Fic drafts for Run and Hide
So in process of writing Run and Hide I wrote and trashed pages and pages of material, including about 50% of the original draft.
For anyone interested in the crazy writing process that was this fic (or why I kept bitching about issues of caricaturization),
There is a dream that is dreaming us.
Pre-draft work
In the end, he goes along.
He probably shouldn’t. Should probably go alone, leave Dog in his corner where he belongs, away from the civilians. God knows Dog is more trouble than he’s worth, most of the time, snarling and snapping at people, totally unsocialized. A nasty piece of work and hours and days on the road with his specialized sense of humor is going to leave both of them with itchy trigger fingers and a whole lot of nobody else to take it out on.
But he’s also the best man for the job, and they both know it. He just needs someone to go with him. Keep him off the civilians, keep him under the radar. Or he’s going to leave a scarlet smear across the lower forty-eight that people would be able to see from space and that’s just not going to fly.
So he has a responsibility.
Dog laughs at him for it, tells him to give it up, says the job is his, his and no one else’s and okay, that’s true. He doesn’t know the job. He doesn’t need to.
“I’m just here for you,” he tells him.
He’s a handler. That’s all.
Dog laughs at him some more, but hell, what else is new?
Dog laughs at everybody.
___________________________
Ver 2:
In the end, he went along with Dog.
It was probably a bad idea. Pretty much anyone else would have told him it was a bad idea, if he had bothered to ask. Which he didn’t, because it would have been redundant. Already knew what a nightmare being trapped alone in a car with Dog and his specialized sense of humor, for any length of time, could be. He’d lived it, after all, more times than he cared to count. He could’ve written a goddamned book about it if he’d wanted. Nobody would buy it, but the point, the point was that the option was there. He could do it.
But someone had to go, had to play the grownup, had to keep Dog flying under the radar, keep the unsocialized asshole from drawing attention in his charming and attractive way, keep him from snarling at the civilians and snapping at the other hunters. Left to his own devices he’d paint a bloody smear across the lower forty-eight that people’d be able to see from fucking space and that sure as hell didn’t count as flying under the radar.
So he shoved into the driver’s seat and grinned a predatory grin he didn’t particularly feel when Dog growled at him. He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel, and fished a tape out of the box on the seat.
“Driver picks the music,” he announced in his smarmiest tones, waving the plastic unconcernedly in the face of the other man’s glare. “So you can just suck on it, scrappy.”
And that was the last thing either of them said for the next hundred fifty miles. After that, well…
None of it was going in the book, that was for damn sure. Probably jump-start some kind of old-fashioned book-burning, just ‘cause of the language.
Jesus.
--
The Thing in Bellefontaine. That was going to be the official name, and they were goddamned well never going to discuss it again. Dog thought it was fucking hilarious, of course, and went on smirking about it for hours after the fact, and muttering little comments like he thought he couldn’t be heard, when of course they both knew he could hear him just fine.
…he said ‘let her go. let her go i won’t tell you again’…
“We’re not talking about this,” he snapped at Dog, who shrugged and cuffed a hand through his hair, like he didn’t have a care in the world. Because he didn’t, of course. He still had blood under his fingernails. And he wouldn’t bother to clean it out before they hit a halfway civilized place, like say a motel, or even a gas station, so he’d be walking around probably for days with brown caked up under his nails.
He’d have to take care of it. God knew he took care of every other fucking thing that didn’t involve slicing, chopping or otherwise dealing out violence.
Sometimes he was pretty sure he got the short end of the stick.
“Next place we stop,” he told the other man, “We’re washing your fucking hands.”
“Hazards of the job,” Dog rumbled , flexing his fingers.
--
(CUT STUFF)
--
He picked up the trail in Bellefontaine, which the locals for some incomprehensible reason insisted on pronouncing “Bell-fountain.” Whatever. Sam was genuinely pretty proud of himself, felt he was doing really well. Relatively. He had a few descriptions, now, things that matched in the right places. The color of the eyes, the shape of the face. General size and build. Mannerisms didn’t match, but that didn’t mean anything, he’d been prepared for that. Expected it. It went with the particular line of work.
Dean’s hair was short again, had been cut since the picture he’d folded into his jacket pocket was taken. Sam knew that much. What that meant he wasn’t sure, but it was later in the season and that meant flannels and leathers. When Sam sat in his motel room and closed his eyes he could picture his brother clearly, as if he stood only a little distance away, smiling that little smile he only ever gave Sam, bathed in the light gushing in through the open motel window. That was how he wanted to find his brother: bright and clean and safe and whole, the way he’d been when Sam left. The pillar of his world. His unshakeable foundation.
He followed his brother’s trail through the Ohio town, his own research and instincts letting him track the older man, even when things started falling in his path that didn’t add up. Why some people seemed downright shy to talk about Dean. One man stood fidgeting on his porch, never raising his eyes to Sam’s. A woman hid behind a screen door and spoke to him in a low voice, long hair hanging to her shoulders. She shied away from looking at him directly. She rubbed distractedly at her wrists. She said, “No, no, you must be mistaken. I don’t know…I’ve never seen him before.
“No. I’ve never seen him.”
Sam knew she was lying. But he didn’t push it.
He already knew his brother had moved on.
--
He said, “Let her go. Don’t make me tell you again.”
Dog snarled at him, actually Goddamned snarled, like he had any say in the matter. Like he was the one in charge.
“This is not a game. You hear me?” And he resisted the urge to grab the other man by the hair and shake him, even though sometimes that was the only thing that got through. “It’s not a game and the people you hurt remember that you hurt them, and we’re going to be on the radar. We’re gonna get caught, you’ll get caught you asshole. You stop or I will stop you.”
This was not the time for some macho bullshit, right in the middle of a hunt with a key witness tied to a chair and her hair all in her face and her eyes wide and terrified, but there wasn’t going to be a question. There wasn’t going to be a single question of who was really running this show.
Not one.
“Get in the corner,” he snapped, shoving forward, shoving Dog out of the way, to stand pinched between the walls, the rough wood and dust. “It’s my turn. We’re ending this right the fuck now.”
The woman whimpered when he approached, and he shot a cold hard glance at Dog, who made a great show of picking disinterestedly at the blood under his nails.
“Hey,” he said, in his best soothing tones. “Hey. You’re gonna-it’s gonna be okay, okay? I’m gonna help you. He can’t hurt you. He won’t. Not anymore.”
She stared at him with wide eyes and he reached out, moved by a sudden tender impulse to brush her hair out of her face, and stopped halfway when he realized he still had Dog’s knife in his hand.
Shit.
This whole thing was one giant clusterfuck.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he said to her again, hurriedly wiping the blade and shoving it in the sheath in his boot. “You’ll be fine. I’ll take care of it. Take care of everything. I promise.”
He gave her a little smile, full of hesitant kindness, and added, “It’s kinda my job.”
--
He said, “Okay, you know what? This isn’t going to happen this way. Not again.”
Dog looked up from the blade he was working to a wicked edge and furrowed his brow.
“Though you said we weren’t talking ‘bout this.”
“I changed my mind. I changed my motherfucking mind because you’re not pulling this shit, not again.” Stopping this before it started had officially become his entire reason for being. He’d yank them off this hunt completely if he had to.
Dog dangled his hands between his knees and cocked his head a little. He ran a thumb almost idly up and down the long blade and tapped it lightly.
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“You hurt that girl. You hurt her a lot.”
Dog shrugged. “You could’ve stopped me.”
“I’m stopping you now. This isn’t going any further. You touch someone else and you’ll be sorry.”
The other man grinned, the long slow one that showed off his teeth. The one that was designed to exaggerate his canines.
“You can’t touch me. Can’t lay a hand on me.”
Oh, so they were going to do this now. Well, fine. Let it never be said that he wasn’t a manipulative bastard.
“You know, maybe we should give John a call. Leave this hunt for a little, look him up. See if he needs backup.”
