almost believe and it's almost enough
TITLE Almost Believe and it's Almost Enough
SUMMARY 'If you wish others to believe in you, you must first convince them that you believe in them'.
NOTE: Part of the Shay!verse. If you haven’t read 'Five Times Shayne saved a Winchester (and one time they saved each other) this might not make sense. Beta'd by the wonderful mabbly.
If you wish others to believe in you, you must first convince them that you believe in them
~ Harvey MacKay
Shayne never remembers ever missing a mother, or a family. Missing whatever life she must of had before.
Maybe because she couldn’t remember ever having it: maybe she had stopped remembering it because she didn’t want to miss it. Pastor Jim was always big on cause and effect. It had almost always boggled Shayne.
She never once remembers asking why she had to move all the time. Why she had to be passed from man to man and back again while everyone else got to go where they wanted or stay with their families and friends. Maybe it was because she had never been all that good at making friends. Maybe she just didn’t make them because she knew she’d have to leave them. Cause and effect.
It’ll drive you fucking crazy.
Shayne remembers being hauled up at Jimmy’s with a broken leg before she had a chance to start second grade - while he and John had a screaming fit down in the cellar that they probably thought she couldn’t hear. She remembers that even though Jimmy seemed to know a lot about everything and Pastors were never ever supposed to lie: she agreed with everything John said this time.
The break wasn’t as bad as it could have been. She was tougher than she seemed. She wasn’t confused about anything. Of course it wasn’t fair, but neither is life.
The argument ended with Jimmy screaming something about a psychologist in town that had offered to help them out and John shutting up pretty quick but Shayne can remember the shudder that ran through Dean from where they were huddled listening on the stairs.
What do they care what a shrink thinks? Dean hissed, predispositioned by months and months of counsellors and child therapists telling his four year old self that its okay to be confused, to be scared; to be angry. It’s okay if he didn’t want to talk about it; he could draw it if he wanted.
Freakin’ draw it,, he’d told her, sarcasm and distain dripping from every word after they’d shuffled stealthily back to the spare bedroom, leaving Jimmy and John arguing the pros and cons of hypnotherapy. Pastor Jim had been on one of his missions lately.
Verging on two years now, and Shayne still wasn’t giving anything away. Shayne wanted to tell Jimmy it wasn’t because she was traumatised. It wasn’t because she was angry or scared. It was just because she really couldn’t remember.
You don’t need a shrink, Dean had assured her that day, his voice steely and sure as it was hushed, as they whispered in the dark, you’re fine. He glanced down at where Sammy was snoring between them. We’re fine.
She never remembers being as sure about that as he was.
Shayne remembers everything about July 16th, 1992. She was ten years old, and it was almost 80 degrees in North Dakota and she was carrying a fractured wrist and a concussion. And there was only one place that a fractured wrist and a concussion could ever be put to good use.
Her bag was too light on her shoulder, and Rumsfeld was going crazy trying to gnaw through his rope to come meet her. She was caught between worrying if anyone had bothered to call Bobby to warn him of her extended stay, wondering exactly what she was supposed to do in a deserted salvage yard for two months when Sam Winchester had jumped the porch steps.
“Hey!”
She remembers how his hair was longer then, fell messily in his eyes and made him look younger than he should. How his scruffy overalls had been two sizes too big and his grin had been boyish.
“You coming in or what? You’ll get sun stoke if you stand out here any more and Dean bought popsicles!”
She remembers how she hadn’t even had time to answer before he was tugging her wrist all the way into the house. She remembers it smelt of gasoline and sea salt. How it always did, every time she’d ever stepped foot into it.
She remembers one of those times, summers later, when the same boy had been tugging her same wrist up the same porch steps. His hair was shorter then, his eyes had lost some shine, but he was taller, surer - stronger in every step he made. They had huddled in the familiar porch corner, away from open windows and cracked shutters and hunter’s ears as Sam let some of his secrets spill onto the rotten wood panels.
