(no subject)
Angles
by whereupon
Sam/Jessica, Sam/ofc, R, very early season one, 3,453 words.
The path of least resistance.
This motel on the side of the coastal highway, the windows painted with salt and the cars in the dead-still parking lot quiet as the wrecks of ships buried deep in the ocean floor. On the road there is engine noise, bullet-fast motion, the occasional glimpse of headlights like the faint lamps of a deep-sea trawler.
In the other bed, Dean sleeps on, his face turned from the window, from Sam, one hand around the knife he keeps tucked beneath his pillow. Sam doesn't know when he started doing that, when he traded the gun on the nightstand for something sharper, more intimate. If there's a scar that might explain the change, if Sam knew where to look, or if Dean would only shrug it off. Hazards of the job, and none of Sam's business anymore.
Sam turns the lamp off, the murky fishtank light fading into angry shadows like ancient demons. He waits for his eyes to adjust, waits until he can make out the rise and fall of Dean's chest. This instant of panic, his world temporarily off-kilter, his heart thundering against his ribs. Dean's all he has left, and then yes, Dean is still alive, Dean is breathing.
Half-past midnight, the darkness settling in, and though Sam's eyes are burning, he doesn't think he'll be sleeping tonight. Dean's been asleep for an hour, but when Sam closes his eyes, he sees ghosts. Sees ghosts, and tastes ashes, as though the wind has carried that condemnation all the way here, hundreds of miles up the coast.
He doesn't remember when he last slept, slept for longer than an hour in the car, sunlight baking into his skin, when he woke to something other than Dean's hand slamming onto his shoulder or onto his chest, Dean telling him to wake up, dude, he's talking in his sleep, and that look in Dean's eyes like maybe he wasn't talking, maybe he was screaming, screaming about fire, telling Dean to get off of him, let go, he had to go back, Jessica, oh, Jess, baby, no.
Please.
He wonders how long it will take for him to go crazy, if he hasn't already. And the room is too small and he can't breathe, can't breathe for how loud it will sound, can't take a goddamn breath for fear of waking Dean, Dean who will lie to him, who'll say that it'll be okay, who'll say that he knows what Sam's going through, like he has any idea at all.
Dean was four years old when Mom died. Four years old, and he knows nothing. Sam is twenty-two and he can't do anything but remember, can't stop knowing, can't do anything but breathe and wish that Dean had driven faster, hadn't called him back to the car, wish that he'd never gone with Dean in the first place, wish that it had been him, that he'd been the one on the ceiling, that Jess had made it out, that Dean and Dad would just have one more reason to hunt this thing, one more reason in case they ever forgot.
Sam was never meant to come back to this life, after all.
In the car Dean plays the music that Sam's heard all his life, songs about life on the highway, about reckless cowboy life and about dying too goddamn soon, songs written and sung by people whose biggest concern was whether or not they were ever gonna get a record deal. In the car Dean punches Sam's shoulder and calls him Sammy, tosses him maps and candy bars and knowing glances. In the car Dean maps out Sam's future and drives him to these shitty motels, two beds and a backalley view. When they get out of the car, Dean buys him beer and whiskey in bad bars and looks at him like he's waiting for Sam to break, like Sam is made of nitric acid or nitroglycerin, and Dean's forgotten how to talk to him, if Dean ever knew to begin with. Dean recites his lines like he's playing a part, like he expects Sam to mourn the same way as Dad, as though he doesn't think there's any other way to grieve, and part of Sam wonders if that's what Dean wants, someone he can clean up after, take care of, now that Dad's not around.
Dean and his fucking savior complex and fuck him. Fuck him, and fuck Dad for doing that to him, for breaking them so irrevocably in their separate ways, Dean who will never grow up and Sam who's had his eyes fixed on the horizon for as long as he can remember.
