these are the best years of your life, son
So thandie said "I wonder how you'd write John," and I said, that's a hella good question, and here we are.
And I Have Asked to Be Where No Storms Come
By Candle Beck
John drove all night and got back late, almost midnight in Texas. They were living out in the oil fields, in a two-room house made of white clapboard, in the grip of derrick shadow and blistering heat. He'd been up maybe three, four days straight.
The headlights splashed across the front, picked up Sam's bike glittering like a pair of pinwheels in the scrub grass, and John shook his head because he couldn't count how many times he'd told Sam not to leave it out in the open like that. The little house was all stitched up tight, neat and well-fortified.
Dean was sitting on the couch in the main room where John slept and where they cooked and ate and watched the junkyard television with aluminum foil wrapped around the rabbit ears. He had a coffee mug that smelled like chicken broth between his hands, steam boiling up. His hair was damp and spiky and he was barefoot and John thought that Dean must have been out earlier, with a girl probably and that was why he'd taken a shower in the middle of the night.
"Dad," Dean said in a low voice. His face was tipped up, wearing half a smile. "How'd it go?"
"By the book. Like we thought."
He let his bag thump down on the soot-colored carpet. A little puff of dust rose and John was amused by that in a dead-on-his-feet kind of way.
"Where's your brother?"
"Asleep."
"He's all right?"
"Of course." A moment passed and then Dean added as an afterthought, "Sir."
Dean's expression was difficult to read through the steam and the fogged glass across his father's eyes. He looked tired, but he usually did, brown thumbprints under his eyes and his lips bitten and chapped. Shoulders were up, though, back straight. John couldn't remember how long he'd been away, but it wasn't like those blackout months when he'd stumbled home (ha) to find two unfamiliar curious-eyed boys where he'd left his sons, two innocents that he was meant to save and then never see again.
It wasn't like that this time. John recognized this Dean, his Dean. Twenty-one years old and on his guard, taking long drinks from the mug. There was a single empty Ramen packet on the card table, and John wondered if they'd shared or if Dean made Sam eat all the noodles because Sam was somehow still growing.
"You get that bike running yet?" John asked him, some vague flash of a rust-colored motorcycle in pieces in the yard.
"Yes sir, sold it 'bout a month back."
"Sold it?"
"Never intended to keep it."
John caught the give in Dean's undertone, the slightest tell. Dean was lying, but John couldn't figure why.
He exhaled, one hand feeling his ribs through his shirts. Like wood, he'd thought as a younger man, tougher'n oak, but that was before he'd seen chests torn open as if made of styrofoam. Dean gave him a considering look but didn't ask if he was okay. John appreciated it, because there wasn't anything wrong with him eighteen hours unconscious wouldn't cure.
"You takin' Sammy to school tomorrow?" he asked, leaning one hand on the counter and feeling exhaustion roll over him. Dean blurred, shuddered.
"Sunday tomorrow, Dad."
"Ah."
There was a pause, and then the soft sound of Dean rising, and John looked up. Dean was almost smiling, small and dark.
"Oughta get some rest, old man."
John just nodded. He gathered his strength, digging his fingers into the rough lip of the counter, and then crossed the carpet, opening the door to the boys' room. A bar of light as thick as a playing card fell across Sam's chest, his youngest sprawled out all arms and legs, half off the cot with his mouth cocked open and his hair dark and curling high on his forehead. John studied him and he felt Dean come to stand at his shoulder.
John closed his eyes, heavy on the doorframe. He'd be able to sleep now.
*
"Sammy."
A jerk, and Sam's awake. Aware at once of the hand on his shoulder, solid grip that means Dean, and Sam curses inwardly because he let someone get close enough to put a hand on him while he was asleep.
He keeps his eyes closed. "What."
"Come running with me."
Dean is pulling at him, tugging out the collar of his T-shirt. A rash of goosebumps prickles on the bared skin of Sam's shoulder, though it's nothing like cold in here, eighty degrees and rising.
"Not today, Dean." Everything is so much easier to deal with when he's got his eyes closed, and Sam marvels.
The bed gives slightly, Dean's hand pressing down with two fingers hot as irons slanting across Sam's collarbone. Sam is seventeen years old and he just woke up, so yes, this does something for him. Half-hard without having opened his eyes yet, but it's just physical, another unorthodox way in which his brain is wired. Just another kind of pain, and Sam learned how to remove himself from pain a long time ago.
But Dean is close behind him on the crappy cot mattress that's barely the width of Sam's shoulders, and Dean is cajoling:
"C'mon man, I'll get you drunk later, whaddaya say." His hand slides hard onto Sam's neck, catches painfully through his hair. "You gotta do your run anyway; Dad's back."
"What?" Sam sits up, pushing Dean's hand off. Eyes wide now and this is the same cell of a room he fell asleep in, same scorch marks on the walls and the glossy pages Dean ripped out of car magazines and stuck up. Sam keeps his back to Dean and presses the heel of his hand down on his dick, willing it down and it goes and he can get up now.
"When did he get in?" Sam asks, grabbing his jeans off the floor and dragging them on. He feels a little better.
"'Round midnight. Right after you fell asleep."
"Thought you did too."
Sam glances over, sees Dean shaking his head. Dean's sitting on Sam's cot, fiddling with the silver ring he's recently taken to wearing. He's different when Dad's around. Sam guesses they both are.
"So, what? We're training all day now?"
Dean looks up at him, pained and irritated. "He just wants to make sure we're keeping up with it now that you're back in school."
