FIC: "Leaving Stars Hollow" - PG - Supernatural/Gilmore Girls
Title: Leaving Stars Hollow
Author: Lemur (lemur710@aol.com)
Fandom: Supernatural/Gilmore Girls
Type: AU
Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Dean Forester
Rating: PG
Warnings: Some minor spoilers for Supernatural, spoilers for about five seasons of Gilmore Girls. Also, AU.
Summary: How the Gilmore Girls’ Dean Forester became Supernatural’s Sam Winchester.
Author’s Notes: Jared Padalecki played Dean Forester pretty much right up until he began playing Sam Winchester. I had to do this. I couldn’t stop myself. Only hope it hasn’t been done before.
Leaving Stars Hollow
By Lemur
Everything hurt. Everything ached, and Dean Forester thrashed beneath his sheets. The nightmares got progressively worse, made the world feel hollow and unreal, made him want to destroy things, break things down, want anything-anything-but what he had right now.
He awoke to the sound of screaming, of violence, and then of silence, and strong hands gripped his heavy head. Body released like a cut puppet and he didn’t hit the ground. A familiar voice, a voice from a dream, said, “Sammy! Wake up, man. Sammy, it’s me. C’mon.” A touch of panic in the throat and he tried to look up.
“Dean,” he said, and fell into darkness.
When he awoke again, it was to aching limbs and a painful ebb in his brain. Bright lights overhead and the obvious sounds of a hospital. A monitor beeping somewhere lazily to his left, the whirr of machines and voices. Voices saying things like, “extreme dehydration” and “touch and go.” He tried to open his eyes, but they felt sealed shut. He wondered if maybe he’d gone blind.
“Could you tell me what happened?” Sympathetic female tones.
“He’d been out camping.” A cough, a cleared throat, a voice reedy with emotion. “He got lost. He said he got lost.”
“He’s lucky you found him when you did.”
“Yeah.”
He knew that voice. It settled in his bones and filled holes he didn’t know he had. A thousand car trips and he remembered.
Dean, his brother. His dad. His mother. Dead. Demons. Ghosts. Werewolves and black dogs. Lake monsters and violent thought-forms. Blood on black leather seats. Long nights of worry, terror. Alone. Alone. Alone. Dean, his brother. Dean.
A cough rattled in his throat. He sputtered, spit wetting his chin, body convulsing. Strong hands on his shoulder, his arm, fluttering against his back. Dean. His brother. Dean.
“Hey there, Sammy. You good?”
He nodded. He could feel his brain shift in the fluid in his head. He could feel the needle in his arm and the tape holding it there. He could feel himself, rickety and sick.
“I want to go home,” he rasped. He didn’t know if he meant a burnt-out house in Lawrence, Kansas; an idyllic two-story in Stars Hollow; or the back seat of an old Chevy. He didn’t even know if he had a home.
“Gotta get better first, Sammy.” The hands brushed against his forehead, pushing aside hair and wiping away cool sweat. “Feel free to hurry it up, too, man. Can’t wait around here all day for your lazy ass.” Casual, flippant. His brother. Dean. Scared to death.
“What happened?” he asked to the darkness behind his eyes.
“You went camping, remember?” Dean said, and the doctor was still in the room. “Last I heard from you was a week ago. You were supposed to be back Tuesday, so I loaded up the car...”
He drifted back to sleep, listening to the whirr of machines and the rumble of Dean’s pleasant fiction.
He woke to fingers scratching at the IV in his skin. His own fingers, his own arm. And he was Sam. Sam Winchester. He opened his eyes.
Dean. His brother. Dean. He looked older. A lot older than Sam remembered. His cheeks were ash and a stitched-up cut left the skin of his forehead red and puckered. Green eyes. Those looked the same. Sam couldn’t look away. Just the same.
“Does it hurt?” Dean asked. His hand pressed broadly, warmly, over the tubes and tape encircling Sam’s arm, stopping the scratching. Sam shook his head no even though it did hurt. It was a dull ache, only a little sharp around the edges and a burn through the center. It kept it real. It didn’t let this-Dean’s eyes and hands on him-become another dream.