Dog actually blanched. He rocked back and narrowly avoided clutching at the blade of the knife. Darted a tongue across his lower lip.
“No.”
“Man’s gotta wonder how you’re gettin’ on. We oughta let him know.”
“No. Fuck you. Fuck you.”
And now it was time to show Dog what a real predatory smile looked like. Leaned up in his space, made the other man lean back.
“While you were learning to play games I was getting an education, boy,” he snarls, right up in his face, and Dog actually flinches. Barely, but he’s good at noticing these things. “Only one of us gets to be in charge, and I’m here to tell you that right now? It ain’t you. Won’t ever be you.”
Dog worked his jaw in silence, fury clenching the muscles around his throat. But he knew he’d lost. Lost before we’d even started.
“Okay,” he said, quietly, and bit his lip before softly laying the knife on the bed, blade pointed away from him, toward the wall. “Okay. We’ll do it your way.”
________________________
Draft 1
Gone
He said, “I’ll be back in a little while. You just stay here, okay?”
Sammy nodded. He pushed himself a little further into the cradle of roots and long grass, until his back was snug against the bole of the tree.
“You wait here,” Dean repeated, hunkering down and taking Sam’s face in both his hands. Nine was so much bigger than five. Sam was so small. So small. “Hear me, Sammy?”
Sam favored him with a smile, brilliant in the summer sun. Dean nodded to himself. He got to his feet, brushing his knees clean, and looked in the direction of the house.
“Okay,” he said.
--
--
Sam stood in the doorway of the little diner and ducked his head, letting his hair fall across his face. He hunched his shoulders a little more inside his jacket, and breathed through his nose. Tried to force his heart to calm, his throat to open, his lungs to inhale. Jesus. He hadn’t reacted to a new place this badly in months. Maybe years. He needed to get himself under control in a hurry.
No one was looking at him.
Of course they weren’t.
Dean would have laughed at him. Before Sam left, before everything fell apart. Would have laughed and ruffled his hair, told him to stand up straighter, to stop trying to hide. But the problem, of course, was that Sam didn’t know where Dean was. Nobody knew where his brother was. That was why Sam had abandoned his quiet life in California and driven well over a thousand miles to this no-name town in south Dakota. Why he was standing in the doorway trying not to catch the eye of the woman wiping halfheartedly at the plastic cover of an abandoned table. Why he hurried across the diner floor and slid quickly behind a small table tucked against the wall, flattening his hands on its plastic surface and staring between his fingers.
He was here for a reason. He wasn’t going to be sick. Nobody was looking at him.
He ordered coffee when the waitress came by, but didn’t manage to make actual eye-contact. That was okay. He was getting a lot better, and knew if he really needed to, he could manage it. If. When. When he needed to. Because very soon, he wasn’t going to have a choice at all.
When the seat across from him squeaked across the laminated floor, he lifted his gaze enough to take in the familiar shape of a man he hadn’t seen in years.
“Sam.” Bobby’s voice was nearly the same. Nearly. A little older, maybe, just a tiny bit. A little drier around the edges. Not the sort of thing most people would notice, but Sam was good at noticing the little things.
Not noticing could get you into trouble.
“Hey, Bobby. It’s good to see you. I’m glad. I’m glad you came.”
“Hell, you’re family, boy. So’s he. Whatever I mighta said to John, it never had anything to do with you.”
Sam felt a little smile creep across his face, though he tried to hide it.
“Thanks, Bobby,” he whispered.
Sam was far too anxious to eat, but Bobby had no such limitations and had driven a good three hours to meet him, and Sam struggled to maintain some level of composure as the other man calmly ordered his own coffee, black, and a tuna melt, when the waitress swung by.
“Look,” the older man said softly as the woman disappeared back behind the counter, “I’ll let you have everything I’ve got, okay? But it ain’t a lot. You might be able to make sense out of it better than I can. You know him, know both of them, at least, enough to maybe guess what’s going on-”
“I haven’t seen them-” Sam broke off, swallowed, “I haven’t seen either of them for years, Bobby. I don’t…things change, you know? People change. Maybe I won’t be able to….” He trailed off, biting his lip, pushing the skin on the back of his hand over and around his knuckles.
“You try, boy. ‘Cause if you can’t, I don’t think there’s anyone that can.”
Sam stared at the plastic table cover as Bobby carefully laid a large envelope, of the inter-office mail type, atop it. He opened it more slowly than Sam would have liked and carefully laid out the contents across the table, so that every piece was visible to both of them. Sam found himself shaking his head.
“That-this is all? That’s everything?”
“Hell of a lot more’n what I thought I’d find, boy. This is everything from every contact I’ve got. Sam, this is a lot more than I ever expected to find. When you Daddy went he just…went. Not a word to a soul. And Dean, well…you know what he’s like.”
In spite of himself, Sam smiled, eyes flicking up briefly to the older man’s.
“Yeah. Yeah, guess I do.”
“If they want to stay gone, chances of finding ‘em are real low. And Sam, if they’re split up….” He let the suggestion hang in the air, and sipped at his coffee. Raised an eyebrow under his hat brim.
That, at least, was a question Sam knew how to answer.
“Dean, Bobby. He’s the one I have to find.”
Bobby was silent for a while, coffee cup never traveling far from his mouth. The waitress returned with his sandwich, warm and greasy and buttressed with chips and a pickle. They scrambled the photos and eyewitness accounts and phone records out of the way to make room, and Sam proffered his cup for a refill, nearly looking the woman in the eye. He caught a glimpse of freckles, and blonde hair fading to grey. She smiled at him, a little.
When Bobby’s coffee was refilled, he pushed a copy of a photo toward Sam. In it, his brother was clearly visible, head and shoulders above a few other people, smiling gently with his hands in his pockets, his head lowered enough to catch the glancing rays of the sun in his hair. He looked softer than Sam remembered seeing him since their childhood. He didn’t look like a man running away from anything.
“You’ll find him, Sam,” Bobby declared, quietly and firmly, as Sam swept the image up in both hands and held onto it. “You will. Believe it.”
--
--
He slipped along the faded seafoam green wall, putting his feet down gently, hands loose and open at his sides. Sam had never carried a gun, had never even been permitted to do so. It would have made no difference anyway-drawing on Dean would be a catastrophic error unless Sam was actually prepared to shoot his brother, which was most definitely not the case.
He skimmed across the tired concrete and flicked his gaze back and forth over the ground, the walls. Seeking signs, some kind of evidence. Tracks in the dust or the disruption of fallen leaves. The lingering smell of sage, the glitter of salt.
He drew up alongside a door whose handle shone more brightly than it should have in the afternoon sun, false brass marred on the underside by a dark smear of grease.
Sam let his hand rest lightly on the painted wood of the door. He was trembling, a little, in the bones of his hands, his wrists.
The hand that clamped down on the back of his neck punched the breath right out of his body.
“Jesus!” Sam blurted, and the door slammed open as a shove sent him stumbling into a dark and dusty room.
He had time to register a pile of blankets in the far corner, flanked by a couple of duffels spilling their contents onto grey carpet, and a shaft of light stabbing through faded, off-white curtains. He hit his knees and rolled, scrambling backward, trying to get his feet under him.
“You come lookin’ for trouble?” His brother snarled from the doorway, and Sam winced. Dean’s voice was a low, ragged growl, his shoulders hunched and his head held low.
This wasn’t going to go well.
“Come on, Dean,” Sam tried in his gentlest tones, “Come on. I was just worried about you, man-”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” The sneer was audible. “You think I’m fuckin’ stupid?”
“No, of-of course not-”
“Shit.” Dean pulled the door shut quietly and moved into the room, squatting beside Sam and running a hand lightly over his hair. Sam swallowed, struggled with himself not to pull away. Dean twisted a lock of Sam’s hair around one finger and cocked his head, staring at it as if it were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.
“You had help finding me,” he said. A statement. Almost gentle. Sam kept his head very still.