So maybe Sam will give it to him after all. Maybe Sam will become the reason behind the gunshots and glass shards that make up his brother's life, if only because the alternative is unthinkable, seconds into minutes into hours and the knowledge that she is dead for every single one, hours into days into years, and he never, never wanted to become their father, but maybe now he will have no choice. Nothing he can do, nothing he could ever do, will be enough, will make it okay, will bring her back, but he will burn himself trying, make a pyre of himself until he stops noticing the heat and maybe then, maybe then, in the charcoal mess and ruin, as his father before him, he will find peace, he will be able to sleep.
And he has to breathe, finally, because it feels like he hasn't breathed for years, breathed out, expelled the ash and embers from his lungs, but surely if he does, it will wake Dean. So the door clicks closed behind him and the breath sounds more like a sob, the noise a dying man might make, or a man who has had everything taken from him and whose heart keeps beating, too stupid to know when to stop.
Brine-tainted air rushing into his lungs, burning as it does, and he thinks of immolation and blinks tears out of his eyes, and Dean does not come after him.
After a minute, Sam straightens. He can hear the muted crackling buzz of the pink neon motel sign, the hum of the pale yellow lamps hanging next to each of the doors, shrines to the dust-dry bodies of moths and flies crumpled at their bases.
Past that, he hears the surf, the ocean, and he swallows. The night's chilly but not cold; he'll be fine. He will not risk going back into the room, not even for a jacket, will not risk waking Dean, who will tell him to get some sleep, as though it's that easy, as though this is something he's chosen to do.
The rocky hill at the edge of the parking lot, loose stones slipping beneath his feet, and then the quiet flat of the sand, the cold wet sand bleached monochrome by the moon, heathen moon high over the water, refusing to leave him to the safety, the sanctity of the dark, the dark like a promise, somewhere deep and black to sink.
The dark is the world he left behind, but if he can find it again, maybe there will be a way. That blurred division of right and wrong, life and death, the sick hope for a kiss from a ghost something that turns his stomach even as he prays for it.
His fingernails are digging into his palms, leave crescents behind when he unclenches his fists. He scrubs his hands across his face, kneels to untie his shoes and takes a step forward. Water cold around his bare feet, cold, but not as cold as he'd expected. The lapping of the waves and the sand sinking beneath him, pulled out slowly with every inhalation of the sea. The hems of his jeans are wet, dragging heavily against his ankles, and he thinks of stones.
He closes his eyes against the way the moonlight stabs at them, against the blind stare of the moon, accusing and eternal.
He thinks about taking a step back, about sleeping up against the rocks. He thinks that maybe he could, out here by the ocean, where his thoughts are almost quiet.
He wonders what Dean would say in the morning, if Dean found him out here. If Dean would make some crack about hippies communing with nature, what the hell'd they put in the kool-aid at that school, huh, Sam, or if he would look at Sam in that awful way, like he would do anything to make Sam's world right again, like he would stab himself in the stomach and bleed to death, messy and violent, if only it would make Sam happy.
All Sam has ever wanted from him was for him to want more, to want more than this brutal outlaw life, the cruelty of its end, and sometimes Sam thinks that Dean is so incredibly stupid, so stupid not to realize that, and sometimes he wonders if Dean knows, if Dean's known that all along and only pretends not to because he doesn't think there's ever been a choice, and why the hell think about something you can't have, huh, Sammy?
Why the hell bother, man. Why the hell, indeed.
Sam lets out a breath. He should go back, should go back inside before Dean does wake up, and he opens his eyes, and he's not alone, not anymore. This woman who he would swear was not there before, but she is, now. This woman here suddenly, quietly, as though she came out of the sea, this woman standing a mere foot away from him, her eyes on the far-off bridge of water to sky.
"My brother and I are looking for a ghost," Sam says, because she's probably wondering what he's doing out here, and because they are, following stories about a drowned sailor who appears on the decks of vessels before they begin to go under. "Have you, uh. Have you seen it?"
She tilts her head as though she hears him, maybe in thought, but she doesn't answer. He bites his lip and he thinks that maybe that wasn't the right thing to say, not the right way to begin. This woman who happens to be on the beach is probably not curious about the tragedy that is his life, probably has no need to hear about the freakshow he tried to escape, would do best to turn away now, run far before he drags her down along with him.