"Well, we have. He could maybe take our word. It's Sunday, Dean."
Dean doesn't answer, looking a little ticked that Sam even brought it up. On Sundays they walk the mile and a half to the diner (they walk, they don't run. Sometimes Sam kicks a soccer ball along, but they don't run), and they get huevos rancheros and pancakes and coffee even though neither of them likes the taste much, bleaching it with cream and sugar. On Sundays Dean washes the Impala and Sam sits in the shade and tries to whittle stuff but he's not very good, and Dean doesn't like it when Sam nicks his fingers. On Sundays they have macaroni and cheese for dinner and usually Dean will let Sam have a couple of his beers and they watch the Simpsons on the fucked-up television, all the colors inverted and the outlines double-imaged.
On all the other days, they run and they spar and they tramp out into the oil fields for shooting practice and Sam likes all of these things well enough when it's just him and Dean. He likes it fine when it's not Sunday.
Sam roots around in the milk crates for a clean shirt, not wanting to look at his brother for a moment. Everything he owns smells sour and stale.
"Dad's fine, by the way."
Sam's eyes snap to him, seeing Dean's lip curl in a sneer.
"Job went good, he's not hurt or anything. You obviously care a whole lot about that."
It's all Sam can do to keep his hands fisted in his dirty laundry. The injustice of it all has struck him dumb. All Sam has ever done is fear for his father's safety, countless nights when he was a kid lying awake and fighting sleep, offering God various bargains if He'd only let the headlights fall like benediction across the windows. Dean always looks at him like he's crazy and insists that their dad is too tough to be killed and that has driven Sam fucking nuts over the years, because no one, no one is too tough to get killed. It's so unapologetically senseless, this undying faith of Dean's.
So forgive Sam if he stopped worrying out loud a while ago.
He picks a shirt and pulls it on, his vision gone red. He doesn't want to wear socks, it's so fucking hot and he's been going around all summer barefoot, but today they're running.
"Sam, could you just-" Dean cuts himself off. Sam hears him exhale, the give of the floorboards as he stands. Sam's back tenses, wondering if Dean's going to touch him again.
But Dean doesn't. There's this weight in the air, difficulty in every breath Sam takes. He knows if he turns to face his brother, he'll see that fucked-up guilty look in Dean's eyes and Sam is so goddamn sick of that look.
"Whatever, Dean, it's fine," Sam says fast, hating himself just a little bit. "Let's go."
He puts his hand on the doorknob but quick as lightning Dean's hand is there too, holding the door shut. Dense insidious warmth presses against Sam's back, the cotton of their shirts thin as cobwebs, and he bites his tongue to keep back a gasp. Dean's mouth is open and hot and sharp at the base of Sam's neck, his hips grinding into Sam's ass, and Sam jerks back into him instinctively. Gripping Sam's hip, Dean pushes him steady and steps away just as quickly as he came.
Sam spins, he's gonna pin Dean to the wall and teach him to fucking tease, but Dean is slick, right through Sam's hands and out through the door, leaving Sam shaking, shaken, blown away by lust and something else, something much less clean.
He hears his father calling, "Sam, come eat your breakfast!" and Sam folds, resting his forehead oh-so-carefully on the thin wall and thinking bleakly, this is not my life.
*
John slept on and off throughout the next few days, six-hour snatches here and there, and he dreamt of screaming children and monsters, a helicopter's rotors beating like a heart above it all. He woke up restless, scratching at the tattoos on his arm, and most of the time Dean was there, seated at the rickety card table playing solitaire or cleaning a brace of weapons or honing his and Sammy's knives.
Dean was there, and he put the coffee on without his father having to ask, stuck a few slices of bread into the gas-smelling oven to toast them. It was the end of the loaf, and John asked, "That money I gave you hold out?"
Dean shrugged. "I got paid on Friday."
"Good," John said, distracted as he weeded through the sparse collection of mail that Dean brought over. There was a letter from one Johnny Strabler, which made John smirk, recognizing Bobby's sense of humor before his handwriting.
He slitted the envelope open with his switch and read about a pattern of cattle mutilations in southeast Montana. Bobby didn't have any concrete theories yet, offered up what he knew to John and asked after his boys.
John had his book open and he was paging through, looking for the match of the symbol that Bobby had traced in his letter. The coffee was black and thick as tar and John could feel the hunt burning off him, the unnatural silence and stillness registering with him again.
"Dad?"
John didn't look up. "Yeah?"
"I, um." Dean faltered, fell short.
John glanced at him, mildly surprised because Dean had a mouth on him and though he usually knew when to keep it shut, he was never at a loss for words when he didn't want to be.
Dean's eyebrows were hunched, his face tense and unwilling. Not scared--never scared, not Dean--but not happy with what he was doing, either.
"What is it?"
A minute flinch like Dean thought it was an order, and then he said, "You gotta go easy on Sammy right now."
John leaned back, setting the mug down and studying his son. Coffee on an empty stomach was dumb, searing and acidic and he had to fight down his gorge. Dean met his eyes steadily, having been well taught.
"What have I done to Sammy this time?"
"Nothing, I mean, it's not just you, just, like, school and stuff, senior year. I dunno. He's stressed."
"He's seventeen."
"And, what, it's such a wonderful age?" Dean half-smiled and John smiled slightly back because Dean had that kind of pass-it-on face. "Maybe it was different for you all those years ago, but I remember seventeen as a series of near-death experiences and, like, constantly imminent apocalypse. Everything that happened seemed so epic and terrible and totally permanent."
