SPN FIC - Fear and Comfort in Milan, Ohio
The Muse sure does like that Dove Extra Dark, lemme tell you. I fed her some last night, and she came up with this. Two parts, post Long Distance Caller.
They’ll cross the line at some point, he thinks. Dean will push the bag away and make some wisecrack about Sam overreacting, call him Samantha, swagger to the bathroom and shut the door to give himself a couple of minutes to get himself together without being watched. But a couple of minutes crawl by with Dean still sitting there quietly, breathing in and out of a greasy paper bag like he doesn’t realize there’s anything out of the ordinary about that. He’s stopped hyperventilating, at least, so Sam lowers the bag.
Characters: Dean, Sam, OFC
Genre: present day, gen; flashbacks, het
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Long Distance Caller (and, in general, most of season 3)
Length: 7974 words
FEAR AND COMFORT IN MILAN, OHIO
By Carol Davis
Brown paper bag, stained with grease from the French fries they had for dinner. Sam plucks it out of the trash, shakes the last couple of bits of fries out of it, straightens it out, rolls the edges over to make them a little more substantial.
Then he sits on the bed alongside his brother and lifts the bag to Dean’s face.
“Do this,” he says quietly.
Dean peers at him, tears cascading down over his cheeks like he’s a water feature in somebody’s yard.
“Come on, man,” Sam urges.
When Dean still makes no move to help himself, Sam plants a hand on Dean’s back and uses the other to hold the bag over Dean’s mouth and nose. A paper bag smelling of stale French fry oil isn’t the ideal solution to this problem, but it’s what they’ve got, right here, right now. Dean’s been hyperventilating for God knows how long - the noise of it woke Sam up - and it’s the Eighth Wonder of the World that he hasn’t passed out. Dean passing out would help, actually, but Sam’s not going to push him in that direction, not unless the bag doesn’t work.
“Slow it down,” he says. “Please, Dean.”
Months ago, he said to his brother This is what you’re like when you’re terrified. Maybe he could have - should have - guessed back then that the way Dean was acting was only the prologue to something worse, that the bacon cheeseburgers and the frantically random sex and the obnoxious, off-the-wall remarks were only Dean testing the waters. Now, now, when there’s only a month left - now Dean is terrified.
This is a 30 days Morgan Spurlock would never want to touch.
Dean’s vibrating like he’s sitting on top of a running clothes dryer, hands twitching uselessly on top of his thighs. He probably can’t think straight, Sam realizes, can’t do the math required to put himself back on solid ground. His eyes aren’t focusing on anything, and just when Sam thinks that yeah, Dean’s going to black out and the only question left is which direction he’s going to topple, he flinches, and Sam can feel him start to settle down.
“Hey, that’s it,” Sam tells him. “You got it.”
They’ll cross the line at some point, he thinks. Dean will push the bag away and make some wisecrack about Sam overreacting, call him Samantha, swagger to the bathroom and shut the door to give himself a couple of minutes to get himself together without being watched. But a couple of minutes crawl by with Dean still sitting there quietly, breathing in and out of a greasy paper bag like he doesn’t realize there’s anything out of the ordinary about that. He’s stopped hyperventilating, at least, so Sam lowers the bag.
“How you doing?” he asks.
Dean stares at nothing for a moment, then shrugs.
With his left hand still splayed like a big starfish against Dean’s sweat-damp, t-shirted back, Sam drops the bag onto the night table between the beds. Dean’s still crying, he realizes, and where the hell all that water is coming from is a mystery.
Thirty days.
They’ve got thirty days left.
It was a mean, shitty trick the crocotta pulled: making Dean think Dad was trying to help him. Not that that’s anything new, in and of itself; they’ve had some pretty mean shit dealt to them all their lives, but this is a new high, and Sam doesn’t doubt for a moment that the bastard knew exactly what kind of effect his little game would have on Dean. He didn’t take the “come to me” route with Dean, didn’t try to lure Dean into offing himself. No, he went for the jugular, and this last couple of years that’s been SOP for pretty much every evil thing they’ve come across. It’s the Winchesters, boys. Gotta raise our game.
In a perverse way, that’s sort of flattering. And if they settled for trying to screw him over, Sam thinks, his response would be Bring it on, motherfuckers. Give me your best shot. He heard Azazel’s remark to Dean at the cemetery in Wyoming, heard him murmur, How sure are you that what you brought back is one hundred percent pure Sam? - and maybe that was bullshit, maybe it was yet another way to yank Dean’s chain, but sometimes Sam wonders. Whether it’s Hell-given or whether it’s just that he’s John Winchester’s kid, he’s not what he used to be. Not after those months the Trickster created and then undid, the months Dean really knows nothing about, the months Sam spent alone. The rest of the world might not think those months took place, but for Sam they did, and he remembers them with a clarity that isn’t at all natural.
He’s not the same. He’s not the Sam that Dean scooped out of Palo Alto two and a half years ago.
He is, however, still Dean’s brother.
