SPN FIC - If the Fates Allow (Thanksgiving)
She's sitting in one of them, relaxed, smiling, like she's poolside on a day that's about fifty degrees warmer than this one. She's wearing scuffed white sneakers, white socks, dark denim jeans, a thick red wooly sweater with three silver-dollar sized buttons running down the middle. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose and the tops of her ears are rosy from the cold.
Characters: Sam, Jess (post 4.10)
Genre: Het
Rating: PG
Length: 2980 words
Spoilers: safe up through 4.10
IF THE FATES ALLOW (THANKSGIVING)
By Carol Davis
It's true, then: Hell is other people.
Dean's version of Hell, anyway, because it seems entirely possible to Sam that one size doesn't fit all.
Couldn't possibly.
Take Dad, for instance. Dad was down there for almost ten months, and by Dean's reckoning (in which four months equals forty years) that'd be somewhere around a century on the Hell-clock. A hundred years of being tormented, or tormenting others, and Dad walked out of there looking nothing more than…tired. Like he'd worked a double shift at some mundane job. Or had sat sentinel at somebody's bedside and that somebody was - finally - going to be okay.
Which makes Sam think of Dean's face, back in September.
And Dean's face now.
That's when Sam's train of thought goes off the tracks. Not surprising, given that he's had almost no sleep in the week since Dean confessed what happened in Hell. He's tried; they've only worked one little cakewalk of a job, and the rest of the week's been eaten up by driving around. Three states, and tomorrow they'll hit a fourth. Gas is cheap again, and Dean only seems functional when he's behind the wheel, so every day, they drive. Stop for the night at whichever motel is handy. Sam gets to pick, although his options are always limited to two or three. He picked this one last night.
Last night? No…a few hours ago. Wasn't it?
He stops walking, pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, rests his head against his hand for a moment.
Tired.
When he opens his eyes he's a dozen steps closer to the door of room 2D than he thought he was. Alongside the door - which is green, a sort of dull gray-green, although he could swear all the doors at this place were blue - there are two of those cheap white molded-plastic chairs you can get for less than ten bucks at Wal-Mart.
She's sitting in one of them, relaxed, smiling, like she's poolside on a day that's about fifty degrees warmer than this one. She's wearing scuffed white sneakers, white socks, dark denim jeans, a thick red wooly sweater with three silver-dollar sized buttons running down the middle. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose and the tops of her ears are rosy from the cold.
"Hey, Sam," she says, and smiles.
It's Ruby, he thinks. He's done something to piss her off, and she's decided to jack him around.
This is a spectacularly shitty way to do that.
With a clenching feeling crawling up the back of his neck that's going to turn into a low-grade but completely unkillable headache, he stops walking and shifts his grip on the big paper bag he's carried back from the diner a little ways down the road. His dinner, and Dean's. Turkey and gravy. Mashed potatoes and stuffing and corn. And pie. Big juicy slabs of pie. Because it's Thanksgiving, and he needs to make sure Dean eats something other than potato chips and beef jerky.
Sam needs a decent meal himself. And some sleep. He picked this motel because it looked like decent mattresses were a possibility. Families stay here. People who don't spend their lives killing things stay here.
People…
That's Ruby, sitting there in the white plastic chair.
Who else would it be?
"I don't blame you for anything," she says. "You know that, don't you?"
Again he closes his eyes and tries to will this away: the green door, the chair, the girl sitting in it. He's got powers he hasn't tapped into yet, he's pretty sure, and maybe that's one of them, the ability to erase things like he's scrubbing drawings off a chalkboard. Eyes still closed, he feels the big paper bag moving, being taken out of his grasp.
She's close by, near enough to make his nose prickle when he catches her scent. "Sam," she says.
He ought to kill Ruby for this. Fuck the fact that she saved his life.
Fuck her, because this isn't fair. It's a whole new level of ugly, in a week, a year, a lifetime that keep accommodating more shit, like those stretchy trash bags the TV commercials claim won't ever rip.
Her palm cups his cheek.
