four months from spring training, i find myself in other fandoms
heyo! supernatural fic, kids. typically i just post this stuff on the supernatural comms, but this punk is too long (who's surprised! nobody!), so i'm fake-cutting it over here. i don't mean to offend your eyes with things that aren't baseball-related, but it must be done.
American Myth
By Candle Beck
Sam is leaning against the car watching the numbers on the gas pump fly upwards, sunstroked and a little hungover with his hair in front of his eyes and his mouth cracked in a constant half-yawn, and Dean, coming back from the store with an armful of Red Bull and beef jerky, says sharply across the bleached cement, “Sam, will you get your ass off my car when you’ve got a goddamn knife in your back pocket,” and Sam bitches back at him on autopilot, and suddenly they’re knee fucking deep into another fight.
This one lasts into Oklahoma, where Sam gets exhausted by the stare of the land, the vast brown reach of nothing in all directions, and lapses into a sullen silence, forfeiting the last word. This is how most of their fights end, with Dean believing that he’s won.
Sam’s getting pretty good and goddamn sick of it, actually, like there’s a crank in the small of his back that tightens every inch of his skin, and Dean keeps turning it with every smirk and every idle insult and every time he calls him Sammy. Dean knows what he’s doing, always watching Sam for his reactions, sucking on the inside of his cheek so that a small hollow forms. Sam won’t give him the satisfaction, staring out the window so that all Dean can see is the line of Sam’s neck, finger-twisted hair half-obscuring his ear, a piece of his cheek.
Small victory, Sam thinks, feeling sick. He lets his forehead rest on the window, curling his shoulder up and closing his eyes. The heat outside bleeds through, a flat red circle taking shape on Sam’s forehead, a bead of sweat racing down the back of his neck. These stupid bickering fights seem to mean more out here in the middle of nowhere; they acquire portentous resonance and depth, because it kinda feels like the world has ended, like Sam and Dean are the only history left, and they’re wasting it on this.
“Sam?” Dean says.
Sam opens his eyes, brown brown brown and the narrow chewed-up strip of gray asphalt at the shoulder, an unbroken white line. He doesn’t move.
“Sam, are you awake, man?”
No, Sam says to the imaginary Dean who lives in his head and occasionally shuts his mouth long enough for Sam to get a word in. I’m not awake, I don’t want to talk to you. Go away.
Dean exhales shortly, and sniffs hard. Sam can hear the faint sound of his fingers rattling on the wheel, the more substantial thwack of his ring. A green highway sign leaps past, twelve miles to gas food lodging, and Sam imagines that they will stop to eat and Dean will take the pickle off Sam’s plate without asking, that shit-eater grin of his, and Sam will want to stab the fork through his hand. Sam doesn’t even like pickles; it’s the principle of the thing.
“Just don’t fuck with my car, is all I was trying to say,” Dean mutters, almost inaudibly and mostly to himself, and Sam tenses, wants to scream, I wasn’t, and his eyes are burning and he knows that Dean can tell he’s awake now-he’s shaking a little-but Sam is biting his tongue hard, copper in his mouth and his hands wrenched into fists, hidden against the door.
Dean says his name once more, and then he’s quiet again. Sam counts the mile markers and the telephone poles and his own slowing heartbeat, anything until he doesn’t want to kill his brother anymore.
*
This was a bad idea, Sam tells his imaginary Dean, watching the real Dean prowl around the motel room gauging which of the beds he wants. We’re nothing alike and we’ve never in our lives gotten along. There’s no reason to think that just because we’re not kids anymore, we somehow learned how to stand each other.
They’re still not speaking, and Dean finally settles on the bed by the window, tossing his bag into the corner and flopping down on his back, arms spread out like a crucifixion. Sam studies him from the doorway, his own bag still on his shoulder, his gun jammed awkwardly in his belt.
Dean could be alone in the room, his breaths measured and his face smoothed out. His boots stick out over the edge of the bed because he hates getting mud or crumbs or blood on sheets he intends to sleep in, and his shirts are crumpled at the corner, revealing a taut wedge of his stomach, skinny ribbon of gray shorts showing over the top of his jeans. A spur of arousal in Sam at the sight of it, but that only irritates him more, one more hold Dean has on him.
Sam drops his bag and adjusts his gun so it sits more comfortably. Dean’s holding still, his face intent and his eyes shut, but Sam knows he’s listening. Sam doesn’t care; he’s already put in a day, a fucking lifetime of this shit, and now he’s getting the hell out before he does something they’ll both regret. He checks for the room key and his wallet and his knife in his pockets, and walks out. Just before the door shuts with a layered click, he hears Dean’s voice rising, half-petulant, almost a whine, “Where the fuck-”
But Sam’s already gone.