Shayne remembers the sudden knot of unexplainable dread that tightened in her gut when she’d taken the papers off him and stared. “My guidance counsellor said I qualified for a full ride. Ivy League, Shay! Can you believe it?”
She remembers how it didn’t look Ivy League. How the neatly scrawled lines of kind words and praises might as well have been a death certificate. She remembers how her friend’s eyes had dimmed and as she handed the reference letters back to him, his brows knitting together as he folded them back into his pant pocket.
“College ain’t hunting, Sam. Your Daddy isn’t gunna like this.”
She remembers how the boy who stood in front of her then was so different than the friend she sometimes felt she’d known her whole life.
“I don’t care what he thinks.” She remembers that as those words fell onto that porch that day, steely and sure, she knew everything was going to be different then.
“I’m going to apply. I’ve already filled in the application forms.”
She remembers his voice had sounded steely and sure, even though every bone in her body had been screaming at her how wrong this was. How every instinct in her head was warning her to put a stop to it on that very porch, where they’d huddled once, a thousand years ago and made childhood promises that not one of them should have believed in. Sam had, though. Sam had believed back then. In a life away from the one he had. In things that in all purposes, he’d been taught to avoid.
Shayne can’t remember when she’d been taught that two heads are better than one.
It was just one of those things she seemed to have always known, just by instinct and common sense. Another opinion is never unwarranted. Another set of eyes is never a set too many. Not when the things watching you could have five sets more. Two heads are better than one. Three heads trump everything.
Their decisions had always meant more when they were made as a team.
Shayne was six years old when they had made the most impending decision of their young lives. Together they huddled on the edge of Bobby’s porch - on the loose panel where they hid their gum wrappers and Popsicle sticks.
“Dad says that blood binds always.” Dean told them, nicking each of their fingers with a pen knife. Sam winced and frowned at the tiny red line but lifted it up anyway, pressed it together with hers and his brother’s; eyes wide, mouth agape. He was like that back then, was Sam. Always wanting to learn, always wanting to know more, be better - be everything he thought his big brother was. If Dean told him that blood promises were forever, then he’d bleed and believe. No questions asked.
“There.” Dean said, matter of factly, after they’d pulled their digits apart and stuck it their mouths to relieve it of sting and red smudges. “Now we’re bound. Always.”
Shayne didn’t carry Sam’s unquestionable trust in Santa and elves at ten years old. She didn’t have a father to quote like Dean did.
But she had a finger, and two people to bleed for.
Shayne can remember believing that was a hell of a lot more than most people had.
:::::
Headlights throw misshapen shadows against the motel wall and Ronnie reaches out from his spot by the window to flick at the moth eaten drapes.
There hasn’t been movement outside for hours. The sharp chill of the evening had given way to even colder temperatures since the darkness had truly set in and the gusts of wind had started blowing leaves and dust and dirt from the roads across the parking lot.
The motel itself is set back far out of town, nestled in barren wasteland, practically deserted apart form a couple of station wagons that hadn’t moved since she and Ronnie had checked in three days ago. That’s mostly why they’d picked this dump. Ronnie was about as anti-social as Shayne, and doubly as paranoid. Shayne finds she likes that kind of company in some towns. Amherst, Massachusetts was one of them.
Ronnie stares out the window for a minute, while the headlights shut off and motel settles back into hazy grey, and the rumble of the engine are swallowed away. He drops the drapes back into place and goes back to cleaning off the blades he has spread across the bedspread.
“You expectin’ company?” He says after a while, his voice low and rumbled, his eyes still tracing the contours of blade and cloth.
Shayne looks up from across the room, where she’s folded into an overstuffed chair, texts spread out across her lap. She brushes a handful off hair out her eyes with one hand and slams the heavy books shut with the other, unfolding her feet from underneath her with a sigh.
