fic: Of the Reddest Stolen Cherries (2/3, Sam/Dean)
Fic: Of the Reddest Stolen Cherries
Table/Prompt: 05 The Open Road / Prompt 11 Great Lakes 1993 - 15 Route 66 1994-1996
Word Count: 25,000
Pairings: Sam/Dean, John/Dean
Ratings: PG to NC-17
Warning: Wincest, Weecest, abuse, death, abuse of metaphor, abuse of fruit symbolism, drug use, porn, prostitution, happy ending
Notes: SPN AU full of homages to my favorite artists - Nabokov, Jim Grimsley, JT Leroy, Mark Twain, Dennis Cooper, Bill Henson, Rimbaud, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Scott Heim, David Quammen, Harper Lee, David Wojnarowicz.
One story told in 30 parts, over 30 years for spn_30snapshots. Order goes from 01-30, not chronological. Title from W.B. Yeats.
Summary: "I like true stories," Dean told him. "Where real things happen."
Great Lakes 1993
Sam thought he understood insatiable hunger sometimes. The hunger for things to be different, but not knowing how to change without losing it all.
He lost his father first. John's eyes were filling with madness. He decided to run north to the Great Lakes in the hopes of ridding themselves of their troubles for good. They could make it to Detroit, and from there, the border.
But monsters lived there, great things with glowing eyes, yellow fangs that smelled of death, long pointed tongues of a serpent that hissed in the night. They called to John, spoke his name on the wind and traveled faster than the shadows.
Dean thought his father was going crazy too, until he heard the locals speak of the Wendigo - the cannibal monster, the hunger. It was a legend of a sane, Christian man turning into something wild and helpless in his need, calling for others to join him in the night. Turn into what you are, it said, and called you by name.
They heard it calling - Wiiiiinchessssster, Wiiiiinchessssster - in the cold whip of the wind off the lakes. Sam would never have believed it, but he heard it. Dean seemed to hear it even louder. He had a shifty-eyed look lately that scared Sam to death - he could lose his father, he could lose even himself, but he couldn't deal with losing Dean, and he didn't have the means to care for him, when Dean needed him to, so badly these days. He wanted to tell him, so much, but he was afraid his questions would break Dean open more, his fears too raw to handle. Sam should have seen it before, he should have, but he didn't. Dean looked as if he was going to take off in a run every time they stopped the car. He was jackrabbit scared, Sam could tell. He hoped when Dean did, that he would have the guts to run after, say: let's run the bottom of our feet raw, lose the skin, bleed out and run on sticks and bone, float over the earth like ghosts and never touch, feed only on each other, forget who we are but still wander and call, howl like monsters in the darkness, die and be born again on the wind.
*
Black Hills 1993
This growing thing between John and Sam was like a living monster, a hated pet.
Sam woke up alone in his bed in a yellow hotel room, with yellow curtains, yellow light, and saw them - his brother, and his father working out his demons without shame, drunk and grunting, over his brother. Sam couldn't move, wished he was sleeping, but he wasn't. He was complicit and alone and there, feeling Dean's shame and fear covering his own anger like a blanket.
That was the first time he saw John break him in in the mornings, breaking him with dilemma and fear. Sam imagined all the things he could do to John to make him stop, but they all seemed like imaginings of a 10 year old, and not the actions of a man. He thought of poison and guns, knives and police sirens, homemade bombs and mail-order machetes. All he knew about the world he learned at the free library and on the TV, and in the faces of tourists, and none of that made any sense at all when it came to this. His brother and his father, and what he should be able to realize, but can't.
"You have to realize something about your brother," John told him on the porch, on a grateful night when Dean was sleeping, and the sound from the bug light snapped like his father's voice, clean and cold. "When you boys were born, I began to see something growing in you. Your mother could see it too, while she was alive. It was the thing that burned our house down, the reason we're running." Sam went cold. "It was monsters, son. Monsters exist, but not like you think with your fairy tales and fantasies. They're right here," John tapped Sam on his cold, cold chest. "They grow and they grow, and soon you can't touch them. But Dean has a special gift - call it a kind of faith." Faith in what, Sam didn't know. "He's a healer. He quiets the monsters. Now, don't you look at me like that - I've seen it. One day you'll see it too, and you'll come to see things the way I do. You'll join with your brother and me in ridding the world of those horrible, monstrous things. You may not be gifted like he is, but the best I can do - and I'm trying, son, I'm really trying with you - is to not let it get any worse." Sam wanted to stop breathing, just to stop. "You think I can't see it but I can - that thing coiling in you like a snake, wanting to strike out at me, wanting to strike out at everything. I used to see it in the way you dressed, all whorish, trying to tempt Dean away from his gifts. Now it just sits in you, growing, waiting 'til the time is right. But I won't let it get its claws in you." John almost sobbed, so Sam flinched at his tears. "God has shown me the way, and I won't let it happen. But I won't destroy you either, not like God wants. I want to give you the chance to change. Everyone deserves that chance. I can be more merciful than God. You hear me? But I won't be easy. I'll make it real hard on you, Sam. Do everything I can to show you the path to salvation. All you have to do is take it, do as I ask, and listen to the voice of God. Can you do that? Can you do that for me, son?"
God? Sam thought. God? He narrowed his eyes and tried to wrap his head around his father's words as his whole world went cold.
*
Crater Lake 1994
Dean ran away at the deepest, bluest lake in all the land.
Sam always thought if Dean disappeared, he would find him, no matter how dark how cold. He didn't think it would happen that morning in January, the day after Dean's fifteenth birthday, when all Sam could remember was the crazy look in his eyes, like a lost man in the woods, knowing a blizzard was coming as his last fire was dying out. Sam knew it Dean could find the bottom of the lake he would stay there, take others into his grip and pull them down with him if he had to, even Sam. Sam knew that feeling - every time he looked at the world without Dean in it.
And the lake was so clear and so blue, Dean said, like his mama's eyes. He'd just wanted to touch it. The lake was a crater in the mountain, a perfect circle. Sam read the brochure to Dean out loud, how it was made by a meteor, and how water had gathered in the crater as a blue pool surrounded by pine trees and creatures drawn to the miraculous. "That's something," Dean had said. Sam nodded too, fascinated as he was by all things outer space and far away from where he was.
Sam's love for his brother burst out of him when Dean was closest to death, because that was allowed. The rest of the time it was this weight holding him down and this weight he had to maintain and it seemed to much easier to be rid of it. It seemed the most practical thing in the world. Because it couldn't be all of what it was, and Sam still breathing, here, without him?
He didn't know what fifteen meant for Dean, what their father wanted for him. He didn't know Dean dreamed of a future with Sam in a quiet place where God and the devil couldn't find, no bug-eyed locals or tourists. Sam looked for Dean among the tourists in their cabins that morning and couldn't find him anywhere. Sam told John that Dean went to the cabin store down the road to get powdered eggs and water; that he would be back soon. He didn't say he hadn't seen Dean all morning; didn't say he'd seen Dean open the cabin door at midnight, the night sky blacker than his shadow, and walk through it.
So Dean was still gone at ten, still gone at noon. John had stopped speaking to Sam long before that, as soon as Sam came back from the store to check on him, empty handed. He held up his hand to strike Sam, shaking with the fury of God himself - red, God was, and angry, like Sam was, but weaker and bare - and Sam was unafraid. In the absence of Dean there was revenge, there was a cleansing purity, and Sam felt as if he were walking on light, he might as well have been on the moon.
Dean returned, walking through the campsite after supper, and he was so pale he was almost blue. His clothes were wet and his skin clammy, but he would never say where he'd been, not in all the years Sam would know him. "Dean? Dean!" Sam's pleas went unanswered. "Were you abducted by aliens?" he whispered. "Where'd you go, huh?" But Dean never said. He swallowed up the secret of his fifteenth birthday like he swallowed so many others. Sam never asked him the question he wanted to ask most of all, knowing even still that Dean hovered between life and death that night, between some kind of choice too awful to mention. And why'd you come back?
Dean spent the next three days in a fever in the backseat of the Impala. Sam sat curled up in the seat next to his father, neither of them speaking unless John had orders to give, or Sam had to ask about Dean's condition. Sam listened to Dean's breaths cut ragged and unsteady in the air in his feverish dreams, he listened to the snake hiss and uncoil in his own chest, and thought the voice of God had left them for good, his daddy's faith shaking in his hands against the steering wheel, scared eyes focused on the windshield, and he wanted to smile, somewhere down deep and cold as the lake.
*
Badlands 1994
John said they were headed for the desert soon as Dean's fever broke. He had been driving East, towards the Badlands to see a preacher. Sam dreaded it like he dreaded every plan in John's head, but he stayed silent and waited for Dean to be okay.
The preacher was tall and thin, like a skeleton covered with skin, and his eyes were a washed-out blue. Sam hated to look at him and the preacher took it as a sign that the devil was afoot. "Watch that one," he warned, "I can see it coiled within him, wanting to strike."
Dean was better now, but he stayed in bed, surrounded by prayer. Crosses hung on the wall at the preacher's house, rosaries on the bed knobs, sheets with embroidered eyelets and dried lavender on the night tables. Sam wanted to stay with him, never leave his side, but John was giving him tasks to do - cook, sweep the floors, wash the car - and dust covered everything, covered him the moment he stepped out onto the porch, whipping across the Badlands.