*
It’s been fifteen years since Dean sat on Sam’s chest and locked Sam’s head between his knees, drawing crude tears in black ink on Sam’s cheeks, face contorted and enraged, helpless as Dean singsonged under his breath, “Crybaby, cry. Crybaby baby cry.” Fifteen years since Sam used his knife (the very same) to cut the tongues out of Dean’s favorite shoes in retaliation, sniffling and swiping angrily at his eyes, smearing ink all over. That was the first night that Sam thought he might want to run away someday.
He’s thinking about that, playing his fingertips unconsciously high on his cheek, sitting in the lemon-colored glow of the all-night diner he’d found. He can’t remember crying much as a child, and he assumes that it was the first thing their father trained out of them. It makes sense, because as it turns out, there are monsters under the bed and being scared, crying, means getting eaten.
But Dean’s the shining exception to the rule, as usual, and Sam can immediately call to mind a dozen times that Dean reduced him to tears when they were kids, simple vicious older brother kind of stuff in between stretches of him being Sam’s very favorite person in the world.
Sam’s not sure how tenable it is that he both hero-worshipped and hated Dean for the first twelve years of his life, dim memory of cognitive dissonance from Intro to Psychology, and even now, when he can’t bear sharing breath with Dean, he’s aware that he’d still die for his brother without thought or hesitation or effort.
Sam stopped crying pretty much for good by the time he was thirteen, but Dean still riles him up better than anyone else, better even than their dad does-did. Dean knows him far too well, having installed half of Sam’s buttons himself: his sensitivity to having his ears fucked with, his dislike of daddy long legs, the fact that smelling spoiled milk or tequila first thing in the morning will make him throw up. Dean always says just the right thing, gets under Sam’s skin just that much more, decades of practice and an innate genius for it, anyway.
Headlights splash across the diner’s windows, and it’s a testament to something that Sam can recognize the Impala from that alone, two high white-gold blasts like small suns in the dark of the parking lot.
He sighs and pours another sugar into his coffee. He really doesn’t know what he was expecting. Dean isn’t the type to let things be, nor the type to fall asleep without knowing where Sam is, and the town’s only so big, after all. Sam considers escaping through the kitchen and out the back, but it seems simultaneously sordid and melodramatic, so instead he orders a donut.
Dean comes in like a storm, banging the door open and making the waitress braiding her hair listlessly at the counter jump, looking guilty and startled. Dean cases the room quickly, a little metallic ting in the back of Sam’s mind when Dean’s eyes light on him for a second. Dean orders a cup of coffee and doesn’t sit down.
Sam picks a few sprinkles off his donut, scowling. He’d anticipated a glazed, for one thing, and it doesn’t seem like too much to ask, a decent donut, an hour or two outside arm’s reach of his brother, time to catch his breath.
Across the nauseating washed-out green linoleum, Dean is saying to the waitress, “Passing through, yes ma’am. Me an’ my brother, we gonna rodeo down in Texas, that’s the plan.”
Rolling his eyes, Sam lifts his coffee to cover his smirk. Dean’s performing, and Sam’s his sole audience, the only one who knows it’s an act, which is nothing new, of course. Sam has always kinda liked the lies that Dean makes up about them, different lives that they might have led.
“Learned to ride ‘fore we learned to walk,” Dean’s saying, and Sam realizes that he’s imitating a friend of their dad’s, Kentucky Pete who sold them weaponry and ammunition with his drawl broad and flat as his brushcut, but the grin on Dean’s face, hooked up in one corner, is Dean’s own.
Sam takes a moment trying to remember the last time Dean smiled, and it was at the motel’s check-in girl, and before that another waitress, before that the guy with blue hair at the gas station. He can’t remember the last time Dean smiled at him, though, and he slumps back in the booth, depressed and still pretty angry.
You shouldn’t have followed me, he thinks, squeezing his fist in his hand under the table. The imaginary Dean in his head only shrugs, chewing on a toothpick, his shoulders loose and his thumbs hasped in his belt loops. Can’t get enough of you, Sammy, he says, and Sam thinks sourly that it’s just like Dean to be a dick even when he’s a construct of Sam’s imagination.
Sneaking looks through curls of steam, Sam’s waiting for Dean to come over and pick up right where he left off, but Dean only leaves two dollars on the counter and takes a booth that allows him to face Sam. They’re mirror images across the landscape of red vinyl, under the fluorescents, drinking their coffee and pretending not to watch each other.
Sam finds himself discomforted after awhile, edgy and out of place with sugar under his nails and caffeine starting to burr under his skin. He doesn’t like Dean treating him like some stranger, sad late-night loser killing time on two dollars, but he doesn’t want Dean to come over, either. It’s another contradiction and Sam hates that.