If he opens his mouth just a little and moves the tip of his tongue to find her hand, he knows what she'll taste like. He wants to move his nose into her palm and draw her deep into his lungs because it's been too long, too goddamn long, since the last time he held her, was with her. He left her that night thinking he'd come back, that he'd help Dean for a couple of days and then come back and pick up where he left off, but his life derailed that night and he's never gotten it back on course. "I'm not that guy any more," he told Dean a week ago, but that's not true. Somewhere down inside he is that guy, he is, and he will always be.
Tears begin to course down his cheeks and he lets them fall, does nothing to stop them from dribbling off his chin, does nothing to stop himself from crying the way Dean cried a week ago because all of this - their lives, both of them - have gone so utterly and irreparably wrong. He will kill Ruby for this, he thinks, because this… He's done nothing to her to merit this.
Her arms circle him, draw him close to her.
"Sam," she says, her voice soft and comforting.
It's Ruby.
But he doesn't really believe that. She can't pull off this level of magic. So maybe he's dreaming. Or maybe…
Hell is other people.
Maybe, Heaven is that too.
"Jess," he whispers into her hair.
"It's all right."
"No," he mumbles, just that, just that one murmured sound. He can't manage anything else. Can't even risk opening his eyes. It's been three years, three years and a month since he lost her, and he's been aware a thousand times that his memory of her is less reliable with every day that passes. That what he thinks is true about her - the way she sounded, smelled, tasted, the way she was - is no longer accurate, has been colored by time and imagination and fear and hope and is hopelessly flawed, broken and patched, okay for everyday use unless you look at it straight on.
He never was that guy, he thinks sometimes: the one who could have been her husband, the father of her children. The one who could have worn a suit and sat behind a desk, could have driven the same small stretch of road every day. That guy was a fiction: Samuel J. Winchester, Esq. The lawyer. The husband. The homeowner, the father.
Just fiction.
But isn't all of it fiction? he thinks. Isn't it true if we make it true?
"I don't blame you," she says against his cheek. "For not telling me. I understand why you did what you did."
"I never should have -"
"Would you give it away?"
He looks, then. Opens his eyes a little to find her peering at him curiously. Sympathetically, yes. But curious.
For a minute, he's not sure he can give her the real answer.
Or that he ought to.
"You'd give away what we had?" she asks.
"If it meant you'd still be alive."
The words stick in his throat like the oatmeal Dean perpetually overcooked when they were kids and finally gave up on, nutritional value be damned. Sam has to force the words out, each one followed by a gulp of air that's heavy with a brew of diesel exhaust and evergreen and thin winter sunshine and sharp cold and her, so very, very much of her.
"I love what we had, Sam."
He's aware of everything around him: the big brown paper bag sitting on the hood of the Impala. The car itself, streaked with mud and dust. The dry leaves of a summer gone by, blown against the curb of the walkway that connects the gray-green doors. The hum of traffic from the main road, faint music from a radio playing somewhere nearby, maybe the room where the maids store the clean linens and the vacuum cleaners. And he realizes after a minute that he has no idea where he is. What town, what state. He and Dean have rolled through three states this past week and he doesn't know which three.
"If I hadn't -" he begins.
She looks sad then, endlessly sad.
"Jess."
"It wasn't worth it?" she asks.
"Letting you die?"
"It wasn't your fault."
"It was. It was my fault. If I hadn't met you, if we hadn't -"
"So you wish you hadn't loved me."
Is that what this is? he wonders frantically. He holds her head between his hands and looks into the well of her eyes, searching for the humor that might be hidden there. Looking for a confirmation that this is a trick, a Tuesday, or something unspoken picked up by an old coin. That he's being mindfucked by Heaven or Hell - and they seem identical to him now, both of them populated by angry, self-centered…yes, dicks. Admitting that makes him want to laugh until his throat is raw, laugh in a way that would guarantee him a nice quiet room in that place Anna Milton broke out of.
But they aren't quiet, are they? Those places. The places occupied by people who won't give up trying to make it true.