John nodded, trying to remember back that far in the haze of the morning. Seventeen, before the war and Mary and his boys and the hunt and everything else that defined his life. Seventeen years old, down by the ravine on a truck-bed in the drenching rain, pleading for his life from the Indian girl he'd been in love with at the time, and John granted Dean the point.
"You may be right, Dean, but it doesn't get him out of his basic responsibilities."
Dean blew out a breath, looked away. "We train, sir, I told you that we train every day except Sunday-"
"Yeah, and I don't want to hear it again," John said, raising his voice and his hand. "Part of fulfilling your basic responsibilities is not whining about them."
"Come on, Dad, it's not whining."
"Sounds like whining? Looks like whining? It's whining."
"It's not."
There was something foreign in Dean's voice, beyond the fact that Dean normally knew better than to talk back like that, and John paused. Two faint spots of color on Dean's cheeks, though his expression was pokered and his jaw set. Dean only got like this when it was about Sam. Sam was the only thing Dean knew better than John.
"It's stupid teenager stuff but you have to take it seriously because it's serious to him, okay? Because he's really pissed off and really stubborn and if you push him too hard he might. He. You know what he could do."
John knew. He passed hitchhikers on the long road home, huddled against the cold or wilting in the heat, tall messy-haired kids in jeans and army coats that caused his pulse to stagger briefly. He never picked them up, never wanted to hear about the fathers that had driven them out, the families that pretended they were dead.
Dean exhaled. "Look, I don't mean you should lay off him entirely. He has gotten to be a bit of a smartass, and by all means, set him straight if he's got it coming. But just. You gotta see that look on his face and back the hell off."
John rubbed a hand across his beard, sighing. He didn't know how he ended up with one boy he could understand blind deaf and dumb, and one who was an ever-increasing mystery to him, and he wondered, helplessly and as he did a dozen times a day, what Mary would have made of their Sam. Mary had a way of explaining things that made everything so clear.
"Which look?" he asked tiredly.
"That look like he's thinking about punching you in the face, sir."
John started. Dean wasn't smirking, goddamn right he wasn't, and his eyes were carefully shuttered, impassive. John wanted to get mad, lay into something and tear off in a cloud of dust, but he knew what Dean was talking about, and he could admit it was the best description. That cold, flat look of Sam's, narrow eyes glittering and cruel, and John remembered the feel of it, this desperate inarticulate rage that Sam would even dare consider it, and even that was overmatched by a wrecking thrum of sorrow, the idea that his son, his baby boy wanted to hurt him with his bare hands. This awful excuse for a family that John had given him, this corrupt backwater of a home, and that dead look on Sam's face.
John got up to fork the toast out of the oven. There was honey; there was almost nothing else, but there was usually honey, because it never went bad. The silence between them was less than accusatory. Dean watched him move down the short strip of the kitchen counter, sink oven and ice-box all along one wall, and John wished he could ask Dean how Dean had managed to stay in Sam's affections, what the trick was to getting past all the petty sniping and adolescent bullshit that characterized his younger son.
It would have been a stupid question, of course. All Dean ever had to do for Sam was stick around.
He gave Dean one of the end pieces. Dean tried to refuse, insisting that he was full, but John told him shortly, "Eat it," and Dean did in two bites, honey shining on his fingertips.
John sat back down. He pushed his cup of coffee across the table to his son. Dean quirked an eyebrow but accepted it, taking a drink and almost hiding his grimace at the taste. John smirked.
"Gotta learn how to drink it black, son."
Dean waved his hand, taking a longer slurp and then making an exaggerated delicious! face that had John chuckling. Dean grinned at him, and John was for some reason hit with an abnormally large rush of pride for the boy.
*
Every day that Dean hadn't had to work, all through this long dry West Texas summer, Sam and Dean had gone into the so-called town to laze around at the community pool, totally bereft of any other ways to beat the heat. It was cramped and the concrete was slick with ice cream and suntan lotion, little kids bawling everywhere and the water so blue it hurt to look at for too long.
Last year, Sam had never failed to remind him, last year in Montana, and the lakes, Dean, remember all those little lakes? Sam squinted against the all-powerful glare and scratched at the back of his shoulder, brightly colored fish on his hand-me-down swimtrunks and Dean flashed on last-year-Sam, faded red boxers and nothing else just as the structure of his bones finally settled into place, whooping and kicking off the rope to fly pinwheeling into a pond that had been punched perfectly into the woods, waiting for them for a number of centuries.
Sam was back in school, though, and Dad was asleep in the middle of the day again (not drunk--not yet), and Dean was going out of his skin without anybody to talk to, so he got in the car and went to the pool alone.
It was a little awkward. The older kids were all gone, leaving just moms and toddlers and old people and Dean. It was quiet and peaceful and he tried like hell not to look like a child molester.
He ended up talking to the lifeguard, who was perhaps not quite in his league but looked just beautiful right now, zinced nose and all. She was attending college via a correspondence course, and she worked four part-time jobs, tired-looking eyes and nice mouth and no tits but no waist either, and Dean could work with that. Her name was. Kara. Karen. Carol. Along those lines.
He did better than he expected, or faster, at any rate, sweating in the sun with his forearms on his bent knees, skin flushed with heat. He'd burned a number of times earlier in the summer, and then Sam reported that his freckles were getting darker by the week, and Dean didn't know what to expect next. But she liked what she saw (so many people did; it still took Dean by surprise more often than not), and her shift was over at three and she had an hour before she had to be at the Dairy Queen and did he maybe wanna?