“Looks that way,” Shayne says, stretching out her aching limbs and grabbing a sweater off the back of the chair on her way past Ronnie, who doesn’t look up from the weaponry as she slips outside without any further explanation.
He’s propped against the Impala when she clicks the door shut behind her; legs crossed at the ankles, hands splayed against the black gleam of the hood, eyes trained on the door. The night time chill tickles any bare skin it can find and she pulls the warmth of her sweater over her fingers and clinches it tight around her waist as she walks slowly across the gravel of the small parking lot.
The motel is a dive. The bathroom is mouldy and the heater rattles so loud it shakes the plaster hanging off the walls, but it was cheap and it’s mostly dry and it was the furthest away from town they could get without changing zip codes.
There are a lot of things Shayne can feign patience with. College towns in September are not one of them. She’d spent the day trying to manoeuvre her way out of packed libraries and even busier side streets, with people thrusting flyers at her for freshman keg mixers and trying to cajole her into pledging something to one numeral or another.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he says by way of greeting, once she’s close enough to hear it.
Shayne hums as she comes to stand a few feet from him and crosses her arms over her torso to trap the open sweater in place, watching the car keys dangle teasingly from his fingers.
“Hmm, fancy that.”
His head is cocked, his eyes playing mischief, but Shayne knows something’s off with the same instinct that told her exactly which car was rolling to a stop outside their motel room earlier.
She cuts him off as soon as his mouth opens again. “Lemme guess?” She tweaks an eyebrow, “What’s a girl like me doing in a place like this?”
His eyes soften and a smile tugs at his lips. “Actually I was gonna say you look like shit, but yeah, now that you mention it this does seem to be one of your more profound shit holes.”
A laugh slips past her lips and he grins, wide and open and shifts his weight so he can reach behind his back with one hand and lift a pack of beer into view between them. “Care to rectify the situation?”
She does look like shit, although the bathroom mirror was so smudged with dirt and grime that she can only imagine to what degree. She knows she has a bruise to her cheek and a knock to the ribs that makes her walk with a slouch. She knows she hasn’t seen a hairbrush since they’d crossed the state line.
None of which could be logically rectified by lukewarm beer, but she steps up to the bumper anyway, so they’re toe to toe and takes the pack from his hands. She sets it beside him and slides up onto the hood.
“Gee Dean, beer and a dirty car hood.” Shayne whistles low and teasing as she shuffles back and stretches out so she’s reclined like she’s on a sun chair. She meets his eyes from where he’s twisted around, following her movements. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
“Damn straight.” He says smugly, shifting backwards to lay beside her, arms brushing through layers of leather and cloth.
Shayne knows why he’s here. She knows why the Impala’s keys look so comfortable in his palm now. Can imagine the trade off that John probably thought was perfectly adequate.
She feels him shift, keeps her gaze turned upwards and when he speaks next its hushed, in the quiet hum that’s settled over them. There’s no tone to his voice.
“Sam’s gone. He left for Stanford on Sunday.”
She tries to imagine Sam in one of those over-sized sweatshirts with the initials printed on them. Standing on some college corner handing out flyers, pumping kegs, being a general nuisance to society September through June.
It’s not as hard as it should be, really. It never had been.
Shayne moves, reaches over him for a beer and twists the cap, “Go Cardinal.”
Dean looks at her dryly and she can’t help but grin around the bottle. His bark of laughter jolts her and makes the hood vibrate underneath them.
She smiles as the bark turns to giggles and then to laughter. She takes another sip of warm beer and grins up at the sky.
She can read Dean’s laughter like she can read car engines through a wall. She’s been reading it for over a decade now. She logs this one and studies it, turns it over as it hits the side of her face.
She knows by instinct that he’s laughing because he can’t cry anymore. So she joins him for the time being - just because it’s the kind thing to do. Mostly because there’s really nothing left to do instead - other than tip her face up to where the night sky is spread out above their heads.