Eventually the coffee is gone and the donut is reduced to a few slight grease stains on the napkin, and Sam’s crawling out of his skin, so he gets up, knees popping, and walks over to Dean’s table. Dean’s eyes flash but he covers his expression too quickly to be read.
“What are you doing here?” Sam asks in a low voice. No reaction, no anger. He couldn’t care less about Dean Winchester.
Dean raises his mug in a little mock toast. “Wrestling alligators, Sam.”
Sam huffs through his nose. “Dean-”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m just sitting here.” Dean looks up at him and his face is all hard and his eyes are shielded and even the cynical crimp of his mouth is a put-on. “See how I’m just sitting here?”
Sam clenches his teeth together hard, sees Dean recognize the flicker of the muscle in his jaw. “You can’t expect me to hang around with you every second of the goddamn day, man. I only get away from you when I sleep.”
Dean looks briefly stricken, hurt, but he whisks that away, sneering, curving his hands around his mug. “You can do whatever the hell you want. I’m just having a cup of coffee.”
“Dean, Jesus,” his temper skyrocketing, but he cuts himself off as a wash of light sweeps across Dean, his shadow sharp-edged defined and whipping in a short arc across the floor. Familiar light, Sam thinks, and then he shouts, “Dean, car!”
Dean’s up and out the door in probably less than three seconds, but the Impala’s already out of the parking lot and gunning up the street, a huge roar filling the air. Dean sprints after the hanging red taillights, screaming so loudly Sam can hear his voice splintering, “STOP YOU MOTHERFUCKER THAT’S MY CAR.”
Sam stands half a block up on the sidewalk, his hand stuck over his mouth, watching the taillights shrink and vanish, Dean’s howls echoing and somewhere off to the left, a dog joins in mournfully. He starts giggling, kinda hysterical, but puts a stop to that right quick, because though he’s never doubted Dean’s loyalty to him, he’s pretty sure laughing when Dean gets back is the kind of the thing that gets a person killed.
Dean’s gone, disappeared into the black that took the car, for so long that Sam starts to get nervous, telling himself that he’ll go after his brother if another five minutes passes. He notes the time on his watch and peers down the road, wondering at how quickly he can go from wanting to throttle Dean to pacing anxious squares of sidewalk waiting for his return. At four and thirty-seven seconds, a small pale figure emerges from the dark and solidifies into Dean, breathing raggedly with his hair sticking up in sweat-spikes, looking like he wants to weep. He must have chased it for half a mile, all the way to the highway.
Sam calls his name and Dean flinches, won’t meet Sam’s eyes as he meets him on the sidewalk and they walk back to the diner. His shoulders are hunched as if in humiliation, and he’s opening and closing his hands compulsively at his sides, feeling for the smooth spinal ridges of the Impala’s steering wheel, the gleam of chrome like diamonds.
There’s a bent pair of tar-black skid marks on the asphalt, and near there, a scatter of glass. Dean makes a small injured sound and goes to crouch by it, finger the thick plasticky fragments.
“They broke her,” he whispers, and Sam realizes that Dean’s more furious than heartbroken-he’s so mad he’s shivering with it, his eyes dark and hot. He doesn’t point out that they also most likely ripped out her dash in service of the hotwire. Dean knows that as well as he does, and Sam’s not interested in pushing him right now, his suffocating black mood drained out of him in the long moments waiting for Dean to rematerialize.
“We’ll find them,” Sam says. “We’ll get it back.”
Dean doesn’t say anything for awhile, pushing the bits of glass around like puzzle pieces, like if he can figure out how they fit together it’ll get him his car back. He takes one perfect see-through cube and slips it into his pocket, and looks up at Sam with that old violent glee rioting on his face, Dean’s let’s-go-kill-something face, knocking Sam’s wind out of him as Dean says with a snarl:
“They better pray you get to them before I do.”
*
They’ve lost twelve guns, six knives including two machetes, and Sam’s crossbow. Well over a thousand rounds of ammunition, the coil of rope and pair of shovels and can of gasoline. Their camp rolls and extra blankets and tent. A quart of vodka and one of whiskey, stashed in the wheel well. The Triple-A road map book Dean’s had since he was eleven years old, blue and black ink rivered and woven along their routes. All their cassette tapes, the long filled-in crossword puzzle magazine under the shotgun seat, the playing cards in the side panel. Sam’s hoodie in the backseat, wrapped up around a pack of Swedish fish he was saving for later. The rosary Dean stole from a crooked priest and looped around the rearview mirror. Twenty-seven different fake IDs in the glove compartment, dozens of packets of ketchup and salt and pepper, moist towelettes and toothpicks, Sam’s best pair of sunglasses.