That? Will never change.
With a smile meant to encourage Dean to hold on for a minute, he says, “I’m gonna get you some water,” and goes into the bathroom long enough to run cold water into a thin plastic cup - one of the motel’s amenities, if you can call them that. He’s about to step back into the bedroom when he reconsiders and runs a drink for himself into another cup, gulping it down quickly, vaguely surprised that it tastes fresh and good, not metallic or chlorine-ish. He half expects to have to hold the cup for Dean, but Dean takes it from him and drains it slowly in a way that says it’s something to do, something to occupy his hands.
He looks like he wants to hang on to Sam like he’s the safety rail on a Tilt-a-Whirl car that’s started to spin out of control.
Sam would let him. Wouldn’t object to it at all.
Instead, Dean holds on to the empty cup, wraps his hands around it, cradles it gently.
Dean’s been awake for a while, Sam thinks. Maybe he never fell asleep at all, after they turned the lights out, after he admitted he was scared and then rebuffed Sam’s attempt to crawl into the foxhole he’s cowering in. Sam slept, though, dropped off not long after lights-out, and that must have been what spun the Tilt-a-Whirl in the wrong direction for Dean: being alone in the dark. They should leave the TV on from now on, Sam figures, to make some noise in the room. They need to do something to make the darkness not quite so empty, because neither one of them can go without sleep for a month.
I’ll sleep after I’m dead runs through Sam’s mind, and he shudders.
He sits down alongside his brother again and they spend a couple of minutes like that, side by side, like they’re sitting on a bench somewhere.
Waiting for a bus.
Waiting for something.
“Listen,” Sam says, and Dean looks at him. There’s no warning in Dean’s eyes this time, no attempt to play the Don’t be a girl card. The way Dean looks right now, Sam can go right ahead and be a girl, can be Valerie Bertinelli in one of those Lifetime TV movies if he feels like it. Sam can do anything he damn well pleases.
As long as he doesn’t leave.
His gut feels like it’s collapsing into itself, turning into some kind of intestinal black hole. He could turn on the TV, let it take care of making some noise in this worn-out, stale-smelling room, but something tells him he’d pull an Elvis and shoot out the fucking picture tube after not very much time at all. He could turn on the clock radio, find a station that favors late-night classic rock, but even glancing at the thing reminds him of Asia, of “Heat of the Moment,” of all those Tuesdays that Dean died.
They need to go someplace safe, he thinks, but where the hell that would be, he doesn’t know.
Then he does. It might not work, but he’ll give it a try.
“You know…I never told you a lot of stuff,” he ventures. “About…school. You keep saying, ‘What did you do there?’ and I know that was rhetorical, but…you’re right. Three years. It was…” He cuts himself off, because he’s not entirely sure where he’s going with this. He’s feeling his way in the dark, hoping the reminder of all that time they spent apart isn’t too much of a sore spot for Dean. It shouldn’t be; it’s not like Dean spent the whole three years curled up in the fetal position, after all. He went on living. Hunted with Dad. “I was wrong,” Sam says after a minute. “I shouldn’t have cut you off. I should have called. Talked to you about what it was like. You could have come out, like at Christmas or something. Or during the summer.”
“And do what?” Dean says, and it’s almost a groan.
That’s good. Sort of.
“I don’t know. We could have hung out.”
Sam waits for the rejoinder, the What, in some fern bar? but it doesn’t come. Dean stares down at his empty cup like he’s forgotten how to do anything else.
“Ask me,” Sam says.
Dean half-shrugs.
“Ask me anything.”
Dean likes to pretend he’s got no interest in college and never did, but Sam’s always been sure that’s a fake-out. If things had been different, if Dad had been a little bit more gung-ho about the school thing, he’s pretty sure Dean would have gone ahead and filled out some applications. His high school grades were only borderline - vanilla enough to avoid his being noticed too often by guidance counselors, but no better than that - but he’s not dumb. Sam didn’t win his brains in a lottery, and Dean’s from the same stock Sam is, has the same genes. Dean could have gotten accepted at any number of decent places, if he’d given it a shot. If he’d boosted his grades just a little bit.
He could have had his own little bit of normal.
“It’s like high school,” Sam says. “Depends on the teacher. Some of ‘em are so boring you want to scream for mercy. But some of ‘em… It is fun sometimes.”
Dean snorts softly, an unspoken Whatever.
“Dude,” Sam says.
“Not my thing, Sam.”
That’s a start. “Maybe not, but -“
“Good place to meet chicks, though, I guess.”
“I met one.”
Dean’s expression shifts a little. He goes on staring at the cup, running the flat of his thumb along a flaw in the plastic. Then he says to the floor, “Guess it’s kind of a miracle factory, then.”
“Screw you,” Sam tells him.