“S-sure I did. Bobby, he-”
Dean curled his hand into a fist, trapping Sam’s hair, forcing him to lean toward the older man, head tilted awkwardly.
“Bobby. Bobby Singer?”
“Just Bobby, Dean, I p-promise. He had some,” he swallowed, “Some photos, that’s all, I promise, Dean please-”
He was expecting the light slap to the side of his face, and the little shake his brother gave him, curling strong fingers around his jaw, forcing his teeth to click together.
“Did you call John?” Dean asked, softly.
“No!” the protest was instantaneous. “Of course not!”
“Did you?” and Dean squeezed his fist more tightly, tugged a little more, hauling Sam uncomfortably close, “Did you call him?”
“Dean, nobody knows w-where he is! Even Bobby doesn’t know-” Too late he realized his mistake, sealed his mouth shut, but the damage was done.
“Bobby’s looking for him? For both of us? You talked to Bobby about this?”
“Dean,” Sam tried, softly. Pleading. “Dean.”
“Shit.” And this time, knowing it was coming didn’t help. He flinched anyway, and the blow bounced his head off the floor and smacked hard pain across his skull and behind his eyes.
“Why the fuck are you so stupid, Jesus-”
He curled up, shielding his head, and took the kick hard on the inside of his arm. Shit. It hurt, muscle buckling, smacking against the bone. He scrabbled backward with one hand, kicking his legs on the floor, even as he curled in tighter on himself. Stop it, don’t hit me, fuck, stop it, stop. Dean snarled and grabbed for Sam’s head, wrenching his arm clear, shaking him by the hair. Sam grit his teeth, flung a hand at his brother and Dean slapped it away and hit him again, across the face, knuckles mashing his lip into his teeth. Warmth erupted across his mouth, over his chin.
“If Bobby can find John then he’ll come looking here, you stupid asshole, you fucker-” he punctuated the sentence with hard slaps to Sam’s face, slamming him down on the dusty carpet again, cracking the side of his fist against Sam’s ear until he cried out in pain.
“Dean stop! He doesn’t-Bobby wouldn’t-please stop I can’t I-”
“Shut up, shut up, God you stupid fuck I don’t even know why I put up with you…”
Sam heaved out a sob, struggled away from his brother, dragged himself across the carpet toward the bathroom door. Blood ran down his face, and tears, and snot. He gulped back another sob, clawing it down into the hollowness inside his chest. Dean might kill him. He didn’t want to die.
Oh God, I don’t want to die.
--
Sam was still where Dean had left him, sitting by the tree, knees drawn up, head tilted back. Looking into the sky, a little smile on his face. It faded slightly when he looked up.
“Dean?” he whispered, eyes widening. “You okay?”
Dean winced internally. You can’t show something like that. Never let it show. Schooled his face into something smoother, calmer. Let the smile come from deep inside, from the warm safe place he kept just for Sammy. Let it fill him up from the inside out.
“Scoot over,” he told his brother, and Sam obliged, making room in the grass. “Listen,” he went on, and pulled the little book of prayers and psalms their Dad had given him for his birthday the previous year from his pocket, “C’mere, kid. You need to look at this stuff too.”
So they sat there under the tree and he quizzed Sammy until the kid could say the Lord’s prayer in English perfectly, and had even managed a few stumbling words of Latin, as the sun melted from yellow into burnished brass and the shadows lengthened.
After a while, their Dad called them in for dinner.
--
The words were trite, Sam knew. But hearing Dean quietly recite them, murmuring “he restoreth my soul” and “yea though I walk” and even “my cup runneth over” as he gently cleansed the wounds on Sam’s face, filled a hole inside that Sam hadn’t even realized was there. The growl was gone from his brother’s voice and it was back to the timbre Sam remembered best, loved best-quiet and honey-warm, resonant and smooth. Soft around the edges, but so steady. So strong.
He didn’t ask, “Why?” And neither did Dean. They just stayed in the little room where the only light came from the sun outside, and let the shadows grow deeper around them. When Sam’s face had been cleaned, when Dean had brushed back his hair and carefully touched the bruised and swollen skin of his ear and tsk’d quietly, they stayed there, Sam sitting, Dean crouched on the floor, repacking the first-aid kit.
“I didn’t,” Sam began, and paused at the sound of his own voice in the little room. Dean’s hands stilled, and he looked up, light glancing off his face. Softened, now. All the sharpness leached right out. Just gone.
“I didn’t call J-Dad,” Sam said softly, and Dean’s brow furrowed ever so slightly.
“What?”
“I didn’t call him. And Bobby-he wasn’t going to look for him. I know. So there’s no way-he’s not looking for you, Dean. Or for me. He’s not.”
Dean was watching him with a mixture of confusion and gentle patience, and he nodded slowly before murmuring a soft, “Okay,” and getting to his feet. A hand fell lightly on Sam’s shoulder.
“You staying here? I don’t “I’ve got one,” Sam said, and Dean smiled. Sam’s favorite smile.
have an extra sleeping bag but-”
“Okay,” he said again. “Come in then. I’ll see if I can get some light in the room…”
Sam trailed after his brother into the darkening room, and flinched when Dean crossed to the window and flung the curtains wide. He turned back and grinned at Sam’s expression.
“I got candles and the lantern, you know,” he said, “But I’d like to save them until I really need them.”
And Sam’s heart was full to bursting . He was going to keep smiling until his face split in half.
“Dean,” he said, squeezing his hands together to keep from crossing the room and grabbing his brother in a bone-crushing hug. “Dean. It’s good to see you, man.”
Dean’s answering smile was blinding.
--
“So what now, Sammy? I know you want somethin’.”
“I just…could you tell me a story, Dean? Please?”
“What kind of story, kiddo?”
“Well, you could. You could tell me about the monsters. If you wanted.”
“Aw, Sam, what are you talking about? There aren’t any monsters.”
--
Someone was breathing. Someone close.
He knew this sound. It fit. It went with the soft rustles of motion, the stirring of blankets and the occasional sigh and murmur. Someone was in the room with him.
Sam was in the room.
He’d had moments, before, where he’d woken up and thought…but no. He pushed himself upright and forced sticky eyes to open fully. The room was real, drowned in shadows and very real, and the sound of his brother and the vague blurry lump nearby filled the entirety of his vision. The whole world contracted around that point.
Dean swallowed.
His hands hurt. That…he pressed his lips together. Smoothed his thumb vaguely against the back of his right hand. His knuckles ached, and the unmistakable tang of rubbing alcohol hung in the air. Dean guessed that if he looked at his hands in the light, there’d be evidence of bruising. Maybe split skin.
“Sam,” he whispered, and the tiny syllable barely made it past his lips.
He was frozen, suspended in a net of the extraordinary. He hadn’t seen Sam for-well, it had been a long time. He was sure. Months, or…even longer. Much longer
But this was real.
He drew in air through his nose. Pushed the blankets aside, moved toward the sleeping shape of his brother. Sam. Sammy was here. The knowledge was too much, was trying to scramble out of his chest, claw its way up his throat. Tears or laughter. There. Right there. The brother he had lost.
The quiet buzz from the nearest bag almost failed to register, sliding under the edges of Dean’s awareness like a current of cold air creeping into a room.
The second buzz got him moving.
The phone wasn’t his. At least, he didn’t think it was his. Maybe it was Sam’s bag he was fumbling through. Maybe it was Sam’s phone, cold and alien, that he flipped open and clutched to his ear.
“Dean?”
His father’s voice was clear and strong. Dean held on to the phone with both hands.
“Dad,” he breathed.
“Dean, son. It’s good to hear your voice.” His Dad was grinning into the phone and Dean felt an answering smile steal across his own face.
“You too, Dad. I-” he cut himself off. Didn’t say, “I missed you.” He wasn’t really sure how long it had been since he’d seen the man.
“I’ve been looking for you, son.”
Dean nodded, before remembering himself. Swallowed, unstuck his throat. Offered, “Yeah, I…I’m sorry.”
“You been hunting?” Disappointment mingled with surprise in his Dad’s voice.
