middle of the afternoon. He found a girl named Angela at a bar stool one night and didn't come back to the hotel for days. Dean kept the TV on loud all the time and played blackjack with Sam for M&Ms on the pink and orange paisley bedspread. They watched Danny Devito movies and fell asleep to laugh tracks. Dean told Sam to take baths, brush his teeth, and take naps just to pass the time better.
"If Dad's gone, what's gonna happen to us?" Sam would ask in the darkness at bedtime, the TV flashing on his face.
"Dad's not gone, Sammy. We're long gone now, and no one's gonna come to find him."
Sam sighed. "Yeah, I guess so. It's just that - if Dad never came back, would we still get to stay together?"
"I'm never leaving you. Never."
"I know. But, what if?"
"I don't know. I just know they're not going to take you, so you don't have to worry about it. Get some sleep."
"I'm not tired. What're you gonna do, Dean? You can barely drive."
"I'll drive if I have to. I'll get food, I'll steal, I'll kill someone if I gotta. I can be meaner than Dad if I wanna be. Just let them try to take you away. Let them try it."
Sam never found Dean's bravado comforting, but he thought maybe Dean was comforted by it, and believed it, though he knew better.
*
Appalachia 1993
John liked that Angela was a dye-job redhead who still wore cut-off shirts even though the trend was passing. She was up for anything after enough alcohol, and alcohol was easy to come by as long as the bars were open. On a Saturday night, he got drunk enough to be caught up in a heist at a liquor store out in the sticks when the neighboring county had gone dry. They never found any guns, but the manager'd said there were, so he'd had to run for it.
Angela gathered the boys while John waited in the car, and they headed out to her brother's place in West Virginia. "Cyril's real nice," she said in the darkness. "You boys'll like it there. But we gotta go."
"Yeah, real nice," Dean mumbled, but he shook Sam awake, grabbed his comic books and both their shoes, the rest of the M&Ms, and ran in behind her and out the open door.
The mountains were different here, Dean thought. There weren't even convenience stores, and the stores didn't have signs, or even paint. They were just people's houses where they traded any old stuff for more stuff - cans of gas for cans of beans, old shoes for wood planks, mason jars of clear liquid for just about anything. Junk was roosting in the grass like rocks. It made him want to keep Sam close, hold onto him at night and listen for sounds. The next time someone came and got him in the middle of the night he wasn't gonna go. He was sure of it. Sam had asked him to. Sam tried to convince him of these things when they walked alone through the woods, hoping not to see a single soul. "I know you could take care of me if you had to. We could do it, Dean."
"Yeah. Sure we could." Dean was always scraping the earth with a stick, stabbing at it like it was his own itch.
"So why don't we?" Sam had wanted to ask for days. For maybe longer than that. He knew what Dean would say, but he wanted to be the one to ask.
Dean huffed out a laugh. "What? Just us? On our own?"
"We could do it if we wanted. You take better care of me than Dad, anyway. He wouldn't care if I was gone."
"Shh, don't say that. It's not true. He would care a lot if we were gone. All he does, he does for us."
"You think so?"
"I know so. He tells me all the time."
"I've never heard him say that, not to me."
"Yeah, well, he says it to me." Dean held his favored status up as a way to end all arguments.
Sam always took it, though he never saw it the same way. "When? When does he say it, Dean?" Sam wanted him to say it then, wanted Dean to admit the things John does in the dark that he doesn't see. Because Sam doesn't know, he really doesn't, but he knows whatever it is, Dean won't say, though it is the only thing keeping him close by, when he would swear all Dean needed was Sam. "Dean? When does Dad say why he does any of the stuff he does?"
Dean shrugged. He had to know it too. John had been different lately. He talked of monsters chasing them up into the mountains. It wasn't just cops. It was creatures from ghost stories he'd heard as a child come alive, tall things with glowing eyes and claws that only came out in the dark. He began reading the Bible, listening to the old men drinking moonshine and preaching from rocking chairs, speaking Gospel about the days to come. Dark days, they said, and certain to be. "These things came after Mary," he'd say to them. "You don't remember, but I was there. I saw them, felt their breath on my neck. Black, evil things." Their dad stared with wide eyes and believed.
"Do you believe in monsters?" Sam asked, like he'd been asking every day since it began, relying on Dean's answer.
"I don't know. Maybe," he said. "Monsters might exist, but they're not going to come after you, Sammy. I promise."
Sam wondered how he knew, but he wanted to believe him, more than anything.
Later, when he is alone, Sam can only hear muffled sounds from the next room, like old mattress and mouths breathing, over the drip of the faucet. He sits in the cold porcelain tub of the bath until it gets cold and he starts to shiver. He wants to stay in there until he's asleep, until he knows John is passed out under the blankets with his shirt off, hairy chest rising and falling, his snore so loud he can hear it through the closed door, and Dean would almost let him stay. He can see it like it's happening, any time he wants to, like clues in a dream.
Then Dean really is there, looking as alien to Sam as he'd ever seen him, freckled skin all mottled with red, his hair already wet and matted down, naked and pale in every place that mattered. He'd been waiting for Dean to do just that, to open the door and climb in after, tip toe across the floor naked and climb in behind him, turn the water on and make it warm again, wash his hair for him and scrub himself all over until they're both pruned and tired. Until the water is colored and filled with fallen pieces of them, dirtier than he thought it could be, until Dean's nakedness is less startling and strange, and he feels like his brother again.
"Have you thought about it any more, Sam?" Dean asked to his back, squeezing out the washcloth and letting the water run down. "About running away?"
Sam was so tired, suddenly. Tired beyond belief. His answer was important to Dean, he could hear it in his voice, but his head was so full of stuff he couldn't figure. Sam nodded. "Yes. I think about it."
"I think." Dean made a decision. Sam could feel it, but he couldn't really know. "I think about it sometimes too. But then, I think I would want to come back, too. You know? We could get away, but then we'd end up back here. We'd try to change it, but nothing could ever be any different."