As soon as John was gone with the preacher to the church in the morning, Sam would put down his work and rush to Dean's side, kneel at his bed and talk to him, faces close together. Dean said he was cold so Sam would remove every layer of dusty clothing, his sneakers, socks, jeans, pullover and undershirt, climb under the covers and cling to his brother's body. They would rub their bodies together without pretense, Sam rubbing Dean just to feel, all about skin and warmth and things he didn't have the words to say. Sam couldn't find release, those times when he was hard all the time and didn't know what to do about it, and Dean knew that in the way Sam moved against him, hard and unsure and constant, constant rubbing, the way he knew his belly felt best, softest against raw skin, Sam's mouth at his temple. Dean was afraid to talk because he knew too much, and he withheld from Sam, wanted to keep him separate, but Sam was alone and had no one else. He was so smart, so sharp, and Dean couldn't bear to leave him alone with this, all the world Sam opened up for him, to leave Sam in the dark with an ever-aching body. He was trying to be so brave, as his breath came out as a whine against Dean's skin, his hips never stopped jerking, him wanting so much more but not even knowing what to ask for. Dean would think, and think, and think, and think of someone else, anyone else, who could help Sam, teach him and understand him, until he couldn't bear the thought of it and his mind went blank. All Sam had was John and Dean, and Dean found he couldn't think of Sammy and John in the same sentence anymore, the same thought or picture. They were like two separate worlds that couldn't even exist together in Dean's brain, like a short-circuit when he tried to connect them. Sam's sweat on his skin and his sobs right in Dean's ear, the jerking in his hips out of control. "Oh, Sammy, Sammy," Dean whispered in a kiss against the sweat at the top of his brother's spine, and his dry lips tasted of salt.
Dean flipped them over, moved over Sam's body and let his own small, snub-tipped hardness drag against Sam's belly. He kept their breaths close, their mouths close, as he lined his body up with Sam's, opened enough to let Sam peek through and thrust until he was captured inside Dean's body, half inside, half caught between Dean's flesh where he placed Sam's hands, his fingers pressing Dean close and closed around his hips, letting Sam hold him and thrust into him from below, forcing Dean's body to control his movements with his weight and his heat. Dean moved his body down and took Sam inside.
Sam's mouth was an O, his nostrils, his breath wild, like his body, writhing as if possessed - dirty, wrong, Sam thought, dirty, wrong - but Dean made him finish with his body and his breath at his shoulder and Sam's breath was at his shoulder and they shouldn't have fit together like this but they did. He didn't have to ask where Dean learned that. He knew, and the thought of it made him shudder, like Dean's body here, right now, disgusted him. Right then Sam couldn't imagine anyone wanting it to be this way, but for the rest of his life he would, he would - Dean's hands smoothing the sweat over his hair and letting Sam slap their bodies together the only place they're not skin and bones, just sweat and heat, sweet suction and warmth until it can't go anywhere but burst out of Sam in a slow, sweet flood, and everything about them here right now is surprise and new and overwhelming.
"You're okay, Sammy, okay," Dean breathed hot against his skin and petted him, some kind of love rimming his eyes in red as he did so. "You don't have to leave."
"Dad," Sam said, "Dad." And God, Sammy thought, God but didn't know what he meant. He got dressed fast then, uncoordinated and lanky and messed up - so many things, so messed up - but he found his socks and his dusty clothes on the floor where he'd left them, like a skin he'd shed that no longer fit. He heard the front door close, "Sam? Why aren't you outside?" John called through the house. He pulled on his shoes and ran out the backdoor and kept running, his feet feeling like they were miles beneath him.
He knew what Dean meant now and it was what he had always meant and it didn't make any more sense now than it ever did, like the fire his mama left for him and the useless words his daddy kept saying.
There was nowhere to hide out there, where he was running. Wherever he went, Dean followed him like a ghost. He could run in circles over the earth, but not the dark madness of the Wendigo. No, this was not a hunger, but a need all the same. It wasn't hiding - there was nowhere to hide out here, among the dust and the Badlands. Just the dying of the light and the howling wind, like being stripped away except for his voice, and Dean's voice like it called now from the house, telling him to run, run faster.
Sam thought, Why? Why? Why was he running, always running? What was Dean facing when he was not there, what else wasn't he seeing when he thought his life was so small and closed-in like a cage? But that cage was Dean now, and Dean was everything.
Sam imagined his father beating Dean with his angry red God hands, the preacher laying hands in the air, saying meaningless words like the howling wind, the angry red bruises on Dean's flesh bringing tears to his eyes like the stinging wind, all of it howling in his ears, around the peace in the center of his chest and his body, sitting like a stone in Sam's stomach, Dean's perfect flesh, flashing inside his eyelids when he stared at the sun and closed his eyes.
If Sam were to go, Dean would follow him like a ghost, all their flesh lost to the wind. What if we can't get away? Sam ran to the edge of town, the end of the street, beyond the last edge of fence. The road led to the horizon, to where the dust covered it from sight. There was nothing else beyond the stones, the ridges of dirt. He ran back across the street, til the fence stopped. The other side of town, the church and the house. This was it, he thought - Sam is finally a ghost. Dean is a ghost. We will run in circles forever across the earth, and no one will know we are ghosts, but us.
At dinner that night, John spoke of taking them to the desert, for a fresh start. Where they can't run away, Sam thought, and said nothing. There were many to convert out there, many who were willing to believe. He will give Sam work to do. And Dean. They will work, start to earn their keep, and God will open up to them all the value of the world.
*
Route 66 1994-1996
John's ambition grew with the desert heat and his thoughts turned towards Los Angeles, its romantic name, its selective commerce. He drove their one-car caravan towards the coast, past one million billboards of the highway painted with giant pictures of ice cream, hamburgers, golfing retirees and girls wearing silk and pigtails and cherry red lipstick. They ate at burger stands painted up to look like they had stood there since John's childhood and watched people walk the streets dressed up in expensive logos he no longer recognized.
John had been showing Dean pictures, ever since he was young - not young now that he could be prettied up like those girls in the billboards, a new design to build fantasies on, something slowing changing into what he did not know. Like every man, John knew, he had a collection, passed down from father to son, as it should be, to create something new out of pink skin to build a life of dreams upon.
Dean had been quiet and moody since the desert, bothered by ideas Sam had no doubt put in his head, the way Sam could be so difficult, so unloving and cruel, not a part of this family the way John hoped. But John wouldn't lose hope for his youngest son; he knew how much he meant to Dean, how much he wanted Sam to mean for himself. John didn't know that Dean loved the boys and girls who looked like Sammy the best. He didn't know how that made Dean feel trapped and free all at once, grateful, loyal in a sideways way to his dad for reaching into the secret places of himself and telling him what to do with all of this desire - hide it and keep it and turn it on and turn it away. He can't turn away now. John needs him. They've all been doing what this city does best - taking away the shame of the world by finding new ways to make more. The bees follow Dean wherever he goes.
The woman John found in the pastel houses of Santa Monica was good at her job. She made her bread and butter snapping head shots in black and white or color, good at making faces look dramatic and inviting in 4x6 or 8x10. She made the rest of her money creating website content at her customers' request, the spare rooms of her house decorated with generic couches and beds with changing covers. Her specialty was making generic things look special enough to look twice at - she worked wonders with the current deluge of twink models, softening them up and capturing something of a wounded soul, natural light in their eyes, free of hair gel and earrings, rounded asses more Hollywood glam and less bubble gum. The 90s were not even halfway over and the trends were taking their toll on her. She fought her own private battle against the masses.
"I want Sammy to stay," this boy had said, speaking about his brother. She assumed he was his brother - there was some love still in those shadowed, narrowed eyes, still cruel like only a twelve year old could be. John didn't seem happy about it, but parents weren't allowed - that was a rule. Parents could bring them here but she wouldn't have them watch. That might have been the rules deeper down in the valley, but there was a reason she'd left, and it wasn't going to happen here. She could give the models that much.
"Alright, he can stay. Just stand behind me, okay," she spoke to the younger boy, more relaxed now with the father gone. She gave Dean a worn pair of jeans to wear and a white undershirt, comically similar to what he had been wearing anyway, but these jeans were distressed to look trendy and acid washed, not softly worn through at the thighs and torn to shreds at the knees, this undershirt was bleached white against his desert tanned skin and freckles, not stained and wrinkled with no hope of recovery. Dean had that desire to please she was so familiar with, a tilt to his head to show he was listening, a wide-eyed look to show he was thinking, a worry to his lips to cover up the rest. He would be beautiful whether he was trying to show it or not, despite any attempt to cover it up, despite all the reasons he might have wanted to. She knew whatever had happened in the past was already too much to let pass - this boy could never run far enough away from it, or float high enough away - but she could give him this moment of physical proof, here in this room with his brother, a sea-foam green couch, fake marble and venetian blinds, to at least see something beyond his grumbling bear of a father (she knew the type) and thousands of miles of highway traffic.
Without being asked, Dean looked straight at his brother, right behind her, just over the lens of her camera, and just like that his eyes turned to cats-eye green marbles, his lashes seemed weighted down with emotion, his freckled skin blushed like a peach, and she couldn't have painted it better if she had been giving all the colors of the Venice sunset. Her camera clicked. "Lay on your stomach. Scoot up a little. That's good." She focused her lens on his face - where his eyes, nose, and lips just pinched together - and the waistband of his jeans where it just met the curve of his ass before trailing back over the bubbles and bows of his legs, his soft, peanut-toed feet resting on the pillows. Perfect. "You're good at this," she wanted to say, but not in front of his brother, not now, not this boy. It would ruin whatever he thought he was doing, because whatever he thought he was doing, it was not this. It was something real and beyond her grasp, like only the real ones were. She knew it in the numbness of her jaw, the tingle of her palms.
"Good, Dean." Thank you, Dean. "Good. Good." She clicked her camera.