He thinks of her, sometimes.
Now and then, here and there. When it's quiet.
He thinks of her smile, of the brush of her fingers against his cheek. Of her laugh. He thinks of the way he used to wonder what their children would look like.
He remembers an afternoon when he pulled his mind away from what the guy at the lectern was saying and began to scrawl in his notebook the words he might say to ask Jessica to marry him, shrinking a little in his seat when he realized the girl sitting to his left had noticed and was smiling, though not in a way that would tell him that what he was writing was romantic and great, or puke-inducingly hideous and wrong.
He remembers their home. The only real home he's ever had.
Remembers a year and a half.
With her.
"I'm sorry," he whispers, and he realizes he's still crying, that tears are sluicing down his cheeks. "I'm so sorry."
"Tell me," she says.
"I can't."
He blinks, once, and the door behind her is blue, not gray-green; it's marked 213, not 2D. 2D was their apartment number.
2D had a green door.
"Tell me," she says again.
Tell me. Tell me what's true.
This can't end well, he thinks. There's no way this can end well.
"Tell me," she insists. "About your brother. You wouldn't tell me then. But you need to tell me now."
"I -"
"Tell me."
Blue. Or green. 2D. Or 213.
He has no idea where he is.
But he does.
They lied to Dean, he understands, standing in the parking lot of a motel somewhere in the middle of nowhere looking at the closed door of a small, ugly room that's different from ten thousand others only by virtue of having his brother inside it, right here, right now. They lied to Dean, and maybe it was Heaven and maybe it was Hell or maybe it was both, because both of them are populated right up to the rafters by angry, violent, self-involved dicks.
He remembers Dean's face back in September, confused and tired and scared; remembers it at the end of October, giddy and gleeful, the way he was at fifteen or sixteen, when big pretzels and beer and girls made him happy.
Dean didn't remember Hell then, at the end of October. Didn't remember it in September, when Castiel raised him up. He remembers it now, though, or says he does, remembers it in a way that's threatening to break him one last time. There's nothing holding him together right now, at the end of November, but spit and glue and desperation.
Because he doesn't understand what's true.
Somebody lied to Dean, and they did it a week ago.
This much is true, Sam thinks: time does seem different in Hell. And in Heaven. And in dreams. It would not have taken thirty years to break his stubborn, foolhardy, infuriating, ridiculous, desperate brother.
It would not have taken thirty years to break the brother who loves like he lives.
It would not have taken thirty days.
And he would not need the memory of tormenting an uncountable number of souls - all of which, by virtue of their being in Hell in the first place, might well have been deserving of being flayed and dismembered - to shatter him the way he is shattered now. There would need to be only a handful.
Or one.
"I want to have loved you," Sam murmurs.
"I know," she says. "I know."
"I want to remember what we had. Always. I don't want to give that up." He stares at her, holds on to her that way as he slides his arms around her, buries his face in her hair so that his tears are lost there instead of falling to the ground. "I want you to have lived. I want you to have had your life. But I don't want to give you up."
"I know," she says.
"I want to remember you."
"Then remember."
"I don't want you to hate me. Jess. I don't want you to hate me."
She runs a hand against his back, up and down. Up and down. "I wouldn't be here if I hated you, Sam."
"Please."
"I don't hate you, Sam."
If this is a lie, a trick, it's spectacular. He can't find anything that says Wrong. That says No. That says Don't believe.
Not one thing.
But there's no way she could be here right now.
"I love you," he says, and the way his voice fractures hurts as much as knowing he will have to let her go.
"I know. Sam, I know."
She turns her head and presses her lips to his. Gently, and there is no way it's not a goodbye.
"Jess," he says, holding her arms in his hands. She's smiling that same sweet smile, the one that always made him think if he could bottle that, he could market it, and there would finally, after too damn many thousands of years of bickering and bragging and bullshit, be a little peace on earth, because you couldn't drink in something like that, something like the sweet peace of that smile, and be angry at anything, anything at all. He wanted their children to inherit that smile.