"Yeah," Sam said, his mouth going dry. "So what, then?"
"I don't think I could take that, you know? Running away is one thing. But it would have to be forever. And I don't think I could do that, no matter how much I wanted to. Forever's a long time. When it's family. And what if..."
"Yeah?" Sam closed his eyes, his brain making his tired with dreams and clues and promises.
"Well, I figure I can't promise you that. I don't wanna break a promise like that to you, Sammy. Not that one. If I'm gonna find a way out for you, it's gonna be for good. You understand?"
Sam nodded. It'd been going on for a while, he figured. A whole new world opened up with what he figured. It was a bad one. One where his heroes had lost all hope and monsters were waking up behind their eyes.
*
onto Part 2 * onto Part 3
Table/Prompt: 05 The Open Road / Prompt 01 Yosemite 1987 - 10 Appalachia 1993
Word Count: 25,000
Pairings: Sam/Dean, John/Dean
Ratings: PG to NC-17
Warning: Wincest, Weecest, abuse, death, abuse of metaphor, abuse of fruit symbolism, drug use, porn, prostitution, happy ending
Notes: SPN AU full of homages to my favorite artists - Nabokov, Jim Grimsley, JT Leroy, Mark Twain, Dennis Cooper, Bill Henson, Rimbaud, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Scott Heim, David Quammen, Harper Lee, David Wojnarowicz.
One story told in 30 parts, over 30 years for spn_30snapshots. Order goes from 01-30, not chronological. Title from W.B. Yeats.
Summary: "I like true stories," Dean told him. "Where real things happen."
Yosemite 1987
The world stopped, as if frozen in the falling ice. "Shhhh," John whispered, and Dean's heart went blank, as it goes blank at every harsh sound his father makes, would ever make.
Brown forms stood as a blur, then started again, in the yellow headlights, so Dean had to open his eyes wide as could be to see what they were. "Elk," his father spoke, answering his question unasked. "A whole family," he said, hands still gripping the wheel, as if any sudden movement would scatter them. They didn't care either way, loping proudly across the highway up the mountain towards Yosemite. Dean counted one big one with antlers and a beard - kinda ugly and misshapen - and two younger ones - with fur, but skinny. He wanted to turn to the backseat and wake up Sammy, but then the extra blanket he had given him would be wasted, and his brother would have to shiver himself back to sleep again.
The largest elk just stood there with the lights reflecting in his eyes, black they were, like globes. So much of the world didn't care what you were thinking, Dean knew, and some people spent their whole lives imagining feelings where none had ever existed. Sometimes things were that empty and that cold, and it didn't matter what you did, it just was. Sam's imagination was different - his brother had an awareness that he had never seen before, and yet he could speak of the most fantastic things. Dean remembered holding him as a baby and looking to him for answers, though he could not speak in words. Sam was a soul and a comfort, and he wished for him even now, selfishly, though he was peacefully asleep.
Dean sat with his father and watched the frozen ice fall, waited for the world to let them be, and drove up the mountain into the dark of the forest, where the wild things were. It was safe there, quiet, and the monsters would not find them, as long as the headlights would stay on. Dean made a wish in his secret, darkest heart that they would.
*
Big Sur 1988
The fog hid the sun from the cold ground, the seabirds crying, the winding road their father drove them. They've been riding the 1 up the coast from Santa Monica, watching the water change from sun-flecked blue to white-capped gray. It was one of the roads John drove because he liked it, not for reasons of efficiency or reminiscing or work, whatever work was supposed to be this time. He looked over his outstretched arms on the steering wheel and thought of things he never talked about. Dean faced the passenger side window, thinking a clip of thoughts cut with his dreams, his fears, the rocky cliffs and roots poking through, gray slate and rust like blood.
Sam stared out the back, turned around away from his family, the road stretching out behind him shrinking and disappearing behind the rocks. They've been driving for days, stopping at rest stops and the outside of tourist attractions like the Hearst Mansion, high on a hill he would never climb, built with the kinds of plans he could almost understand. The need for a concrete life. He thought they would find no one on the mountain, maybe run out of gas, out of food, out of whatever it was they needed just when they lost it. He always thinks this, no matter how much Dean promises, no matter how much he tries. Dean tries; he always tries. The world is just different.
But there was a man at the one-shack Chevron station, a kind old man, around one more impossible bend through the fog. He shuffled over to the car, waved a hand and asked questions of warmth and no consequence.
"Need a fill-up?"
Sam heard John's muffled answer as he walked away from the car. "Yup. You're the only place we've seen for miles." Sam thought it was so quiet, he could hear everything. He heard the crunch under Dean's soles as he walked the gravel, the metal clang of the gas spout. If he closed he eyes, he thought he might still hear the ocean. Seagulls walked the tree-lined road without feeling out of place among the trees.
"Where you headed?" the old man asked. "It's gonna be dark soon."
"We're headed up to Monterey. Get a place there for the night." Dad always sounded so nice, so calm to strangers. Had to, he figured, otherwise -
Sam could no longer see the road through the insect-and-light-streaked windshield, and he knew Dad would tell Dean to clean it, standing on his toes to reach the middle, making faces at Sam through the glass on all sides. Sam will sink into the seat, poke his bangs and his eyes over the top of the cushion at wherever Dean is, share glances that say nothing more than "I know who you are" in brother code. I know you, even if no one else does. I know. Sam watched his brother walk away, seat of his jeans worn through white, mud caking his boots from the neighboring state, cheap sunglasses from a Florida convenience store. When he returns, he'll toss a bag of M&Ms into the back seat - "Dinner, Sammy" - open a frayed comic book and stare at the pages until he has to take his sunglasses off, has to squint in the half-light, has to dream on his own.