“I-hunting? I don’t….”
“Hmm.” The line was silent for a moment. “Listen, Deano, where are you now?”
“Why?” he sat up a little straighter. “You want to meet up?”
“No, son,” his father began, and dean struggled to quash the disappointment that threatened to overwhelm him before his Dad continued, “I’ll come to you. Just-tell me where you are. I’ll come find you.”
Dean was nodding again, uselessly, scrambling for his boots. He’d have to hit the car, maybe, look at a map, figure out where in hell he was. But he’d work it out. Dad would find him.
He could go home.
He was babbling into the receiver as he yanked on his boots-about the room, about the candles that were scattered around, when the phone was yanked unceremoniously from his grasp, his father’s voice made suddenly tinny and faint with distance. Dean gaped upward at the shadowed figure of his brother, face bathed in the stark light of the cellphone’s screen.
Jesus. He’d forgotten Sammy was even in the room.
“Get dressed, Dean,” Sam hissed, voice urgent and low as he snapped the phone closed and shoved it in a back pocket. “Hurry, do it now.”
“What-Sam, what are you-I was talking to Dad!”
“I know!” And Sam flicked the switch on the camp lantern and filled the whole room with cold, thin light. “Christ, Dean, get dressed! We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”
Whatever had got Sam’s panties in a bunch, Dean recognized that the urgency and raw desperation in his voice was real. He grabbed the shirt Sam chucked at his head and scrambled to collect his blankets and bags and shrug into his jacket.
“Gimme the keys,” Sam said, and Dean gaped at him. Sam gestured, furious and impatient.
“Keys, goddamit Dean!”
What the hell had happened to Sam’s face?
“Dammit!” Sam yanked Dean close enough to fish the keys out of his jacket and then he was propelling his older brother toward the door in what nearly constituted a frog march.
“Sam, for Christ’s sake-”
“Shut up,” Sam said tightly, and without quite knowing how it had happened Dean found himself fin the car, Sam sliding into the driver’s seat, lips thin and hard. “Just-enough, okay Dean?”
Of course it wasn’t “okay.” But too much had happened in too short a time, in blurry and chaotic fits and starts, and Dean’s hands still smelled of rubbing alcohol and were trembling a little. He wasn’t sure why.
“Sorry,” he tried, but Sam was gunning the engine, and didn’t hear him.
He curled in a little, resting his shoulder against the door, his forehead against the window. He’d ask Sammy about his face, maybe. In a little while, when his brother had calmed down. Try to make sense out of this situation. Figure out why they were flying along back roads in the Impala through a night so black nothing was visible before or behind, above or below. Dean could barely make out the patch of road illuminated by the headlights.
It was just him and his brother, together in the dark.
He imagined soft hands on his shoulders, a gentle kiss planted on his forehead. His mother, maybe. A memory so old he barely recognized it as belonging to him, anymore.
“Go to sleep,” she whispered, from far away, the rolling echoes of dreams and distant thunder. “Close your eyes, kiddo. Things will be better when you wake up.”
Dean shifted a little bit, sinking deeper into his jacket. He didn’t try to look outside-there was nothing to see out there anyway.
He shut his eyes.
--
Sam ditched the phone outside Youngstown.
Dean didn’t wake up when they stopped, but that was okay.
Sam would handle things. For now.
-end-
_______
Drafts 2 and 3
“Shh,” Dean whispered, and Sam pushed in closer, pressing his head and shoulder against Dean’s chest, until the older boy wrapped skinny arms around him and rested his chin atop Sam’s head.
Like all motel closets, this one had little space for two boys, even relatively small ones, filled as it already was with bags and their father’s coats and shirts. They did the best they could, though, and Dean was pressed back against the wall, legs bent out to the side to accommodate his six year old brother’s invasion of his space. Outside they could hear their father thumping around, and Sam caught snatches of muttered phrases, words he didn’t understand.
Sam’s skin felt cold. Something was trying to crawl up his throat. He whispered, “Dean?”
“Shh,” Dean repeated, hands tightening where they gripped Sam’s arm and shoulder. He shifted position so that he could press Sam’s head more firmly against his chest. Sam squeezed his eyes shut.
“No sounds, Sammy.”
Sam caught the inside of his cheek between his teeth and gave a tiny nod. Didn’t move even when the rattle and hiss of pouring salt filled the air, or when their Dad’s voice rumbled through the closet door.
“You boys stay inside until I tell you it’s safe. Dean, you look after your brother. Hear me?
Dean’s spine straightened, and his fingers curved slightly, nails digging into Sam’s skin.
“Yessir,” he said, voice strong.
“Sammy, you be good for your brother,” Dad went on, and Sam pushed himself away from Dean’s embrace to call, “Okay!” through the plywood door.
“I’ll be back soon’s I can.” He thumped the door, once, and then was gone. Sam heard the lock on the motel click.
Sam wasn’t sure how long they stayed there in the dark, silent and clinging to each other. His heart beat loudly, in his chest and in his head, in the space between himself and his brother. He might have fallen asleep because suddenly he was pulling away from his brother and the cool air washed across his face, raising goosebumps. He kind of needed to pee.
“Shh,” his brother murmured, “S’okay, Sammy. It’s gonna be okay.”
Sam swallowed and rubbed at his eyes.
“It’s dark,” he whispered, voice raspy.
“I know, kiddo.”
“Can we come out yet?”
“No.” Dean reached out and pulled Sam back in. “Not yet. It isn’t safe.”
“Why?” Sam squinted at the nearest bag, the misshapen bulk of it. “Why isn’t it safe?”
Dean shifted a little, as if uncomfortable.
“Because J-” and here Dean broke off, began again. “It….just isn’t safe, okay? Not yet.”
“When will Dad be back?”
There was no answer.
“Dean?”
“I don’t know. When it’s safe.”
“When will-”
“Sam! Sam, I don’t know, okay?” Dean took a deep, shuddering breath, ribs expanding. Then, very quietly, he said, “Sammy there’s…there’s something I need to tell you, okay?”
Sam allowed himself to be pushed back a bit farther. His eyes had adjusted to the dark, but he could barely make out Dean’s features. His brother’s face was a mess of shadows. Was nothing Sam could recognize.
“Sammy,” Dean began, voice low and serious so that there would be no way for Sam to misunderstand what he was saying as some kind of joke.
“Sammy. Monsters are real.”
Later, Dad came and let them out of the closet.
--
--
“Be still, son.”
Cold sweat. He was sweating and cold and a little sick inside. His hands opened and shut spasmodically where they gripped the edge of the couch and John growled a little and slapped at them.
“Hold still or this will take longer.”
Soldiers said ‘yessir.’ But right now he couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Knew what would happen if he opened his mouth.
His skin was cold but his legs, his feet still hurt. Every time John pushed the knife against the bottom of his foot he twitched. He didn’t mean to, was doing his damndest to keep still, but as it turned out even knowing it was coming didn’t help that much. The knife bit into his skin and he flinched. John was going to fucking kill him for all this moving around.
Why it had to be his feet he didn’t know. John was a very need-to-know kind of guy, and he definitely didn’t need to know why protection symbols were best carved into the feet. He’d already done John’s and the man hadn’t so much as twitched, which was really goddamned humiliating, but after all he’d been in a fucking war. Had probably had worse things done to his feet and the rest of him, than something this small and stupid
So he did his best. He really really did. The metal was grey and bright and thin and sliced neatly into the thick pads of his heel and toes, and cut almost gracefully through the more delicate skin of the arch. He bit his lip and fought the muscles in his legs as they twitched and struggled to contract, to yank away from John’s careful hold. The man hissed and drew back, briefly, before redoubling his iron grip and bending again to his task.
“Stop moving, Dean. We still have to do the other one.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed hard. The knife sliced into the pad of his big toe and traced carefully down.
He didn’t make a single goddamned sound.
______________________________
Woo! That's like 20+ pages (a little over 6000 words) worth of discarded material. Not including the stuff I couldn't find. HOLY CRAP.