He wanted their children.
"Jess -" he begins.
And she touches a finger to his lips.
When he opens his eyes he's alone in the parking lot. The bag he brought back from the diner up the road is sitting on the hood of the Impala, a couple of yards from a blue door marked 213. The white plastic chairs are still there on the walkway, both of them empty now, one of them sitting crooked because one of its legs is broken.
"I love you," he says to the sharp cold silence around him, then reaches up to scrub his face with a hand that is dry and scraped and calloused. No one answers him, of course; there's no one around. He looks around for a minute, not sure whether he wants someone to appear or not, whether he wants to be reassured that he's not alone in this place he still can't identify.
Maybe alone is good, just for a minute.
He should want to know what just happened, he supposes. That's what they do: find explanations for the unexplainable. It's what Dad taught them to do, etched it into them so indelibly that it's their operating system, their own Windows Vista. Maybe, Sam thinks as he scuffs his hand back and forth over his face, it's so fucking old that it's DOS-based.
Older than online porn.
That makes him smile, makes him look at that blue door. It's a pathetic excuse for a smile, he supposes, especially given that his eyes are swollen from the crying and his nose is running. He snorts back some of the snot, wipes the rest with the back of his hand and wipes that on his jeans, then picks up the big paper bag and juggles it as he ferrets the room key, the key to 213 (not 2D), out of his pocket. He raps on the door, a quick tattoo that Dean will understand, then slides the key into the lock. He doesn't look back, doesn't glance over his shoulder; she won't be there. His body feels the phantom of her embrace, though, as he pushes the door open and finds Dean where he left him, curled on his side on the bed nearest the bathroom. Dean's not sleeping, and isn't doing much of a job pretending to be. He lies still and quiet as Sam deposits the bag on the table near the door.
Sam stands there for a minute, looking at his brother, then crosses to the bed, leans in a little and rests a hand on Dean's shoulder, the one that's scarred by that terrible handprint from Heaven, the visible remnant of being raised up, brought back to the front lines. It doesn't hurt, Dean says, though it looks painful.
Looks terribly, terribly painful.
"Come eat," Sam tells his brother, his tone low and soft. "Okay? Come and eat. I brought you some pie."
* * * * *
Characters: Sam, Jess (post 4.10)
Genre: Het
Rating: PG
Length: 2980 words
Spoilers: safe up through 4.10
IF THE FATES ALLOW (THANKSGIVING)
By Carol Davis
It's true, then: Hell is other people.
Dean's version of Hell, anyway, because it seems entirely possible to Sam that one size doesn't fit all.
Couldn't possibly.
Take Dad, for instance. Dad was down there for almost ten months, and by Dean's reckoning (in which four months equals forty years) that'd be somewhere around a century on the Hell-clock. A hundred years of being tormented, or tormenting others, and Dad walked out of there looking nothing more than…tired. Like he'd worked a double shift at some mundane job. Or had sat sentinel at somebody's bedside and that somebody was - finally - going to be okay.
Which makes Sam think of Dean's face, back in September.
And Dean's face now.
That's when Sam's train of thought goes off the tracks. Not surprising, given that he's had almost no sleep in the week since Dean confessed what happened in Hell. He's tried; they've only worked one little cakewalk of a job, and the rest of the week's been eaten up by driving around. Three states, and tomorrow they'll hit a fourth. Gas is cheap again, and Dean only seems functional when he's behind the wheel, so every day, they drive. Stop for the night at whichever motel is handy. Sam gets to pick, although his options are always limited to two or three. He picked this one last night.
Last night? No…a few hours ago. Wasn't it?
He stops walking, pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, rests his head against his hand for a moment.
Tired.
When he opens his eyes he's a dozen steps closer to the door of room 2D than he thought he was. Alongside the door - which is green, a sort of dull gray-green, although he could swear all the doors at this place were blue - there are two of those cheap white molded-plastic chairs you can get for less than ten bucks at Wal-Mart.