The car.
Sam misses it more than he would have thought, walking back to the motel with Dean shell-shocked and muttering curses beside him. There are only two constants in his life: his brother and his brother’s car. Though he’s still got his gun and knife on him as always, he feels unarmed, defenseless-it’s the inability to tear the hell out of town at a hundred and twenty miles an hour and a moment’s notice if he needs to. Too many people try to kill them for them not to have a ready escape.
They were both kinda raised in cars, too, thousand-mile trips on the weekends, the months that they spent on the run when their family’s name got known by federal officers and flesh-eating demons. Sam remembers math homework in the backseat when he was probably eight or nine, using Dean’s body as a desk for the paper, the flat of his back, lines of his ribs laid out like he was designed for this, because Dean liked what it felt like when Sam wrote on him.
So cars say ‘home’ to Sam a little bit, and this car in particular, this car that Dean wears like a favorite shirt, broken in around his form with the lovely night-black sleek and warming quickly in the sun. Sam recognized the Impala the second he first saw it, dented all to hell with mismatched side panels and a spiderwebbed back windshield: Dean’s. Dean fixed it up and baptized it in Metallica and rigged it for their outlaw side, treated it better than he’d ever treated a girl, and sometimes when Sam was in high school and being in the same house as their dad made him want to set himself on fire, he would go out and sleep in Dean’s car, comforted by the prayer card strung on a dogtag chain around the rearview mirror, which preceded the rosary by several years.
It takes them thirty minutes to walk back, a five-minute drive. Sam feels his world constricting down to as far as he can get walking, penned in by public transportation. Dean’s not speaking anymore, hissing between his teeth with his hand dug into his pocket.
When they get inside, he sets the piece of glass carefully down on top of the television and goes directly to his bag, rummaging until he unearths a socket wrench that Sam doesn’t think he’s ever seen before, folding up his shirt cuffs to reveal an ancient mustard stain.
“What are you doing?” Sam asks, feeling like it should be obvious, like maybe he’s missing something. Dean doesn’t spare him a glance.
“Going to get my car back, why, what the fuck are you doing?”
Sam glares at him and fights a fresh strain of irritation back down, more important things to worry about right now. “Why do you need a wrench?”
“Helps when I break the window of the car I’m gonna steal.”
“Dude. You’re not gonna repeat the same exact crime.”
“It is not the same crime, they took my car.” Dean slams his bag down into the corner, his mouth wrenched like he knows he’s not making any sense. “I, I’ll bring it back, anyway, I’ll pay for the window.”
“Or, you’ll get arrested. And then they’ll figure out who you are and you’ll get even more arrested. And then you’ll never see the Impala again.”
“Don’t say that,” Dean says sharply, a little too loud, and Sam laughs once, harsh-sounding and odd. This was an awful day before the car got stolen, and Sam’s honestly kinda worried about what the rest of the night might do to them.
“Look, I think we need to come up with a better plan than you smashing shit, okay? Because, really, that hardly ever works.”
Dean sits down abruptly on the bed, clutching the socket wrench against his leg so that a line of black grease is pressed into his jeans. He looks at Sam with his mouth cocked open a little, unsure and caught between anger and despair. “You have a better plan?”
“No, Dean, but I’m sure we can figure something out. We track way tougher things than joyriders, man.”
Dean’s expression twists slightly. “What if. What if they’re not just joyriders?” His eyes widen as he considers it, his grip tightening on the wrench. “What if they strip her for parts?”
Sam can see the reflection of it in Dean’s face, the Impala up on blocks with its guts ripped out and swatches of oil and grease spattered like viscera on the pavement, the desolate hanging wires of a stolen radio, jagged grin of the broken window. Sam’s stomach turns at the image, a lesser version of every time Dean’s been held hostage and Sam has been obliged to imagine his brother with his fingernails peeled back, gory mess where his ear’s been cut off, nails driven through the backs of his hands.
“Don’t borrow trouble,” he tells Dean somewhat shakily. “If it’s stripped, we’ll, we’ll deal with that when we get to it.”
Dean swears, just tainting the air a bit, and pulls his hand through his hair, scrubs hard at his face with the heel of his hand. Sam’s already thinking about how he’s gonna talk Dean out of actually killing any of the car thieves once they catch up to them, old arguments and worn courses of logic-Dean has a tendency to let his emotions get the best of him, but then, so does Sam.
“Come on,” Sam says, trying to sound like a man in control of the situation. “Let’s go make some friends.”
Lifting his head, the expression on Dean’s face strikes a chord deep in Sam, the lines on his forehead exactly like their dad had and his eyes turned down at the corners, a dim vein of hope amid the distress, and sometimes Dean looks like a picture in a magazine, flawless like that, and it never fails to knock Sam’s breath out of him.