For anyone interested in the crazy writing process that was this fic (or why I kept bitching about issues of caricaturization),
There is a dream that is dreaming us.
Pre-draft work
In the end, he goes along.
He probably shouldn’t. Should probably go alone, leave Dog in his corner where he belongs, away from the civilians. God knows Dog is more trouble than he’s worth, most of the time, snarling and snapping at people, totally unsocialized. A nasty piece of work and hours and days on the road with his specialized sense of humor is going to leave both of them with itchy trigger fingers and a whole lot of nobody else to take it out on.
But he’s also the best man for the job, and they both know it. He just needs someone to go with him. Keep him off the civilians, keep him under the radar. Or he’s going to leave a scarlet smear across the lower forty-eight that people would be able to see from space and that’s just not going to fly.
So he has a responsibility.
Dog laughs at him for it, tells him to give it up, says the job is his, his and no one else’s and okay, that’s true. He doesn’t know the job. He doesn’t need to.
“I’m just here for you,” he tells him.
He’s a handler. That’s all.
Dog laughs at him some more, but hell, what else is new?
Dog laughs at everybody.
___________________________
Ver 2:
In the end, he went along with Dog.
It was probably a bad idea. Pretty much anyone else would have told him it was a bad idea, if he had bothered to ask. Which he didn’t, because it would have been redundant. Already knew what a nightmare being trapped alone in a car with Dog and his specialized sense of humor, for any length of time, could be. He’d lived it, after all, more times than he cared to count. He could’ve written a goddamned book about it if he’d wanted. Nobody would buy it, but the point, the point was that the option was there. He could do it.
But someone had to go, had to play the grownup, had to keep Dog flying under the radar, keep the unsocialized asshole from drawing attention in his charming and attractive way, keep him from snarling at the civilians and snapping at the other hunters. Left to his own devices he’d paint a bloody smear across the lower forty-eight that people’d be able to see from fucking space and that sure as hell didn’t count as flying under the radar.
So he shoved into the driver’s seat and grinned a predatory grin he didn’t particularly feel when Dog growled at him. He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel, and fished a tape out of the box on the seat.
“Driver picks the music,” he announced in his smarmiest tones, waving the plastic unconcernedly in the face of the other man’s glare. “So you can just suck on it, scrappy.”
And that was the last thing either of them said for the next hundred fifty miles. After that, well…
None of it was going in the book, that was for damn sure. Probably jump-start some kind of old-fashioned book-burning, just ‘cause of the language.
Jesus.
--
The Thing in Bellefontaine. That was going to be the official name, and they were goddamned well never going to discuss it again. Dog thought it was fucking hilarious, of course, and went on smirking about it for hours after the fact, and muttering little comments like he thought he couldn’t be heard, when of course they both knew he could hear him just fine.
…he said ‘let her go. let her go i won’t tell you again’…
“We’re not talking about this,” he snapped at Dog, who shrugged and cuffed a hand through his hair, like he didn’t have a care in the world. Because he didn’t, of course. He still had blood under his fingernails. And he wouldn’t bother to clean it out before they hit a halfway civilized place, like say a motel, or even a gas station, so he’d be walking around probably for days with brown caked up under his nails.
He’d have to take care of it. God knew he took care of every other fucking thing that didn’t involve slicing, chopping or otherwise dealing out violence.
Sometimes he was pretty sure he got the short end of the stick.
“Next place we stop,” he told the other man, “We’re washing your fucking hands.”
“Hazards of the job,” Dog rumbled , flexing his fingers.
--
(CUT STUFF)
--
He picked up the trail in Bellefontaine, which the locals for some incomprehensible reason insisted on pronouncing “Bell-fountain.” Whatever. Sam was genuinely pretty proud of himself, felt he was doing really well. Relatively. He had a few descriptions, now, things that matched in the right places. The color of the eyes, the shape of the face. General size and build. Mannerisms didn’t match, but that didn’t mean anything, he’d been prepared for that. Expected it. It went with the particular line of work.
Dean’s hair was short again, had been cut since the picture he’d folded into his jacket pocket was taken. Sam knew that much. What that meant he wasn’t sure, but it was later in the season and that meant flannels and leathers. When Sam sat in his motel room and closed his eyes he could picture his brother clearly, as if he stood only a little distance away, smiling that little smile he only ever gave Sam, bathed in the light gushing in through the open motel window. That was how he wanted to find his brother: bright and clean and safe and whole, the way he’d been when Sam left. The pillar of his world. His unshakeable foundation.
He followed his brother’s trail through the Ohio town, his own research and instincts letting him track the older man, even when things started falling in his path that didn’t add up. Why some people seemed downright shy to talk about Dean. One man stood fidgeting on his porch, never raising his eyes to Sam’s. A woman hid behind a screen door and spoke to him in a low voice, long hair hanging to her shoulders. She shied away from looking at him directly. She rubbed distractedly at her wrists. She said, “No, no, you must be mistaken. I don’t know…I’ve never seen him before.
“No. I’ve never seen him.”
Sam knew she was lying. But he didn’t push it.
He already knew his brother had moved on.
--
He said, “Let her go. Don’t make me tell you again.”
Dog snarled at him, actually Goddamned snarled, like he had any say in the matter. Like he was the one in charge.
“This is not a game. You hear me?” And he resisted the urge to grab the other man by the hair and shake him, even though sometimes that was the only thing that got through. “It’s not a game and the people you hurt remember that you hurt them, and we’re going to be on the radar. We’re gonna get caught, you’ll get caught you asshole. You stop or I will stop you.”
This was not the time for some macho bullshit, right in the middle of a hunt with a key witness tied to a chair and her hair all in her face and her eyes wide and terrified, but there wasn’t going to be a question. There wasn’t going to be a single question of who was really running this show.
Not one.
“Get in the corner,” he snapped, shoving forward, shoving Dog out of the way, to stand pinched between the walls, the rough wood and dust. “It’s my turn. We’re ending this right the fuck now.”
The woman whimpered when he approached, and he shot a cold hard glance at Dog, who made a great show of picking disinterestedly at the blood under his nails.
“Hey,” he said, in his best soothing tones. “Hey. You’re gonna-it’s gonna be okay, okay? I’m gonna help you. He can’t hurt you. He won’t. Not anymore.”
She stared at him with wide eyes and he reached out, moved by a sudden tender impulse to brush her hair out of her face, and stopped halfway when he realized he still had Dog’s knife in his hand.
Shit.
This whole thing was one giant clusterfuck.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he said to her again, hurriedly wiping the blade and shoving it in the sheath in his boot. “You’ll be fine. I’ll take care of it. Take care of everything. I promise.”
He gave her a little smile, full of hesitant kindness, and added, “It’s kinda my job.”
--
He said, “Okay, you know what? This isn’t going to happen this way. Not again.”
Dog looked up from the blade he was working to a wicked edge and furrowed his brow.
“Though you said we weren’t talking ‘bout this.”
“I changed my mind. I changed my motherfucking mind because you’re not pulling this shit, not again.” Stopping this before it started had officially become his entire reason for being. He’d yank them off this hunt completely if he had to.
Dog dangled his hands between his knees and cocked his head a little. He ran a thumb almost idly up and down the long blade and tapped it lightly.
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“You hurt that girl. You hurt her a lot.”
Dog shrugged. “You could’ve stopped me.”
“I’m stopping you now. This isn’t going any further. You touch someone else and you’ll be sorry.”
The other man grinned, the long slow one that showed off his teeth. The one that was designed to exaggerate his canines.
“You can’t touch me. Can’t lay a hand on me.”
Oh, so they were going to do this now. Well, fine. Let it never be said that he wasn’t a manipulative bastard.
“You know, maybe we should give John a call. Leave this hunt for a little, look him up. See if he needs backup.”
Dog actually blanched. He rocked back and narrowly avoided clutching at the blade of the knife. Darted a tongue across his lower lip.