When Dean changed back into his familiar clothes, he took his brother's hand and kissed him on the temple. "That was for you, Sam. I was only good for you," he whispered, the light still in his eyes.
Sam hadn't asked for any of it, and never wanted it - that was the way he saw Dean in his mind, for him, not in a photograph or billboard or big screen movie - but he held himself back from cringing at his brother's kiss, because he wanted him still, just never in the way he was allowed to. "Dean...," he began, trying not to let his voice shake, "Dean." Somehow he found the words no one else could say. "Um, thanks. I... that was pretty. It was pretty because it was you. It looked like you."
Dean huffed out a laugh, "It was me, silly. It's always me."
No, it's not. Sam didn't say. It's not.
They saw the first billboard on the way to Kingman, traveling back past the desert on old Route 66. The truckers' route, their dad had said. Winchester Ministries, the billboard read in simple font, black letters: "And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him." - Genesis 1:7. The words floated above and below Dean's prone body, his welcoming form, his rapturous face, just this side of indecent, the face of all advertising.
John pulled over, whooping, and the boys climbed out of the car, faces stony and silent. "What do you think?" John called, looking between their faces and the sign, lit up even in the daytime. "We're going cross-country, nationwide."
Dean's eyes blinked with the passing of cars on the highway, like the world was moving too fast for him to keep up. "It's nice. I look nice, don't I?" His voice dull and toneless. "Sammy?"
But Sam was turned around, trying to clear his mind of the sight of Dean's freckles as big as his hand, his lips toned-down red and big enough to walk through, knowing he would see it again and again, ripping his heart out on the highway when he least expected it, for thousands upon thousands of miles.
John took them for sundaes at Denny's, whipped cream with a cherry on top, when the desert became too hot to breathe.
They stopped the next day outside of Flagstaff, at a diner with open faced gravy sandwiches and toy trains going round and round over their heads. John kept going to the pay phone to make calls, kept flirting with the waitress when she refilled his coffee cup, kept making notes in a leather-bound journal. Sam watched him as subtly as he could, knowing John's mistrusting eyes were on him all the time, and let Dean dip his fries in his half-eaten gravy plate. He couldn't shake the feeling that this, right now, bad as it was, was going to get worse real soon. John was too happy, Dean trying too hard to get them all to eat and sleep and talk like normal, the way he thought he could hold the world together with just his will and his wishes, Dean's biggest conceit. The thing he perhaps loved about him the most, no matter how much he was wrong.
"Dean?" Sam had to try, while John was on the phone. The moments where it might have been possible. He began when Dean's eyes were on him. "What do you think is going to happen? What's he planning, you think?"
Dean shrugged, and Sam tried to hold himself from shuddering with it. "I dunno, Sammy. Nothing that bad. Maybe something good. What'd you say that sign said? Ministries? That's good, Christian stuff, right? Maybe he's changed his mind; gonna settle down in a room somewhere and park the car for awhile. Give us some time to ourselves; just the three of us, all together in the same spot. He says New Orleans, even." Dean turned his attention back to his fries halfway through talking, seeing how Sam's expression fell. "You never believe in nothing, Sammy. Give it a chance, huh?"
"Ready, boys?" John shook the booth as he returned.
"For what?" Sam said, sharp and flat. "The Grand Canyon?"
John ignored him. "We're going to Winslow. Truckers' paradise. Lots of nice people. You'll see."
Giant plateaus greeted them on the way to Winslow, signs for some kind of petrified forest, dusty trucks leading both ways into the horizon. They got two hotel rooms, one next to the other, a bathroom in between, next to the showers and the 24-hour diner at a truck stop just outside of town. The walls inside and out were white painted wood paneling with curtains made of fabric painted with orange and yellow fruit, with bedspreads to match. The carpets were yellow and smelled of smoke, just like everything smelled of smoke. The whole place was surrounded by a porch with tiny metal stools with all the paint worn off and makeshift ashtrays and spittoons of used cans and metal buckets filled with sand.
Sam hated it. He spent his days reading discarded books that someone had left while passing through - he would ask the front desk every day, go looking at the diner, confiscate newspapers of every kind from the garbage cans and the bathrooms, eventually made some extra cash by cleaning up. He tried to stay in his room, and avoid the adjoining bathroom and bedroom entirely. He considered hitching on the back of a truck just to get away, but he might end up worse off than Dean, with no way out. Or worse. As it was, he tried not to think of Dean as much as possible, tried to focus on the rest of the world that had to be better than this one. As it was, the sound of Dean traveled to meet him wherever he went, his face rose up to greet him in his sleep, and none of it was going to go away.
From what he could tell, the mornings would begin with John reaching out to wake Dean from his sleep next to him, cough his lungs clear and awake, fall over him and break him in, break him open with his morning-hard cock, thrust into him and come in a matter of seconds, his face too red and blurry to feel much else. Sam would awake with his eyes, his face shut against it, not wanting to hear the sound of the bed against the wall, or the struggle of one more dirty man's dirty lungs, but he ached to hear Dean, something from Dean, who was all but lost to him these days. When he heard the shower turn on, he knew Dean was alive and breathing. He would put his ear to the door, too scared to open it, and hear Dean softly sing him a song in a voice just a tone off, just out of tune, over the sound of the weak spray, like some half-drowned mockingbird spent listening to country radio a bit too long.
All he could do was his old habit of obsessively cleaning the car as he had in the desert, once at morning and once at night, as if Dean would still turn to him once at any hour of the day or night, car keys in hand, and say "Let's go". They'd go somewhere far away, refilling with M&Ms and gas until the money ran out, find some other way to live that was not this. The whole time Sam worked his muscles against the paint and the leather and the chrome, he ignored the line on the porch, growing with the day and never shrinking until the quietest hours of the night, when even the stars had gone back to bed. The line of men started at the door and led around the corner and back around, some sitting on the metal stools, some on the ground, some glancing at magazines or just talking, spitting juice on the rotting wood of the porch if they couldn't make the buckets, passing around brown bottles in paper bags, soaking in cigar smoke. They would enter through the white door, let their eyes adjust to the light, to the prone body of his brother, his skin already sweating feverishly, his legs bowed more and more open to greet them, his hole red and sore and soft beyond reason, push once more inside, push down on the bed and its white sheets sweat-soaked clear, push and push and push until Dean would tell them to stop, no more, no more, please, his pleading taking them over the edge one more time.
Sam knew this in the few minutes he was allowed to spend with Dean each day, entering the dim-lit room to clean out the spittoon bucket filled with used condoms next to the bed, to watch Dean shake half-delirious when he touched him, pleading under his breath until he saw his Sammy, begging him with his eyes for something sweeter, soothing with the touch of his fingers behind his ear while Sam stroked him with a cool washcloth, dabbing gently at the bruises, the places where his skin looked rubbed raw to shiny pink. "It hurts, Sammy," Dean whispered, "It hurts," and begged him for something that would help.
But Sam would never find any help in that place, where the trucks moved in both directions towards the horizon. They stayed there until John started making phone calls again, making more notes in his leather-bound journal, started to speak of "other opportunities" down the road that stretched from Chicago to the coast of California. Sam held Dean's head in his lap when John drove them to Albuquerque, his brother drifting in and out of sleep. When Dean spoke, it was only to Sam with mumbled responses and half-gestures, a "Yes-sir" or "No-sir" to John when he asked anything, a dutiful amount of eating and sleeping, just as often saving his food for Sam or when he might feel like eating later, which was never. The desert colors stretched outside the car window - rose purple, sea blue green, yellow orange pink flowers - and Sam thought of his brother's pale face in his lap and though his eyes burned he would not cry.
John was the most frightening in those days, his bright-eyed hope seeming to crush Sam's heart like a vise, and he finally knew that there was no hope here, that John didn't see the world this way, and he and Dean were on their own, not even blessed enough to be alone, but on their own nonetheless. It was a matter of time before he lost Dean for good, to some crazy passerby with a knife, to some infection in the blood, to John's growing madness, like the road eating them whole. John hoped for some future Sam just couldn't see, outside of some monstrous place his vision couldn't go, some place where this was right and normal and agreed with by polite, pleasant stranger's eyes. Though Sam lived in that place, he knew his survival depended on getting far away from it.
The land stretching out towards Amarillo was dry and dusty, but Sam found that the Texas cowboys could teach mercy with their leathery fingers, their bodies spent riding all day with the animals. The men with fitted hats stopped at the truck stop on their way out of town; they treated the waitresses with an agreed-upon politeness, exchanging conversation and a tip for endless cups of coffee and greasy eggs done just as easy as they ask for. Sam followed them out to their trailers sometimes, asking about their animals to see if he could touch. He loved the brown, heavy-lashed balls of horses' eyes, looking wise and kind even though sad. He learned from the way the cowboys touched them with heavy pats followed by soft fingers. Their blue eyes looked out at him from leathery wrinkled skin that spoke to him of kindness as they soothed the horses' wounds with a flower-scented ointment.
"What's that stuff?" Sam asked, putting a gentle curiosity into his voice, more fitting for his twelve years.
"You see those flowers?" The cowboy pointed at the highway and the sunbursts of yellow orange that lined the road. "Them's Calendulas. Like Marigolds. Bloom all over the place."
Sam nodded. "You use flower oil?" He'd read a lot of horse veterinary magazines, explaining how to make tinctures and ointments from beeswax, cocoa butter, Vitamin E oil and flowers with names like Elderberry and Chamomile.
"They used to use this stuff way back in the Civil War, for when the soldiers got wounded. It would keep bad stuff from getting in, help make it feel better and heal faster. Works good for horses too. I made it m'self, back at the ranch. Lots o' different kinds. Easy enough to do."