The car will purr through another tank of gas, another dark night in the mountains, another restless sleep on the black leather seat. Sam will awake through the night to see headlights on the ceiling, Dean's head turned towards him from the front seat, finally the fog and mosquitoes of the sunrise at the shore.
*
El Camino Real 1984
Dean didn't know any lullabies then, and so he never would. He'd learned to hold Sammy in his arms, rock him until he couldn't feel his weight anymore, until they were no longer separate. His hands learned that fine baby hair felt like silk, that Sammy's gaze was different for him, that he liked the sound of his voice even if he was just humming and there was no song at all. It was a panicked whine, a higher tone, a sound for a dog. As much for Sammy as for the air itself, for someone out there he just couldn't find, but had to exist somewhere, had to.
Dad was looking too, he thought. Drove the car down to Mexico, where they didn't even check who crossed over, just wanted them to come and try to find a place among the sun and the breeze and the missions of the baja. Dean watched the cacti, like people waving at him, or telling them to stop, stop, turn back, come no further, before it was too late. No going back, no going back. The friendly people of the sun, not the night people of the shadows, come to take them all away one by one, momma, baby, child. His thoughts raced like this, looping like the worn tires of the Impala, burning out on the road.
When Dad stopped, he didn't know why. Sometimes just to piss on the side of the road together, even urine shiny in the sun. Sometimes when Dean told him to stop, didn't know why, because Sammy wouldn't make a sound. He cried when the car stilled, and sometimes Dean needed to hear it. "For me," the baby seemed to cry. "Do this for me," again and again. Then they kept going.
Too often it was for the missions. Dean only saw one before he wanted to leave. The walls were white, like bone like wall like mother, the angels with glassy eyes like death looking down from the place where the corners met, the last place he saw his mother, suspended like them, and Dean waited for the fire.
John got on his knees only once, nails cutting into the waxy wood of the pews, weary bones falling on rock, and Dean railed with his fists at what looked too much like his own doubt and fear and "help me help me" - not like Sammy's demands, not demanding anything at all - just the surrender he couldn't bear to feel. The angels will never have him, Dean thought. The angels will never have any of them, not pushed up into the corners of the walls, not afire and gone to a better place, never giving into anything but each other - flesh to touch on the earth - no knees to the ground, no eyes raised skyward. Here. Here. Here.
John gave into him then, in that moment of grace in the church. Dean remembered how he looked at him and soundlessly got up, seemed to understand what Dean wanted and gave it to him, in the form of escape. Just that one time, got up off his knee and carried his son's violence against his chest - close, close - and felt it and knew it then, all the way back to the car. Dean sat in silence in the shade of the backseat, legs hanging out, and watched the young girl (she was round, like the sun, like the fire had touched her and she knew what it was) give them back the baby. Then held him, back to the border, where an old Marines story gave them passage, where he could tuck Sammy into the floor, feel his soft cotton-covered belly with one hand and sleep, without a lullaby.
*
Mojave Desert 1994
Beyond the suburban lights stretching out from the highway to the horizon, where the truly religious squat in abandoned trailers and harem tents painted with signs meant to be seen from the sky, the Impala stood covered in dust.
It'd been sitting there for months, driven only by John when he had to meet with men from the cities. "To make plans," he'd said. Sam had begun to hate John's plans, getting steadily worse - more decadent, more cruel. He didn't know where John picked up his ringmaster persona and ideas, perhaps a dream, a movie he'd seen, too much tequila the men made out in the Mojave. It smelled and tasted like gasoline to Sam, the way John had always begun to smell, just like the engine of the car he hated so much. He watched them make it when the flaps of the tents would fly open, the rotting acid smell of agave hitting him in a wave, and he'd have to spit into the sand, his dry mouth suddenly tasting of sweat.
John's voice for Sam was always harsh. "Someone gotta do something for this family, and your brother's the only one willing to do it. So you do what I tell you to do and think about being nicer to the both of us. We deserve it."
Sam scowled, threw around oiled rags and dragged his feet.
His father pointed a finger in his face. "It's about time. You just think about that, son."
All of Sam's imagination of eleven years had since dried up. He didn't care anymore. He did what he did so he could be there when the end came for Dean, whenever that would be. Dean barely knew he was there in the daytimes; he'd been too far gone too long. Every day John walked out of the tent, one bottle for Dean and one for himself. He got what else he could for Dean when someone would bring it through - the pharmaceutical train out of Cali, because they got whatever the suburbs didn't want, or had too much of.
He'd spent two weeks nursing Dean's bruises on the drive out here from the Badlands. They always seemed to be moving from one dusty stretch of nothing to another. All that changed was the colors on Dean's skin, the look in his eyes as he grew into something Sam knew not what. It scared him and turned him colder.
Every day Sam woke up with narrowed eyes and a curse on his lips. When he walked, leather-skinned and dry, to the edge of the shade, past John, where the tent flap whipped hard enough to cut, the curse would escape, hissing past his lips like a snake. Meant to hear it or made to hear it, John would deliver the same punishment. Sam would spend the day until noon shining the Impala with his spit, the sweat that appeared on his brow, under his arms, down the V-shaped bone on his chest - the only places sweat would appear, evaporating in the heat - the remains of a can of wax, the strength in the arms of his wiry frame. Over the buzz in his ears, the anger and the heat, he would hear them, getting ready for the heat to peak, the show to start.
"Come one, come all!" John would chant, his voice booming as a bear's. Everything about him was grizzled, Sam thought. Hairy, big he was, and flashed of all smiles and violence.
So the people loved him. So they did come, and some stayed for the late show, and some stayed into the night.
First, the drifters from the colonies, as they called it. The squatters in the desert who had come because they were looking to be saved. The ones who had given up liquor and sin in exchange for what God would bring them in the sand and the heat that never stopped. Where the nights were medieval and dark, starry and cold. Their fellow runaways in rectangles painted white, tents that billowed white, houses made of recycled plastic and white plaster. Then, the lost ones from the suburbs, broken down on the side of the highway, mistaken on the way to a tourist trap, saved by the drifters, or confused and choking by the smog and left to wander here. Even the regulars would come, escaping from their tract houses just for a day, lured by word of mouth and promises of something they'd never seen before. They were tourists, gratified by judging what they saw, calling it what they would.