“What happened?” Sam asked. His voice cracked when he used it. He looked down at his own skinny, undernourished body beneath the white hospital blanket; white with a rusty stain beneath Sam’s arm. He felt lost; more rooted, more at home in this alien body than he had been in the broad six-foot-five frame he knew he should have had, would have had, if not for the-
“Djinn,” Dean said. “It was a djinn. They, uh, let you live in this dream world-your perfect world, I guess-while they drink you dry. They live off people for years, sometimes.” He looked weatherworn and beaten down in the unforgiving overhead light. Dark circles under sharp eyes, and pale skin. “You left when you were 16. Once we figured out you hadn’t just run away, Dad and me, we looked for you for-for years, Sammy. We didn’t know where you were or what had gotten you. We went everywhere, followed any lead, any story ‘bout people being taken or-” A bit of wetness entered Dean’s voice and he coughed, wiped his eyes as if he resented their weakness. He tugged the blanket more firmly across Sam’s narrow chest. “Dad died about a year ago. A wendigo, of all things. In Colorado. I picked up the trail of the djinn; there was this girl missing...anyway. I found you.” He smiled at Sam then, an expression that would have seemed bold or casual if it weren’t for the glimmer of tears.
So little of his real world had made it into his fantasy, and nothing of Dad or Dean. Sam felt a pang of guilt for having forgotten them, for having rejected them, for letting his perfect world be one without them.
But he also remembered being 16 years old and hating this, wondering why they couldn’t just find a house and stay. Hating how obsessed and stubborn Dad and Dean could be. Thinking the old picture of them-husband, wife, child and baby-was how life was supposed to be. Loving school and the smiles of teachers who called him a smart kid, the dark-haired girl in his Biology class who read Ayn Rand and was too shy to accept Sam’s 50¢ pink carnation on Valentine’s Day.
He remembered packing his duffle bag, stealing a few wrinkled twenties from the emergency stash, and walking away, refusing to spend another night alone in a rat hole motel while Dad and Dean dealt with a poltergeist. Unable to spend another night worrying about Dean, trying to understand their tangles. He’d planned to go back to the place they’d been living in Ohio the past few months, finish out the school year. He remembered getting as far as the bus station, dark and shady on the bad side of a bad town. He remembered sitting, waiting for his bus, imagining everything his life wasn’t that it should have been.
Then, the Forester family moved to Stars Hollow and their only son found himself a girl.
Dean Forester didn’t think about his childhood in Chicago once he’d come to Connecticut; remembered it only as some vague, dark, scary place where he’d never felt safe, never felt like he’d had a home; and he never talked about it.
In Stars Hollow, his house had a picket fence. His mother had dinner ready on the table by 6:30 every night. No older brother; no brother at all-only a little sister who looked up to him, a father who helped him with math homework, and a mother with short, dark hair who baked biscuits from scratch and still wanted to tuck him in at night.
It made sense, he told himself, but the guilt made a knot in his gut. It made sense. He’d created a world so provincial that the biggest drama was who married whom, who dated whom, and the greatest evil faced was a town councilman on a power trip.
He’d come alive when the pretty blue-eyed girl passed him. He’d seen her in another life, dark hair a cascade around her pale face as she bent her head to a book. Perfect, beautiful and smart. Naïve and shy, sweet, strong-willed and strong-minded. And he had the courage to speak to her now, bring her into his sunny life, meet his mother, his father, his sister.
“Hey, Sammy, stay with me, man. You gotta eat something. C’mon, sit up.”
Dean helped him sit up toward a tray of broth and lemon jello and Sam slumped against him, didn’t let him take his arm back, folded himself into it. He collapsed against Dean and sighed when the arm around his back tugged him nearer. Tears pricked behind his eyes, a burn of pain at the back of his throat because nothing ever in his life, that life-not his wedding, not any moment with Rory-had felt as right as this. Nothing had ever fit like it should until now. He sucked in a rattling, sobbing breath.