"That was a, a joke," he says. "I'm not actually," and then he realizes that she's naked, and he swallows. He should get her a blanket, he thinks, should ask her if she's okay, maybe there was an accident, a boating accident, or maybe she's lost. Maybe she's ill, because her skin's a pale green, faintly iridescent, but that's only a trick of the light, the play of moonlight and shadows across the rocks and the water and her body. Her nipples are brown, he thinks, brown, not the bruised color of the seaweed that would wrap around his feet if he stepped further into the water, and then he thinks that he should probably look away.
He clears his throat, wonders if he should apologize, and she takes his hand, her fingers wrapping around his own. She's warm, warm as blood, and he'd expected her somehow to be as cold as the ocean, at least as the water around his feet. He opens his mouth and for a moment he could swear that they are underwater, that the moon is shimmering high overhead, filtered through the ocean, that he is breathing underwater, that he cannot breathe.
He thinks of riptides as his vision begins to sparkle, and then she kisses him, presses her saltwater mouth to his and parts his lips with her tongue.
And then the rocks press against his back, maybe the rocks of the hillside, of the bluff, or maybe some ancient, older rocks, rocks across which the drowned dead walk and over which their cries sigh with the wind. And they are on the shore again, they have never left the shore, and he is breathing, he can breathe again.
He looks down, meets her eyes. Her eyes, black and ancient, and he closes his own against the reel of the stars behind her and sees for an instant her likeness, her likeness lashed to the mast of a wooden ship, impossibly old.
This woman who has kissed dying boys and who has quieted the screams of men before they were dragged down, he thinks, and as she runs a hand down his chest, cups a hand behind his neck to draw him down, he kisses her once more, presses his mouth to hers. She's not at all sweet, this feral-edged thing slipping against him, baring her teeth, and then he breaks away, because she is not, she is not, she is not. Jess, or anyone, and this is insanity, drunken insanity, maybe he's finally cracked, and he says, a little hoarsely, "I'm sorry, I can't. I can't."
She looks up at him, waiting, and he wonders dazedly how he was going to finish that sentence. What it is he cannot do. He could lose himself, certainly, could lose himself here beneath the stars, washed out to sea. The salt of her skin, the saltwater slipping through her skin to mingle with the salt on his own face, the hot tears he did not realize he was crying, and how easy it is, then, to give himself over. Easier than breathing, than thinking, than anything.
The fit of her body against his, as he clutches her to him, the flex and push of her arms around his waist, her hands slipping to the small of his back, knotting hard. Pushing him back, the sand at his back, and he opens his mouth, opens his mouth to anything, opens his mouth to the taste of her skin, the scent of her neck like some faint metal, some unknowable sky, like rain in reverse, and then he is alone, he is on his knees.
He is on his knees, on his knees as he vomits whiskey and seawater onto the sand and shivers, his jeans soaked as the water laps around him. A caress, or laughter, or merely the ceaseless energy of the sea.
He lifts his head, slowly, painfully, because there is a next step, there is something he has to do, something he should do, something other than staying here, on his knees, waiting piteously for the tide. He should get up, should go all the way back up to the motel, and Dean is scrambling down the hill, is nearly falling, Dean is coming towards him, his eyes wide, his mouth moving, saying something that Sam can't hear.
Sam gets to his feet as Dean's hands cup his face, as Dean says, "Sammy, goddamn it, Sammy," over and over again, low and fast like he might not know he's saying it.
"I'm sorry," Sam says, because if he doesn't say something, Dean might go on forever, might forget how to say anything else. "I'm needed air, I didn't mean to, to, I was just." Realizing abruptly what it must look like, what it must look like to Dean who knows nothing, who didn't see any of it, arrived a moment too late. A moment too late to, what, watch his brother and that woman, that woman who is, who is gone now, whatever she is, whatever she was.