He rebounds. He offers Dean his hand.
*
onwards!
American Myth
By Candle Beck
Sam is leaning against the car watching the numbers on the gas pump fly upwards, sunstroked and a little hungover with his hair in front of his eyes and his mouth cracked in a constant half-yawn, and Dean, coming back from the store with an armful of Red Bull and beef jerky, says sharply across the bleached cement, “Sam, will you get your ass off my car when you’ve got a goddamn knife in your back pocket,” and Sam bitches back at him on autopilot, and suddenly they’re knee fucking deep into another fight.
This one lasts into Oklahoma, where Sam gets exhausted by the stare of the land, the vast brown reach of nothing in all directions, and lapses into a sullen silence, forfeiting the last word. This is how most of their fights end, with Dean believing that he’s won.
Sam’s getting pretty good and goddamn sick of it, actually, like there’s a crank in the small of his back that tightens every inch of his skin, and Dean keeps turning it with every smirk and every idle insult and every time he calls him Sammy. Dean knows what he’s doing, always watching Sam for his reactions, sucking on the inside of his cheek so that a small hollow forms. Sam won’t give him the satisfaction, staring out the window so that all Dean can see is the line of Sam’s neck, finger-twisted hair half-obscuring his ear, a piece of his cheek.
Small victory, Sam thinks, feeling sick. He lets his forehead rest on the window, curling his shoulder up and closing his eyes. The heat outside bleeds through, a flat red circle taking shape on Sam’s forehead, a bead of sweat racing down the back of his neck. These stupid bickering fights seem to mean more out here in the middle of nowhere; they acquire portentous resonance and depth, because it kinda feels like the world has ended, like Sam and Dean are the only history left, and they’re wasting it on this.
“Sam?” Dean says.
Sam opens his eyes, brown brown brown and the narrow chewed-up strip of gray asphalt at the shoulder, an unbroken white line. He doesn’t move.
“Sam, are you awake, man?”
No, Sam says to the imaginary Dean who lives in his head and occasionally shuts his mouth long enough for Sam to get a word in. I’m not awake, I don’t want to talk to you. Go away.
Dean exhales shortly, and sniffs hard. Sam can hear the faint sound of his fingers rattling on the wheel, the more substantial thwack of his ring. A green highway sign leaps past, twelve miles to gas food lodging, and Sam imagines that they will stop to eat and Dean will take the pickle off Sam’s plate without asking, that shit-eater grin of his, and Sam will want to stab the fork through his hand. Sam doesn’t even like pickles; it’s the principle of the thing.
“Just don’t fuck with my car, is all I was trying to say,” Dean mutters, almost inaudibly and mostly to himself, and Sam tenses, wants to scream, I wasn’t, and his eyes are burning and he knows that Dean can tell he’s awake now-he’s shaking a little-but Sam is biting his tongue hard, copper in his mouth and his hands wrenched into fists, hidden against the door.
Dean says his name once more, and then he’s quiet again. Sam counts the mile markers and the telephone poles and his own slowing heartbeat, anything until he doesn’t want to kill his brother anymore.
*
This was a bad idea, Sam tells his imaginary Dean, watching the real Dean prowl around the motel room gauging which of the beds he wants. We’re nothing alike and we’ve never in our lives gotten along. There’s no reason to think that just because we’re not kids anymore, we somehow learned how to stand each other.
They’re still not speaking, and Dean finally settles on the bed by the window, tossing his bag into the corner and flopping down on his back, arms spread out like a crucifixion. Sam studies him from the doorway, his own bag still on his shoulder, his gun jammed awkwardly in his belt.
Dean could be alone in the room, his breaths measured and his face smoothed out. His boots stick out over the edge of the bed because he hates getting mud or crumbs or blood on sheets he intends to sleep in, and his shirts are crumpled at the corner, revealing a taut wedge of his stomach, skinny ribbon of gray shorts showing over the top of his jeans. A spur of arousal in Sam at the sight of it, but that only irritates him more, one more hold Dean has on him.
Sam drops his bag and adjusts his gun so it sits more comfortably. Dean’s holding still, his face intent and his eyes shut, but Sam knows he’s listening. Sam doesn’t care; he’s already put in a day, a fucking lifetime of this shit, and now he’s getting the hell out before he does something they’ll both regret. He checks for the room key and his wallet and his knife in his pockets, and walks out. Just before the door shuts with a layered click, he hears Dean’s voice rising, half-petulant, almost a whine, “Where the fuck-”
But Sam’s already gone.