She's sitting in one of them, relaxed, smiling, like she's poolside on a day that's about fifty degrees warmer than this one. She's wearing scuffed white sneakers, white socks, dark denim jeans, a thick red wooly sweater with three silver-dollar sized buttons running down the middle. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose and the tops of her ears are rosy from the cold.
"Hey, Sam," she says, and smiles.
It's Ruby, he thinks. He's done something to piss her off, and she's decided to jack him around.
This is a spectacularly shitty way to do that.
With a clenching feeling crawling up the back of his neck that's going to turn into a low-grade but completely unkillable headache, he stops walking and shifts his grip on the big paper bag he's carried back from the diner a little ways down the road. His dinner, and Dean's. Turkey and gravy. Mashed potatoes and stuffing and corn. And pie. Big juicy slabs of pie. Because it's Thanksgiving, and he needs to make sure Dean eats something other than potato chips and beef jerky.
Sam needs a decent meal himself. And some sleep. He picked this motel because it looked like decent mattresses were a possibility. Families stay here. People who don't spend their lives killing things stay here.
People…
That's Ruby, sitting there in the white plastic chair.
Who else would it be?
"I don't blame you for anything," she says. "You know that, don't you?"
Again he closes his eyes and tries to will this away: the green door, the chair, the girl sitting in it. He's got powers he hasn't tapped into yet, he's pretty sure, and maybe that's one of them, the ability to erase things like he's scrubbing drawings off a chalkboard. Eyes still closed, he feels the big paper bag moving, being taken out of his grasp.
She's close by, near enough to make his nose prickle when he catches her scent. "Sam," she says.
He ought to kill Ruby for this. Fuck the fact that she saved his life.
Fuck her, because this isn't fair. It's a whole new level of ugly, in a week, a year, a lifetime that keep accommodating more shit, like those stretchy trash bags the TV commercials claim won't ever rip.
Her palm cups his cheek.
If he opens his mouth just a little and moves the tip of his tongue to find her hand, he knows what she'll taste like. He wants to move his nose into her palm and draw her deep into his lungs because it's been too long, too goddamn long, since the last time he held her, was with her. He left her that night thinking he'd come back, that he'd help Dean for a couple of days and then come back and pick up where he left off, but his life derailed that night and he's never gotten it back on course. "I'm not that guy any more," he told Dean a week ago, but that's not true. Somewhere down inside he is that guy, he is, and he will always be.
Tears begin to course down his cheeks and he lets them fall, does nothing to stop them from dribbling off his chin, does nothing to stop himself from crying the way Dean cried a week ago because all of this - their lives, both of them - have gone so utterly and irreparably wrong. He will kill Ruby for this, he thinks, because this… He's done nothing to her to merit this.
Her arms circle him, draw him close to her.
"Sam," she says, her voice soft and comforting.
It's Ruby.
But he doesn't really believe that. She can't pull off this level of magic. So maybe he's dreaming. Or maybe…
Hell is other people.
Maybe, Heaven is that too.
"Jess," he whispers into her hair.
"It's all right."
"No," he mumbles, just that, just that one murmured sound. He can't manage anything else. Can't even risk opening his eyes. It's been three years, three years and a month since he lost her, and he's been aware a thousand times that his memory of her is less reliable with every day that passes. That what he thinks is true about her - the way she sounded, smelled, tasted, the way she was - is no longer accurate, has been colored by time and imagination and fear and hope and is hopelessly flawed, broken and patched, okay for everyday use unless you look at it straight on.
He never was that guy, he thinks sometimes: the one who could have been her husband, the father of her children. The one who could have worn a suit and sat behind a desk, could have driven the same small stretch of road every day. That guy was a fiction: Samuel J. Winchester, Esq. The lawyer. The husband. The homeowner, the father.
Just fiction.
But isn't all of it fiction? he thinks. Isn't it true if we make it true?
"I don't blame you," she says against his cheek. "For not telling me. I understand why you did what you did."
"I never should have -"
"Would you give it away?"
He looks, then. Opens his eyes a little to find her peering at him curiously. Sympathetically, yes. But curious.
