kin & keeper; part 11.
Minersville, Utah-Flagstaff, Arizona
October 1999
Sam was gone for a week and five days before he managed to piece it all together.
Dean had never been so panicked in his life. He thought about it a lot, as he was frantically tearing their motel room apart looking for any clue as to where his little brother might be headed. Tried to imagine the last time Sam had sent him into such a frenzy of anxiety. Fort Douglas, probably. That shtriga, and that hadn't even been Sam's fault.
This time it was most certainly his fault. Sam vanished into thin air twelve days ago, and Dad was due back in two, and Dean had no idea what to do.
He'd taken clothes and his backpack and his knives, at least, so Dean could rule out kidnapping; on the morning when he woke to find Sam gone the salt lines were unbroken save for the gentlest nudge of the motel door opening, so he could rule out something supernatural spiriting him away. But beyond that he had nothing-no way of contacting him or tracking him down, no clue where he could have gone, no surefire way to contact Dad, and even if he'd had that, it was strictly a last resort. Dad was upstate but he'd be back soon and Dean was beginning to wear himself out with fretting and searching and trying to piece together where his little brother had gone.
He turned Sam's bags inside out fifteen or sixteen times, looking through every last bit of crumpled paper, every notebook, every paperback for a hint as to where he was headed; he sat down with a pen and paper and listed everything Sam had taken with him, trying to decide how far he could have gotten, but even that wasn't good enough, because there were a thousand different directions he could have taken off in, a thousand different ways to be out of Dean's reach within a day, let alone a week and five.
Dean called every contact in the Four Corners area and even tried a few on the western edges of Texas and Oklahoma but none of them had seen Sam or heard from Sam or knew anything about where he was. Dean scoured every restaurant and Gas-n-Sip and hole-in-the-wall for fifty miles up and down I-15 with Sam's sophomore yearbook photo clutched in his hands, asking everyone who would listen if they'd seen him hitchhiking, if he'd stopped for a soda, if he'd been anywhere, anywhere at all-but the people shook their heads, frowned in sympathy, turned their eyes away from him or wished him luck in finding the kid, suggested putting out an Amber Alert, suggested everything but anything that was helpful.
In Parowan he caught a glimpse of himself in the red, reflective metal of some farmer's dusty old Ford pickup and even in the harsh near-desert light he could see how pale and harried he looked. Like something out of a Dust Bowl documentary-not a twenty-year-old man.
In between the flutters of his worry he swore Sam's name like a curse word under his breath, turning their bags inside out for the millionth time.
It occurred to him more than once that Sam might be dead. Picked up on the side of the road like one of those unfortunates in a horror film who end up hitchhiking with a serial killer, bones left to bleach in the desert sun. He pushed that down as best he could; it never helped, when hunting things that stole their victims away, to imagine the victims as being dead; imagining them alive was what kept you going, gave you the push the find the thing.
Sam was alive, and he was going to find him, and then he was going to open the biggest can of whoop-ass on that boy that he'd ever seen.
A week and five days after Sam vanished Dean finally had the presence of mind to dig the old road atlas out of the Impala's glove compartment and finally, finally he found his clue-he searched every map for unfamiliar marks or dog-ears until he found one: the route from I-15 down to Flagstaff, Arizona was highlighted in Sam's favourite orange highlighter, and they'd never had reason to trace the route to Flagstaff before.
An hour later he was roaring down I-15 headed for UT-17, the sun going down out the passenger window, melting warm in the dense white sky.
The Autolodge Flagstaff had one light on in the entrance and Dean idled on the curb, watching it, running his fingers anxiously over the steering wheel.
It was well past midnight. He'd been to every motel he could find on this side of Flagstaff that offered rates low enough that Sam could pay them with his measly cash allowance. Even that was a long-shot, though, Dean thought-there was no telling where he was, what he was doing here, if he was even in a motel at all. But none felt right-none felt like Sam.
He'd been checking almost every alleyway and underpass for him, too, sick to his stomach with the thought that maybe Sam was sleeping on the streets, that maybe his stupid reckless idea to run off had gone badly and he was lost somewhere in this city with little money and no food-
Dean swallowed hard, rubbed his eyes. No. Sam was smart, and Sam was resourceful, and he was tall enough now to pass for eighteen, and there was no way he'd pass up a chance to use that to his advantage and get a room somewhere, and this Autolodge-though it didn't look any more promising than the last six motels-was cheap, no-questions-asked, and just like a hundred other motels they'd stayed in as kids.
Familiar and affordable. He had to at least look.
Dean pulled in to an empty spot and ducked his head when he went in to the front desk, where the single light was burning and a large, wrinkled woman in her sixties was playing solitaire on the yellowed counter-top. The low-slung lobby smelled sharply of bleach and age and everything was the same old, mildewed shade of brown.