“No.”
“Man’s gotta wonder how you’re gettin’ on. We oughta let him know.”
“No. Fuck you. Fuck you.”
And now it was time to show Dog what a real predatory smile looked like. Leaned up in his space, made the other man lean back.
“While you were learning to play games I was getting an education, boy,” he snarls, right up in his face, and Dog actually flinches. Barely, but he’s good at noticing these things. “Only one of us gets to be in charge, and I’m here to tell you that right now? It ain’t you. Won’t ever be you.”
Dog worked his jaw in silence, fury clenching the muscles around his throat. But he knew he’d lost. Lost before we’d even started.
“Okay,” he said, quietly, and bit his lip before softly laying the knife on the bed, blade pointed away from him, toward the wall. “Okay. We’ll do it your way.”
________________________
Draft 1
Gone
He said, “I’ll be back in a little while. You just stay here, okay?”
Sammy nodded. He pushed himself a little further into the cradle of roots and long grass, until his back was snug against the bole of the tree.
“You wait here,” Dean repeated, hunkering down and taking Sam’s face in both his hands. Nine was so much bigger than five. Sam was so small. So small. “Hear me, Sammy?”
Sam favored him with a smile, brilliant in the summer sun. Dean nodded to himself. He got to his feet, brushing his knees clean, and looked in the direction of the house.
“Okay,” he said.
--
--
Sam stood in the doorway of the little diner and ducked his head, letting his hair fall across his face. He hunched his shoulders a little more inside his jacket, and breathed through his nose. Tried to force his heart to calm, his throat to open, his lungs to inhale. Jesus. He hadn’t reacted to a new place this badly in months. Maybe years. He needed to get himself under control in a hurry.
No one was looking at him.
Of course they weren’t.
Dean would have laughed at him. Before Sam left, before everything fell apart. Would have laughed and ruffled his hair, told him to stand up straighter, to stop trying to hide. But the problem, of course, was that Sam didn’t know where Dean was. Nobody knew where his brother was. That was why Sam had abandoned his quiet life in California and driven well over a thousand miles to this no-name town in south Dakota. Why he was standing in the doorway trying not to catch the eye of the woman wiping halfheartedly at the plastic cover of an abandoned table. Why he hurried across the diner floor and slid quickly behind a small table tucked against the wall, flattening his hands on its plastic surface and staring between his fingers.
He was here for a reason. He wasn’t going to be sick. Nobody was looking at him.
He ordered coffee when the waitress came by, but didn’t manage to make actual eye-contact. That was okay. He was getting a lot better, and knew if he really needed to, he could manage it. If. When. When he needed to. Because very soon, he wasn’t going to have a choice at all.
When the seat across from him squeaked across the laminated floor, he lifted his gaze enough to take in the familiar shape of a man he hadn’t seen in years.
“Sam.” Bobby’s voice was nearly the same. Nearly. A little older, maybe, just a tiny bit. A little drier around the edges. Not the sort of thing most people would notice, but Sam was good at noticing the little things.
Not noticing could get you into trouble.
“Hey, Bobby. It’s good to see you. I’m glad. I’m glad you came.”
“Hell, you’re family, boy. So’s he. Whatever I mighta said to John, it never had anything to do with you.”
Sam felt a little smile creep across his face, though he tried to hide it.
“Thanks, Bobby,” he whispered.
Sam was far too anxious to eat, but Bobby had no such limitations and had driven a good three hours to meet him, and Sam struggled to maintain some level of composure as the other man calmly ordered his own coffee, black, and a tuna melt, when the waitress swung by.
“Look,” the older man said softly as the woman disappeared back behind the counter, “I’ll let you have everything I’ve got, okay? But it ain’t a lot. You might be able to make sense out of it better than I can. You know him, know both of them, at least, enough to maybe guess what’s going on-”
“I haven’t seen them-” Sam broke off, swallowed, “I haven’t seen either of them for years, Bobby. I don’t…things change, you know? People change. Maybe I won’t be able to….” He trailed off, biting his lip, pushing the skin on the back of his hand over and around his knuckles.
“You try, boy. ‘Cause if you can’t, I don’t think there’s anyone that can.”
Sam stared at the plastic table cover as Bobby carefully laid a large envelope, of the inter-office mail type, atop it. He opened it more slowly than Sam would have liked and carefully laid out the contents across the table, so that every piece was visible to both of them. Sam found himself shaking his head.
“That-this is all? That’s everything?”
“Hell of a lot more’n what I thought I’d find, boy. This is everything from every contact I’ve got. Sam, this is a lot more than I ever expected to find. When you Daddy went he just…went. Not a word to a soul. And Dean, well…you know what he’s like.”
In spite of himself, Sam smiled, eyes flicking up briefly to the older man’s.
“Yeah. Yeah, guess I do.”
“If they want to stay gone, chances of finding ‘em are real low. And Sam, if they’re split up….” He let the suggestion hang in the air, and sipped at his coffee. Raised an eyebrow under his hat brim.
That, at least, was a question Sam knew how to answer.
“Dean, Bobby. He’s the one I have to find.”
Bobby was silent for a while, coffee cup never traveling far from his mouth. The waitress returned with his sandwich, warm and greasy and buttressed with chips and a pickle. They scrambled the photos and eyewitness accounts and phone records out of the way to make room, and Sam proffered his cup for a refill, nearly looking the woman in the eye. He caught a glimpse of freckles, and blonde hair fading to grey. She smiled at him, a little.
When Bobby’s coffee was refilled, he pushed a copy of a photo toward Sam. In it, his brother was clearly visible, head and shoulders above a few other people, smiling gently with his hands in his pockets, his head lowered enough to catch the glancing rays of the sun in his hair. He looked softer than Sam remembered seeing him since their childhood. He didn’t look like a man running away from anything.
“You’ll find him, Sam,” Bobby declared, quietly and firmly, as Sam swept the image up in both hands and held onto it. “You will. Believe it.”
--
--
He slipped along the faded seafoam green wall, putting his feet down gently, hands loose and open at his sides. Sam had never carried a gun, had never even been permitted to do so. It would have made no difference anyway-drawing on Dean would be a catastrophic error unless Sam was actually prepared to shoot his brother, which was most definitely not the case.
He skimmed across the tired concrete and flicked his gaze back and forth over the ground, the walls. Seeking signs, some kind of evidence. Tracks in the dust or the disruption of fallen leaves. The lingering smell of sage, the glitter of salt.
He drew up alongside a door whose handle shone more brightly than it should have in the afternoon sun, false brass marred on the underside by a dark smear of grease.
Sam let his hand rest lightly on the painted wood of the door. He was trembling, a little, in the bones of his hands, his wrists.
The hand that clamped down on the back of his neck punched the breath right out of his body.
“Jesus!” Sam blurted, and the door slammed open as a shove sent him stumbling into a dark and dusty room.
He had time to register a pile of blankets in the far corner, flanked by a couple of duffels spilling their contents onto grey carpet, and a shaft of light stabbing through faded, off-white curtains. He hit his knees and rolled, scrambling backward, trying to get his feet under him.
“You come lookin’ for trouble?” His brother snarled from the doorway, and Sam winced. Dean’s voice was a low, ragged growl, his shoulders hunched and his head held low.
This wasn’t going to go well.
“Come on, Dean,” Sam tried in his gentlest tones, “Come on. I was just worried about you, man-”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” The sneer was audible. “You think I’m fuckin’ stupid?”
“No, of-of course not-”
“Shit.” Dean pulled the door shut quietly and moved into the room, squatting beside Sam and running a hand lightly over his hair. Sam swallowed, struggled with himself not to pull away. Dean twisted a lock of Sam’s hair around one finger and cocked his head, staring at it as if it were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.
“You had help finding me,” he said. A statement. Almost gentle. Sam kept his head very still.
“S-sure I did. Bobby, he-”
Dean curled his hand into a fist, trapping Sam’s hair, forcing him to lean toward the older man, head tilted awkwardly.