Dean's voice is pitched low with fear, is angry, is telling him that he can't do that, can't wander off like that. Dean, standing before him with his hair matted pillow-flat, standing there in his jeans and yesterday's wrinkled shirt, untied boots and that jacket, Dad's jacket, like a shield, like he dressed hastily, dressed while panicking and maybe cursing his brother, cursing Sam because it's easier to be angry than to be fearful and Dean's been scared of being left alone for as long as Sam can remember.
"Jesus, Sam, you're shivering, how long you been out here," Dean says accusingly. He shrugs out of the jacket, drapes it over Sam's shoulders because it's too small to fit him properly, and Sam could laugh, he really could.
"I'm okay," Sam says, and Dean narrows his eyes, Dean turns around and heads back up the bluff, walking slowly and looking over his shoulder every three steps to make sure that Sam is still following. Dean would have made a lousy Orpheus, Sam thinks, but he doesn't say it aloud. He's far too weary to speak, far too weary to explain it to Dean, in the event that Dean doesn't get it.
He looks back himself, once. From the safety of the parking lot, he looks down at the water, the flat surface of the ocean, and has the strangest sensation, something close to loss, to loneliness, as though this exhaustion setting in is taking the place of something he cannot remember. And then he turns back to Dean and they track sand across the pavement, sand across the floor of their motel room, where Dean says, "You don't go swimming in your clothes, you idiot," and Sam thinks gratefully that maybe that's all he'll say on the subject.
The cold sheets around him, the pillow frozen beneath his head, and he can't stop shivering. Dean sits on the edge of the other bed and watches him, Dean who will keep vigil, who maybe will not sleep again that night, but Sam will, finally, wrecked and sea-battered to the point of oblivion.
And Sam does.
In the morning, Dean looks tired, red-eyed and pale, looks vaguely hurt in a way that Sam can't name, as though it's something lurking just below Dean's skin, something wrapped tight around his bones, but if Sam looks too closely, all he can see are the details.
Sam isn't shivering anymore. He does not remember his dreams.
The sky is storm-tossed and soft with clouds. In the parking lot, standing next to the car while Dean rearranges their bags in the trunk, Sam thinks that he should have checked for footprints, should have seen where she'd come from, should have been sure. He should have, but already it seems unreal, a dream, a drunken hallucination, and he won't ask Dean.
Dean got there too late to see anything, anyway.
"What about the sailor's ghost?" Sam asks when they're pulling out of the motel, when Dean flicks on the turn signal, flashing left left left loudly, all around, jarring noise settling against Sam's head, pressed as it is against the window.
"It was probably nothing," Dean says. "I mean, it showed up, but it didn't kill anybody. Probably your run of the mill, uh."
"Psychopomp," Sam fills in automatically.
"What'd I do without you," Dean says. "Oh, yeah, I didn't go around sounding like a reject from Jeopardy, Mr. Oxford Goddamn Dictionary."
Sam could reply, could argue with him until Dean feels better about everything, about the night before, or until they're not speaking, but he doesn't feel like it, can't bring himself to make the effort. Instead, he looks at the dashboard clock and thinks, almost without meaning to, about Jessica, as always, as he might for the rest of his life.
If none of this had happened, he would probably still be in bed, in bed with Jess, asleep until she rolled over and looked at the clock and smacked his shoulder before leaning over to kiss him. She would say Your turn to make breakfast, wake me when it's done, but she would get out of bed anyway, would follow him out to the kitchen and lean against the doorjamb with her cup of coffee until he lifted her onto the counter and breakfast burned, breakfast went forgotten.
Dean mutters something under his breath, something Sam doesn't catch, turns off the turn signal and turns right instead, pulling out in front of somebody who honks loudly in return.
The ocean is grey outside Sam's window, a grey plateau that might as well be made of stone. He doesn't look at it, looks instead at the dashboard, the black groove of the dashboard, and at his knees.
"Banana pancakes," Dean says suddenly and Sam looks over at him. "How 'bout it, you want breakfast?"
"Yeah," Sam says, because he does not want to explain to Dean why he's not hungry, why maybe he'll never eat breakfast again. "Sure. Next town we pass, we should stop."
"Yeah," Dean says. "Next town."