*
It’s been fifteen years since Dean sat on Sam’s chest and locked Sam’s head between his knees, drawing crude tears in black ink on Sam’s cheeks, face contorted and enraged, helpless as Dean singsonged under his breath, “Crybaby, cry. Crybaby baby cry.” Fifteen years since Sam used his knife (the very same) to cut the tongues out of Dean’s favorite shoes in retaliation, sniffling and swiping angrily at his eyes, smearing ink all over. That was the first night that Sam thought he might want to run away someday.
He’s thinking about that, playing his fingertips unconsciously high on his cheek, sitting in the lemon-colored glow of the all-night diner he’d found. He can’t remember crying much as a child, and he assumes that it was the first thing their father trained out of them. It makes sense, because as it turns out, there are monsters under the bed and being scared, crying, means getting eaten.
But Dean’s the shining exception to the rule, as usual, and Sam can immediately call to mind a dozen times that Dean reduced him to tears when they were kids, simple vicious older brother kind of stuff in between stretches of him being Sam’s very favorite person in the world.
Sam’s not sure how tenable it is that he both hero-worshipped and hated Dean for the first twelve years of his life, dim memory of cognitive dissonance from Intro to Psychology, and even now, when he can’t bear sharing breath with Dean, he’s aware that he’d still die for his brother without thought or hesitation or effort.
Sam stopped crying pretty much for good by the time he was thirteen, but Dean still riles him up better than anyone else, better even than their dad does-did. Dean knows him far too well, having installed half of Sam’s buttons himself: his sensitivity to having his ears fucked with, his dislike of daddy long legs, the fact that smelling spoiled milk or tequila first thing in the morning will make him throw up. Dean always says just the right thing, gets under Sam’s skin just that much more, decades of practice and an innate genius for it, anyway.
Headlights splash across the diner’s windows, and it’s a testament to something that Sam can recognize the Impala from that alone, two high white-gold blasts like small suns in the dark of the parking lot.
He sighs and pours another sugar into his coffee. He really doesn’t know what he was expecting. Dean isn’t the type to let things be, nor the type to fall asleep without knowing where Sam is, and the town’s only so big, after all. Sam considers escaping through the kitchen and out the back, but it seems simultaneously sordid and melodramatic, so instead he orders a donut.
Dean comes in like a storm, banging the door open and making the waitress braiding her hair listlessly at the counter jump, looking guilty and startled. Dean cases the room quickly, a little metallic ting in the back of Sam’s mind when Dean’s eyes light on him for a second. Dean orders a cup of coffee and doesn’t sit down.
Sam picks a few sprinkles off his donut, scowling. He’d anticipated a glazed, for one thing, and it doesn’t seem like too much to ask, a decent donut, an hour or two outside arm’s reach of his brother, time to catch his breath.
Across the nauseating washed-out green linoleum, Dean is saying to the waitress, “Passing through, yes ma’am. Me an’ my brother, we gonna rodeo down in Texas, that’s the plan.”
Rolling his eyes, Sam lifts his coffee to cover his smirk. Dean’s performing, and Sam’s his sole audience, the only one who knows it’s an act, which is nothing new, of course. Sam has always kinda liked the lies that Dean makes up about them, different lives that they might have led.
“Learned to ride ‘fore we learned to walk,” Dean’s saying, and Sam realizes that he’s imitating a friend of their dad’s, Kentucky Pete who sold them weaponry and ammunition with his drawl broad and flat as his brushcut, but the grin on Dean’s face, hooked up in one corner, is Dean’s own.
Sam takes a moment trying to remember the last time Dean smiled, and it was at the motel’s check-in girl, and before that another waitress, before that the guy with blue hair at the gas station. He can’t remember the last time Dean smiled at him, though, and he slumps back in the booth, depressed and still pretty angry.
You shouldn’t have followed me, he thinks, squeezing his fist in his hand under the table. The imaginary Dean in his head only shrugs, chewing on a toothpick, his shoulders loose and his thumbs hasped in his belt loops. Can’t get enough of you, Sammy, he says, and Sam thinks sourly that it’s just like Dean to be a dick even when he’s a construct of Sam’s imagination.
Sneaking looks through curls of steam, Sam’s waiting for Dean to come over and pick up right where he left off, but Dean only leaves two dollars on the counter and takes a booth that allows him to face Sam. They’re mirror images across the landscape of red vinyl, under the fluorescents, drinking their coffee and pretending not to watch each other.
Sam finds himself discomforted after awhile, edgy and out of place with sugar under his nails and caffeine starting to burr under his skin. He doesn’t like Dean treating him like some stranger, sad late-night loser killing time on two dollars, but he doesn’t want Dean to come over, either. It’s another contradiction and Sam hates that.