Sam took some between his thumb and forefinger, smelled it and rubbed it around. It felt good. Natural. "Nice," he said. He felt his pocket for the five bucks he had been saving up to buy Dean something nice. He hadn't known what he was gonna use it for. Not until now. But it seemed like not nearly enough. He bit his thumbnail, tired and worn down to the nub.
"I got some extra. You're welcome to it. I always carry it but haven't used it yet. A little goes a long way." He held out a silver tin with a horse's head on it, looking brown and wise.
Sam let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. "Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Thank you, really. It's... It's a lot."
"Nah, it's nothing. I gotta get on the road though. Maybe I'll see you again. You say you're headed to the show in Oklahoma City?"
"Yeah," Sam remembered, having told a lie about meeting up with his mother at a horse show, his dappled horse called Brownie. "Take care now," he finished, repeating the state goodbye of Texas. Then he took the long way back to the trucker motel and waited for the line to die down, leading back to Dean.
The afternoons were full of bees in Sam's head, flies in the room, while his daddy spent the time in local bars, hanging outside of gas stations, making conversation at the fuel pumps. Dim rooms smelled of flowers, lavender and rose water on his brother's skin, Calendula ointment rubbed into Dean's wounds. Sam was never more careful than when he turned Dean on his side, face and arms pressed into the pillow, knees drawn up to reveal his shiny red and puffy sore places, trusting Sam as the only one who would help him. He wiped at him slow, cleaned what he could with a warm washcloth without going inside, washing away remains of men who wouldn't use condoms, knowing no one would stop them if they didn't, couldn't be the watcher even if his father let him, smoking at the table near the door and counting money. He knew the brush burns of so much hair and skin and sweat still stung at his touch, all along his brother's thighs and the curve of his body, but he had to get them clean, dried with a towel and still stinging red. The ointment was soft and greasy in his fingers, rubbing them together to warm it before starting at the backs of his knees and working downward in tiny circles at anywhere that was red. It wouldn't take long for him to run out, but he'd find a way to get more. There was no part of Dean's body that he could neglect, so much of it already used and neglected, and he would finish with small daubs and circles at Dean's hole, rubbing up inside as far as he could take without pushing, waiting for the tiniest of shudders to signal for him to stop.
Dean turned to him and opened his eyes, calm and grateful and threatened with an exhaustion he didn't want to think about. His face was shiny with sweat from the heat of the afternoon, his lips cracked and dry in contrast. Sam wanted more than anything to find something stronger to help Dean, something to take away all the pain and the memories, especially of Dean's words to him when he used to hope for something better than this. He hoped Dean didn't remember, that his pleas to him now were only for the moment, for a glass of water or some food. Sam took a clean washcloth and squeezed the water over Dean's lips, watched him smooth it over with his tongue before rubbing more ointment with his pinky finger like some lipstick. He fed him fruit from a soft banana, covered his closed eyes with a wet cloth while he chewed, and found a glass of water for Dean's shaky hands.
Sam didn't dare stay long enough for their dad to return, his shame growing strongest at the end, and for the night to come. He left Dean with his eyes closed, sleeping for maybe an hour if he was lucky while night fell, and entered back to his room through the bathroom, his own reflection in the mirror something of a ghoul, colored yellow green by the flickering lights. When he went outside the blue bug light snapped at him, and he watched the lit cigars and dusty boots gather at the porch. He spared them barely a glance, his empty stomach wanting to be sick with it all but long forgotten how, and spent the night trudging back and forth between his bed and the Impala willing to find a quiet place for good, for sleep, but afraid to miss the minute when his brother would finally scream, to see if it would ever come.
The flat lands of Oklahoma looked no different from Texas, acted no different. Sam didn't know why he thought they would, or why things would ever change, but he did, the promises in what he read renewing his faith in what, he wasn't sure, but something out there, waiting. Some nights John never made it to a hotel, stalling out at a bar with his lips wrapped around a bottle, glazed-eyed and genially joking, his voice nothing but a buzz to Sam's ears anymore.
Sam walked the blocks of beaten down saloons outside of Oklahoma City with a knife in his boot, but just walked in circles, never thinking, his brother's name sending his mind into loops that ended in the same place, no different. He ended up walking between his father's voice from inside the wooden door of the saloon, between the darkness of the alley which showed nothing but the shine of glass and chrome, the pale skin of his brother where he hung half in and half out of the backseat of the car, his brother's face a flash in the window, his palm on the glass. As before, Dean had just as likely found it easier to turn around on his belly, hold onto the seat and push off the ground with his toes against the weight of the men on his back, the only bright spots in the alley the skin of his calves as he moved, pumping up and down off the ground, or the shine of his skin when they left, the slippery pile of condoms beside the rear tire, his ass open to the night and the city for as long as it would take.
Sam walked and waited for the bar to close, for John to allow him to collect Dean up in his arms and let him rest there as he drove them someplace else, then forgot, fell asleep behind the wheel in a motel parking lot and gave them peace until sunrise. But it didn't happen. Sam found himself opening the wooden door of the saloon with a bottle in his hand and throwing it at the sound of his father's voice, hard enough to smash and hurt and make another kind of noise, one that might bring him back to his senses and his sanity, lost somewhere out there in the alleys and sidewalks. He didn't know where he'd hit, just that glass exploded in John's hand, spilled out blood and liquor, and then that hand was in his face, gripping his hair and pulling, jerking slippery strands of hair back again to places Sam didn't want to be.
Sam didn't want to be handcuffed to the rear car door, squirming and kicking at the back of the front seat, screaming over the squeal of the tires and the roar coming from his father's head. He didn't want to see Dean naked and curled up around the seat beside him, eyes closed to the world, his placid waiting face. He never wanted John to stop the car in a deserted waiting place, his shoes scuffing angrily in the gravel while he walked around to take Dean again, his tequila-soft cock just hard enough to last, his hairy belly pushing Dean into the seat with no room to move, his grip long enough to reach Sam's face, hiss words into his ear about blame and fire and monstrous boys with monstrous ideas who can't stay away from each other, who taught him all they needed to about what they really needed, each word a violent thrust. All his sons owed him, in the language of violent thrusts.
There were no more secrets then, nothing in John that would quiet the monsters except hours of drinking in Tulsa bars, only to find themselves surrounded again, with the same questions that spoke nothing of getting away, not for years and years. John could have Dean when he wanted and Sam couldn't touch him, not without reprisals and some dark imagined revenge. And John's imagination was limitless. Sam grew to know what it sounded like, Dean against the wall high up off the ground and split by John's cock, the wet sound when John finally came down his throat, the slap of skin when he took him from behind with no preparation, the slick sound of John's hand so fast on his cock that Dean could hardly breathe through the spanking on his ass, the sound of Dean's frustration when John was too drunk to come or let them sleep, the roar in his own head when John was beating either one of them - Sam always harder, more, with nothing to lose and the fear that this time it would not end with just sore bruises, limbs twisted just until, broken fingers and toes, cracked ribs and burning cheeks.
There was a split between them - Sam and Dean - with John threatening to make it wider. Though John blamed them for everything, Sam did not. He saved all of his salve for Dean, anything he had left of hope or concern. Everything else, he saved for John. In his dreams, he imagined poison, quiet stabbings, even fire, that old nightmarish foe he had begun to think of as a friend. He found himself wondering, more than ever, what Dean dreamed about.
The remains of the World's Fair in St. Louis made John full of his circus sideshow ideas again, his need for over-the-top spectacle and flim-flam. Sam thought it was as if the world were full of mad things he'd never known about, things his father had clung to his whole life and never spoken about. In his paranoia, he'd been loading up on guns. When Sam had thought he'd seen them all, he'd find a new one poking out of John's waistband, stashed in the glove-box, piled in with the others in the trunk, next to flares, grenades, boxes of bullets and packets of knives. He'd never been taught to use them; Dean neither. But he found his fingers itching for triggers and pins, blade handles and shiny things, just because John threatened never touch.
"Give up on revenge, Sam." Dean's voice was flat and quiet, his eyes staring out at rows of houses, utterly blank. "I don't want you thinking that way."
He almost thought he didn't hear him right. Didn't think Dean could say that, much less mean it. He looked around instinctively to see where John was, even though he knew he was in the hardware store, behind the glass. "What're you saying?"
"You know what I mean. I don't gotta say it." Dean shuffled on his feet. He looked way younger than seventeen, way older too. It was as if Sam knew how old he should be, and none of it seemed right. "Just, forget it."
"Or what?"
"Or I'll stop you. That's what."
"You can't... You can't be serious?"
"I'm your older brother and that's how it's gonna be."
Sam felt sick to his stomach, to hear his father's words come out of his brother, to feel his rage redirect itself at Dean, burning twice as hot, white-hot, acid. "No. No." He spat. All the weapons in the car were not enough, would never be enough. He flashed back to his brother lighting a cigarette in the desert.
It finally dawned on him that this was how it was. Dean would never leave while John was alive, would never see things for how they were. That maybe he was as deluded as John was, only clouded, only frail. Dean's bravery was a front; the thing Sam relied on most in the world, the only thing, had never existed. He had been the delusional one. He had been wrong. "Dean," he spoke one last time.
Dean never turned his head.
Sam ran towards nothing that night, just away. When he heard the trains whistle, he ran towards them. He couldn't hear a sound beyond the trains, and never stopped until he was at the doorstep of a woman who said her name was the same of the state he was in, who said she knew how to hide from dangerous things, and much more besides. The years were lost again - three years Sam left Dean to John that he could never take back forever after.