Dean choked. (Not literally.) He stammered something that was immediately blocked out of his memory because it was just too stupid ("I, uh, you're very, ah, cool and that's, that's cool but I, I, shit, gottagopickupmylittlebrother") and then he booked, humiliated.
Once in the car, he scrubbed his face hard and muttered, "What the fuck was that?"
Dean was not new to this shit. He fucking knew how to fucking hit on girls, so what the fuck?
It wasn't the hitting-on, he thought. That had gone very well. Too well. Dean raised one eyebrow at himself in the mirror. He stroked the beard he didn't have and it made him feel a little better, a little more like this was all a joke his psyche was playing on him. Which wouldn't be entirely out of character.
Dean pulled up a visual of the girl and let his imagination go to work, all the possibilities in that skimpy red swimsuit, but it was kinda boring and that was it. She was kinda boring, kinda not worth the time, and Dean suddenly wondered when any sex had become not worth his time. It wasn't at all like him.
He started the car because it was almost three. It hadn't been a total lie; he didn't have to pick up Sam, but he might as well. He was right there.
Dean thought about Sam for a minute, fussing over some essay on the ride in this morning, his hair still wet from the shower and sticking to his neck, biting his lip and telling Dean that this was for real, he couldn't fuck this one up. Dean kept saying, it's just school, Sammy, and Sam glared at him and hissed between his teeth in irritation and bitched about how it was Sam not Sammy, and it was all terribly hot and not boring in any way.
Sam, he realized suddenly, though really, Dean, what else was it gonna be? This messed-up thing with Sam. Fucking Dean up outside as well as in, apparently, because Dean didn't think there was anyone in the world that could break the fascinated hold Sam had over him.
Sam had always had an inordinate amount of Dean's attention, an understandable side effect of having fucking raised him. He'd watched Sam grow and grow, right out of his split-seam shirts and pants that exposed his ankles, taller than Dean (motherfucker) and then taller than Dad (which was slightly mollifying), and then suddenly there was this rangy full-grown man with gigantic mitt hands and his kid brother Sammy's sharp nose and wary eyes and the chin they shared, Sammy's questions and brattiness and dogged loyalty but none of his obedience and, horrifyingly, almost none of Sammy's abiding love for John, another thing he and Dean shared. Dean needed to figure out who this guy was who picked fights and lounged around like a huge cat and drove their father even further into the bottle (not that he had much further to go). Reconciling the man Sam was becoming seemed to take all of his energy, sucked him as dry as the desert around.
And then this thing, this summer thing (they only had once since the school year began, and Dean was gonna stop lying awake waiting to see if it would any freakin' day now). Strange interludes all season, always when Dad was gone, always in the middle of the night when Sam would push onto Dean's tiny cot and rub him off through his shorts, bite his neck until Dean keened, teeth digging into his lip because he didn't want to say Sam's name, he didn't want to hear it torn from him like that. Middle of the night when Dean would lick down Sam's ribs and over the bony points of his hips until Sam was squirming and begging in small pants and almost crying he was so hard, his palms pressed flat and hot to the sides of Dean's head. Middle of the night, that one time, when Sam had fit his arm around Dean's body and dragged them flush, fit them chest to back and Dean remembered gasping, Sam everywhere around him, grinding into him and his huge hand wide open on Dean's bare stomach, scuffed fingertips under the elastic. Sam's mouth moaning against the back of Dean's neck, and Dean couldn't stand it, too much and too hot and Sam, little Sammy had him completely under his control, physical and mental and "anything," Dean told his brother, out of his mind by then, stone gone. "Anything you want, Sam."
Dean was in some trouble. The only good thing was at least he knew it.
Dean got to the high school, parked illegally in his usual spot. Most of the vehicles in the lot were beat-up farm trucks that didn't shine and Dean buffed the Impala's hood with an old T-shirt, trying to draw attention. Dad had been leaving the car in Dean's care more and more often, tacitly acknowledging that Dean was earning it, working for the day he could pick out his own keychain. It was encouraging, especially after Dean had to sell his motorcycle to cover Sam's soccer expenses and lab fees. He liked the Impala better anyway.
Kids started to pour out of the school, fresh-faced and sunburned and Dean watched them laughing, boys tossing footballs in long spirals across the cracked asphalt. Careless and lazy, still fighting off the summer, and Dean studied the ease of their complex interactions, the weave of friends in and around each other. Dean shifted his weight, swiping a hand across the slick back of his neck.
"Hey."
Dean jerked, and Sam was somehow behind him, on the other side of the car. He'd snuck up, sly little bitch.
"How's your day, Sam?"
Sam shrugged, impossibly broad shoulders falling with a sigh. His hair was in front of his eyes and Dean wasn't thinking about brushing it away. Sam would probably snap his wrist for even trying.
"Only half over," Sam said, and got in the Impala, tossing his backpack in the back.
He gnawed on his thumbnail as Dean maneuvered them away from the school, staring out the window. Dean looked at the smooth line of Sam's neck and his nervous mouth and Dean's whole body flushed, jerking his eyes back to the road.
He remembered thinking the first time he'd let Sam put a hand on him, half-drunk and already dizzy and overheated, Dean had thought desperately that this would be no big deal. It didn't make him a bad person, didn't make him twisted and sick because Sam wasn't and Sam wanted it, at least for now he wanted it. They could help each other out just because they didn't have anybody else, and it wouldn't be weirder than the rest of the shitshow that was their life, and Sam would grow out of it eventually just like everything else.