--
end
by whereupon
Sam/Jessica, Sam/ofc, R, very early season one, 3,453 words.
The path of least resistance.
This motel on the side of the coastal highway, the windows painted with salt and the cars in the dead-still parking lot quiet as the wrecks of ships buried deep in the ocean floor. On the road there is engine noise, bullet-fast motion, the occasional glimpse of headlights like the faint lamps of a deep-sea trawler.
In the other bed, Dean sleeps on, his face turned from the window, from Sam, one hand around the knife he keeps tucked beneath his pillow. Sam doesn't know when he started doing that, when he traded the gun on the nightstand for something sharper, more intimate. If there's a scar that might explain the change, if Sam knew where to look, or if Dean would only shrug it off. Hazards of the job, and none of Sam's business anymore.
Sam turns the lamp off, the murky fishtank light fading into angry shadows like ancient demons. He waits for his eyes to adjust, waits until he can make out the rise and fall of Dean's chest. This instant of panic, his world temporarily off-kilter, his heart thundering against his ribs. Dean's all he has left, and then yes, Dean is still alive, Dean is breathing.
Half-past midnight, the darkness settling in, and though Sam's eyes are burning, he doesn't think he'll be sleeping tonight. Dean's been asleep for an hour, but when Sam closes his eyes, he sees ghosts. Sees ghosts, and tastes ashes, as though the wind has carried that condemnation all the way here, hundreds of miles up the coast.
He doesn't remember when he last slept, slept for longer than an hour in the car, sunlight baking into his skin, when he woke to something other than Dean's hand slamming onto his shoulder or onto his chest, Dean telling him to wake up, dude, he's talking in his sleep, and that look in Dean's eyes like maybe he wasn't talking, maybe he was screaming, screaming about fire, telling Dean to get off of him, let go, he had to go back, Jessica, oh, Jess, baby, no.
Please.
He wonders how long it will take for him to go crazy, if he hasn't already. And the room is too small and he can't breathe, can't breathe for how loud it will sound, can't take a goddamn breath for fear of waking Dean, Dean who will lie to him, who'll say that it'll be okay, who'll say that he knows what Sam's going through, like he has any idea at all.
Dean was four years old when Mom died. Four years old, and he knows nothing. Sam is twenty-two and he can't do anything but remember, can't stop knowing, can't do anything but breathe and wish that Dean had driven faster, hadn't called him back to the car, wish that he'd never gone with Dean in the first place, wish that it had been him, that he'd been the one on the ceiling, that Jess had made it out, that Dean and Dad would just have one more reason to hunt this thing, one more reason in case they ever forgot.
Sam was never meant to come back to this life, after all.
In the car Dean plays the music that Sam's heard all his life, songs about life on the highway, about reckless cowboy life and about dying too goddamn soon, songs written and sung by people whose biggest concern was whether or not they were ever gonna get a record deal. In the car Dean punches Sam's shoulder and calls him Sammy, tosses him maps and candy bars and knowing glances. In the car Dean maps out Sam's future and drives him to these shitty motels, two beds and a backalley view. When they get out of the car, Dean buys him beer and whiskey in bad bars and looks at him like he's waiting for Sam to break, like Sam is made of nitric acid or nitroglycerin, and Dean's forgotten how to talk to him, if Dean ever knew to begin with. Dean recites his lines like he's playing a part, like he expects Sam to mourn the same way as Dad, as though he doesn't think there's any other way to grieve, and part of Sam wonders if that's what Dean wants, someone he can clean up after, take care of, now that Dad's not around.
Dean and his fucking savior complex and fuck him. Fuck him, and fuck Dad for doing that to him, for breaking them so irrevocably in their separate ways, Dean who will never grow up and Sam who's had his eyes fixed on the horizon for as long as he can remember.