*
back to Part 1 * onto Part 3
Table/Prompt: 05 The Open Road / Prompt 11 Great Lakes 1993 - 15 Route 66 1994-1996
Word Count: 25,000
Pairings: Sam/Dean, John/Dean
Ratings: PG to NC-17
Warning: Wincest, Weecest, abuse, death, abuse of metaphor, abuse of fruit symbolism, drug use, porn, prostitution, happy ending
Notes: SPN AU full of homages to my favorite artists - Nabokov, Jim Grimsley, JT Leroy, Mark Twain, Dennis Cooper, Bill Henson, Rimbaud, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Scott Heim, David Quammen, Harper Lee, David Wojnarowicz.
One story told in 30 parts, over 30 years for spn_30snapshots. Order goes from 01-30, not chronological. Title from W.B. Yeats.
Summary: "I like true stories," Dean told him. "Where real things happen."
Great Lakes 1993
Sam thought he understood insatiable hunger sometimes. The hunger for things to be different, but not knowing how to change without losing it all.
He lost his father first. John's eyes were filling with madness. He decided to run north to the Great Lakes in the hopes of ridding themselves of their troubles for good. They could make it to Detroit, and from there, the border.
But monsters lived there, great things with glowing eyes, yellow fangs that smelled of death, long pointed tongues of a serpent that hissed in the night. They called to John, spoke his name on the wind and traveled faster than the shadows.
Dean thought his father was going crazy too, until he heard the locals speak of the Wendigo - the cannibal monster, the hunger. It was a legend of a sane, Christian man turning into something wild and helpless in his need, calling for others to join him in the night. Turn into what you are, it said, and called you by name.
They heard it calling - Wiiiiinchessssster, Wiiiiinchessssster - in the cold whip of the wind off the lakes. Sam would never have believed it, but he heard it. Dean seemed to hear it even louder. He had a shifty-eyed look lately that scared Sam to death - he could lose his father, he could lose even himself, but he couldn't deal with losing Dean, and he didn't have the means to care for him, when Dean needed him to, so badly these days. He wanted to tell him, so much, but he was afraid his questions would break Dean open more, his fears too raw to handle. Sam should have seen it before, he should have, but he didn't. Dean looked as if he was going to take off in a run every time they stopped the car. He was jackrabbit scared, Sam could tell. He hoped when Dean did, that he would have the guts to run after, say: let's run the bottom of our feet raw, lose the skin, bleed out and run on sticks and bone, float over the earth like ghosts and never touch, feed only on each other, forget who we are but still wander and call, howl like monsters in the darkness, die and be born again on the wind.
*
Black Hills 1993
This growing thing between John and Sam was like a living monster, a hated pet.
Sam woke up alone in his bed in a yellow hotel room, with yellow curtains, yellow light, and saw them - his brother, and his father working out his demons without shame, drunk and grunting, over his brother. Sam couldn't move, wished he was sleeping, but he wasn't. He was complicit and alone and there, feeling Dean's shame and fear covering his own anger like a blanket.
That was the first time he saw John break him in in the mornings, breaking him with dilemma and fear. Sam imagined all the things he could do to John to make him stop, but they all seemed like imaginings of a 10 year old, and not the actions of a man. He thought of poison and guns, knives and police sirens, homemade bombs and mail-order machetes. All he knew about the world he learned at the free library and on the TV, and in the faces of tourists, and none of that made any sense at all when it came to this. His brother and his father, and what he should be able to realize, but can't.
"You have to realize something about your brother," John told him on the porch, on a grateful night when Dean was sleeping, and the sound from the bug light snapped like his father's voice, clean and cold. "When you boys were born, I began to see something growing in you. Your mother could see it too, while she was alive. It was the thing that burned our house down, the reason we're running." Sam went cold. "It was monsters, son. Monsters exist, but not like you think with your fairy tales and fantasies. They're right here," John tapped Sam on his cold, cold chest. "They grow and they grow, and soon you can't touch them. But Dean has a special gift - call it a kind of faith." Faith in what, Sam didn't know. "He's a healer. He quiets the monsters. Now, don't you look at me like that - I've seen it. One day you'll see it too, and you'll come to see things the way I do. You'll join with your brother and me in ridding the world of those horrible, monstrous things. You may not be gifted like he is, but the best I can do - and I'm trying, son, I'm really trying with you - is to not let it get any worse." Sam wanted to stop breathing, just to stop. "You think I can't see it but I can - that thing coiling in you like a snake, wanting to strike out at me, wanting to strike out at everything. I used to see it in the way you dressed, all whorish, trying to tempt Dean away from his gifts. Now it just sits in you, growing, waiting 'til the time is right. But I won't let it get its claws in you." John almost sobbed, so Sam flinched at his tears. "God has shown me the way, and I won't let it happen. But I won't destroy you either, not like God wants. I want to give you the chance to change. Everyone deserves that chance. I can be more merciful than God. You hear me? But I won't be easy. I'll make it real hard on you, Sam. Do everything I can to show you the path to salvation. All you have to do is take it, do as I ask, and listen to the voice of God. Can you do that? Can you do that for me, son?"
God? Sam thought. God? He narrowed his eyes and tried to wrap his head around his father's words as his whole world went cold.
*
Crater Lake 1994
Dean ran away at the deepest, bluest lake in all the land.
Sam always thought if Dean disappeared, he would find him, no matter how dark how cold. He didn't think it would happen that morning in January, the day after Dean's fifteenth birthday, when all Sam could remember was the crazy look in his eyes, like a lost man in the woods, knowing a blizzard was coming as his last fire was dying out. Sam knew it Dean could find the bottom of the lake he would stay there, take others into his grip and pull them down with him if he had to, even Sam. Sam knew that feeling - every time he looked at the world without Dean in it.
And the lake was so clear and so blue, Dean said, like his mama's eyes. He'd just wanted to touch it. The lake was a crater in the mountain, a perfect circle. Sam read the brochure to Dean out loud, how it was made by a meteor, and how water had gathered in the crater as a blue pool surrounded by pine trees and creatures drawn to the miraculous. "That's something," Dean had said. Sam nodded too, fascinated as he was by all things outer space and far away from where he was.
Sam's love for his brother burst out of him when Dean was closest to death, because that was allowed. The rest of the time it was this weight holding him down and this weight he had to maintain and it seemed to much easier to be rid of it. It seemed the most practical thing in the world. Because it couldn't be all of what it was, and Sam still breathing, here, without him?
He didn't know what fifteen meant for Dean, what their father wanted for him. He didn't know Dean dreamed of a future with Sam in a quiet place where God and the devil couldn't find, no bug-eyed locals or tourists. Sam looked for Dean among the tourists in their cabins that morning and couldn't find him anywhere. Sam told John that Dean went to the cabin store down the road to get powdered eggs and water; that he would be back soon. He didn't say he hadn't seen Dean all morning; didn't say he'd seen Dean open the cabin door at midnight, the night sky blacker than his shadow, and walk through it.
So Dean was still gone at ten, still gone at noon. John had stopped speaking to Sam long before that, as soon as Sam came back from the store to check on him, empty handed. He held up his hand to strike Sam, shaking with the fury of God himself - red, God was, and angry, like Sam was, but weaker and bare - and Sam was unafraid. In the absence of Dean there was revenge, there was a cleansing purity, and Sam felt as if he were walking on light, he might as well have been on the moon.
Dean returned, walking through the campsite after supper, and he was so pale he was almost blue. His clothes were wet and his skin clammy, but he would never say where he'd been, not in all the years Sam would know him. "Dean? Dean!" Sam's pleas went unanswered. "Were you abducted by aliens?" he whispered. "Where'd you go, huh?" But Dean never said. He swallowed up the secret of his fifteenth birthday like he swallowed so many others. Sam never asked him the question he wanted to ask most of all, knowing even still that Dean hovered between life and death that night, between some kind of choice too awful to mention. And why'd you come back?
Dean spent the next three days in a fever in the backseat of the Impala. Sam sat curled up in the seat next to his father, neither of them speaking unless John had orders to give, or Sam had to ask about Dean's condition. Sam listened to Dean's breaths cut ragged and unsteady in the air in his feverish dreams, he listened to the snake hiss and uncoil in his own chest, and thought the voice of God had left them for good, his daddy's faith shaking in his hands against the steering wheel, scared eyes focused on the windshield, and he wanted to smile, somewhere down deep and cold as the lake.
*
Badlands 1994
John said they were headed for the desert soon as Dean's fever broke. He had been driving East, towards the Badlands to see a preacher. Sam dreaded it like he dreaded every plan in John's head, but he stayed silent and waited for Dean to be okay.
The preacher was tall and thin, like a skeleton covered with skin, and his eyes were a washed-out blue. Sam hated to look at him and the preacher took it as a sign that the devil was afoot. "Watch that one," he warned, "I can see it coiled within him, wanting to strike."
Dean was better now, but he stayed in bed, surrounded by prayer. Crosses hung on the wall at the preacher's house, rosaries on the bed knobs, sheets with embroidered eyelets and dried lavender on the night tables. Sam wanted to stay with him, never leave his side, but John was giving him tasks to do - cook, sweep the floors, wash the car - and dust covered everything, covered him the moment he stepped out onto the porch, whipping across the Badlands.