For a minute, he's not sure he can give her the real answer.
Or that he ought to.
"You'd give away what we had?" she asks.
"If it meant you'd still be alive."
The words stick in his throat like the oatmeal Dean perpetually overcooked when they were kids and finally gave up on, nutritional value be damned. Sam has to force the words out, each one followed by a gulp of air that's heavy with a brew of diesel exhaust and evergreen and thin winter sunshine and sharp cold and her, so very, very much of her.
"I love what we had, Sam."
He's aware of everything around him: the big brown paper bag sitting on the hood of the Impala. The car itself, streaked with mud and dust. The dry leaves of a summer gone by, blown against the curb of the walkway that connects the gray-green doors. The hum of traffic from the main road, faint music from a radio playing somewhere nearby, maybe the room where the maids store the clean linens and the vacuum cleaners. And he realizes after a minute that he has no idea where he is. What town, what state. He and Dean have rolled through three states this past week and he doesn't know which three.
"If I hadn't -" he begins.
She looks sad then, endlessly sad.
"Jess."
"It wasn't worth it?" she asks.
"Letting you die?"
"It wasn't your fault."
"It was. It was my fault. If I hadn't met you, if we hadn't -"
"So you wish you hadn't loved me."
Is that what this is? he wonders frantically. He holds her head between his hands and looks into the well of her eyes, searching for the humor that might be hidden there. Looking for a confirmation that this is a trick, a Tuesday, or something unspoken picked up by an old coin. That he's being mindfucked by Heaven or Hell - and they seem identical to him now, both of them populated by angry, self-centered…yes, dicks. Admitting that makes him want to laugh until his throat is raw, laugh in a way that would guarantee him a nice quiet room in that place Anna Milton broke out of.
But they aren't quiet, are they? Those places. The places occupied by people who won't give up trying to make it true.
He thinks of her, sometimes.
Now and then, here and there. When it's quiet.
He thinks of her smile, of the brush of her fingers against his cheek. Of her laugh. He thinks of the way he used to wonder what their children would look like.
He remembers an afternoon when he pulled his mind away from what the guy at the lectern was saying and began to scrawl in his notebook the words he might say to ask Jessica to marry him, shrinking a little in his seat when he realized the girl sitting to his left had noticed and was smiling, though not in a way that would tell him that what he was writing was romantic and great, or puke-inducingly hideous and wrong.
He remembers their home. The only real home he's ever had.
Remembers a year and a half.
With her.
"I'm sorry," he whispers, and he realizes he's still crying, that tears are sluicing down his cheeks. "I'm so sorry."
"Tell me," she says.
"I can't."
He blinks, once, and the door behind her is blue, not gray-green; it's marked 213, not 2D. 2D was their apartment number.
2D had a green door.
"Tell me," she says again.
Tell me. Tell me what's true.
This can't end well, he thinks. There's no way this can end well.
"Tell me," she insists. "About your brother. You wouldn't tell me then. But you need to tell me now."
"I -"
"Tell me."
Blue. Or green. 2D. Or 213.
He has no idea where he is.
But he does.
They lied to Dean, he understands, standing in the parking lot of a motel somewhere in the middle of nowhere looking at the closed door of a small, ugly room that's different from ten thousand others only by virtue of having his brother inside it, right here, right now. They lied to Dean, and maybe it was Heaven and maybe it was Hell or maybe it was both, because both of them are populated right up to the rafters by angry, violent, self-involved dicks.
He remembers Dean's face back in September, confused and tired and scared; remembers it at the end of October, giddy and gleeful, the way he was at fifteen or sixteen, when big pretzels and beer and girls made him happy.
Dean didn't remember Hell then, at the end of October. Didn't remember it in September, when Castiel raised him up. He remembers it now, though, or says he does, remembers it in a way that's threatening to break him one last time. There's nothing holding him together right now, at the end of November, but spit and glue and desperation.
Because he doesn't understand what's true.
Somebody lied to Dean, and they did it a week ago.