Eventually the coffee is gone and the donut is reduced to a few slight grease stains on the napkin, and Sam’s crawling out of his skin, so he gets up, knees popping, and walks over to Dean’s table. Dean’s eyes flash but he covers his expression too quickly to be read.
“What are you doing here?” Sam asks in a low voice. No reaction, no anger. He couldn’t care less about Dean Winchester.
Dean raises his mug in a little mock toast. “Wrestling alligators, Sam.”
Sam huffs through his nose. “Dean-”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m just sitting here.” Dean looks up at him and his face is all hard and his eyes are shielded and even the cynical crimp of his mouth is a put-on. “See how I’m just sitting here?”
Sam clenches his teeth together hard, sees Dean recognize the flicker of the muscle in his jaw. “You can’t expect me to hang around with you every second of the goddamn day, man. I only get away from you when I sleep.”
Dean looks briefly stricken, hurt, but he whisks that away, sneering, curving his hands around his mug. “You can do whatever the hell you want. I’m just having a cup of coffee.”
“Dean, Jesus,” his temper skyrocketing, but he cuts himself off as a wash of light sweeps across Dean, his shadow sharp-edged defined and whipping in a short arc across the floor. Familiar light, Sam thinks, and then he shouts, “Dean, car!”
Dean’s up and out the door in probably less than three seconds, but the Impala’s already out of the parking lot and gunning up the street, a huge roar filling the air. Dean sprints after the hanging red taillights, screaming so loudly Sam can hear his voice splintering, “STOP YOU MOTHERFUCKER THAT’S MY CAR.”
Sam stands half a block up on the sidewalk, his hand stuck over his mouth, watching the taillights shrink and vanish, Dean’s howls echoing and somewhere off to the left, a dog joins in mournfully. He starts giggling, kinda hysterical, but puts a stop to that right quick, because though he’s never doubted Dean’s loyalty to him, he’s pretty sure laughing when Dean gets back is the kind of the thing that gets a person killed.
Dean’s gone, disappeared into the black that took the car, for so long that Sam starts to get nervous, telling himself that he’ll go after his brother if another five minutes passes. He notes the time on his watch and peers down the road, wondering at how quickly he can go from wanting to throttle Dean to pacing anxious squares of sidewalk waiting for his return. At four and thirty-seven seconds, a small pale figure emerges from the dark and solidifies into Dean, breathing raggedly with his hair sticking up in sweat-spikes, looking like he wants to weep. He must have chased it for half a mile, all the way to the highway.
Sam calls his name and Dean flinches, won’t meet Sam’s eyes as he meets him on the sidewalk and they walk back to the diner. His shoulders are hunched as if in humiliation, and he’s opening and closing his hands compulsively at his sides, feeling for the smooth spinal ridges of the Impala’s steering wheel, the gleam of chrome like diamonds.
There’s a bent pair of tar-black skid marks on the asphalt, and near there, a scatter of glass. Dean makes a small injured sound and goes to crouch by it, finger the thick plasticky fragments.
“They broke her,” he whispers, and Sam realizes that Dean’s more furious than heartbroken-he’s so mad he’s shivering with it, his eyes dark and hot. He doesn’t point out that they also most likely ripped out her dash in service of the hotwire. Dean knows that as well as he does, and Sam’s not interested in pushing him right now, his suffocating black mood drained out of him in the long moments waiting for Dean to rematerialize.
“We’ll find them,” Sam says. “We’ll get it back.”
Dean doesn’t say anything for awhile, pushing the bits of glass around like puzzle pieces, like if he can figure out how they fit together it’ll get him his car back. He takes one perfect see-through cube and slips it into his pocket, and looks up at Sam with that old violent glee rioting on his face, Dean’s let’s-go-kill-something face, knocking Sam’s wind out of him as Dean says with a snarl:
“They better pray you get to them before I do.”
*
They’ve lost twelve guns, six knives including two machetes, and Sam’s crossbow. Well over a thousand rounds of ammunition, the coil of rope and pair of shovels and can of gasoline. Their camp rolls and extra blankets and tent. A quart of vodka and one of whiskey, stashed in the wheel well. The Triple-A road map book Dean’s had since he was eleven years old, blue and black ink rivered and woven along their routes. All their cassette tapes, the long filled-in crossword puzzle magazine under the shotgun seat, the playing cards in the side panel. Sam’s hoodie in the backseat, wrapped up around a pack of Swedish fish he was saving for later. The rosary Dean stole from a crooked priest and looped around the rearview mirror. Twenty-seven different fake IDs in the glove compartment, dozens of packets of ketchup and salt and pepper, moist towelettes and toothpicks, Sam’s best pair of sunglasses.
The car.