The woman looked up, adjusted her glasses when he came inside.
“Can I help you?” she asked, in a tired voice as dry as the Arizona highway. She didn't look too pleased to have an unshaven harrowed-looking young man in her office at one in the morning, and Dean suspected that the subtle movement of her hand down beneath the desk was to reach for a gun in case she was being robbed.
But he didn't have time to play nice or allay her fears-in a few hours it'd be a week and six days and Dad would be back the next, if not sooner, and he had to get in and get out if nothing was here for him. He had to know if Sam was here, if he'd stood in this angry-smelling lobby and rented out one of those shitty rooms.
“Hi,” he said, lamely, approaching the desk too fast for the old woman, who scooted her chair back cautiously the closer he came. “Um. I got-separated from a friend of mine and he said to meet back here, but I forgot his room number-”
She blinked; she didn't seem convinced. Her name tag said Rhonda.
“I can't give out room numbers to just anybody,” she said bluntly. “'Specially not at one in the morning.”
Dean felt his heart sink and shutter, and paused for just a minute before reaching back to dig his wallet out of his pocket. Rhonda watched him with heavy-lidded blue-shadowed eyes.
He dropped a crumpled twenty on the counter in front of her.
“Please,” he said, painfully aware of how hard he was breathing, how desperate and dangerous he probably looked, but dammit, this was Sam-
Rhonda made a gravelly noise in her throat and hesitated for a minute before she reached up with pink lacquered nails and slid the twenty off the counter and under it.
She grunted, stood up wearily, moved towards the register behind the desk. “Name?” she said over her shoulder.
Dean closed his eyes. Shit. He hadn't thought about what alias Sam might use. He wouldn't have used his real name-Dad had ground it into their heads a long time ago that their names were private and rarely to be used with strangers-but there were a dozen names he could have used, and if he threw out the wrong one she'd think he was up to something nasty-
“James Taylor,” he blurted out, before he could even stop to think about it, and immediately he bit his tongue, hoping it was the right one by some miracle.
Sam loved that stupid song these days. Fire and Rain. Played it all the goddamn time, crackling out of the headphones of his Walkman. It stood to reason he might use Taylor's name-it was the kind of thing he'd do-
Rhonda ran her pink lacquered fingernail down the register, turned a page, and Dean bit his tongue harder, heart bumping in his chest.
“James Taylor. Room 15,” she said, finally, and turned around and waddled back to her chair and sat back down to her solitaire, and Dean thought he might cry right there with relief.
It was too dark to find the room that night.
Dean pulled the Impala across the lot, waited until Rhonda vanished behind the window of the front desk to turn her off and stretch out across the back seat. He could see the block where Room 15 would be if he nudged his head up the window, and somehow-despite how strange it felt to think that Sam was just across the lot, probably thinking how clever he was for getting away, or dreaming deep all alone, unaware of how close Dean was-somehow, he managed to fall asleep.
The sun was what woke him, sliding across his eyelids in shades of orange and red.
What made him come awake was the blurry movement across the lot when he opened his eyes.
Dean sat up, rubbed the sleep from them with his knuckles, and leaned forward.
A door had opened across the way-it was too distant to read the number punched in brass onto the wood, but it wasn't too distant to recognise the tall, skinny figure coming out into the cool morning.
Sam stood in the doorway a minute, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and his boxers, and Dean wasn't sure what he was waiting for until something else came out of the room. A dog, golden, long-haired, its tail low but wagging contentedly.
“He got a fucking dog,” Dean murmured under his breath.
Sam looked okay, even from this distance, and Dean felt his shoulders relaxing when that became apparent. He wasn't hurt, wasn't beaten, wasn't malnourished or high-in fact, he looked like he almost belonged here, padding barefoot alongside the dog down the pavement after he turned the key in the door of Room 15. He looked for all the world like a longtime resident who knew how to breathe this city's air, knew his way, and Dean almost hoped-as Sam disappeared behind a column and reappeared closer to the lobby, looked to be making for the sidewalk along the road-that he wouldn't turn his head and see the Impala in the lot.
Dean was going to have to drag him back to Minersville, but he looked-well, happy. He was walking with a straight back and an easy gait and he looked happy.
And Dean was angry, furious, that he'd put him through all this, but he didn't want to burst that bubble just yet.
He watched Sam vanish around the corner of the Autolodge, following the dog. He wasn't going to go far in his bare feet and his underwear like that. He'd come back soon enough.
Dean sat there a while, gathering himself, rubbing exhaustion from his eyes, thinking about how this was going to work.
Finally he popped the door of the Impala and felt for his lockpick in his jacket pocket.
When Sam came back, he'd be here.