“What did you see, Sammy?” Dean’s soft breath stirred Sam’s too-long hair.
Sam heaved in another lungful of air. “I couldn’t make it work. Nothing I did-” Images and moments turned dizzily in his head-holding his little sister’s hand as she pulled him toward a glittering carnival; towering over, getting right up in the face of some asshole punk with a leather jacket and mocking smile; making love to a beautiful girl and wanting it, just wanting it to be good, even when everything was bad-all of it seemed like a series of false starts, a continual effort to find the path that felt right under his feet, but none ever did. Rory didn’t understand-couldn’t understand-how much he’d felt it when he’d said, “What am I doing here? I don’t belong here.”
Sam breathed in again and Dean smelled of motor oil. Another sob ratcheted in Sam’s throat. Building that car for Rory. Maybe he’d been wrong about which part of it had made him feel so happy. Maybe he’d been wrong about why he’d felt so in love.
“It’s okay, man.” Sam felt Dean press a kiss to his head. His voice sounded thick and water-logged. “We got all the time in the world now.” Sam cried against his brother, feeling weak, feeling angry, feeling so desperately relieved and happy his body couldn’t contain it.
After a few moments; though it could have been an hour, Sam didn’t know anymore; his head rested heavily on Dean’s shoulder and limbs weighted, darkness teasing at the edges of his mind. His face was stiff with cried salt, but dry.
“Here, Sammy, sit up a little,” Dean said, easing Sam off his shoulder. “We gotta get some food in you. If you want to leave, you gotta eat.” He adjusted the blanket over Sam’s lap and picked up the flimsy spoon. Sam obediently opened his mouth, swallowing broth he knew was little more than water but that burst with flavor on his starved tongue.
A stock boy in a grocery store and still, he’d felt a compulsive need to stay in shape. He’d run, done sit-ups and push-ups until he was larger than any boy in his grade, when he was already taller than all of them. Larger, stronger, faster, more agile than he needed to be as a construction worker, as a 19-year-old husband in a failing marriage, as a young man in safe, small Stars Hollow, Connecticut, where nothing changed but the seasons. Some drive inside of him telling him to keep moving, never stop, always be ready, even if it never told him ready for what.
Lindsey had felt right, had fit some weird sense memory, fit some unknown shape Dean Forester had behind his eyes with her soft blonde hair and cloudless smile. But he hadn’t been able to live the life he’d thought he wanted, with Lindsey, with a loving girl who wanted to be his wife, make him pot roast and bear his children. Even in a world of his own making, he couldn’t make that work.
He’d been trapped in Stars Hollow. Made worse because he couldn’t figure out why. In a world of such brightness and sun, there should be no limitations and yet, at 21 years old, he’d been stumped, corralled by a lack of education, a lack of money, a town turned on him because of his infidelity. He saw before him a life stretching on endlessly, full of nothing of worth, nothing of import; a life of hauling furniture and fixing shaky staircases. A life that would affect no one. Energy had burned under his skin and the violent flame of unfairness because he could sense it: He was meant for more than this. He was bigger than this town, bigger than the picture-perfect gazebos and charming, rustic inns. He was supposed to be above and outside this, looking in. Above and outside this. People were supposed to know his name, even if “Dean Forester” didn’t sound right on his tongue.
“Dean,” Sam whispered. He pushed away a spoonful of slimy gelatin. “I want to leave.” He lifted his eyes to his big brother’s, though it took too much strength, though it hurt to do in every way. “Get me out of here.”
Within the hour, Dean settled Sam on the back seat of the Impala, whatever alias he’d been admitted under dodging the forms and the bills. “I’ll drive us someplace we can lay low a few days,” Dean said, “‘Cause we gotta get you food, okay, Sammy? You gotta eat.” His hand ghosted over Sam’s slender cheek. “Go ahead and spread out back here.”