As soon as John was gone with the preacher to the church in the morning, Sam would put down his work and rush to Dean's side, kneel at his bed and talk to him, faces close together. Dean said he was cold so Sam would remove every layer of dusty clothing, his sneakers, socks, jeans, pullover and undershirt, climb under the covers and cling to his brother's body. They would rub their bodies together without pretense, Sam rubbing Dean just to feel, all about skin and warmth and things he didn't have the words to say. Sam couldn't find release, those times when he was hard all the time and didn't know what to do about it, and Dean knew that in the way Sam moved against him, hard and unsure and constant, constant rubbing, the way he knew his belly felt best, softest against raw skin, Sam's mouth at his temple. Dean was afraid to talk because he knew too much, and he withheld from Sam, wanted to keep him separate, but Sam was alone and had no one else. He was so smart, so sharp, and Dean couldn't bear to leave him alone with this, all the world Sam opened up for him, to leave Sam in the dark with an ever-aching body. He was trying to be so brave, as his breath came out as a whine against Dean's skin, his hips never stopped jerking, him wanting so much more but not even knowing what to ask for. Dean would think, and think, and think, and think of someone else, anyone else, who could help Sam, teach him and understand him, until he couldn't bear the thought of it and his mind went blank. All Sam had was John and Dean, and Dean found he couldn't think of Sammy and John in the same sentence anymore, the same thought or picture. They were like two separate worlds that couldn't even exist together in Dean's brain, like a short-circuit when he tried to connect them. Sam's sweat on his skin and his sobs right in Dean's ear, the jerking in his hips out of control. "Oh, Sammy, Sammy," Dean whispered in a kiss against the sweat at the top of his brother's spine, and his dry lips tasted of salt.
Dean flipped them over, moved over Sam's body and let his own small, snub-tipped hardness drag against Sam's belly. He kept their breaths close, their mouths close, as he lined his body up with Sam's, opened enough to let Sam peek through and thrust until he was captured inside Dean's body, half inside, half caught between Dean's flesh where he placed Sam's hands, his fingers pressing Dean close and closed around his hips, letting Sam hold him and thrust into him from below, forcing Dean's body to control his movements with his weight and his heat. Dean moved his body down and took Sam inside.
Sam's mouth was an O, his nostrils, his breath wild, like his body, writhing as if possessed - dirty, wrong, Sam thought, dirty, wrong - but Dean made him finish with his body and his breath at his shoulder and Sam's breath was at his shoulder and they shouldn't have fit together like this but they did. He didn't have to ask where Dean learned that. He knew, and the thought of it made him shudder, like Dean's body here, right now, disgusted him. Right then Sam couldn't imagine anyone wanting it to be this way, but for the rest of his life he would, he would - Dean's hands smoothing the sweat over his hair and letting Sam slap their bodies together the only place they're not skin and bones, just sweat and heat, sweet suction and warmth until it can't go anywhere but burst out of Sam in a slow, sweet flood, and everything about them here right now is surprise and new and overwhelming.
"You're okay, Sammy, okay," Dean breathed hot against his skin and petted him, some kind of love rimming his eyes in red as he did so. "You don't have to leave."
"Dad," Sam said, "Dad." And God, Sammy thought, God but didn't know what he meant. He got dressed fast then, uncoordinated and lanky and messed up - so many things, so messed up - but he found his socks and his dusty clothes on the floor where he'd left them, like a skin he'd shed that no longer fit. He heard the front door close, "Sam? Why aren't you outside?" John called through the house. He pulled on his shoes and ran out the backdoor and kept running, his feet feeling like they were miles beneath him.
He knew what Dean meant now and it was what he had always meant and it didn't make any more sense now than it ever did, like the fire his mama left for him and the useless words his daddy kept saying.
There was nowhere to hide out there, where he was running. Wherever he went, Dean followed him like a ghost. He could run in circles over the earth, but not the dark madness of the Wendigo. No, this was not a hunger, but a need all the same. It wasn't hiding - there was nowhere to hide out here, among the dust and the Badlands. Just the dying of the light and the howling wind, like being stripped away except for his voice, and Dean's voice like it called now from the house, telling him to run, run faster.
Sam thought, Why? Why? Why was he running, always running? What was Dean facing when he was not there, what else wasn't he seeing when he thought his life was so small and closed-in like a cage? But that cage was Dean now, and Dean was everything.
Sam imagined his father beating Dean with his angry red God hands, the preacher laying hands in the air, saying meaningless words like the howling wind, the angry red bruises on Dean's flesh bringing tears to his eyes like the stinging wind, all of it howling in his ears, around the peace in the center of his chest and his body, sitting like a stone in Sam's stomach, Dean's perfect flesh, flashing inside his eyelids when he stared at the sun and closed his eyes.
If Sam were to go, Dean would follow him like a ghost, all their flesh lost to the wind. What if we can't get away? Sam ran to the edge of town, the end of the street, beyond the last edge of fence. The road led to the horizon, to where the dust covered it from sight. There was nothing else beyond the stones, the ridges of dirt. He ran back across the street, til the fence stopped. The other side of town, the church and the house. This was it, he thought - Sam is finally a ghost. Dean is a ghost. We will run in circles forever across the earth, and no one will know we are ghosts, but us.
At dinner that night, John spoke of taking them to the desert, for a fresh start. Where they can't run away, Sam thought, and said nothing. There were many to convert out there, many who were willing to believe. He will give Sam work to do. And Dean. They will work, start to earn their keep, and God will open up to them all the value of the world.
*
Route 66 1994-1996
John's ambition grew with the desert heat and his thoughts turned towards Los Angeles, its romantic name, its selective commerce. He drove their one-car caravan towards the coast, past one million billboards of the highway painted with giant pictures of ice cream, hamburgers, golfing retirees and girls wearing silk and pigtails and cherry red lipstick. They ate at burger stands painted up to look like they had stood there since John's childhood and watched people walk the streets dressed up in expensive logos he no longer recognized.
John had been showing Dean pictures, ever since he was young - not young now that he could be prettied up like those girls in the billboards, a new design to build fantasies on, something slowing changing into what he did not know. Like every man, John knew, he had a collection, passed down from father to son, as it should be, to create something new out of pink skin to build a life of dreams upon.
Dean had been quiet and moody since the desert, bothered by ideas Sam had no doubt put in his head, the way Sam could be so difficult, so unloving and cruel, not a part of this family the way John hoped. But John wouldn't lose hope for his youngest son; he knew how much he meant to Dean, how much he wanted Sam to mean for himself. John didn't know that Dean loved the boys and girls who looked like Sammy the best. He didn't know how that made Dean feel trapped and free all at once, grateful, loyal in a sideways way to his dad for reaching into the secret places of himself and telling him what to do with all of this desire - hide it and keep it and turn it on and turn it away. He can't turn away now. John needs him. They've all been doing what this city does best - taking away the shame of the world by finding new ways to make more. The bees follow Dean wherever he goes.
The woman John found in the pastel houses of Santa Monica was good at her job. She made her bread and butter snapping head shots in black and white or color, good at making faces look dramatic and inviting in 4x6 or 8x10. She made the rest of her money creating website content at her customers' request, the spare rooms of her house decorated with generic couches and beds with changing covers. Her specialty was making generic things look special enough to look twice at - she worked wonders with the current deluge of twink models, softening them up and capturing something of a wounded soul, natural light in their eyes, free of hair gel and earrings, rounded asses more Hollywood glam and less bubble gum. The 90s were not even halfway over and the trends were taking their toll on her. She fought her own private battle against the masses.
"I want Sammy to stay," this boy had said, speaking about his brother. She assumed he was his brother - there was some love still in those shadowed, narrowed eyes, still cruel like only a twelve year old could be. John didn't seem happy about it, but parents weren't allowed - that was a rule. Parents could bring them here but she wouldn't have them watch. That might have been the rules deeper down in the valley, but there was a reason she'd left, and it wasn't going to happen here. She could give the models that much.
"Alright, he can stay. Just stand behind me, okay," she spoke to the younger boy, more relaxed now with the father gone. She gave Dean a worn pair of jeans to wear and a white undershirt, comically similar to what he had been wearing anyway, but these jeans were distressed to look trendy and acid washed, not softly worn through at the thighs and torn to shreds at the knees, this undershirt was bleached white against his desert tanned skin and freckles, not stained and wrinkled with no hope of recovery. Dean had that desire to please she was so familiar with, a tilt to his head to show he was listening, a wide-eyed look to show he was thinking, a worry to his lips to cover up the rest. He would be beautiful whether he was trying to show it or not, despite any attempt to cover it up, despite all the reasons he might have wanted to. She knew whatever had happened in the past was already too much to let pass - this boy could never run far enough away from it, or float high enough away - but she could give him this moment of physical proof, here in this room with his brother, a sea-foam green couch, fake marble and venetian blinds, to at least see something beyond his grumbling bear of a father (she knew the type) and thousands of miles of highway traffic.
Without being asked, Dean looked straight at his brother, right behind her, just over the lens of her camera, and just like that his eyes turned to cats-eye green marbles, his lashes seemed weighted down with emotion, his freckled skin blushed like a peach, and she couldn't have painted it better if she had been giving all the colors of the Venice sunset. Her camera clicked. "Lay on your stomach. Scoot up a little. That's good." She focused her lens on his face - where his eyes, nose, and lips just pinched together - and the waistband of his jeans where it just met the curve of his ass before trailing back over the bubbles and bows of his legs, his soft, peanut-toed feet resting on the pillows. Perfect. "You're good at this," she wanted to say, but not in front of his brother, not now, not this boy. It would ruin whatever he thought he was doing, because whatever he thought he was doing, it was not this. It was something real and beyond her grasp, like only the real ones were. She knew it in the numbness of her jaw, the tingle of her palms.
"Good, Dean." Thank you, Dean. "Good. Good." She clicked her camera.