So maybe Sam will give it to him after all. Maybe Sam will become the reason behind the gunshots and glass shards that make up his brother's life, if only because the alternative is unthinkable, seconds into minutes into hours and the knowledge that she is dead for every single one, hours into days into years, and he never, never wanted to become their father, but maybe now he will have no choice. Nothing he can do, nothing he could ever do, will be enough, will make it okay, will bring her back, but he will burn himself trying, make a pyre of himself until he stops noticing the heat and maybe then, maybe then, in the charcoal mess and ruin, as his father before him, he will find peace, he will be able to sleep.
And he has to breathe, finally, because it feels like he hasn't breathed for years, breathed out, expelled the ash and embers from his lungs, but surely if he does, it will wake Dean. So the door clicks closed behind him and the breath sounds more like a sob, the noise a dying man might make, or a man who has had everything taken from him and whose heart keeps beating, too stupid to know when to stop.
Brine-tainted air rushing into his lungs, burning as it does, and he thinks of immolation and blinks tears out of his eyes, and Dean does not come after him.
After a minute, Sam straightens. He can hear the muted crackling buzz of the pink neon motel sign, the hum of the pale yellow lamps hanging next to each of the doors, shrines to the dust-dry bodies of moths and flies crumpled at their bases.
Past that, he hears the surf, the ocean, and he swallows. The night's chilly but not cold; he'll be fine. He will not risk going back into the room, not even for a jacket, will not risk waking Dean, who will tell him to get some sleep, as though it's that easy, as though this is something he's chosen to do.
The rocky hill at the edge of the parking lot, loose stones slipping beneath his feet, and then the quiet flat of the sand, the cold wet sand bleached monochrome by the moon, heathen moon high over the water, refusing to leave him to the safety, the sanctity of the dark, the dark like a promise, somewhere deep and black to sink.
The dark is the world he left behind, but if he can find it again, maybe there will be a way. That blurred division of right and wrong, life and death, the sick hope for a kiss from a ghost something that turns his stomach even as he prays for it.
His fingernails are digging into his palms, leave crescents behind when he unclenches his fists. He scrubs his hands across his face, kneels to untie his shoes and takes a step forward. Water cold around his bare feet, cold, but not as cold as he'd expected. The lapping of the waves and the sand sinking beneath him, pulled out slowly with every inhalation of the sea. The hems of his jeans are wet, dragging heavily against his ankles, and he thinks of stones.
He closes his eyes against the way the moonlight stabs at them, against the blind stare of the moon, accusing and eternal.
He thinks about taking a step back, about sleeping up against the rocks. He thinks that maybe he could, out here by the ocean, where his thoughts are almost quiet.
He wonders what Dean would say in the morning, if Dean found him out here. If Dean would make some crack about hippies communing with nature, what the hell'd they put in the kool-aid at that school, huh, Sam, or if he would look at Sam in that awful way, like he would do anything to make Sam's world right again, like he would stab himself in the stomach and bleed to death, messy and violent, if only it would make Sam happy.
All Sam has ever wanted from him was for him to want more, to want more than this brutal outlaw life, the cruelty of its end, and sometimes Sam thinks that Dean is so incredibly stupid, so stupid not to realize that, and sometimes he wonders if Dean knows, if Dean's known that all along and only pretends not to because he doesn't think there's ever been a choice, and why the hell think about something you can't have, huh, Sammy?
Why the hell bother, man. Why the hell, indeed.
Sam lets out a breath. He should go back, should go back inside before Dean does wake up, and he opens his eyes, and he's not alone, not anymore. This woman who he would swear was not there before, but she is, now. This woman here suddenly, quietly, as though she came out of the sea, this woman standing a mere foot away from him, her eyes on the far-off bridge of water to sky.
"My brother and I are looking for a ghost," Sam says, because she's probably wondering what he's doing out here, and because they are, following stories about a drowned sailor who appears on the decks of vessels before they begin to go under. "Have you, uh. Have you seen it?"
She tilts her head as though she hears him, maybe in thought, but she doesn't answer. He bites his lip and he thinks that maybe that wasn't the right thing to say, not the right way to begin. This woman who happens to be on the beach is probably not curious about the tragedy that is his life, probably has no need to hear about the freakshow he tried to escape, would do best to turn away now, run far before he drags her down along with him.