Sam rubbed the wax deeper into the paint, pressing so hard he could barely move, and watched them come.
"Come one, come all!" John would chant in his carnal carny voice, a grin, a hum, on his lips. "Come see the Boy Wonder - the Fantastic Dean!"
Sam rubbed. T-shirt screeching on the paint. Dean's name; he had to use Dean's name. That name would never not be raw to him, would never hurt any less. Then it would be time for Dean to make his entrance, and if Sam didn't know better, he would think that it could never hurt more.
For what Dean was, was an exceptional beauty. Their father, lost in rage and poverty, had become entrepreneurial. Pictures of Dean would eventually make them all famous, in only the way that naked and pink and the Internet can do.
For now, Dean was a showy version of himself. The promise of cotton candy bliss. Painted-on freckles over powdery makeup, under darkened lashes, over stained lips. When all this would end, and the next phase begun, the makeup would be wiped away with heavy cream, when it was the close-up that mattered. Dressed only in black shorts, his skin still white under the desert sun, his legs bent just enough to make his ankles poke out if he stepped on the balls of his feet, his perky adolescent ass high and rounded enough to hold up his jockeys, Dean stepped up to the platform.
In his hands was a knife - its long blade tilted back and forth to glint in the sun, his chin tilted up in concentration when he threw it from one hand to the other, ready to take on all comers, if he himself weren't the bait. John reached into the pockets of his pin-striped pants, his ugly suits just this side of zoot, and took out a shiny new red apple. "Catch!" He would call, barking his words, and Dean would catch it with his free hand like a ball, bending only at the waist in a bow. As the audience clapped - they always did, Sam knew them too well - Dean placed the apple onto his head, balancing it there, stepping across the stage on the balls of his feet while John collected the money. "It's a show, folks, a real show. People come from miles around, across the great states of this land, across oceans of seawater and desert..." He went on and on. The sound Sam could never drown out. Even if he closed his eyes he could still see his lips move, watch the people slobber into their laps.
Hear Dean's footsteps across the stage - swear he could hear him place the apple on his head, place another between his hard smooth thighs, hold his arms out like a desert saint. Hear the slice of John's blade through the air, through the wooden planks behind his brother's head, through the crisp apples - the crisp, wet sound. Hear the drip of juices on Dean's tongue, down the skin of his legs, bowed together and holding the remains of apples in between. Hear the slurp as he took a bite, heard the buzz of the bees who dared not touch him.
Hear Dean's footsteps across the stage - swear he could hear John take his head in his hand, place another between his hard smooth thighs, hold his arms down like Magdalene. Hear the slide of John's cock through the air, through the parted flanks of his brother's body, through the tight cheeks and through - the crisp, wet sound. Hear the drip of juices on Dean's body, down the skin of his legs, bowed together and holding himself together around his father's belly. Hear the slurp as their thighs slipped together, heard the buzz of the men who would pay to touch him.
Dean was something amazing; he shouldn't have existed. It was clear to anyone who looked that Dean shouldn't have existed, and yet he did. He was some kind of a miracle, so ugly and beautiful, so there and not there; it gave them the out to stop caring, to stop thinking of him as something like them. There were things people could do to drag themselves down to the level where desire would eat itself; where engorged genitals could block out the sun, where bodies tasted of earth and death and cum all at once, where the profane was made holy again, and this was where Dean lived. Sam wished sometimes, far and above all his other deadened wishes, that he could think of Dean that way too - forget all he ever was and let the illusion drag him down. Dean, most of all, wouldn't let him.
At night, in the car where they hid sometimes with nothing but a blanket and Sam's formula bottle, Dean had put baby Sammy's fingers to his lips, kissed them until they tickled. When Sammy had cried, Dean had used his thumb as a pacifier. He still had the scars from Sammy teething in the night, when John couldn't, didn't want to hear.
Now, at night, in the car where they hid sometimes with nothing but a blanket and Dean's emptying bottle of tequila, Dean put Sam's fingers to his lips, his teeth, his tongue, took them inside and let him feel, silently, the way Sam knew him.
Sam wondered if John knew about them. He hoped so; he hoped it made his heart sour as an apple.
*
The Everglades 1991
They drove southeast along the highway 10, through Mobile and Tallahassee, deeper into the muck, until it formed on their skin, the sweat and the dirt and the no-see-ums growing thicker in the air. When Dean and Sam let their hair grow long, they got mistaken for girls and didn't correct anyone.
Sammy's hair grew out faster, curling down over his shoulders in shaggy feathering, like a misplaced Charlie's Angel. He wore plastic heart-shaped sunglasses, pink t-shirt his nipples shone through, jean skirt and alligator boots Dean found for him in Tamiami. He picked up a habit of lolling out his tongue at Dean, hanging out candy-stained red, obscene, like a dog's or a man's, when Sammy was still somewhere in between.
Dean wore a white undershirt, jeans just past his waist, mussed hair just past his chin and cherry lip gloss he carried in a stick in his pocket. His cheeks looked like they've been molded in plastic, not sharp like Sammy's elfin eight-year-old features, but no more real, freckled up high and unaccountable by strangers, allowing him to pass in the daylight, a shocking thing and unmemorable, like the sun.
"What're you?" They would hear drawled out long and slow at the store counters. "A boy? 'R a girl?"
When they walked along the side of the road, drunk teenagers would stretch their arms outside of car windows to burn them with cigarettes as they passed by speeding, laughing.
They were accountable and touchable only to each other, though Dean would know miles of skin, though Sam would travel the whole world, and they would never return here, to this place where Dean learned his shimmy from the snakes, where Sammy learned her high walk from the herons. Where John let them go to a place he almost couldn't get them back from, his jaws opening like a maw to snap the tendons between them. "Creeper John" they called him behind his back already.