Three trumps everything. But two will do for now.
SUMMARY 'If you wish others to believe in you, you must first convince them that you believe in them'.
NOTE: Part of the Shay!verse. If you haven’t read 'Five Times Shayne saved a Winchester (and one time they saved each other) this might not make sense. Beta'd by the wonderful mabbly.
If you wish others to believe in you, you must first convince them that you believe in them
~ Harvey MacKay
Shayne never remembers ever missing a mother, or a family. Missing whatever life she must of had before.
Maybe because she couldn’t remember ever having it: maybe she had stopped remembering it because she didn’t want to miss it. Pastor Jim was always big on cause and effect. It had almost always boggled Shayne.
She never once remembers asking why she had to move all the time. Why she had to be passed from man to man and back again while everyone else got to go where they wanted or stay with their families and friends. Maybe it was because she had never been all that good at making friends. Maybe she just didn’t make them because she knew she’d have to leave them. Cause and effect.
It’ll drive you fucking crazy.
Shayne remembers being hauled up at Jimmy’s with a broken leg before she had a chance to start second grade - while he and John had a screaming fit down in the cellar that they probably thought she couldn’t hear. She remembers that even though Jimmy seemed to know a lot about everything and Pastors were never ever supposed to lie: she agreed with everything John said this time.
The break wasn’t as bad as it could have been. She was tougher than she seemed. She wasn’t confused about anything. Of course it wasn’t fair, but neither is life.
The argument ended with Jimmy screaming something about a psychologist in town that had offered to help them out and John shutting up pretty quick but Shayne can remember the shudder that ran through Dean from where they were huddled listening on the stairs.
What do they care what a shrink thinks? Dean hissed, predispositioned by months and months of counsellors and child therapists telling his four year old self that its okay to be confused, to be scared; to be angry. It’s okay if he didn’t want to talk about it; he could draw it if he wanted.
Freakin’ draw it,, he’d told her, sarcasm and distain dripping from every word after they’d shuffled stealthily back to the spare bedroom, leaving Jimmy and John arguing the pros and cons of hypnotherapy. Pastor Jim had been on one of his missions lately.
Verging on two years now, and Shayne still wasn’t giving anything away. Shayne wanted to tell Jimmy it wasn’t because she was traumatised. It wasn’t because she was angry or scared. It was just because she really couldn’t remember.
You don’t need a shrink, Dean had assured her that day, his voice steely and sure as it was hushed, as they whispered in the dark, you’re fine. He glanced down at where Sammy was snoring between them. We’re fine.
She never remembers being as sure about that as he was.
Shayne remembers everything about July 16th, 1992. She was ten years old, and it was almost 80 degrees in North Dakota and she was carrying a fractured wrist and a concussion. And there was only one place that a fractured wrist and a concussion could ever be put to good use.
Her bag was too light on her shoulder, and Rumsfeld was going crazy trying to gnaw through his rope to come meet her. She was caught between worrying if anyone had bothered to call Bobby to warn him of her extended stay, wondering exactly what she was supposed to do in a deserted salvage yard for two months when Sam Winchester had jumped the porch steps.
“Hey!”
She remembers how his hair was longer then, fell messily in his eyes and made him look younger than he should. How his scruffy overalls had been two sizes too big and his grin had been boyish.
“You coming in or what? You’ll get sun stoke if you stand out here any more and Dean bought popsicles!”
She remembers how she hadn’t even had time to answer before he was tugging her wrist all the way into the house. She remembers it smelt of gasoline and sea salt. How it always did, every time she’d ever stepped foot into it.
She remembers one of those times, summers later, when the same boy had been tugging her same wrist up the same porch steps. His hair was shorter then, his eyes had lost some shine, but he was taller, surer - stronger in every step he made. They had huddled in the familiar porch corner, away from open windows and cracked shutters and hunter’s ears as Sam let some of his secrets spill onto the rotten wood panels.