When Dean changed back into his familiar clothes, he took his brother's hand and kissed him on the temple. "That was for you, Sam. I was only good for you," he whispered, the light still in his eyes.
Sam hadn't asked for any of it, and never wanted it - that was the way he saw Dean in his mind, for him, not in a photograph or billboard or big screen movie - but he held himself back from cringing at his brother's kiss, because he wanted him still, just never in the way he was allowed to. "Dean...," he began, trying not to let his voice shake, "Dean." Somehow he found the words no one else could say. "Um, thanks. I... that was pretty. It was pretty because it was you. It looked like you."
Dean huffed out a laugh, "It was me, silly. It's always me."
No, it's not. Sam didn't say. It's not.
They saw the first billboard on the way to Kingman, traveling back past the desert on old Route 66. The truckers' route, their dad had said. Winchester Ministries, the billboard read in simple font, black letters: "And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him." - Genesis 1:7. The words floated above and below Dean's prone body, his welcoming form, his rapturous face, just this side of indecent, the face of all advertising.
John pulled over, whooping, and the boys climbed out of the car, faces stony and silent. "What do you think?" John called, looking between their faces and the sign, lit up even in the daytime. "We're going cross-country, nationwide."
Dean's eyes blinked with the passing of cars on the highway, like the world was moving too fast for him to keep up. "It's nice. I look nice, don't I?" His voice dull and toneless. "Sammy?"
But Sam was turned around, trying to clear his mind of the sight of Dean's freckles as big as his hand, his lips toned-down red and big enough to walk through, knowing he would see it again and again, ripping his heart out on the highway when he least expected it, for thousands upon thousands of miles.
John took them for sundaes at Denny's, whipped cream with a cherry on top, when the desert became too hot to breathe.
They stopped the next day outside of Flagstaff, at a diner with open faced gravy sandwiches and toy trains going round and round over their heads. John kept going to the pay phone to make calls, kept flirting with the waitress when she refilled his coffee cup, kept making notes in a leather-bound journal. Sam watched him as subtly as he could, knowing John's mistrusting eyes were on him all the time, and let Dean dip his fries in his half-eaten gravy plate. He couldn't shake the feeling that this, right now, bad as it was, was going to get worse real soon. John was too happy, Dean trying too hard to get them all to eat and sleep and talk like normal, the way he thought he could hold the world together with just his will and his wishes, Dean's biggest conceit. The thing he perhaps loved about him the most, no matter how much he was wrong.
"Dean?" Sam had to try, while John was on the phone. The moments where it might have been possible. He began when Dean's eyes were on him. "What do you think is going to happen? What's he planning, you think?"
Dean shrugged, and Sam tried to hold himself from shuddering with it. "I dunno, Sammy. Nothing that bad. Maybe something good. What'd you say that sign said? Ministries? That's good, Christian stuff, right? Maybe he's changed his mind; gonna settle down in a room somewhere and park the car for awhile. Give us some time to ourselves; just the three of us, all together in the same spot. He says New Orleans, even." Dean turned his attention back to his fries halfway through talking, seeing how Sam's expression fell. "You never believe in nothing, Sammy. Give it a chance, huh?"
"Ready, boys?" John shook the booth as he returned.
"For what?" Sam said, sharp and flat. "The Grand Canyon?"
John ignored him. "We're going to Winslow. Truckers' paradise. Lots of nice people. You'll see."
Giant plateaus greeted them on the way to Winslow, signs for some kind of petrified forest, dusty trucks leading both ways into the horizon. They got two hotel rooms, one next to the other, a bathroom in between, next to the showers and the 24-hour diner at a truck stop just outside of town. The walls inside and out were white painted wood paneling with curtains made of fabric painted with orange and yellow fruit, with bedspreads to match. The carpets were yellow and smelled of smoke, just like everything smelled of smoke. The whole place was surrounded by a porch with tiny metal stools with all the paint worn off and makeshift ashtrays and spittoons of used cans and metal buckets filled with sand.
Sam hated it. He spent his days reading discarded books that someone had left while passing through - he would ask the front desk every day, go looking at the diner, confiscate newspapers of every kind from the garbage cans and the bathrooms, eventually made some extra cash by cleaning up. He tried to stay in his room, and avoid the adjoining bathroom and bedroom entirely. He considered hitching on the back of a truck just to get away, but he might end up worse off than Dean, with no way out. Or worse. As it was, he tried not to think of Dean as much as possible, tried to focus on the rest of the world that had to be better than this one. As it was, the sound of Dean traveled to meet him wherever he went, his face rose up to greet him in his sleep, and none of it was going to go away.
From what he could tell, the mornings would begin with John reaching out to wake Dean from his sleep next to him, cough his lungs clear and awake, fall over him and break him in, break him open with his morning-hard cock, thrust into him and come in a matter of seconds, his face too red and blurry to feel much else. Sam would awake with his eyes, his face shut against it, not wanting to hear the sound of the bed against the wall, or the struggle of one more dirty man's dirty lungs, but he ached to hear Dean, something from Dean, who was all but lost to him these days. When he heard the shower turn on, he knew Dean was alive and breathing. He would put his ear to the door, too scared to open it, and hear Dean softly sing him a song in a voice just a tone off, just out of tune, over the sound of the weak spray, like some half-drowned mockingbird spent listening to country radio a bit too long.
All he could do was his old habit of obsessively cleaning the car as he had in the desert, once at morning and once at night, as if Dean would still turn to him once at any hour of the day or night, car keys in hand, and say "Let's go". They'd go somewhere far away, refilling with M&Ms and gas until the money ran out, find some other way to live that was not this. The whole time Sam worked his muscles against the paint and the leather and the chrome, he ignored the line on the porch, growing with the day and never shrinking until the quietest hours of the night, when even the stars had gone back to bed. The line of men started at the door and led around the corner and back around, some sitting on the metal stools, some on the ground, some glancing at magazines or just talking, spitting juice on the rotting wood of the porch if they couldn't make the buckets, passing around brown bottles in paper bags, soaking in cigar smoke. They would enter through the white door, let their eyes adjust to the light, to the prone body of his brother, his skin already sweating feverishly, his legs bowed more and more open to greet them, his hole red and sore and soft beyond reason, push once more inside, push down on the bed and its white sheets sweat-soaked clear, push and push and push until Dean would tell them to stop, no more, no more, please, his pleading taking them over the edge one more time.
Sam knew this in the few minutes he was allowed to spend with Dean each day, entering the dim-lit room to clean out the spittoon bucket filled with used condoms next to the bed, to watch Dean shake half-delirious when he touched him, pleading under his breath until he saw his Sammy, begging him with his eyes for something sweeter, soothing with the touch of his fingers behind his ear while Sam stroked him with a cool washcloth, dabbing gently at the bruises, the places where his skin looked rubbed raw to shiny pink. "It hurts, Sammy," Dean whispered, "It hurts," and begged him for something that would help.
But Sam would never find any help in that place, where the trucks moved in both directions towards the horizon. They stayed there until John started making phone calls again, making more notes in his leather-bound journal, started to speak of "other opportunities" down the road that stretched from Chicago to the coast of California. Sam held Dean's head in his lap when John drove them to Albuquerque, his brother drifting in and out of sleep. When Dean spoke, it was only to Sam with mumbled responses and half-gestures, a "Yes-sir" or "No-sir" to John when he asked anything, a dutiful amount of eating and sleeping, just as often saving his food for Sam or when he might feel like eating later, which was never. The desert colors stretched outside the car window - rose purple, sea blue green, yellow orange pink flowers - and Sam thought of his brother's pale face in his lap and though his eyes burned he would not cry.
John was the most frightening in those days, his bright-eyed hope seeming to crush Sam's heart like a vise, and he finally knew that there was no hope here, that John didn't see the world this way, and he and Dean were on their own, not even blessed enough to be alone, but on their own nonetheless. It was a matter of time before he lost Dean for good, to some crazy passerby with a knife, to some infection in the blood, to John's growing madness, like the road eating them whole. John hoped for some future Sam just couldn't see, outside of some monstrous place his vision couldn't go, some place where this was right and normal and agreed with by polite, pleasant stranger's eyes. Though Sam lived in that place, he knew his survival depended on getting far away from it.
The land stretching out towards Amarillo was dry and dusty, but Sam found that the Texas cowboys could teach mercy with their leathery fingers, their bodies spent riding all day with the animals. The men with fitted hats stopped at the truck stop on their way out of town; they treated the waitresses with an agreed-upon politeness, exchanging conversation and a tip for endless cups of coffee and greasy eggs done just as easy as they ask for. Sam followed them out to their trailers sometimes, asking about their animals to see if he could touch. He loved the brown, heavy-lashed balls of horses' eyes, looking wise and kind even though sad. He learned from the way the cowboys touched them with heavy pats followed by soft fingers. Their blue eyes looked out at him from leathery wrinkled skin that spoke to him of kindness as they soothed the horses' wounds with a flower-scented ointment.
"What's that stuff?" Sam asked, putting a gentle curiosity into his voice, more fitting for his twelve years.
"You see those flowers?" The cowboy pointed at the highway and the sunbursts of yellow orange that lined the road. "Them's Calendulas. Like Marigolds. Bloom all over the place."
Sam nodded. "You use flower oil?" He'd read a lot of horse veterinary magazines, explaining how to make tinctures and ointments from beeswax, cocoa butter, Vitamin E oil and flowers with names like Elderberry and Chamomile.
"They used to use this stuff way back in the Civil War, for when the soldiers got wounded. It would keep bad stuff from getting in, help make it feel better and heal faster. Works good for horses too. I made it m'self, back at the ranch. Lots o' different kinds. Easy enough to do."