It was genuinely frightening sometimes, the things this new Sam could do to him. The insane stuff he had Dean believing.
*
John has them out in the oil fields at sunset, the worst possible time for shooting practice and that is the intention. Train under the most adverse conditions, in the pouring rain and the cold so wicked it freezes their guns, make training hell so that everything else will be that much easier.
Sam gets the logic behind it, but it still pisses him right the fuck off. He'd been reading Blood Meridian, which had been on the suggested summer reading list for AP English, though he honestly has no idea why, considering it's the goriest thing he's read so far in his long life. Also completely engrossing, which is why he doesn't appreciate John brusquely calling him Sammy and tossing him a rifle without the slightest acknowledgement that Sam is kinda fuckin' occupied.
He trudges out behind Dean, squeezing the stock and feeling sweat coat his palms. Dean glances back at him from time to time, his eyes unreadable. After awhile, Sam starts sneering back at him. He doesn't need to be checked on like a six year old.
"All right, Sammy," John says, and Sam would have flinched if there was any chance of John noticing. "Start at twenty yards and work your way out. Into the sun, boy."
Sam spins on his heel and stalks off, his shadow stretching out ladder-tall before him. His spine feels as hard as the rifle barrel, and he doesn't want to be here anymore, he doesn't want to dislike his dad quite this much.
There's a scurry of steps, and then Dean falls into stride beside him. Sam glances at him out of the corner of his eye, wondering if John sent him to put Sammy back in line.
Dean doesn't say anything. They get twenty yards out and don't turn around for a second, looking at each other in the dying moments of the day, skeletal shadows stretched on a rack. Dean's mouth twitches and he sets his rifle on his shoulder, executes a perfect about-face, stamps his heel down and then looks over his shoulder to grin at Sam, the bloody sunlight all over his face.
"Little tin soldier," Sam calls him, feeling the band of metal around his heart constrict.
Dean's face might fall. It's hard to tell, in this kind of light.
Their dad is shouting for them to take a low position, and Sam is staring at his brother, the fine bones of Dean's face and his mouth that says at least as much silently as out loud, and he wishes he could take it back.
Sam wishes he could take a lot of stuff back.
Dean drops to one knee, and Sam hesitates, skin prickling because he's not as good a shot from his knees, and follows suit. John sets up bottles on the sawhorse he hauled out, gets back out of the way. The sun is so low and the land so flat, everything stretches on and on.
Quick pull of Dean's finger, and a bottle explodes twenty yards away. The glassine crack of the shot bounces around in Sam's head, and he rubs his eye, spits to one side. Dean nudges him with his shoulder, "Your turn, Sammy."
"It's Sam, Dean, fuck."
Sam squeezes off two shots and misses both. He curses, bracing himself in advance and still suffering a flood of anger when his dad yells, "What the hell was that?"
Sam's hands hurt and he looks down to find them wrapped white-knuckled around the gun. His hair is stinging in his eyes and he doesn't want to fucking be here.
Dean touches Sam's forearm carefully. "Sam?"
Looking up, teeth dug into his lip and hateful tears standing in his eyes, Sam finds Dean watching him alert and cautious and Sam knows that look, a hunting look. Something evil here but Dean doesn't know exactly what. Something evil wearing Dean's brother's face.
Sam pushes him off, gets shakily to his feet. Their dad is still hollering at him, and Sam cuts him off, takes a huge breath and then bellows, "Enough!" with enough force that a scatter of small black birds erupts out of the scraggly tree.
Sam chocks the rifle into the hollow of his shoulder and picks off a half-dozen bottles in a row, pop pop pop and his ears are ringing, his heartbeat enormous in his ears. Splinters of glass fill the air, catch the sunset like bits of flame.
Everyone's completely silent in the moment after.
Then Sam chucks his rifle at where Dean is still kneeling on the ground, and says in a voice too low for John to hear, "He knows I'm better on my feet."
*
John waited until the boys were in their room and the intermittent inaudible conversation faded from behind the door, and then he took the Impala down to a bar called the Old Press. Same exact bar it'd always been, same exact drink filling John's hand.
Pretzels instead of peanuts. A juke and a pool table and a pinball machine and a forty year old woman with hair the color of burnished steel tending bar who appraised him frankly and John got the sense his credit was a little short tonight. He gave the wearily apologetic grin that had gotten him out of worse fixes, and was rewarded for his efforts with a long-suffering sigh and a tumbler of gin that was heavier than it should have been.
John had always done well in bars. That moment-to-moment draw and parry of an interaction taking place across a crowded room. How to pitch his voice over the music but under the hearing of the people around him. How to spot a mark, how to dive believably in the first game, how to hold aces over eights. John could smell out the kind of place from the cigarette smoke and the tap beer soaking into the sawdust. At any given moment, he could tell you how many people were in the room and how many were women and how many were men who might pose a threat. John was the type of drunk who had full and articulate conversations in the midst of a blackout.
The first drink was the best. And tomorrow the sun would rise.
He was having a discussion with one of the rig workers who went from well to well, about the likelihood of rain and a third straight World Series win for the New York Yankees, and the man, Ricky, said he had a son who played professional baseball down in some South American country whose name he couldn't recall.
John nodded, tapping a finger on his glass. "Mine plays soccer."
"Soccer?" Odd tone to it, and John remembered where the hell he was.