Shayne remembers the sudden knot of unexplainable dread that tightened in her gut when she’d taken the papers off him and stared. “My guidance counsellor said I qualified for a full ride. Ivy League, Shay! Can you believe it?”
She remembers how it didn’t look Ivy League. How the neatly scrawled lines of kind words and praises might as well have been a death certificate. She remembers how her friend’s eyes had dimmed and as she handed the reference letters back to him, his brows knitting together as he folded them back into his pant pocket.
“College ain’t hunting, Sam. Your Daddy isn’t gunna like this.”
She remembers how the boy who stood in front of her then was so different than the friend she sometimes felt she’d known her whole life.
“I don’t care what he thinks.” She remembers that as those words fell onto that porch that day, steely and sure, she knew everything was going to be different then.
“I’m going to apply. I’ve already filled in the application forms.”
She remembers his voice had sounded steely and sure, even though every bone in her body had been screaming at her how wrong this was. How every instinct in her head was warning her to put a stop to it on that very porch, where they’d huddled once, a thousand years ago and made childhood promises that not one of them should have believed in. Sam had, though. Sam had believed back then. In a life away from the one he had. In things that in all purposes, he’d been taught to avoid.
Shayne can’t remember when she’d been taught that two heads are better than one.
It was just one of those things she seemed to have always known, just by instinct and common sense. Another opinion is never unwarranted. Another set of eyes is never a set too many. Not when the things watching you could have five sets more. Two heads are better than one. Three heads trump everything.
Their decisions had always meant more when they were made as a team.
Shayne was six years old when they had made the most impending decision of their young lives. Together they huddled on the edge of Bobby’s porch - on the loose panel where they hid their gum wrappers and Popsicle sticks.
“Dad says that blood binds always.” Dean told them, nicking each of their fingers with a pen knife. Sam winced and frowned at the tiny red line but lifted it up anyway, pressed it together with hers and his brother’s; eyes wide, mouth agape. He was like that back then, was Sam. Always wanting to learn, always wanting to know more, be better - be everything he thought his big brother was. If Dean told him that blood promises were forever, then he’d bleed and believe. No questions asked.
“There.” Dean said, matter of factly, after they’d pulled their digits apart and stuck it their mouths to relieve it of sting and red smudges. “Now we’re bound. Always.”
Shayne didn’t carry Sam’s unquestionable trust in Santa and elves at ten years old. She didn’t have a father to quote like Dean did.
But she had a finger, and two people to bleed for.
Shayne can remember believing that was a hell of a lot more than most people had.
:::::
Headlights throw misshapen shadows against the motel wall and Ronnie reaches out from his spot by the window to flick at the moth eaten drapes.
There hasn’t been movement outside for hours. The sharp chill of the evening had given way to even colder temperatures since the darkness had truly set in and the gusts of wind had started blowing leaves and dust and dirt from the roads across the parking lot.
The motel itself is set back far out of town, nestled in barren wasteland, practically deserted apart form a couple of station wagons that hadn’t moved since she and Ronnie had checked in three days ago. That’s mostly why they’d picked this dump. Ronnie was about as anti-social as Shayne, and doubly as paranoid. Shayne finds she likes that kind of company in some towns. Amherst, Massachusetts was one of them.
Ronnie stares out the window for a minute, while the headlights shut off and motel settles back into hazy grey, and the rumble of the engine are swallowed away. He drops the drapes back into place and goes back to cleaning off the blades he has spread across the bedspread.
“You expectin’ company?” He says after a while, his voice low and rumbled, his eyes still tracing the contours of blade and cloth.
Shayne looks up from across the room, where she’s folded into an overstuffed chair, texts spread out across her lap. She brushes a handful off hair out her eyes with one hand and slams the heavy books shut with the other, unfolding her feet from underneath her with a sigh.