Sam lay down, his body nestling into the warmth on the leather seats where he’d grown up, where he’d spent at least part of every day since before he could remember, in either life. The Impala started, a grumbling, rumbling vibration under him and he was six again, 16 again. This boy in this car, these smells and sounds, this life and he didn’t know why his world with the djinn had been so different. He loved this car. He loved his family; his mother, his brother. His father, he’d lost and never-another parent-and he didn’t get to say goodbye. A tear slid from his eye and hit the black leather; their tears, their sweat, their blood-Winchesters.
He’d blamed his father, blamed his brother, but it’d all been the wrong blame. None of them should have ever been here. It should have been melted ice cream and spilled sodas on these seats; should have been summer days spent washing the car as punishment for staying out past curfew. Their lives should never have brought so much blood to this creased black leather.
In Stars Hollow, he’d rebuilt old cars. His hands had felt steady and sure on tools he could barely identify in this world, in the reality he’d been born to. He’d worn a leather jacket and had trouble getting his mind to focus on books for more than a few minutes at a time. A smart kid, but not with books, not with tests and organized learning; not with scholarships and degrees and universities.
“My name was Dean,” he said into the loud quiet of the car moving down the road.
“What?” Dean asked. He glanced in the rear view mirror. Sam watched his eyes greedily even when they returned to the road.
“In the djinn’s world,” Sam said, “my name was Dean.”
“Oh.” Dean’s eyes flickered to the mirror again, but Sam knew he couldn’t see him so low in the back seat. “That’s what you were saying.”
“What was I saying?”
Dean swallowed, his jaw working tightly. “When I found you. You were just saying ‘Dean’ over and over.”
Sam’s body rocked with the motion of the car. He watched Dean, the side of his face, the line of his nose, the dusting of stubble on his cheeks, the angle of his jaw, the motion of his throat, until his own eyelids grew too heavy to keep open and his heart ached too much to endure. He slept peacefully in the rocking car, slept well for the first time since he was 16 years old. He thought of old cars and leather jackets, doting father and doting mother, sweet-faced little sister, no brother, and he wondered, with his last conscious thought, whose life he’d been trying to live.
Author: Lemur (lemur710@aol.com)
Fandom: Supernatural/Gilmore Girls
Type: AU
Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Dean Forester
Rating: PG
Warnings: Some minor spoilers for Supernatural, spoilers for about five seasons of Gilmore Girls. Also, AU.
Summary: How the Gilmore Girls’ Dean Forester became Supernatural’s Sam Winchester.
Author’s Notes: Jared Padalecki played Dean Forester pretty much right up until he began playing Sam Winchester. I had to do this. I couldn’t stop myself. Only hope it hasn’t been done before.
Leaving Stars Hollow
By Lemur
Everything hurt. Everything ached, and Dean Forester thrashed beneath his sheets. The nightmares got progressively worse, made the world feel hollow and unreal, made him want to destroy things, break things down, want anything-anything-but what he had right now.
He awoke to the sound of screaming, of violence, and then of silence, and strong hands gripped his heavy head. Body released like a cut puppet and he didn’t hit the ground. A familiar voice, a voice from a dream, said, “Sammy! Wake up, man. Sammy, it’s me. C’mon.” A touch of panic in the throat and he tried to look up.
“Dean,” he said, and fell into darkness.
When he awoke again, it was to aching limbs and a painful ebb in his brain. Bright lights overhead and the obvious sounds of a hospital. A monitor beeping somewhere lazily to his left, the whirr of machines and voices. Voices saying things like, “extreme dehydration” and “touch and go.” He tried to open his eyes, but they felt sealed shut. He wondered if maybe he’d gone blind.
“Could you tell me what happened?” Sympathetic female tones.
“He’d been out camping.” A cough, a cleared throat, a voice reedy with emotion. “He got lost. He said he got lost.”
“He’s lucky you found him when you did.”
“Yeah.”
He knew that voice. It settled in his bones and filled holes he didn’t know he had. A thousand car trips and he remembered.