“Bobby. Bobby Singer?”
“Just Bobby, Dean, I p-promise. He had some,” he swallowed, “Some photos, that’s all, I promise, Dean please-”
He was expecting the light slap to the side of his face, and the little shake his brother gave him, curling strong fingers around his jaw, forcing his teeth to click together.
“Did you call John?” Dean asked, softly.
“No!” the protest was instantaneous. “Of course not!”
“Did you?” and Dean squeezed his fist more tightly, tugged a little more, hauling Sam uncomfortably close, “Did you call him?”
“Dean, nobody knows w-where he is! Even Bobby doesn’t know-” Too late he realized his mistake, sealed his mouth shut, but the damage was done.
“Bobby’s looking for him? For both of us? You talked to Bobby about this?”
“Dean,” Sam tried, softly. Pleading. “Dean.”
“Shit.” And this time, knowing it was coming didn’t help. He flinched anyway, and the blow bounced his head off the floor and smacked hard pain across his skull and behind his eyes.
“Why the fuck are you so stupid, Jesus-”
He curled up, shielding his head, and took the kick hard on the inside of his arm. Shit. It hurt, muscle buckling, smacking against the bone. He scrabbled backward with one hand, kicking his legs on the floor, even as he curled in tighter on himself. Stop it, don’t hit me, fuck, stop it, stop. Dean snarled and grabbed for Sam’s head, wrenching his arm clear, shaking him by the hair. Sam grit his teeth, flung a hand at his brother and Dean slapped it away and hit him again, across the face, knuckles mashing his lip into his teeth. Warmth erupted across his mouth, over his chin.
“If Bobby can find John then he’ll come looking here, you stupid asshole, you fucker-” he punctuated the sentence with hard slaps to Sam’s face, slamming him down on the dusty carpet again, cracking the side of his fist against Sam’s ear until he cried out in pain.
“Dean stop! He doesn’t-Bobby wouldn’t-please stop I can’t I-”
“Shut up, shut up, God you stupid fuck I don’t even know why I put up with you…”
Sam heaved out a sob, struggled away from his brother, dragged himself across the carpet toward the bathroom door. Blood ran down his face, and tears, and snot. He gulped back another sob, clawing it down into the hollowness inside his chest. Dean might kill him. He didn’t want to die.
Oh God, I don’t want to die.
--
Sam was still where Dean had left him, sitting by the tree, knees drawn up, head tilted back. Looking into the sky, a little smile on his face. It faded slightly when he looked up.
“Dean?” he whispered, eyes widening. “You okay?”
Dean winced internally. You can’t show something like that. Never let it show. Schooled his face into something smoother, calmer. Let the smile come from deep inside, from the warm safe place he kept just for Sammy. Let it fill him up from the inside out.
“Scoot over,” he told his brother, and Sam obliged, making room in the grass. “Listen,” he went on, and pulled the little book of prayers and psalms their Dad had given him for his birthday the previous year from his pocket, “C’mere, kid. You need to look at this stuff too.”
So they sat there under the tree and he quizzed Sammy until the kid could say the Lord’s prayer in English perfectly, and had even managed a few stumbling words of Latin, as the sun melted from yellow into burnished brass and the shadows lengthened.
After a while, their Dad called them in for dinner.
--
The words were trite, Sam knew. But hearing Dean quietly recite them, murmuring “he restoreth my soul” and “yea though I walk” and even “my cup runneth over” as he gently cleansed the wounds on Sam’s face, filled a hole inside that Sam hadn’t even realized was there. The growl was gone from his brother’s voice and it was back to the timbre Sam remembered best, loved best-quiet and honey-warm, resonant and smooth. Soft around the edges, but so steady. So strong.
He didn’t ask, “Why?” And neither did Dean. They just stayed in the little room where the only light came from the sun outside, and let the shadows grow deeper around them. When Sam’s face had been cleaned, when Dean had brushed back his hair and carefully touched the bruised and swollen skin of his ear and tsk’d quietly, they stayed there, Sam sitting, Dean crouched on the floor, repacking the first-aid kit.
“I didn’t,” Sam began, and paused at the sound of his own voice in the little room. Dean’s hands stilled, and he looked up, light glancing off his face. Softened, now. All the sharpness leached right out. Just gone.
“I didn’t call J-Dad,” Sam said softly, and Dean’s brow furrowed ever so slightly.
“What?”
“I didn’t call him. And Bobby-he wasn’t going to look for him. I know. So there’s no way-he’s not looking for you, Dean. Or for me. He’s not.”
Dean was watching him with a mixture of confusion and gentle patience, and he nodded slowly before murmuring a soft, “Okay,” and getting to his feet. A hand fell lightly on Sam’s shoulder.
“You staying here? I don’t “I’ve got one,” Sam said, and Dean smiled. Sam’s favorite smile.
have an extra sleeping bag but-”
“Okay,” he said again. “Come in then. I’ll see if I can get some light in the room…”
Sam trailed after his brother into the darkening room, and flinched when Dean crossed to the window and flung the curtains wide. He turned back and grinned at Sam’s expression.
“I got candles and the lantern, you know,” he said, “But I’d like to save them until I really need them.”
And Sam’s heart was full to bursting . He was going to keep smiling until his face split in half.
“Dean,” he said, squeezing his hands together to keep from crossing the room and grabbing his brother in a bone-crushing hug. “Dean. It’s good to see you, man.”
Dean’s answering smile was blinding.
--
“So what now, Sammy? I know you want somethin’.”
“I just…could you tell me a story, Dean? Please?”
“What kind of story, kiddo?”
“Well, you could. You could tell me about the monsters. If you wanted.”
“Aw, Sam, what are you talking about? There aren’t any monsters.”
--
Someone was breathing. Someone close.
He knew this sound. It fit. It went with the soft rustles of motion, the stirring of blankets and the occasional sigh and murmur. Someone was in the room with him.
Sam was in the room.
He’d had moments, before, where he’d woken up and thought…but no. He pushed himself upright and forced sticky eyes to open fully. The room was real, drowned in shadows and very real, and the sound of his brother and the vague blurry lump nearby filled the entirety of his vision. The whole world contracted around that point.
Dean swallowed.
His hands hurt. That…he pressed his lips together. Smoothed his thumb vaguely against the back of his right hand. His knuckles ached, and the unmistakable tang of rubbing alcohol hung in the air. Dean guessed that if he looked at his hands in the light, there’d be evidence of bruising. Maybe split skin.
“Sam,” he whispered, and the tiny syllable barely made it past his lips.
He was frozen, suspended in a net of the extraordinary. He hadn’t seen Sam for-well, it had been a long time. He was sure. Months, or…even longer. Much longer
But this was real.
He drew in air through his nose. Pushed the blankets aside, moved toward the sleeping shape of his brother. Sam. Sammy was here. The knowledge was too much, was trying to scramble out of his chest, claw its way up his throat. Tears or laughter. There. Right there. The brother he had lost.
The quiet buzz from the nearest bag almost failed to register, sliding under the edges of Dean’s awareness like a current of cold air creeping into a room.
The second buzz got him moving.
The phone wasn’t his. At least, he didn’t think it was his. Maybe it was Sam’s bag he was fumbling through. Maybe it was Sam’s phone, cold and alien, that he flipped open and clutched to his ear.
“Dean?”
His father’s voice was clear and strong. Dean held on to the phone with both hands.
“Dad,” he breathed.
“Dean, son. It’s good to hear your voice.” His Dad was grinning into the phone and Dean felt an answering smile steal across his own face.
“You too, Dad. I-” he cut himself off. Didn’t say, “I missed you.” He wasn’t really sure how long it had been since he’d seen the man.
“I’ve been looking for you, son.”
Dean nodded, before remembering himself. Swallowed, unstuck his throat. Offered, “Yeah, I…I’m sorry.”
“You been hunting?” Disappointment mingled with surprise in his Dad’s voice.
“I-hunting? I don’t….”