"That was a, a joke," he says. "I'm not actually," and then he realizes that she's naked, and he swallows. He should get her a blanket, he thinks, should ask her if she's okay, maybe there was an accident, a boating accident, or maybe she's lost. Maybe she's ill, because her skin's a pale green, faintly iridescent, but that's only a trick of the light, the play of moonlight and shadows across the rocks and the water and her body. Her nipples are brown, he thinks, brown, not the bruised color of the seaweed that would wrap around his feet if he stepped further into the water, and then he thinks that he should probably look away.
He clears his throat, wonders if he should apologize, and she takes his hand, her fingers wrapping around his own. She's warm, warm as blood, and he'd expected her somehow to be as cold as the ocean, at least as the water around his feet. He opens his mouth and for a moment he could swear that they are underwater, that the moon is shimmering high overhead, filtered through the ocean, that he is breathing underwater, that he cannot breathe.
He thinks of riptides as his vision begins to sparkle, and then she kisses him, presses her saltwater mouth to his and parts his lips with her tongue.
And then the rocks press against his back, maybe the rocks of the hillside, of the bluff, or maybe some ancient, older rocks, rocks across which the drowned dead walk and over which their cries sigh with the wind. And they are on the shore again, they have never left the shore, and he is breathing, he can breathe again.
He looks down, meets her eyes. Her eyes, black and ancient, and he closes his own against the reel of the stars behind her and sees for an instant her likeness, her likeness lashed to the mast of a wooden ship, impossibly old.
This woman who has kissed dying boys and who has quieted the screams of men before they were dragged down, he thinks, and as she runs a hand down his chest, cups a hand behind his neck to draw him down, he kisses her once more, presses his mouth to hers. She's not at all sweet, this feral-edged thing slipping against him, baring her teeth, and then he breaks away, because she is not, she is not, she is not. Jess, or anyone, and this is insanity, drunken insanity, maybe he's finally cracked, and he says, a little hoarsely, "I'm sorry, I can't. I can't."
She looks up at him, waiting, and he wonders dazedly how he was going to finish that sentence. What it is he cannot do. He could lose himself, certainly, could lose himself here beneath the stars, washed out to sea. The salt of her skin, the saltwater slipping through her skin to mingle with the salt on his own face, the hot tears he did not realize he was crying, and how easy it is, then, to give himself over. Easier than breathing, than thinking, than anything.
The fit of her body against his, as he clutches her to him, the flex and push of her arms around his waist, her hands slipping to the small of his back, knotting hard. Pushing him back, the sand at his back, and he opens his mouth, opens his mouth to anything, opens his mouth to the taste of her skin, the scent of her neck like some faint metal, some unknowable sky, like rain in reverse, and then he is alone, he is on his knees.
He is on his knees, on his knees as he vomits whiskey and seawater onto the sand and shivers, his jeans soaked as the water laps around him. A caress, or laughter, or merely the ceaseless energy of the sea.
He lifts his head, slowly, painfully, because there is a next step, there is something he has to do, something he should do, something other than staying here, on his knees, waiting piteously for the tide. He should get up, should go all the way back up to the motel, and Dean is scrambling down the hill, is nearly falling, Dean is coming towards him, his eyes wide, his mouth moving, saying something that Sam can't hear.
Sam gets to his feet as Dean's hands cup his face, as Dean says, "Sammy, goddamn it, Sammy," over and over again, low and fast like he might not know he's saying it.
"I'm sorry," Sam says, because if he doesn't say something, Dean might go on forever, might forget how to say anything else. "I'm needed air, I didn't mean to, to, I was just." Realizing abruptly what it must look like, what it must look like to Dean who knows nothing, who didn't see any of it, arrived a moment too late. A moment too late to, what, watch his brother and that woman, that woman who is, who is gone now, whatever she is, whatever she was.