At the beach, Sammy wore the suit Dean bought him - little red shorts to match his sunglasses. He body stretched out skinny on all sides of it, dark and lean. The dark round pointed discs of his nipples, the jut of his chin and nose, the barely-there fullness in his shorts, were all things Dean loved to stare at and pinch; tease him just to make him blush.
Sammy made up lyrics to the tunes of songs he knew and hissed them in Dean's ears at the candy counters to make him giggle. He took the monsters from Dean's comic books and painted the faces of John onto their reptilian bodies and monstrous apes with his stories. Dean laughed and laughed with him, but Sammy waited for his brother's stories to come, to do more than just laugh.
Later, Sam would understand how Dean couldn't make fun of the faces that floated above him every night, couldn't pull a story from his breath and beat it out of himself, out of his gut like a drum. He would have heard the sound himself at night by then, known it was there, waiting for him in the future. How the men would be coming from thousands of miles away to hear it, beating with that pulse in their blood. When Dean would let them in, that beat would thrum in him, and Sam would hear it - a deep and constant thrumming like no regular beat, no regular sound he'd ever heard - how it would shake away even the screaming inside of him and even the thoughts that Dean would have in their absence and even the thoughts Dean may have had when they came but no amount of them coming could silence it, no coming they've heard yet. Only the breath of Dean's lungs, in and out, sweat-covered cage expanding each time. Only the breath of Sam, the quiet whisper he heard like a howl. But it was the breeze at night, and all that could comfort his voice and his sweat was that howl.
*
Big Bend 1995
Sam knew these places of absolute darkness existed, the kind where the only thing leading to his next breath was a single electric light, or the short life of a match. The dust-colored plateaus of Texas led to the dust-colored hills of Texas led to the dust-colored valleys, but here in the nighttime, next to their campsite, it was all shades of black. He preferred the stars spotting around up there, above the matte line where the treetops began, far higher than he had ever been. But Dean lived down here where his face floated for three seconds in the darkness, lit by fire and then gone again. He existed for as long as a cigarette.
Sometimes he thought these places of darkness were everywhere they went, a part of himself or John or Dean or all three of them, like his own dark little heart. Sammy's dark little heart - coal covered in soot covered in tar, pumping with oil - pumping for Dean all he did and did not want. He went towards where the light had flashed and knew Dean would still be waiting there, would give him the six minutes it took to bring the cigarette down to the filter, then no more.
"Hey, Sammy," Dean spoke over his shoulder. His voice was thin and cut down by moans when Sam heard him at night. All Sam could see was his moonlit face, mostly in shadow. He always got what was left.
"Dean? When are we getting out of here?" He barely heard his own voice. All it was unsure and halfway to pleading. "You said soon, right? Last time I asked."
Dean huffed out smoke and breath, mingling together. "I know but you just asked me, what was it, a week ago?"
It had been two months. "Yeah. But..." He shuffled dust at his feet. All the land here was dust, surrounded by rocks, covered in rocks, dappled with spines and fangs. "I just wanna know. You always say the same thing, but... I wanna know."
"Soon, Sammy."
"Tell me, Dean. I wanna know."
"Sammy..." Dean huffed.
"I wanna know! And you never say. You just say 'soon' and then forget. Then you say 'soon' again and I never know. I just need to hear something else. Tell me something else." He heard himself beg, but it wasn't, it wasn't, it was just desperation.
Dean sucked smoke in harder, wanting this to be over, but turned to face him anyway. "I'm doing this the best way I know how."
"We need a plan. Just - tell me, do you have a plan? 'Cause I could do something. I'm younger than you, but I could help. He lets me leave. He lets me do stuff."
Dean whipped his head around like a horse, all those horses out here, shaking their manes and flicking their ears like that. They were wild, like them. They had no masters.
Sam never, ever wanted to ask. "Don't you wanna go?"
Dean turned back to walk away, flicked the last bit of tobacco and burned his fingers - "Fuck!" - stumbled over brush, but never stopped.
"Dean! Dean!" Sam would never know what he was swearing at. He always figured it was him. But he was the last one Dean should be angry at, the one who never used him, and the only one he loved. He guessed sometimes that Dean had the choice to love everything there was to hate around him, or to love Sam back. It would have been an easy choice to make; Dean's whole life had given him that one simple choice. Yet he never made it. He took what else was offered, took John's constant presence, took the men on the flat roll-out beds - took their sweat and mouths and seed, took their hands to mark his skin, took their insults just as well - and their alcohol and promises, took his possessions from gas stations, all that was cheap and free.
Taking Sam meant being something else entirely. He didn't know what Dean would be when it was just Dean. Would the panic set in after a matter of days? Would the whole world scare him and make him alone in it, some place Sam could never reach? Would things get all turned around, Sam's fault for leading him away, and the heart that Dean could have had come crashing down on them in a fury, some time bomb in his chest, breaking for all it could not hold? Dean was a mystery. But then Sam knew he was too. They were hollow things made of oil and skin and smoke, not real yet, not fully made. All the parts they were missing we scattered in the deserts and the night sky, tattered things for coyotes and wolves to find. If they took all of Dean away, would Sam even find him again? Would he see it and notice, Dean breathing smoke in and out, eyes dry and dull?
Dean might be grateful for Sam being gone. He could smoke in peace, have nothing more to think about, let them take the rest of himself away. Dean lived for Sammy, making it so much harder. Because Dean's life was a hole he was digging in the desert that something had to end up inside. Every breath he took, at least it's me, and every choice he did not make, me, not Sammy. If Sam had given him any choices, he had only give him two - Dean or Sammy. Everything else there never was, never would be - just a binary life, alively robotic. Dean Sammy. Sammy Dean.