"Football too, and he's real good. He just prefers soccer for some reason."
Ricky squinted knowingly, weasel-like eyes under the brim of his battered trucker cap. "You give 'em choices and they're gonna figure out which one you like the least and go for it full-bore."
"Now there's a truth."
"How old's your boy?"
"Sixteen," and John bit his tongue immediately, "Seventeen, just turned seventeen." In May, a wretched little voice reminded him, only four short months ago. "And my older one's twenty-one."
"They must be at each other's throats near constant; I remember what that's like."
Ricky launched into a many-layered anecdote about cousins of his, brothers whose idea of fun was sucker-punching each other hard enough to shatter noses and pop knuckles out of joint. John only half-listened, nodding and taking measured sips of his drink.
His boys bickered and they occasionally came to blows, now that Sam was bigger than Dean and Dean had weaned himself of almost all of his innate instinct to pull his punches when sparring with his baby brother. But it was routine and without teeth, and most of the time Dean was the only person Sam could stand to be around, and Sam was the only person in whose company Dean was truly at ease.
Ricky's story came to a rambling end, and he allowed a lull, scratching at his salt-colored stubble before saying in a bar philosopher's voice, "Drive you crazy while they're around, but wait till you have to let 'em go."
And John nodded, hiding a little smile behind the near-empty glass. He tried to imagine what it would have been like to lose Dean three summers ago, to be losing Sammy in the blink of this next year, but it wasn't conceivable, no more than trying to imagine how the boys would have turned out if Mary had lived, the bright happy ignorant sons that existed facelessly in some alternate reality.
John would never have that kind of family, but this, this was a greater good. Both his boys understood the importance of the work, the cleansing of true evil from a world already going to hell in feints and half-measures. There was Sam's face when he was about eleven or twelve and sat in the car watching as John carried a weightless sweatshirt-wrapped bundle of four year old up the walk to a lit doorway. That tiny little kid who coulda been a girl or boy just as easy, just a huge pair of dark eyes staring up at Sam's dad like he was a god, huddled up close to John's chest. And the mother who'd answered the door, crumpling to her knees when she saw what the frightening man in the dirty coat held in his arms, and how she wept and thanked him and clung to her child. Sam's face when John came back to the car, serious little Sammy with his mouth hanging open slightly, his eyes very big and very white, and how Sam had wanted to sit in the front for the ride back, between him and Dean, bouncing and pounding his small fist on Dean's leg and saying, "Holy crap, that was cool," over and over again until Dean noogied him quiet.
John kept that night at the forefront of his mind, his go-to reminder that Sam did get it, no matter what his snide teenager's mouth wanted to sneer, Sam knew that they were talking about people's lives. On some very basic level Sam understood that no other job, no other way of life beat that of a savior. John had seen it in his face.
Sam was fighting and kicking now, but it was just he was so smart. He never took anything on faith, Sam always had to be convinced and prodded along, usually by Dean, and he was resisting the life just because it was the only thing he'd ever known. For a kid like Sammy that was the worst kind of torture, the idea of a whole world that he was missing out on, the lighter side of existence through the veil.
But this cheap adolescent shit wouldn't last. Sam was going to get his diploma (Dean had talked his way into dropping out junior year with the promise of acquiring a GED in the mythical and unrealized future), and then they'd all of them go on the road for real, not these bullshit weekend hunts and the easy stuff Dean was always pushing for when Sam came along. Sam was good, much better than either he or Dean realized, but John could see it, in his reaction time and sniper's eye and the gathering strength of his full size. Sam was ready, and once they were out on the road there would be a place for Sam's restlessness and deathless energy, and they could get on with the righteous work of eradicating evil and keeping families unbroken, and Sam would remember. He'd get that look on his face again; John couldn't wait to see what it looked like now that Sam was almost all grown up.
John and Ricky both stayed until last call, and then made their way to the door holding each other up, arms slung 'round shoulders. They were trading war stories, though Ricky had been a stationed as a clerk in Tokyo for most of it, because it was about that time of night. They separated with back slaps and good-on-yas in the parking lot, and John made for the Impala, weaving like a boxer.
Driving drunk was far from the most dangerous thing John did. He had to be more careful but he could do that; he was a hunter and he'd stayed alive this long. It reminded him of going on patrols bombed out of his mind back in-country, stoned and drunk on weedy-tasting moonshine in the driving rain. Anything to keep his head out of the deafening overbearing terror of now, anything to forget that he was standing up to his knees in mud in the middle of a guerilla war, unable to run.
The West Texas highways were straight and flat and John could appreciate that. He liked this part of the country, the simplicity of the land and the evidence of the physical work it had taken to carve an existence out of the desert. Since his year in the jungle, John had preferred places where he could see the horizon in all directions, three hundred and sixty degrees of ways out.
A satellite or a plane flitted across the sky, blinking red in front of the moon. John's hands on the steering wheel were scarred and misshapen.
The red light in the sky made him think of the helicopters again, and then the child's face reoccurred, floating up from the darkness.
Small face smudged with ash and dirt and carrying two parallel scratches on his cheek (John thought it had been a boy; he hoped it had been), maybe ten years old, maybe eleven. Slight like all the Vietnamese kids seemed to be, with liquid dark eyes and filthy black hair in tangles, teeth set shockingly white in his dirty face. He had walked into their camp and John had always liked kids and he was gonna offer this one a Hershey's when he saw the bandolier of grenades strapped across his narrow chest, a piece of twine strung through all the rings and wrapped around the kid's twig-fingered hand.