This much is true, Sam thinks: time does seem different in Hell. And in Heaven. And in dreams. It would not have taken thirty years to break his stubborn, foolhardy, infuriating, ridiculous, desperate brother.
It would not have taken thirty years to break the brother who loves like he lives.
It would not have taken thirty days.
And he would not need the memory of tormenting an uncountable number of souls - all of which, by virtue of their being in Hell in the first place, might well have been deserving of being flayed and dismembered - to shatter him the way he is shattered now. There would need to be only a handful.
Or one.
"I want to have loved you," Sam murmurs.
"I know," she says. "I know."
"I want to remember what we had. Always. I don't want to give that up." He stares at her, holds on to her that way as he slides his arms around her, buries his face in her hair so that his tears are lost there instead of falling to the ground. "I want you to have lived. I want you to have had your life. But I don't want to give you up."
"I know," she says.
"I want to remember you."
"Then remember."
"I don't want you to hate me. Jess. I don't want you to hate me."
She runs a hand against his back, up and down. Up and down. "I wouldn't be here if I hated you, Sam."
"Please."
"I don't hate you, Sam."
If this is a lie, a trick, it's spectacular. He can't find anything that says Wrong. That says No. That says Don't believe.
Not one thing.
But there's no way she could be here right now.
"I love you," he says, and the way his voice fractures hurts as much as knowing he will have to let her go.
"I know. Sam, I know."
She turns her head and presses her lips to his. Gently, and there is no way it's not a goodbye.
"Jess," he says, holding her arms in his hands. She's smiling that same sweet smile, the one that always made him think if he could bottle that, he could market it, and there would finally, after too damn many thousands of years of bickering and bragging and bullshit, be a little peace on earth, because you couldn't drink in something like that, something like the sweet peace of that smile, and be angry at anything, anything at all. He wanted their children to inherit that smile.
He wanted their children.
"Jess -" he begins.
And she touches a finger to his lips.
When he opens his eyes he's alone in the parking lot. The bag he brought back from the diner up the road is sitting on the hood of the Impala, a couple of yards from a blue door marked 213. The white plastic chairs are still there on the walkway, both of them empty now, one of them sitting crooked because one of its legs is broken.
"I love you," he says to the sharp cold silence around him, then reaches up to scrub his face with a hand that is dry and scraped and calloused. No one answers him, of course; there's no one around. He looks around for a minute, not sure whether he wants someone to appear or not, whether he wants to be reassured that he's not alone in this place he still can't identify.
Maybe alone is good, just for a minute.
He should want to know what just happened, he supposes. That's what they do: find explanations for the unexplainable. It's what Dad taught them to do, etched it into them so indelibly that it's their operating system, their own Windows Vista. Maybe, Sam thinks as he scuffs his hand back and forth over his face, it's so fucking old that it's DOS-based.
Older than online porn.
That makes him smile, makes him look at that blue door. It's a pathetic excuse for a smile, he supposes, especially given that his eyes are swollen from the crying and his nose is running. He snorts back some of the snot, wipes the rest with the back of his hand and wipes that on his jeans, then picks up the big paper bag and juggles it as he ferrets the room key, the key to 213 (not 2D), out of his pocket. He raps on the door, a quick tattoo that Dean will understand, then slides the key into the lock. He doesn't look back, doesn't glance over his shoulder; she won't be there. His body feels the phantom of her embrace, though, as he pushes the door open and finds Dean where he left him, curled on his side on the bed nearest the bathroom. Dean's not sleeping, and isn't doing much of a job pretending to be. He lies still and quiet as Sam deposits the bag on the table near the door.
Sam stands there for a minute, looking at his brother, then crosses to the bed, leans in a little and rests a hand on Dean's shoulder, the one that's scarred by that terrible handprint from Heaven, the visible remnant of being raised up, brought back to the front lines. It doesn't hurt, Dean says, though it looks painful.
Looks terribly, terribly painful.
"Come eat," Sam tells his brother, his tone low and soft. "Okay? Come and eat. I brought you some pie."
* * * * *