He wanted a tunnel out of the absolute darkness. Sam needed a way up. The way back was slowly through the brush, cracking branches following his footsteps home. He would break them all and keep on going, finding himself in the morning at Dean's, asleep.
*
Niagara Falls, late 1980s
The first time he gave him a ring, Sammy was just a baby.
"You want it?" Dean held it out in front of him between his thumb and fingers, sugar-candy pink shining in the sun.
Sammy took the ring between his lips and tried to bite.
"Ew, you slobber!" Dean wiped his hand on his jeans and then pushed the ring at Sammy's chest. "It's plastic - you can't eat it. Here, put it on your finger," but there was space showing on all sides. "Never mind - use your thumb." He placed it there himself, used to doing everything for his baby brother. The yellow plastic just fit, but the pink plastic heart with "Niagara Falls" written on it jutted off the side of his hand. He wore it until the words disappeared, worn down by chlorine of hotel pools that summer.
The second time, Sammy was older, so Dean tried again.
He had irony on his side. "Sammy, will you marry me?" He even got down on one knee, held those awkwardly long teenage hands in his own and put the ring on himself. This time, the shiny pink plastic clashed with Sammy's painted fingernails, but it fit. Sammy's skin was tanned and beautiful, more olive than it had ever been, even though they were in New York and it was cold, even though the hair at Sam's brow and his green-flecked eyes seemed to burn with a kind of heat Dean never remembered having when he was his age. But he remembered very little of how time passed, their years together one clump of shared memory where nothing ever seemed separate and alone.
"Yes, Dean," Sammy put his hands on his shoulders and leaned down, nose to nose. "I will."
Dean felt his own eyes cross, watched his brother's, felt his long brown hair fall against his chest, and didn't quite know what was going on, but knew something about it was trouble.
Then Sam had the ring and was running through the tourists again, waiting for Dean to catch up.
They had nothing else to do after seeing the falls, except to see them again.
"Who cares about some falling water? We've all seen rain, right?" Dean would joke. Then they spent the rest of that week inside watching TV while John wandered the streets looking for something neither of them knew what. TV was full of normal people doing normal things, not fathers and their sons lost on the road.
*
Bible Belt 1993
By the time they got to Nashville, John had been saved.
It started long before, in between the Pledge of Allegiance before the blackboard and the heft of his rifle in Echo company, in the red flare glow over the canopy, the bullets over his head and the promises he made to Mary to return home. It called to him across the world and back again, said there would always be something more waiting for him. He never believed in God until he learned of the demons; he never saw the demons until his sons were born; then, he saw them all around, creeping in the shadows and the faces of the ordinary people who called themselves his neighbors; saw them even in Mary, pulling them behind her like a ghost rattling the chains of their precious, precarious fortune. She promised him, she promised.
The farms stood still by the roadside near Waco. As he drove, he listened to country stations and Christian radio; sometimes both, it was hard to tell the difference anymore. He expected things to sound different than they did. This was close to Kansas, close to home. The farms spoke of nothing, but the landowners shared their philosophies in makeshift billboards, paint fading but not cheap:
"Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell." (Proverbs 23:13-14)
John stopped the car after midnight near Refinery Road, just off the Interstate. All day they'd been in Texas, and they weren't going to get out tomorrow, driving east. The street looked gray in the headlights; orange lights dotted the night from far away; the rest was black. Spotlights meant refineries, bright enough lights to catch the fan of smog in the air and show the silvery metal almost white. Sam would think they looked like sentient robots, planning in the night to take over in our sleep. John would have to laugh at such paranoia; monsters never revealed themselves so clearly, not even in Texas. Even at night the sky looked blue against the silver. There had to be at least five stations, modern tan rectangle buildings, water from the dam, wide flat silos, tall thin stacks, metal infrastructure supporting hovering white lights.
This was not monstrous - instead, progress. This is what it came to. He knew the meaning; he worked his life for it; he was just never meant to find a way in. He knew that now; the culmination of Mary's death, no work, no lies, no way in. It reminded him of when he heard about the moon landing; he had been knee-deep in paddies that felt like mud puddles in Kansas, only on some alien world, so far away he could never explain, barely on the edge of 19, and some other guy was in a space suit on the bone-dry lunar plains; he thought of the conversation they could try to have, to try to suck meaning out of their shoes like so much mud and dust. He started to laugh, the kind of belly laugh he would be known for later, born that day, and it wouldn't let go of him for long stretches of time, until his buddies would threaten to pull out their guns, long-since driven mad by the inexplicable sound of it, by the juxtaposition.
Juxtaposition, John thought. That's it - juxtaposition. The meaning of things lay in between them. He'd have to dig.
Dallas looked no different. It was an orange-green dome on the horizon, criss-crossed by overpasses like dead tentacles; it was as if the refineries had grown and supported whole suburban blocks, then spread out some more, dotted with shacks and taco huts and electric wires. There were no people out for scale, no sense of size of things; wood looked like metal looked like rust looked like light; a telephone pole was a dead tree, smog was a fire; yes, that's it.
Past the city, he saw devils in the orange glow of the tumbleweeds. "Come stand with me boys. Look at it - all of it. D'you see?" It was all fire, so many shades of fire. The tops of the thin gap pipes flared like torches, the refinery spotlights shone, the streetlamps buzzed, and the whole of the city was covered in a halo of smog, beige-blue and green like dirty cotton.
Dean rubbed his eyes and squinted, hugged his arms and tried not to shake. "Yeah, Dad. I see it. 's Dallas, right? Said on the map. What're we doin' up? We gonna stop for awhile?" His speech was slurred, eyes tired, jaw sore from sleep and yawning.
"We're just stopping for a minute," John touched Dean's shoulder and looked behind him. "Just wanted you to see it."