John did not hesitate. He shot the boy in the face. He blew the boy's head off his body in a spray of red and gray and the body (so small and thin, so insubstantial) dropped almost gracefully, disintegrating on the dirt. John remembered looking down at the boy's skinny legs, skewed and crooked and one sandal missing, the gun searing in his hands.
The rest of his unit had called him a hero. John threw up all that night and didn't speak for three days and didn't sleep longer than an hour at a stretch for almost a month, until he started hallucinating and was sent to Bangkok for R&R. Everywhere he looked, the little boy dressed in grenades blinked back at him, silent and lost.
John survived and came home and met Mary and the boy's face never left him. He was sure the boy had been a war orphan (what parent would strap grenades to their child's chest? what parent would make their son into a martyr?), and he thought he was probably the only one left who remembered him, his slashed cheekbones and damning eyes and stub of a nose, the neat little face that had smiled and cried and existed once. The boy lived on in John, and he watched his sons grow up wondering if the boy would have turned out tall like Sam or handsome like Dean, better with rifles or knives, sweet-tempered or fiery, a good man or wicked.
John pulled up in front of the house, spotlit and then crashed into darkness, and he shook off the spectre of the boy, pushing himself out of the car and hearing his bones creak. He was still drunk, unsteady and trying to blink the dimness from his eyes. The night sky was clear as a bell and thatched with stars.
As he came in, there was a thump behind the wall of the boys' room and then quick footsteps, and John tensed, not wanting to be seen like this, but the footsteps ended in a floorboard creak and the muffled sound of a body falling onto a cot. John didn't know what to make of it, his mind fogged and unreliable.
He turned on the tap and the water came out rusty and John bent his head, drank straight from the faucet until a glassy ache split his head. His throat was coated and his mouth tasted metallic, sore used.
Moving carefully, he went to the door of the boys' room and cracked the door open. It was perfectly dark and the air was scented heavy, something familiar and unsettling that John couldn't quite place. His eyes adjusted and he was able to make out the lump of Dean turned towards the wall, his back bare and tense. Dean must be dreaming, some nightmare that John was probably responsible for.
"Dad."
John jerked his gaze over to the other side of the room, where Sam's eyes were watchful, glittering. John tried to smile, but it was so dark Sam's hair looked black and tangled and his eyes were smudges of ink and the Vietnamese boy's face shuttered over his son's, chilling John to his core.
"Oughta be asleep, Sammy," John said in a rough voice.
Sam's teeth glinted as he sneered. "Maybe you woke me up."
"Watch yourself," John warned automatically, no real force behind it. "You. How's school?"
A burst of breath, an aggrieved sigh. "Fine, Dad."
John nodded, clicking his tongue against his teeth. "Good. That's good."
"Was there something else you wanted?"
Sometimes Sam made him so angry John couldn't see through it.
"Don't you take that tone-" he started to say, voice rising as he reeled in the doorway, but suddenly Dean was there, clean wide-eyed with his hands steadying his father.
"C'mon, Dad, it's okay," Dean murmured, steering him out of the room. Over the curve of Dean's bare shoulder John could see Sam pushed up on his elbows, his mouth warped and his eyes blazing. He exhausted John, wore him down better than a two thousand mile drive or a three-day march through the jungle.
He let Dean guide him over to the couch and sit him down, blood rushing and his head spinning. He could feel his pulse throbbing in his temples.
"Hates me," John muttered. Dean's face was pinched and weary, his hands so strong.
"No he doesn't."
John turned his face into the couch cushion, his heart aching. "You're a good boy, Dean."
"Yeah." Dean was efficient, stripping John out of his jacket, kneeling to untie his boots and yank them off. "I'm a prince."
"You are." John palmed his son's face, smiling at him. "Best of me."
Dean flushed, looking down. His mouth was pressed into a thin line, and he glanced back at the door of his room.
"Go to sleep, Dad."
John nodded, sighing and letting himself fall sideways. Dean grabbed his legs and hoisted them onto the couch and then cuffed the top of John's head and John's throat was thick and he thought he might weep for the love of his boys.
The door to the boys' room closed with a click, and John listened to Dean's footsteps crossing to his brother's bed. The last thing he heard was broken and muffled, Dean saying low:
"It's all right now, Sammy, don't cry."
*
Sam had been a bitch all weekend, and on Sunday Dean couldn't find him. He wanted to go to the diner, his stomach felt like it was eating itself, but Sam wasn't in earshot because Dean had hollered for him until their dad, stoically suffering a hangover, hollered back for him to quit.
There were only so many places that Sam could go with the car parked out front, and Dean ran around looking until his shirt was damp and his side stitched with fire. He ran over to the decommissioned derricks to the west and then along the dry creek bed, whorls and sinews etched in the dirt, and his sneakers and legs were covered in pale brown dust. Dean imagined that he was leaving clouds behind, vanishing like a cartoon.
He found Sam out in the oil fields, under the single black-knuckled tree they used as their point of reference for shooting practice. Sam had several books out and open, pages weighed down with rocks and his canteen, and he was sitting indian-style bent over a notebook. Dean sighed inwardly, rolled his eyes. Sam Winchester, king of the geeks.
Dean fell back, circling back around the tree, but his clever plan to jump out at Sam and hopefully scare a little-girl yip out of him was dashed when Sam said from the other side of the tree:
"I know you're there, Dean."
Dean stopped. He could see the edge of Sam's knobby knee from around the tree, one bare foot with a sole grimed black.