Dean, his brother. His dad. His mother. Dead. Demons. Ghosts. Werewolves and black dogs. Lake monsters and violent thought-forms. Blood on black leather seats. Long nights of worry, terror. Alone. Alone. Alone. Dean, his brother. Dean.
A cough rattled in his throat. He sputtered, spit wetting his chin, body convulsing. Strong hands on his shoulder, his arm, fluttering against his back. Dean. His brother. Dean.
“Hey there, Sammy. You good?”
He nodded. He could feel his brain shift in the fluid in his head. He could feel the needle in his arm and the tape holding it there. He could feel himself, rickety and sick.
“I want to go home,” he rasped. He didn’t know if he meant a burnt-out house in Lawrence, Kansas; an idyllic two-story in Stars Hollow; or the back seat of an old Chevy. He didn’t even know if he had a home.
“Gotta get better first, Sammy.” The hands brushed against his forehead, pushing aside hair and wiping away cool sweat. “Feel free to hurry it up, too, man. Can’t wait around here all day for your lazy ass.” Casual, flippant. His brother. Dean. Scared to death.
“What happened?” he asked to the darkness behind his eyes.
“You went camping, remember?” Dean said, and the doctor was still in the room. “Last I heard from you was a week ago. You were supposed to be back Tuesday, so I loaded up the car...”
He drifted back to sleep, listening to the whirr of machines and the rumble of Dean’s pleasant fiction.
He woke to fingers scratching at the IV in his skin. His own fingers, his own arm. And he was Sam. Sam Winchester. He opened his eyes.
Dean. His brother. Dean. He looked older. A lot older than Sam remembered. His cheeks were ash and a stitched-up cut left the skin of his forehead red and puckered. Green eyes. Those looked the same. Sam couldn’t look away. Just the same.
“Does it hurt?” Dean asked. His hand pressed broadly, warmly, over the tubes and tape encircling Sam’s arm, stopping the scratching. Sam shook his head no even though it did hurt. It was a dull ache, only a little sharp around the edges and a burn through the center. It kept it real. It didn’t let this-Dean’s eyes and hands on him-become another dream.
“What happened?” Sam asked. His voice cracked when he used it. He looked down at his own skinny, undernourished body beneath the white hospital blanket; white with a rusty stain beneath Sam’s arm. He felt lost; more rooted, more at home in this alien body than he had been in the broad six-foot-five frame he knew he should have had, would have had, if not for the-
“Djinn,” Dean said. “It was a djinn. They, uh, let you live in this dream world-your perfect world, I guess-while they drink you dry. They live off people for years, sometimes.” He looked weatherworn and beaten down in the unforgiving overhead light. Dark circles under sharp eyes, and pale skin. “You left when you were 16. Once we figured out you hadn’t just run away, Dad and me, we looked for you for-for years, Sammy. We didn’t know where you were or what had gotten you. We went everywhere, followed any lead, any story ‘bout people being taken or-” A bit of wetness entered Dean’s voice and he coughed, wiped his eyes as if he resented their weakness. He tugged the blanket more firmly across Sam’s narrow chest. “Dad died about a year ago. A wendigo, of all things. In Colorado. I picked up the trail of the djinn; there was this girl missing...anyway. I found you.” He smiled at Sam then, an expression that would have seemed bold or casual if it weren’t for the glimmer of tears.
So little of his real world had made it into his fantasy, and nothing of Dad or Dean. Sam felt a pang of guilt for having forgotten them, for having rejected them, for letting his perfect world be one without them.
But he also remembered being 16 years old and hating this, wondering why they couldn’t just find a house and stay. Hating how obsessed and stubborn Dad and Dean could be. Thinking the old picture of them-husband, wife, child and baby-was how life was supposed to be. Loving school and the smiles of teachers who called him a smart kid, the dark-haired girl in his Biology class who read Ayn Rand and was too shy to accept Sam’s 50¢ pink carnation on Valentine’s Day.