Sam stood there half-awake in the street lights, undershirt flimsy, frayed, and filled with holes. His hair hung to his shoulders and his nose stuck out sharply from the black shadows of his face. He didn't look or dress like a girl anymore; not since he was nine. John felt his eyes, felt the deliberate sag of his arms and the sure square of his shoulders, all blank with anger, directed towards him like patience's gun. Sam was ten; Dean was fourteen. It was all gonna happen so fast now.
Their money went missing outside of Texarkana.
They'd been sleeping in the car, John in front, his boys in the back, belongings stuffed between the seats and blankets covering all. He woke up from dreams he couldn't remember and checked his pockets. He'd had a thick wad of twenties in his pocket, another in his boot. Twenty-four twenties from hustling pool. Twelve in each. What he'd left in his pocket, what he swore he'd left, wasn't there. He opened all the car doors so Sam and Dean fell out with aluminum cans and candy bar wrappers, strung all the clothes out in the dirt, shook the blankets out, the one remaining floor mat, the tools and the bottles clanging against each other as they flew out of the trunk.
The dirt from under the scrub was blown all over the road they parked beside. It was quiet enough to hear the water from the brook, just beyond the trees. It was calming and constant, like Sam's blood was straining to be, as he listened to his father's breathing, like he could feel it hot on his face already. "Look! Look, dammit!" John's voice was loud and shaky, the worse after a night of drinking. Sam recognized it, but he didn't think about what it could mean. It just was, to him.
When John grabbed his arm, he wasn't even paying attention, just staring at the mess on the ground, at what was and wasn't his - an old pair of Converse sneakers that used to belong to Dean and that he'd grown out of two months ago, refilled plastic bottles now empty, torn bags of Doritos, guns'n'ammo magazines, dirty tube socks - the stuff of his life, and he didn't even understand half of it. John grabbed his arm and pulled. "Tell me what happened!"
Tell him what? What happened to the money? What happened last night? What was happening now? Sam didn't have an answer for any of it. "Dean," he called. "Dean..."
Dean got up off his knees, came running, and moved his fists to John's chest, not pressing or beating, just holding there with his will, "Not Sam." He said, "Not Sam," and looked at John until John heard him. "Not Sam, not Sam, not Sam."
Why, not Sam? Sam thought, his arm still in John's fist, fingers wrapped all around and then some. Not Sam, what? John let go of his arm, pushed past Dean, pushed down in the dirt, and walked out to the edge of the water. Fists at his sides, he just stared out as they silently counted the rise and fall of his chest, his breaths slowing down.
Afterwards, they piled what they wanted to keep back in the car and John just started driving. Dean stayed in the back and kept Sam's head in his lap and covered the whole back seat in a blanket, letting his brother sleep past the dawn. Silence had a way of multiplying his fears into possibilities that felt as if they were happening even if they weren't. This one, John wouldn't stop until they were out of gas, ditch the car and keep on walking. This one, John would accuse them of stealing and raise his hand against the truth. This one, he would steal a bottle and draw this out until the next day. This one, Dean would have to steal candy bars instead. This one, John would smile out of the corner of his mouth and forget.
Finally, it was a shared hot dog with every free topping bought with change and split into threes. "I'm doing the best I can. It's the best I know how. So you take it, and eat it."
Dean gave his to Sammy, who was too sleepy to notice.
*
Graceland 1993
Across the border of Tennessee, at the edge of Memphis, the bridge was a half-moon on the water. This bridge was spokes of steel over their first glimpse of the Mississippi in two pairs of sneakers ago, twelve states.
"Don't you want something, Dean? What do you wanna be, when we're all grown up?"
Dean shrugged. "I'm gonna be just like Dad. I mean, I already am, right?"
Sam didn't say anything.
Dean punched his shoulder. "Hey, what do you want to be then? What's wrong with what you've got? You've got us, right?"
"Yeah. I guess I do. It's just... Don't you ever want to choose something? Do decide, instead of just what you've got?"
"I dunno. You've only got what you got, right? Can't make it any different. So? Sometimes I want to eat until I get full and sometimes I want to sleep without you pokin' into me all the time and sometimes I want to know what everyone else is thinking of, but I'm not gonna know it. So."
"What's wrong with wanting stuff?"
"Makes you unhappy, that's what. You're a sourpuss, Sam. Always have been. Suck it up sometimes. You wanna be a man, right? Like Dad?"
"Not really."
"Yeah. Well. Wait until you're older." Dean lived for the promise of older.
Instead, John took them to Graceland later, or let them wander around the front gates while he sneaked on the tour, flirted with a tour guide who looked like a stewardess in a polyester pink uniform. Dean hoped he'd stay away for a few hours. Long enough to charm an old couple into buying them ice cream cones, to charm a guy in front of the hotel to bum him a cigarette. He didn't care about some stupid house, another one he couldn't live in. Like a tourist trap was any good use for a house that people could actually be living in.
He waited with Sam at the front gates, curved and painted with musical notes like a song he couldn't read. "What's 'Graceland'?" Sam asked, his chin still sticky. Dean wiped it with the edge of his shirt. "Beats me," he said. "Grace is a girl's name."
Their gas ran out in Nashville, but John knew strangers in Nashville, and Tennessee was just that way about wild-eyed strangers and their bleary-eyed sons in the middle of the afternoon. He found a girl named Angela at a bar stool one night and didn't come back to the hotel for days. Dean kept the TV on loud all the time and played blackjack with Sam for M&Ms on the pink and orange paisley bedspread. They watched Danny Devito movies and fell asleep to laugh tracks. Dean told Sam to take baths, brush his teeth, and take naps just to pass the time better.
"If Dad's gone, what's gonna happen to us?" Sam would ask in the darkness at bedtime, the TV flashing on his face.
"Dad's not gone, Sammy. We're long gone now, and no one's gonna come to find him."
Sam sighed. "Yeah, I guess so. It's just that - if Dad never came back, would we still get to stay together?"
"I'm never leaving you. Never."
"I know. But, what if?"
"I don't know. I just know they're not going to take you, so you don't have to worry about it. Get some sleep."