Dean's voice is pitched low with fear, is angry, is telling him that he can't do that, can't wander off like that. Dean, standing before him with his hair matted pillow-flat, standing there in his jeans and yesterday's wrinkled shirt, untied boots and that jacket, Dad's jacket, like a shield, like he dressed hastily, dressed while panicking and maybe cursing his brother, cursing Sam because it's easier to be angry than to be fearful and Dean's been scared of being left alone for as long as Sam can remember.
"Jesus, Sam, you're shivering, how long you been out here," Dean says accusingly. He shrugs out of the jacket, drapes it over Sam's shoulders because it's too small to fit him properly, and Sam could laugh, he really could.
"I'm okay," Sam says, and Dean narrows his eyes, Dean turns around and heads back up the bluff, walking slowly and looking over his shoulder every three steps to make sure that Sam is still following. Dean would have made a lousy Orpheus, Sam thinks, but he doesn't say it aloud. He's far too weary to speak, far too weary to explain it to Dean, in the event that Dean doesn't get it.
He looks back himself, once. From the safety of the parking lot, he looks down at the water, the flat surface of the ocean, and has the strangest sensation, something close to loss, to loneliness, as though this exhaustion setting in is taking the place of something he cannot remember. And then he turns back to Dean and they track sand across the pavement, sand across the floor of their motel room, where Dean says, "You don't go swimming in your clothes, you idiot," and Sam thinks gratefully that maybe that's all he'll say on the subject.
The cold sheets around him, the pillow frozen beneath his head, and he can't stop shivering. Dean sits on the edge of the other bed and watches him, Dean who will keep vigil, who maybe will not sleep again that night, but Sam will, finally, wrecked and sea-battered to the point of oblivion.
And Sam does.
In the morning, Dean looks tired, red-eyed and pale, looks vaguely hurt in a way that Sam can't name, as though it's something lurking just below Dean's skin, something wrapped tight around his bones, but if Sam looks too closely, all he can see are the details.
Sam isn't shivering anymore. He does not remember his dreams.
The sky is storm-tossed and soft with clouds. In the parking lot, standing next to the car while Dean rearranges their bags in the trunk, Sam thinks that he should have checked for footprints, should have seen where she'd come from, should have been sure. He should have, but already it seems unreal, a dream, a drunken hallucination, and he won't ask Dean.
Dean got there too late to see anything, anyway.
"What about the sailor's ghost?" Sam asks when they're pulling out of the motel, when Dean flicks on the turn signal, flashing left left left loudly, all around, jarring noise settling against Sam's head, pressed as it is against the window.
"It was probably nothing," Dean says. "I mean, it showed up, but it didn't kill anybody. Probably your run of the mill, uh."
"Psychopomp," Sam fills in automatically.
"What'd I do without you," Dean says. "Oh, yeah, I didn't go around sounding like a reject from Jeopardy, Mr. Oxford Goddamn Dictionary."
Sam could reply, could argue with him until Dean feels better about everything, about the night before, or until they're not speaking, but he doesn't feel like it, can't bring himself to make the effort. Instead, he looks at the dashboard clock and thinks, almost without meaning to, about Jessica, as always, as he might for the rest of his life.
If none of this had happened, he would probably still be in bed, in bed with Jess, asleep until she rolled over and looked at the clock and smacked his shoulder before leaning over to kiss him. She would say Your turn to make breakfast, wake me when it's done, but she would get out of bed anyway, would follow him out to the kitchen and lean against the doorjamb with her cup of coffee until he lifted her onto the counter and breakfast burned, breakfast went forgotten.
Dean mutters something under his breath, something Sam doesn't catch, turns off the turn signal and turns right instead, pulling out in front of somebody who honks loudly in return.
The ocean is grey outside Sam's window, a grey plateau that might as well be made of stone. He doesn't look at it, looks instead at the dashboard, the black groove of the dashboard, and at his knees.
"Banana pancakes," Dean says suddenly and Sam looks over at him. "How 'bout it, you want breakfast?"
"Yeah," Sam says, because he does not want to explain to Dean why he's not hungry, why maybe he'll never eat breakfast again. "Sure. Next town we pass, we should stop."
"Yeah," Dean says. "Next town."
--
end