Sam took some between his thumb and forefinger, smelled it and rubbed it around. It felt good. Natural. "Nice," he said. He felt his pocket for the five bucks he had been saving up to buy Dean something nice. He hadn't known what he was gonna use it for. Not until now. But it seemed like not nearly enough. He bit his thumbnail, tired and worn down to the nub.
"I got some extra. You're welcome to it. I always carry it but haven't used it yet. A little goes a long way." He held out a silver tin with a horse's head on it, looking brown and wise.
Sam let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. "Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Thank you, really. It's... It's a lot."
"Nah, it's nothing. I gotta get on the road though. Maybe I'll see you again. You say you're headed to the show in Oklahoma City?"
"Yeah," Sam remembered, having told a lie about meeting up with his mother at a horse show, his dappled horse called Brownie. "Take care now," he finished, repeating the state goodbye of Texas. Then he took the long way back to the trucker motel and waited for the line to die down, leading back to Dean.
The afternoons were full of bees in Sam's head, flies in the room, while his daddy spent the time in local bars, hanging outside of gas stations, making conversation at the fuel pumps. Dim rooms smelled of flowers, lavender and rose water on his brother's skin, Calendula ointment rubbed into Dean's wounds. Sam was never more careful than when he turned Dean on his side, face and arms pressed into the pillow, knees drawn up to reveal his shiny red and puffy sore places, trusting Sam as the only one who would help him. He wiped at him slow, cleaned what he could with a warm washcloth without going inside, washing away remains of men who wouldn't use condoms, knowing no one would stop them if they didn't, couldn't be the watcher even if his father let him, smoking at the table near the door and counting money. He knew the brush burns of so much hair and skin and sweat still stung at his touch, all along his brother's thighs and the curve of his body, but he had to get them clean, dried with a towel and still stinging red. The ointment was soft and greasy in his fingers, rubbing them together to warm it before starting at the backs of his knees and working downward in tiny circles at anywhere that was red. It wouldn't take long for him to run out, but he'd find a way to get more. There was no part of Dean's body that he could neglect, so much of it already used and neglected, and he would finish with small daubs and circles at Dean's hole, rubbing up inside as far as he could take without pushing, waiting for the tiniest of shudders to signal for him to stop.
Dean turned to him and opened his eyes, calm and grateful and threatened with an exhaustion he didn't want to think about. His face was shiny with sweat from the heat of the afternoon, his lips cracked and dry in contrast. Sam wanted more than anything to find something stronger to help Dean, something to take away all the pain and the memories, especially of Dean's words to him when he used to hope for something better than this. He hoped Dean didn't remember, that his pleas to him now were only for the moment, for a glass of water or some food. Sam took a clean washcloth and squeezed the water over Dean's lips, watched him smooth it over with his tongue before rubbing more ointment with his pinky finger like some lipstick. He fed him fruit from a soft banana, covered his closed eyes with a wet cloth while he chewed, and found a glass of water for Dean's shaky hands.
Sam didn't dare stay long enough for their dad to return, his shame growing strongest at the end, and for the night to come. He left Dean with his eyes closed, sleeping for maybe an hour if he was lucky while night fell, and entered back to his room through the bathroom, his own reflection in the mirror something of a ghoul, colored yellow green by the flickering lights. When he went outside the blue bug light snapped at him, and he watched the lit cigars and dusty boots gather at the porch. He spared them barely a glance, his empty stomach wanting to be sick with it all but long forgotten how, and spent the night trudging back and forth between his bed and the Impala willing to find a quiet place for good, for sleep, but afraid to miss the minute when his brother would finally scream, to see if it would ever come.
The flat lands of Oklahoma looked no different from Texas, acted no different. Sam didn't know why he thought they would, or why things would ever change, but he did, the promises in what he read renewing his faith in what, he wasn't sure, but something out there, waiting. Some nights John never made it to a hotel, stalling out at a bar with his lips wrapped around a bottle, glazed-eyed and genially joking, his voice nothing but a buzz to Sam's ears anymore.
Sam walked the blocks of beaten down saloons outside of Oklahoma City with a knife in his boot, but just walked in circles, never thinking, his brother's name sending his mind into loops that ended in the same place, no different. He ended up walking between his father's voice from inside the wooden door of the saloon, between the darkness of the alley which showed nothing but the shine of glass and chrome, the pale skin of his brother where he hung half in and half out of the backseat of the car, his brother's face a flash in the window, his palm on the glass. As before, Dean had just as likely found it easier to turn around on his belly, hold onto the seat and push off the ground with his toes against the weight of the men on his back, the only bright spots in the alley the skin of his calves as he moved, pumping up and down off the ground, or the shine of his skin when they left, the slippery pile of condoms beside the rear tire, his ass open to the night and the city for as long as it would take.
Sam walked and waited for the bar to close, for John to allow him to collect Dean up in his arms and let him rest there as he drove them someplace else, then forgot, fell asleep behind the wheel in a motel parking lot and gave them peace until sunrise. But it didn't happen. Sam found himself opening the wooden door of the saloon with a bottle in his hand and throwing it at the sound of his father's voice, hard enough to smash and hurt and make another kind of noise, one that might bring him back to his senses and his sanity, lost somewhere out there in the alleys and sidewalks. He didn't know where he'd hit, just that glass exploded in John's hand, spilled out blood and liquor, and then that hand was in his face, gripping his hair and pulling, jerking slippery strands of hair back again to places Sam didn't want to be.
Sam didn't want to be handcuffed to the rear car door, squirming and kicking at the back of the front seat, screaming over the squeal of the tires and the roar coming from his father's head. He didn't want to see Dean naked and curled up around the seat beside him, eyes closed to the world, his placid waiting face. He never wanted John to stop the car in a deserted waiting place, his shoes scuffing angrily in the gravel while he walked around to take Dean again, his tequila-soft cock just hard enough to last, his hairy belly pushing Dean into the seat with no room to move, his grip long enough to reach Sam's face, hiss words into his ear about blame and fire and monstrous boys with monstrous ideas who can't stay away from each other, who taught him all they needed to about what they really needed, each word a violent thrust. All his sons owed him, in the language of violent thrusts.
There were no more secrets then, nothing in John that would quiet the monsters except hours of drinking in Tulsa bars, only to find themselves surrounded again, with the same questions that spoke nothing of getting away, not for years and years. John could have Dean when he wanted and Sam couldn't touch him, not without reprisals and some dark imagined revenge. And John's imagination was limitless. Sam grew to know what it sounded like, Dean against the wall high up off the ground and split by John's cock, the wet sound when John finally came down his throat, the slap of skin when he took him from behind with no preparation, the slick sound of John's hand so fast on his cock that Dean could hardly breathe through the spanking on his ass, the sound of Dean's frustration when John was too drunk to come or let them sleep, the roar in his own head when John was beating either one of them - Sam always harder, more, with nothing to lose and the fear that this time it would not end with just sore bruises, limbs twisted just until, broken fingers and toes, cracked ribs and burning cheeks.
There was a split between them - Sam and Dean - with John threatening to make it wider. Though John blamed them for everything, Sam did not. He saved all of his salve for Dean, anything he had left of hope or concern. Everything else, he saved for John. In his dreams, he imagined poison, quiet stabbings, even fire, that old nightmarish foe he had begun to think of as a friend. He found himself wondering, more than ever, what Dean dreamed about.
The remains of the World's Fair in St. Louis made John full of his circus sideshow ideas again, his need for over-the-top spectacle and flim-flam. Sam thought it was as if the world were full of mad things he'd never known about, things his father had clung to his whole life and never spoken about. In his paranoia, he'd been loading up on guns. When Sam had thought he'd seen them all, he'd find a new one poking out of John's waistband, stashed in the glove-box, piled in with the others in the trunk, next to flares, grenades, boxes of bullets and packets of knives. He'd never been taught to use them; Dean neither. But he found his fingers itching for triggers and pins, blade handles and shiny things, just because John threatened never touch.
"Give up on revenge, Sam." Dean's voice was flat and quiet, his eyes staring out at rows of houses, utterly blank. "I don't want you thinking that way."
He almost thought he didn't hear him right. Didn't think Dean could say that, much less mean it. He looked around instinctively to see where John was, even though he knew he was in the hardware store, behind the glass. "What're you saying?"
"You know what I mean. I don't gotta say it." Dean shuffled on his feet. He looked way younger than seventeen, way older too. It was as if Sam knew how old he should be, and none of it seemed right. "Just, forget it."
"Or what?"
"Or I'll stop you. That's what."
"You can't... You can't be serious?"
"I'm your older brother and that's how it's gonna be."
Sam felt sick to his stomach, to hear his father's words come out of his brother, to feel his rage redirect itself at Dean, burning twice as hot, white-hot, acid. "No. No." He spat. All the weapons in the car were not enough, would never be enough. He flashed back to his brother lighting a cigarette in the desert.
It finally dawned on him that this was how it was. Dean would never leave while John was alive, would never see things for how they were. That maybe he was as deluded as John was, only clouded, only frail. Dean's bravery was a front; the thing Sam relied on most in the world, the only thing, had never existed. He had been the delusional one. He had been wrong. "Dean," he spoke one last time.
Dean never turned his head.
Sam ran towards nothing that night, just away. When he heard the trains whistle, he ran towards them. He couldn't hear a sound beyond the trains, and never stopped until he was at the doorstep of a woman who said her name was the same of the state he was in, who said she knew how to hide from dangerous things, and much more besides. The years were lost again - three years Sam left Dean to John that he could never take back forever after.
*
back to Part 1 * onto Part 3