Room 15 was a mess when he broke in. The coffee table in front of the couch was covered in pizza boxes, all of them cold and empty and stained in rings at the bottom with grease; one corner of the couch was stuffed full of empty Funyun bags, and the windowsill was lined with soda bottles behind the ugly yellowish curtains. When Dean swiped his hand across the coverlet of the bed it came away reddish with dog hair. He wrinkled his nose.
The room smelled of pizza dough and dog and boy, and a few of Sam's shorts were draped across the back of an armchair. His duffel bag was open on the floor and shirts scattered all around.
Out of vague curiosity Dean lifted up the pillow that was dented with the imprint of Sam's head. One of his knives was underneath, laid neatly next to a glossy new hardly-touched copy of Sports Illustrated.
“Really?” Dean mumbled, picking it up. Sam liked soccer, and that was about it, and the guy on the cover was clearly suited up for football. He was good-looking, though, Dean thought. Slim, high cheekbones and freckles, dusty short-cropped hair, bright green eyes-
Oh.
Dean dropped the magazine back on the mattress and wiped his fingers on his jeans. He had a feeling he knew what Sam was doing with that.
“Jesus.”
He stood there in the half-dark, the door still open an infinitesimal crack, sunlight streaming in through the dust, surrounded by Sam's mess. Postcards on the walls.
Quietly, he picked his way across the minefield of Sam's discarded boxers to close the door, and then he cleared the armchair of Sam's clothes and settled into it.
A clock ticked away somewhere.
A half-hour later the door to the motel clicked open and the big golden dog padded in, took a sharp left and went right up to Dean, still sitting in the chair. Dean pulled his legs back a little, frowning at it, and a moment later Sam's shadow entered into the light and right into the room.
He closed the door, scuffed off his feet on the carpet, apparently oblivious to Dean's presence. Then he stopped-put his feet down-pulled a little at the hem of his T-shirt.
“How'd you find me?” he said, looking at the curtains. Not at him.
“Well, Sammy,” Dean said, sitting up a little, “I'm a hunter. Finding is kind of what I do.”
Then Sam looked at him-turned those sharp, fox-like hazel eyes on him, flashing in the barest glare of the sun, and Dean felt pinned like a goddamn butterfly, just like every other time. But he took a deep breath despite the needle in his chest, stood up.
“Get your shit,” he said, firmly. “We're leaving.”
Sam blinked at him, face impassive. He didn't move; maybe he couldn't. Dean wasn't sure. At this point, he couldn't afford to care.
“Sam,” he said, sighing, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose, “don't fight me about this, just get your clothes and let's go. Please.”
“What about my dog?” Sam said, flatly. The dog came to him as if it could recognise its species in the cadence of his voice; it rubbed up against his leg and he reached down, almost involuntarily, to scratch at the fur behind its ears.
Dean felt a sharp twist of frustration. “You don't have a dog,” he snapped, “that's a stray, and it's staying here.”
Sam still didn't move. He stood there, stroking the dog's delicate silky ears with his long slim fingers.
He didn't seem upset, or even surprised. Mostly he just looked resigned, Dean thought, and he didn't know what to make of that, was increasingly finding it difficult to know what to make of Sam at all.
“Get your shit,” he said again, harder, flinty, feeling hot and angry in his hands and gut. “And meet me in the car. Now.”
This time Sam went-to, slowly leaving the dog in the middle of the room. He brushed past Dean, picked up his duffel, started gathering armfuls of clothes from the floor to shove inside. His face was carefully, precisely blank.
Dean left, leaving the door swinging open behind him. The Arizona sun was high, high and throbbing overhead.
Dean drove them out of Flagstaff, back up to US-89N, Sam sitting cold and far away in the passenger seat, quietly watching the scenery blur by.
They were an hour out of Cameron before Dean spoke.
“Why the hell would you do something like that, Sam?” he said.
Sam said nothing, but he turned his face back from the window, looked down at the floor between his knees.
Dean shook his head, finding his down-turned eyes in the rear-view mirror. All his anger was collecting like a bad taste in his throat.
“I thought you were dead,” he said, hoarsely. “For a while. You know that? Do you know how hard I looked for you up there? How many people I called asking if they'd seen you?”
“Does Dad know?” Sam asked, very softly.
“No,” Dean said, “and if we make it back up to Minersville tonight he won't have to. But that's not my point.”
Sam swallowed, thinned his lips out into that quiet line he had sometimes. His listening line, Dean called it, privately. Sam only ever made that face for him. Only respected him enough to shut up and hear.
“That? Taking off in the middle of the night-hell if I know how you even got down there-”
“Hitchhiked,” Sam said quietly.
“Whatever you did-that was reckless, it was stupid, it was irresponsible, it was selfish, Sam. I mean, do you get that?”