“Hmm.” The line was silent for a moment. “Listen, Deano, where are you now?”
“Why?” he sat up a little straighter. “You want to meet up?”
“No, son,” his father began, and dean struggled to quash the disappointment that threatened to overwhelm him before his Dad continued, “I’ll come to you. Just-tell me where you are. I’ll come find you.”
Dean was nodding again, uselessly, scrambling for his boots. He’d have to hit the car, maybe, look at a map, figure out where in hell he was. But he’d work it out. Dad would find him.
He could go home.
He was babbling into the receiver as he yanked on his boots-about the room, about the candles that were scattered around, when the phone was yanked unceremoniously from his grasp, his father’s voice made suddenly tinny and faint with distance. Dean gaped upward at the shadowed figure of his brother, face bathed in the stark light of the cellphone’s screen.
Jesus. He’d forgotten Sammy was even in the room.
“Get dressed, Dean,” Sam hissed, voice urgent and low as he snapped the phone closed and shoved it in a back pocket. “Hurry, do it now.”
“What-Sam, what are you-I was talking to Dad!”
“I know!” And Sam flicked the switch on the camp lantern and filled the whole room with cold, thin light. “Christ, Dean, get dressed! We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”
Whatever had got Sam’s panties in a bunch, Dean recognized that the urgency and raw desperation in his voice was real. He grabbed the shirt Sam chucked at his head and scrambled to collect his blankets and bags and shrug into his jacket.
“Gimme the keys,” Sam said, and Dean gaped at him. Sam gestured, furious and impatient.
“Keys, goddamit Dean!”
What the hell had happened to Sam’s face?
“Dammit!” Sam yanked Dean close enough to fish the keys out of his jacket and then he was propelling his older brother toward the door in what nearly constituted a frog march.
“Sam, for Christ’s sake-”
“Shut up,” Sam said tightly, and without quite knowing how it had happened Dean found himself fin the car, Sam sliding into the driver’s seat, lips thin and hard. “Just-enough, okay Dean?”
Of course it wasn’t “okay.” But too much had happened in too short a time, in blurry and chaotic fits and starts, and Dean’s hands still smelled of rubbing alcohol and were trembling a little. He wasn’t sure why.
“Sorry,” he tried, but Sam was gunning the engine, and didn’t hear him.
He curled in a little, resting his shoulder against the door, his forehead against the window. He’d ask Sammy about his face, maybe. In a little while, when his brother had calmed down. Try to make sense out of this situation. Figure out why they were flying along back roads in the Impala through a night so black nothing was visible before or behind, above or below. Dean could barely make out the patch of road illuminated by the headlights.
It was just him and his brother, together in the dark.
He imagined soft hands on his shoulders, a gentle kiss planted on his forehead. His mother, maybe. A memory so old he barely recognized it as belonging to him, anymore.
“Go to sleep,” she whispered, from far away, the rolling echoes of dreams and distant thunder. “Close your eyes, kiddo. Things will be better when you wake up.”
Dean shifted a little bit, sinking deeper into his jacket. He didn’t try to look outside-there was nothing to see out there anyway.
He shut his eyes.
--
Sam ditched the phone outside Youngstown.
Dean didn’t wake up when they stopped, but that was okay.
Sam would handle things. For now.
-end-
_______
Drafts 2 and 3
“Shh,” Dean whispered, and Sam pushed in closer, pressing his head and shoulder against Dean’s chest, until the older boy wrapped skinny arms around him and rested his chin atop Sam’s head.
Like all motel closets, this one had little space for two boys, even relatively small ones, filled as it already was with bags and their father’s coats and shirts. They did the best they could, though, and Dean was pressed back against the wall, legs bent out to the side to accommodate his six year old brother’s invasion of his space. Outside they could hear their father thumping around, and Sam caught snatches of muttered phrases, words he didn’t understand.
Sam’s skin felt cold. Something was trying to crawl up his throat. He whispered, “Dean?”
“Shh,” Dean repeated, hands tightening where they gripped Sam’s arm and shoulder. He shifted position so that he could press Sam’s head more firmly against his chest. Sam squeezed his eyes shut.
“No sounds, Sammy.”
Sam caught the inside of his cheek between his teeth and gave a tiny nod. Didn’t move even when the rattle and hiss of pouring salt filled the air, or when their Dad’s voice rumbled through the closet door.
“You boys stay inside until I tell you it’s safe. Dean, you look after your brother. Hear me?
Dean’s spine straightened, and his fingers curved slightly, nails digging into Sam’s skin.
“Yessir,” he said, voice strong.
“Sammy, you be good for your brother,” Dad went on, and Sam pushed himself away from Dean’s embrace to call, “Okay!” through the plywood door.
“I’ll be back soon’s I can.” He thumped the door, once, and then was gone. Sam heard the lock on the motel click.
Sam wasn’t sure how long they stayed there in the dark, silent and clinging to each other. His heart beat loudly, in his chest and in his head, in the space between himself and his brother. He might have fallen asleep because suddenly he was pulling away from his brother and the cool air washed across his face, raising goosebumps. He kind of needed to pee.
“Shh,” his brother murmured, “S’okay, Sammy. It’s gonna be okay.”
Sam swallowed and rubbed at his eyes.
“It’s dark,” he whispered, voice raspy.
“I know, kiddo.”
“Can we come out yet?”
“No.” Dean reached out and pulled Sam back in. “Not yet. It isn’t safe.”
“Why?” Sam squinted at the nearest bag, the misshapen bulk of it. “Why isn’t it safe?”
Dean shifted a little, as if uncomfortable.
“Because J-” and here Dean broke off, began again. “It….just isn’t safe, okay? Not yet.”
“When will Dad be back?”
There was no answer.
“Dean?”
“I don’t know. When it’s safe.”
“When will-”
“Sam! Sam, I don’t know, okay?” Dean took a deep, shuddering breath, ribs expanding. Then, very quietly, he said, “Sammy there’s…there’s something I need to tell you, okay?”
Sam allowed himself to be pushed back a bit farther. His eyes had adjusted to the dark, but he could barely make out Dean’s features. His brother’s face was a mess of shadows. Was nothing Sam could recognize.
“Sammy,” Dean began, voice low and serious so that there would be no way for Sam to misunderstand what he was saying as some kind of joke.
“Sammy. Monsters are real.”
Later, Dad came and let them out of the closet.
--
--
“Be still, son.”
Cold sweat. He was sweating and cold and a little sick inside. His hands opened and shut spasmodically where they gripped the edge of the couch and John growled a little and slapped at them.
“Hold still or this will take longer.”
Soldiers said ‘yessir.’ But right now he couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Knew what would happen if he opened his mouth.
His skin was cold but his legs, his feet still hurt. Every time John pushed the knife against the bottom of his foot he twitched. He didn’t mean to, was doing his damndest to keep still, but as it turned out even knowing it was coming didn’t help that much. The knife bit into his skin and he flinched. John was going to fucking kill him for all this moving around.
Why it had to be his feet he didn’t know. John was a very need-to-know kind of guy, and he definitely didn’t need to know why protection symbols were best carved into the feet. He’d already done John’s and the man hadn’t so much as twitched, which was really goddamned humiliating, but after all he’d been in a fucking war. Had probably had worse things done to his feet and the rest of him, than something this small and stupid
So he did his best. He really really did. The metal was grey and bright and thin and sliced neatly into the thick pads of his heel and toes, and cut almost gracefully through the more delicate skin of the arch. He bit his lip and fought the muscles in his legs as they twitched and struggled to contract, to yank away from John’s careful hold. The man hissed and drew back, briefly, before redoubling his iron grip and bending again to his task.
“Stop moving, Dean. We still have to do the other one.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed hard. The knife sliced into the pad of his big toe and traced carefully down.
He didn’t make a single goddamned sound.
______________________________
Woo! That's like 20+ pages (a little over 6000 words) worth of discarded material. Not including the stuff I couldn't find. HOLY CRAP.