“Looks that way,” Shayne says, stretching out her aching limbs and grabbing a sweater off the back of the chair on her way past Ronnie, who doesn’t look up from the weaponry as she slips outside without any further explanation.
He’s propped against the Impala when she clicks the door shut behind her; legs crossed at the ankles, hands splayed against the black gleam of the hood, eyes trained on the door. The night time chill tickles any bare skin it can find and she pulls the warmth of her sweater over her fingers and clinches it tight around her waist as she walks slowly across the gravel of the small parking lot.
The motel is a dive. The bathroom is mouldy and the heater rattles so loud it shakes the plaster hanging off the walls, but it was cheap and it’s mostly dry and it was the furthest away from town they could get without changing zip codes.
There are a lot of things Shayne can feign patience with. College towns in September are not one of them. She’d spent the day trying to manoeuvre her way out of packed libraries and even busier side streets, with people thrusting flyers at her for freshman keg mixers and trying to cajole her into pledging something to one numeral or another.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he says by way of greeting, once she’s close enough to hear it.
Shayne hums as she comes to stand a few feet from him and crosses her arms over her torso to trap the open sweater in place, watching the car keys dangle teasingly from his fingers.
“Hmm, fancy that.”
His head is cocked, his eyes playing mischief, but Shayne knows something’s off with the same instinct that told her exactly which car was rolling to a stop outside their motel room earlier.
She cuts him off as soon as his mouth opens again. “Lemme guess?” She tweaks an eyebrow, “What’s a girl like me doing in a place like this?”
His eyes soften and a smile tugs at his lips. “Actually I was gonna say you look like shit, but yeah, now that you mention it this does seem to be one of your more profound shit holes.”
A laugh slips past her lips and he grins, wide and open and shifts his weight so he can reach behind his back with one hand and lift a pack of beer into view between them. “Care to rectify the situation?”
She does look like shit, although the bathroom mirror was so smudged with dirt and grime that she can only imagine to what degree. She knows she has a bruise to her cheek and a knock to the ribs that makes her walk with a slouch. She knows she hasn’t seen a hairbrush since they’d crossed the state line.
None of which could be logically rectified by lukewarm beer, but she steps up to the bumper anyway, so they’re toe to toe and takes the pack from his hands. She sets it beside him and slides up onto the hood.
“Gee Dean, beer and a dirty car hood.” Shayne whistles low and teasing as she shuffles back and stretches out so she’s reclined like she’s on a sun chair. She meets his eyes from where he’s twisted around, following her movements. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
“Damn straight.” He says smugly, shifting backwards to lay beside her, arms brushing through layers of leather and cloth.
Shayne knows why he’s here. She knows why the Impala’s keys look so comfortable in his palm now. Can imagine the trade off that John probably thought was perfectly adequate.
She feels him shift, keeps her gaze turned upwards and when he speaks next its hushed, in the quiet hum that’s settled over them. There’s no tone to his voice.
“Sam’s gone. He left for Stanford on Sunday.”
She tries to imagine Sam in one of those over-sized sweatshirts with the initials printed on them. Standing on some college corner handing out flyers, pumping kegs, being a general nuisance to society September through June.
It’s not as hard as it should be, really. It never had been.
Shayne moves, reaches over him for a beer and twists the cap, “Go Cardinal.”
Dean looks at her dryly and she can’t help but grin around the bottle. His bark of laughter jolts her and makes the hood vibrate underneath them.
She smiles as the bark turns to giggles and then to laughter. She takes another sip of warm beer and grins up at the sky.
She can read Dean’s laughter like she can read car engines through a wall. She’s been reading it for over a decade now. She logs this one and studies it, turns it over as it hits the side of her face.
She knows by instinct that he’s laughing because he can’t cry anymore. So she joins him for the time being - just because it’s the kind thing to do. Mostly because there’s really nothing left to do instead - other than tip her face up to where the night sky is spread out above their heads.
Three trumps everything. But two will do for now.