"You're no fun," he told his brother, and came around into the sunlight. Sam didn't look up, his messy head bowed. "I don't know what I did to get stuck with such a buzzkill for a brother."
"Original sin," Sam said flatly, and Dean started. Without seeing Sam's face, he didn't know how to take that.
"What's all this shit?" he asked, kicking at one of the books and spraying grit across the pages.
"Dude." Sam snatched the book up, and there it was, his beautiful glare. Dean rejoiced quietly inside, his mission accomplished. "Could you not be a jerk for like five fucking minutes?"
"Whatever, bitch. Don't try to change me."
Sam's mouth quirked like he was thinking about smiling, before setting in a hard line again. "Kinda occupied here, Dean."
Dean brushed that off like a leaf on his shoulder. He plopped down on the dirt in front of his brother, just inside the jagged shadow of the tree, and leaned back on his hands, the sun beating warm on the backs of his arms. Sam was still scowling, wearing a slash of dust as warpaint on his cheek, and his eyes were the dark color they got when he was really angry or really turned on. Dean licked his lips, feeling that hot guilty crawl in his belly and wondering if he'd ever be shook of this.
"Unless you have some insights into the Christ imagery in Faulkner-" Sam started to say snidely, but Dean had had just about enough of that.
"Don't be a complete tool your whole life, Sam."
Sam's face snapped, his lip curling up. "I'm sorry, are you laboring under the misconception that I want you around right now?"
That kinda hurt kinda a lot, but Dean had had worse. He could take it.
"You talk so pretty when you're mad, Sammy." A sneer, perfectly formed and bitter-tasting.
"Stop calling me that."
Sam kicked out at him, and Dean was surprised anew at the length of Sam when his dirty foot clipped across his jaw. Dean jerked backwards, spitting, "Motherfucker," and Sam's eyes got strange and wide, shocked himself. Dean took advantage, grabbed Sam's leg with both hands and hauled his brother to him.
Skidding across the dirt and over an open book, Sam made a funny squawking sound that Dean would normally mock until he lost his voice, but no time for that now, not with Sam in his hands once more.
Dean pulled Sam's leg over his own, fisted a hand in his shirt and slammed him down on the ground, rising to his knees for the right leverage. He could feel Sam's leg fold behind him, hooking around his thighs, and Dean shivered, rough hair and the hard dirt everywhere. Sam was looking up at him with his mouth rounded and his eyes like a heatstroke, so fucking hot.
Dean leaned over him, hovering his face close enough to Sam's that he could make out the tear-shaped scar just under his lip. A dozen years ago they had been playing with matches, and Sam had thought the fire looked pretty tasty. Dean could call back his pained bird-like cry with absolutely no effort, and he thought disjointedly that he could probably get him to make that sound again.
"You're such a brat," he breathed out against Sam's mouth. Sam shuddered and it burred through Dean like an electrocution.
Sam's head craned back slowly, offering his throat. "Yeah?" he said, voice thick. Unspoken he asked, what're you gonna do about it?
Dean swallowed hard. He lowered his head, hesitant for reasons that he couldn't explain, and licked at the line of Sam's neck, searching for his reedy pulse. Sam hummed, a vibration against Dean's lips and his stomach bottomed out, a bolt of heat through him as he went suddenly, shockingly hard.
"Dean," Sam mumbled. Dean flushed, he wasn't the hair-trigger teenager here, goddamn it, but Sam's eyes were closed and he was rocking up into Dean, his hair tangled in the scrub grass and dirt. Right here right now, Dean was the only thing Sam was thinking about.
"Sammy," Dean said reverently against his brother's throat.
Sam grabbed Dean's shoulders, dug his nails in hard, and Dean hissed. His hips ground down involuntarily and they were right together, fit as if molded, and Sam moaned even as he was trying to swear, trying to draw blood and cause some permanent damage.
Dean bit at Sam's jaw and pushed his hands up under Sam's shirt onto his slick thin skin. He felt drunk and made hysterical by the ceaseless pound of the sun, unable to believe that he'd never had Sam in the light like this, all his fine lines and sharp angles revealed as stark and clear as roads on a map. Sam's face was still smooth, boyish and clean and Dean hated how much he liked that.
"You son of a bitch," Sam gasped, clinging to Dean's shoulders and driving up into him faster and faster.
"Hush," Dean said, almost absent-minded. He'd shaped a bruise under Sam's jaw, and he pressed his thumb down on it, fascinated. He thought about how it would fade over a week and maybe Sam would touch it sometimes when he wasn't thinking about it, and maybe Sam would remember the feel of it even after it was gone. He passed his fingers over Sam's mouth and Sam licked and sucked at them and Dean kinda lost it at that point. He buried his face in his brother's shoulder and felt his fingers hook over his teeth and he came like falling off a cliff, that crazy euphoric feeling of imminent death.
Sam followed right after, rapping his fists on Dean's shoulders and panting and cursing and begging him all in the same ragged breath. Dean could feel the taut shiver go through Sam's long body, his teeth dug into his lip hard enough to break the skin.
This moment, right here right now, and Dean wanted to force Sam into the earth, lock him in place. Sam was looking up at him all dazed and limp and there was a terrible smile spreading on his face, a careless and inconstant joy in his eyes.
Dean had never in his life kissed his brother. He looked at the match-head of blood on Sam's mouth, red and soft and he was moving before he could think, swiping his tongue across and Sam gasped, his breath pushing warm into Dean, and then there they were.
*
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