Sam didn't say anything. His lower lip trembled a moment in the rear-view mirror but then it settled and Dean pressed on, turning his eyes back to the rise of the road in front of him, bleached white in the afternoon light.
“You're always telling me about how you wanna get away and all that stuff, and I get it, I do, but-this ain't Vina, Sam, you're sixteen, you're old enough now to get yourself in real trouble with these ideas you get in your head. You could have gotten yourself killed and we'd never have known where you were, do you see that? I mean, I've barely slept, I've been so freaked-that's not fair, dude, it's just not.”
Silence fell, save for the rumble of the car beneath them.
They passed a turn-off out into the desert, a pale line carved into the sand and the rocky crags, disappearing into the plateaus. Vultures circled somewhere far out there.
“I'm sorry,” Sam said, so low Dean almost couldn't hear over the sound of the road. Sam didn't lift his head. He kept staring down into the footwell like some guilty penitent on the confessional kneeler. “I didn't-I didn't mean to make you worry.”
“Sure seemed like it.”
“I didn't,” Sam protested, voice going steely. He worked his jaw a minute, the nerve ticking at the hinge of his throat. “I didn't leave to freak you out.”
“Then why?” Dean laughed, a mirthless scoffing noise. “What the hell did you think you were gonna do? Live in that shit-hole Autolodge the rest of your life?”
Sam went quiet again, looked out the window again. His knee was jarring up and down the way it did when he was holding something back.
Dean looked at him in the mirror, past the glare of the sun.
“Sam,” he said, a little gentler.
“What.”
“Why'd you do that, then?”
Sam shrugged. Not sullenly-almost sadly, as if he were disappointed in himself somehow.
“Huh?” Dean watched him a still moment longer and then sighed; he couldn't keep anger in his veins too long when it came to Sam, and especially not when he was low like this, so he leaned sideways to gently shove against his shoulder. “Come on. Why?”
Sam sighed, settling forward in the seat; he rubbed the palm of his hand against his face, twitched his shoulders.
“I wanted to see if I could do it,” he said.
Dean blinked. A set of tourist-trap stalls whisked by them on the side of the road. The mountains and plateaus were baking in the sun. “Do what?”
He felt Sam's eyes turn on him, bore into him with their strange, delicate fire, and he kept his own firmly on the road, almost afraid to meet them.
“Get away.”
“Yeah, I figured that-”
“Get away from you.”
He didn't mean to pull off the road-it kind of happened on its own, as if the Impala herself were startled by those words. A minute later a cloud of dust was falling away from the windshield and they were stopped, idling, rocking a little on the desert wind.
Dean looked Sam up and down-his melancholy sloping body in the seat, hands fiddling together in his lap, eyes averted once again in shame.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he said. “Get away from-”
“That came out wrong,” Sam said, apologetically, wincing a little.
“No, seriously, Sam, what does that mean? What did I-”
“Nothing! Nothing.”
“Well, then what the hell-”
“You said it was a phase,” Sam said, too loud, over him, and then shut his mouth like a steel trap, and Dean felt his own shutting too.
He felt cold, suddenly, though the air outside was warm for autumn in the wastes. Felt as though something creeping, some uninvited passenger, had moved forward in the back seat and was hanging over the front, intruding on the space between them though it had been there, really, all along-
“What?” Dean said, feebly, because he already knew.
Sam shook his head, smiled, looked out past the windshield to the endless highway stretching out.
“You said it was a phase,” he said again, his voice cracking now, tortured with a total lack of humour. “In Vina.”
“The wanting to get away, yeah, I did-”
“You know what I'm talking about,” Sam said. He put his elbow up on the edge of the door, rested his head on his knuckles. He looked old, suddenly, old and very tired. When he sighed his whole body seemed to collapse. “You knew back then, too. You just never said it out loud.”
“What are you talking about?” But he knew, he knew; but he had to ask. Dean had the terrible feeling of having stumbled into a conversation he'd been expecting but hadn't even remotely prepared for.
“I wanted to see if I could do it,” Sam said. “Get away, make it on my own for a while. I was gonna come back,” he said, as if that somehow made it better, “I was gonna come back, I was gonna try three weeks and then come back-I just had to see if I could do it.”
“What? Do what, Sam-”
“If I could be-if I could be without you,” Sam said. His eyes looked wet. His voice was as broken-up now as the wrinkles in the plateaus past his head.
“Why the hell would that matter?”
The questions were coming out now without any thought behind them. Dean felt completely turned-around, tramping down the only path he saw because it was the only path there was.
“Do I seriously have to spell it out for you?” Sam asked. He was looking so hard at the horizon Dean thought it might burst into pieces.
“Sam,” Dean said.
It seemed to be enough.
“Your freak little brother's in love with you,” Sam said, all at once. He turned his heavy head to him, a sad, awful half-smile on his lips. “Happy?”