Sam misses it more than he would have thought, walking back to the motel with Dean shell-shocked and muttering curses beside him. There are only two constants in his life: his brother and his brother’s car. Though he’s still got his gun and knife on him as always, he feels unarmed, defenseless-it’s the inability to tear the hell out of town at a hundred and twenty miles an hour and a moment’s notice if he needs to. Too many people try to kill them for them not to have a ready escape.
They were both kinda raised in cars, too, thousand-mile trips on the weekends, the months that they spent on the run when their family’s name got known by federal officers and flesh-eating demons. Sam remembers math homework in the backseat when he was probably eight or nine, using Dean’s body as a desk for the paper, the flat of his back, lines of his ribs laid out like he was designed for this, because Dean liked what it felt like when Sam wrote on him.
So cars say ‘home’ to Sam a little bit, and this car in particular, this car that Dean wears like a favorite shirt, broken in around his form with the lovely night-black sleek and warming quickly in the sun. Sam recognized the Impala the second he first saw it, dented all to hell with mismatched side panels and a spiderwebbed back windshield: Dean’s. Dean fixed it up and baptized it in Metallica and rigged it for their outlaw side, treated it better than he’d ever treated a girl, and sometimes when Sam was in high school and being in the same house as their dad made him want to set himself on fire, he would go out and sleep in Dean’s car, comforted by the prayer card strung on a dogtag chain around the rearview mirror, which preceded the rosary by several years.
It takes them thirty minutes to walk back, a five-minute drive. Sam feels his world constricting down to as far as he can get walking, penned in by public transportation. Dean’s not speaking anymore, hissing between his teeth with his hand dug into his pocket.
When they get inside, he sets the piece of glass carefully down on top of the television and goes directly to his bag, rummaging until he unearths a socket wrench that Sam doesn’t think he’s ever seen before, folding up his shirt cuffs to reveal an ancient mustard stain.
“What are you doing?” Sam asks, feeling like it should be obvious, like maybe he’s missing something. Dean doesn’t spare him a glance.
“Going to get my car back, why, what the fuck are you doing?”
Sam glares at him and fights a fresh strain of irritation back down, more important things to worry about right now. “Why do you need a wrench?”
“Helps when I break the window of the car I’m gonna steal.”
“Dude. You’re not gonna repeat the same exact crime.”
“It is not the same crime, they took my car.” Dean slams his bag down into the corner, his mouth wrenched like he knows he’s not making any sense. “I, I’ll bring it back, anyway, I’ll pay for the window.”
“Or, you’ll get arrested. And then they’ll figure out who you are and you’ll get even more arrested. And then you’ll never see the Impala again.”
“Don’t say that,” Dean says sharply, a little too loud, and Sam laughs once, harsh-sounding and odd. This was an awful day before the car got stolen, and Sam’s honestly kinda worried about what the rest of the night might do to them.
“Look, I think we need to come up with a better plan than you smashing shit, okay? Because, really, that hardly ever works.”
Dean sits down abruptly on the bed, clutching the socket wrench against his leg so that a line of black grease is pressed into his jeans. He looks at Sam with his mouth cocked open a little, unsure and caught between anger and despair. “You have a better plan?”
“No, Dean, but I’m sure we can figure something out. We track way tougher things than joyriders, man.”
Dean’s expression twists slightly. “What if. What if they’re not just joyriders?” His eyes widen as he considers it, his grip tightening on the wrench. “What if they strip her for parts?”
Sam can see the reflection of it in Dean’s face, the Impala up on blocks with its guts ripped out and swatches of oil and grease spattered like viscera on the pavement, the desolate hanging wires of a stolen radio, jagged grin of the broken window. Sam’s stomach turns at the image, a lesser version of every time Dean’s been held hostage and Sam has been obliged to imagine his brother with his fingernails peeled back, gory mess where his ear’s been cut off, nails driven through the backs of his hands.
“Don’t borrow trouble,” he tells Dean somewhat shakily. “If it’s stripped, we’ll, we’ll deal with that when we get to it.”
Dean swears, just tainting the air a bit, and pulls his hand through his hair, scrubs hard at his face with the heel of his hand. Sam’s already thinking about how he’s gonna talk Dean out of actually killing any of the car thieves once they catch up to them, old arguments and worn courses of logic-Dean has a tendency to let his emotions get the best of him, but then, so does Sam.
“Come on,” Sam says, trying to sound like a man in control of the situation. “Let’s go make some friends.”
Lifting his head, the expression on Dean’s face strikes a chord deep in Sam, the lines on his forehead exactly like their dad had and his eyes turned down at the corners, a dim vein of hope amid the distress, and sometimes Dean looks like a picture in a magazine, flawless like that, and it never fails to knock Sam’s breath out of him.
He rebounds. He offers Dean his hand.
*
onwards!