He remembered packing his duffle bag, stealing a few wrinkled twenties from the emergency stash, and walking away, refusing to spend another night alone in a rat hole motel while Dad and Dean dealt with a poltergeist. Unable to spend another night worrying about Dean, trying to understand their tangles. He’d planned to go back to the place they’d been living in Ohio the past few months, finish out the school year. He remembered getting as far as the bus station, dark and shady on the bad side of a bad town. He remembered sitting, waiting for his bus, imagining everything his life wasn’t that it should have been.
Then, the Forester family moved to Stars Hollow and their only son found himself a girl.
Dean Forester didn’t think about his childhood in Chicago once he’d come to Connecticut; remembered it only as some vague, dark, scary place where he’d never felt safe, never felt like he’d had a home; and he never talked about it.
In Stars Hollow, his house had a picket fence. His mother had dinner ready on the table by 6:30 every night. No older brother; no brother at all-only a little sister who looked up to him, a father who helped him with math homework, and a mother with short, dark hair who baked biscuits from scratch and still wanted to tuck him in at night.
It made sense, he told himself, but the guilt made a knot in his gut. It made sense. He’d created a world so provincial that the biggest drama was who married whom, who dated whom, and the greatest evil faced was a town councilman on a power trip.
He’d come alive when the pretty blue-eyed girl passed him. He’d seen her in another life, dark hair a cascade around her pale face as she bent her head to a book. Perfect, beautiful and smart. Naïve and shy, sweet, strong-willed and strong-minded. And he had the courage to speak to her now, bring her into his sunny life, meet his mother, his father, his sister.
“Hey, Sammy, stay with me, man. You gotta eat something. C’mon, sit up.”
Dean helped him sit up toward a tray of broth and lemon jello and Sam slumped against him, didn’t let him take his arm back, folded himself into it. He collapsed against Dean and sighed when the arm around his back tugged him nearer. Tears pricked behind his eyes, a burn of pain at the back of his throat because nothing ever in his life, that life-not his wedding, not any moment with Rory-had felt as right as this. Nothing had ever fit like it should until now. He sucked in a rattling, sobbing breath.
“What did you see, Sammy?” Dean’s soft breath stirred Sam’s too-long hair.
Sam heaved in another lungful of air. “I couldn’t make it work. Nothing I did-” Images and moments turned dizzily in his head-holding his little sister’s hand as she pulled him toward a glittering carnival; towering over, getting right up in the face of some asshole punk with a leather jacket and mocking smile; making love to a beautiful girl and wanting it, just wanting it to be good, even when everything was bad-all of it seemed like a series of false starts, a continual effort to find the path that felt right under his feet, but none ever did. Rory didn’t understand-couldn’t understand-how much he’d felt it when he’d said, “What am I doing here? I don’t belong here.”
Sam breathed in again and Dean smelled of motor oil. Another sob ratcheted in Sam’s throat. Building that car for Rory. Maybe he’d been wrong about which part of it had made him feel so happy. Maybe he’d been wrong about why he’d felt so in love.
“It’s okay, man.” Sam felt Dean press a kiss to his head. His voice sounded thick and water-logged. “We got all the time in the world now.” Sam cried against his brother, feeling weak, feeling angry, feeling so desperately relieved and happy his body couldn’t contain it.
After a few moments; though it could have been an hour, Sam didn’t know anymore; his head rested heavily on Dean’s shoulder and limbs weighted, darkness teasing at the edges of his mind. His face was stiff with cried salt, but dry.
“Here, Sammy, sit up a little,” Dean said, easing Sam off his shoulder. “We gotta get some food in you. If you want to leave, you gotta eat.” He adjusted the blanket over Sam’s lap and picked up the flimsy spoon. Sam obediently opened his mouth, swallowing broth he knew was little more than water but that burst with flavor on his starved tongue.
A stock boy in a grocery store and still, he’d felt a compulsive need to stay in shape. He’d run, done sit-ups and push-ups until he was larger than any boy in his grade, when he was already taller than all of them. Larger, stronger, faster, more agile than he needed to be as a construction worker, as a 19-year-old husband in a failing marriage, as a young man in safe, small Stars Hollow, Connecticut, where nothing changed but the seasons. Some drive inside of him telling him to keep moving, never stop, always be ready, even if it never told him ready for what.