"I'm not tired. What're you gonna do, Dean? You can barely drive."
"I'll drive if I have to. I'll get food, I'll steal, I'll kill someone if I gotta. I can be meaner than Dad if I wanna be. Just let them try to take you away. Let them try it."
Sam never found Dean's bravado comforting, but he thought maybe Dean was comforted by it, and believed it, though he knew better.
*
Appalachia 1993
John liked that Angela was a dye-job redhead who still wore cut-off shirts even though the trend was passing. She was up for anything after enough alcohol, and alcohol was easy to come by as long as the bars were open. On a Saturday night, he got drunk enough to be caught up in a heist at a liquor store out in the sticks when the neighboring county had gone dry. They never found any guns, but the manager'd said there were, so he'd had to run for it.
Angela gathered the boys while John waited in the car, and they headed out to her brother's place in West Virginia. "Cyril's real nice," she said in the darkness. "You boys'll like it there. But we gotta go."
"Yeah, real nice," Dean mumbled, but he shook Sam awake, grabbed his comic books and both their shoes, the rest of the M&Ms, and ran in behind her and out the open door.
The mountains were different here, Dean thought. There weren't even convenience stores, and the stores didn't have signs, or even paint. They were just people's houses where they traded any old stuff for more stuff - cans of gas for cans of beans, old shoes for wood planks, mason jars of clear liquid for just about anything. Junk was roosting in the grass like rocks. It made him want to keep Sam close, hold onto him at night and listen for sounds. The next time someone came and got him in the middle of the night he wasn't gonna go. He was sure of it. Sam had asked him to. Sam tried to convince him of these things when they walked alone through the woods, hoping not to see a single soul. "I know you could take care of me if you had to. We could do it, Dean."
"Yeah. Sure we could." Dean was always scraping the earth with a stick, stabbing at it like it was his own itch.
"So why don't we?" Sam had wanted to ask for days. For maybe longer than that. He knew what Dean would say, but he wanted to be the one to ask.
Dean huffed out a laugh. "What? Just us? On our own?"
"We could do it if we wanted. You take better care of me than Dad, anyway. He wouldn't care if I was gone."
"Shh, don't say that. It's not true. He would care a lot if we were gone. All he does, he does for us."
"You think so?"
"I know so. He tells me all the time."
"I've never heard him say that, not to me."
"Yeah, well, he says it to me." Dean held his favored status up as a way to end all arguments.
Sam always took it, though he never saw it the same way. "When? When does he say it, Dean?" Sam wanted him to say it then, wanted Dean to admit the things John does in the dark that he doesn't see. Because Sam doesn't know, he really doesn't, but he knows whatever it is, Dean won't say, though it is the only thing keeping him close by, when he would swear all Dean needed was Sam. "Dean? When does Dad say why he does any of the stuff he does?"
Dean shrugged. He had to know it too. John had been different lately. He talked of monsters chasing them up into the mountains. It wasn't just cops. It was creatures from ghost stories he'd heard as a child come alive, tall things with glowing eyes and claws that only came out in the dark. He began reading the Bible, listening to the old men drinking moonshine and preaching from rocking chairs, speaking Gospel about the days to come. Dark days, they said, and certain to be. "These things came after Mary," he'd say to them. "You don't remember, but I was there. I saw them, felt their breath on my neck. Black, evil things." Their dad stared with wide eyes and believed.
"Do you believe in monsters?" Sam asked, like he'd been asking every day since it began, relying on Dean's answer.
"I don't know. Maybe," he said. "Monsters might exist, but they're not going to come after you, Sammy. I promise."
Sam wondered how he knew, but he wanted to believe him, more than anything.
Later, when he is alone, Sam can only hear muffled sounds from the next room, like old mattress and mouths breathing, over the drip of the faucet. He sits in the cold porcelain tub of the bath until it gets cold and he starts to shiver. He wants to stay in there until he's asleep, until he knows John is passed out under the blankets with his shirt off, hairy chest rising and falling, his snore so loud he can hear it through the closed door, and Dean would almost let him stay. He can see it like it's happening, any time he wants to, like clues in a dream.
Then Dean really is there, looking as alien to Sam as he'd ever seen him, freckled skin all mottled with red, his hair already wet and matted down, naked and pale in every place that mattered. He'd been waiting for Dean to do just that, to open the door and climb in after, tip toe across the floor naked and climb in behind him, turn the water on and make it warm again, wash his hair for him and scrub himself all over until they're both pruned and tired. Until the water is colored and filled with fallen pieces of them, dirtier than he thought it could be, until Dean's nakedness is less startling and strange, and he feels like his brother again.
"Have you thought about it any more, Sam?" Dean asked to his back, squeezing out the washcloth and letting the water run down. "About running away?"
Sam was so tired, suddenly. Tired beyond belief. His answer was important to Dean, he could hear it in his voice, but his head was so full of stuff he couldn't figure. Sam nodded. "Yes. I think about it."
"I think." Dean made a decision. Sam could feel it, but he couldn't really know. "I think about it sometimes too. But then, I think I would want to come back, too. You know? We could get away, but then we'd end up back here. We'd try to change it, but nothing could ever be any different."
"Yeah," Sam said, his mouth going dry. "So what, then?"
"I don't think I could take that, you know? Running away is one thing. But it would have to be forever. And I don't think I could do that, no matter how much I wanted to. Forever's a long time. When it's family. And what if..."
"Yeah?" Sam closed his eyes, his brain making his tired with dreams and clues and promises.
"Well, I figure I can't promise you that. I don't wanna break a promise like that to you, Sammy. Not that one. If I'm gonna find a way out for you, it's gonna be for good. You understand?"
Sam nodded. It'd been going on for a while, he figured. A whole new world opened up with what he figured. It was a bad one. One where his heroes had lost all hope and monsters were waking up behind their eyes.
*
onto Part 2 * onto Part 3