Lindsey had felt right, had fit some weird sense memory, fit some unknown shape Dean Forester had behind his eyes with her soft blonde hair and cloudless smile. But he hadn’t been able to live the life he’d thought he wanted, with Lindsey, with a loving girl who wanted to be his wife, make him pot roast and bear his children. Even in a world of his own making, he couldn’t make that work.
He’d been trapped in Stars Hollow. Made worse because he couldn’t figure out why. In a world of such brightness and sun, there should be no limitations and yet, at 21 years old, he’d been stumped, corralled by a lack of education, a lack of money, a town turned on him because of his infidelity. He saw before him a life stretching on endlessly, full of nothing of worth, nothing of import; a life of hauling furniture and fixing shaky staircases. A life that would affect no one. Energy had burned under his skin and the violent flame of unfairness because he could sense it: He was meant for more than this. He was bigger than this town, bigger than the picture-perfect gazebos and charming, rustic inns. He was supposed to be above and outside this, looking in. Above and outside this. People were supposed to know his name, even if “Dean Forester” didn’t sound right on his tongue.
“Dean,” Sam whispered. He pushed away a spoonful of slimy gelatin. “I want to leave.” He lifted his eyes to his big brother’s, though it took too much strength, though it hurt to do in every way. “Get me out of here.”
Within the hour, Dean settled Sam on the back seat of the Impala, whatever alias he’d been admitted under dodging the forms and the bills. “I’ll drive us someplace we can lay low a few days,” Dean said, “‘Cause we gotta get you food, okay, Sammy? You gotta eat.” His hand ghosted over Sam’s slender cheek. “Go ahead and spread out back here.”
Sam lay down, his body nestling into the warmth on the leather seats where he’d grown up, where he’d spent at least part of every day since before he could remember, in either life. The Impala started, a grumbling, rumbling vibration under him and he was six again, 16 again. This boy in this car, these smells and sounds, this life and he didn’t know why his world with the djinn had been so different. He loved this car. He loved his family; his mother, his brother. His father, he’d lost and never-another parent-and he didn’t get to say goodbye. A tear slid from his eye and hit the black leather; their tears, their sweat, their blood-Winchesters.
He’d blamed his father, blamed his brother, but it’d all been the wrong blame. None of them should have ever been here. It should have been melted ice cream and spilled sodas on these seats; should have been summer days spent washing the car as punishment for staying out past curfew. Their lives should never have brought so much blood to this creased black leather.
In Stars Hollow, he’d rebuilt old cars. His hands had felt steady and sure on tools he could barely identify in this world, in the reality he’d been born to. He’d worn a leather jacket and had trouble getting his mind to focus on books for more than a few minutes at a time. A smart kid, but not with books, not with tests and organized learning; not with scholarships and degrees and universities.
“My name was Dean,” he said into the loud quiet of the car moving down the road.
“What?” Dean asked. He glanced in the rear view mirror. Sam watched his eyes greedily even when they returned to the road.
“In the djinn’s world,” Sam said, “my name was Dean.”
“Oh.” Dean’s eyes flickered to the mirror again, but Sam knew he couldn’t see him so low in the back seat. “That’s what you were saying.”
“What was I saying?”
Dean swallowed, his jaw working tightly. “When I found you. You were just saying ‘Dean’ over and over.”
Sam’s body rocked with the motion of the car. He watched Dean, the side of his face, the line of his nose, the dusting of stubble on his cheeks, the angle of his jaw, the motion of his throat, until his own eyelids grew too heavy to keep open and his heart ached too much to endure. He slept peacefully in the rocking car, slept well for the first time since he was 16 years old. He thought of old cars and leather jackets, doting father and doting mother, sweet-faced little sister, no brother, and he wondered, with his last conscious thought, whose life he’d been trying to live.