Moving slowly, shuffling his bare feet like somebody who’s been bedridden for a while, Dean goes into the bathroom, runs some water into the sink, and splashes it onto his face. He cringes a little, as if the water hurts him, as if it’s hitting some open wound. When he comes back to the bed, he piles his pillows in a heap at the head of the bed, then assumes his favorite TV-watching, beer-drinking, hanging-out-in-the-room position, back resting against the pillows. He abandoned his cup in the bathroom, so he starts to fuss with a lint ball on the blanket, idly, as if he’s not entirely aware he’s doing it.
“You want to watch something?” Sam asks, looking around for the remote.
Dean shakes his head.
Sam turned on one lamp when he got up, the one on the night table between the beds. It’s got a 40-watt bulb in it, he figures, because the room’s pretty dim, but there’s enough light for him to see that Dean’s eyes are bloodshot and puffy. His sinuses are probably pretty well plugged, too, because that’s what happens when you cry that hard.
For a moment Sam wants to call Morgan Spurlock. And that guy who’s on Dirty Jobs.
“Can ask you anything?” Dean mutters, and there’s a hint of the old Dean in it, the one who took every available opportunity to mock his kid brother - like he was trying to rack up points, like he’d signed up with some You Can Earn a MILLION DOLLARS In One Year! offer in the back of a magazine.
“Yeah,” Sam says warily.
“Anything.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Then I wanna know.”
There’s a sly look building on Dean’s face, and that’s a good thing. It’s also a really bad thing, because Sam sort of knows what’s coming. “What?” Sam sighs.
“You know what.”
“No way, man.”
“You said anything.”
“Forget it.”
“I know it happened,” Dean says, and he’s building momentum moment by moment. And yes, that’s a good thing. It’s luring him away from the fact that it’s three-thirty in the morning, he hasn’t slept, he’s afraid of sleeping, he’s starting to be afraid of pretty much everything. Sam knows where’s Dean is going, and okay, it’s not like he’s headed for a hundred-mile-an-hour collision with a brick wall, but…
No. There’s no “but.”
“It happened,” Dean says, “and you guard it like the fucking nuclear launch codes.”
That’s true. It’s always been true. And it’s rankled Dean for years, because Dean has been up-front of every single blessed one of his sexual encounters, to the point where it not only skeeves Sam out, it’s made him want to plead the case of those women whose privacy Dean doesn’t even think about. Because the problem is? Dean respects their privacy with the entire rest of the world. Just not with Sam. It’s like he’s trying to prove something, and what exactly that is, Sam’s never been able to pin down to his own satisfaction. Yes, he knows Dean’s straight, and Dean’s a stud, and Dean can get pretty much any woman he fixes his sights on.
Yes, he knows Dean leaves ‘em happy and smiling.
Also? Yes, he knows Dean would give his left nut for the chance to have a home and a family - that Dean’s dreams included Lisa Braeden telling him she loved him was no surprise, none at all - but if the job didn’t kill that opportunity for him, Cassie Robinson dumping him certainly killed his willingness to try for it. Dean had dreams, had vivid, Technicolor dreams of normal and maybe still does, but they’re just dreams.
That’s kind of pathetic, Sam thinks. To give up. So why Dean would go to such great lengths to demonstrate to Sam that he’s given up on anything long-term and solid is…well, it makes no sense. Because Sam is the one person who, if Dean said he wanted to try for the gold ring, would support him a hundred percent.
Always would have.
Always will.
“I wanna know,” Dean says firmly. “When you popped your fuckin’ cherry. How. And with who.”
“Whom,” Sam replies.
“Spill it.”
They grew up together. Shared motel rooms and small bedrooms in small apartments and rented houses. More times than he cares to count, his proximity to Dean reminded Sam of prisoners locked into the same six-by-nine-foot cell. Not much of what either of them did was a secret to the other. And Sam was never alone.
Never.
A few times, he and Dean attended separate schools, because in that particular town, the elementary school was in a different building from the middle school, or the middle school in a different building from the high school. Either way, he was told to wait inside the building until Dean, or Dad, showed up to take him home. If his soccer team had a game, Dean was in the stands. On the rare occasions when Dad would take Dean along with him to hunt something, Sam was left with Pastor Jim, or Bobby, or someone else on the short list of people Dad trusted.
Sam was Never. Fucking. Alone.
Never.
Ten minutes, maybe, or an hour, here and there, after they’d trained him to lay salt lines and chant Latin and keep a container of holy water within reach.
Ten minutes, or an hour, or two, when he could sneak away.
Yes, he had that.
But basically?
He had no privacy. Never had a room of his own. Never had much of a span of time when he didn’t feel like he was living some freakish version of Ed TV. Add to that Dean’s gleeful desire to know precisely when his Grasshopper, his protégé, crossed the line into Becoming A Man, and you got a situation that was no more palatable than…well, than those French fries they’d had for dinner tonight. Last night. Whenever.
“Told you,” Sam says. “That’s -“
“Forget it,” Dean replies. “You said, ‘Ask me anything.’ Give it up. That’s what I want to know.”
“Dean -“
Dean raises an eyebrow.
Sam made a promise to himself: that when it happened (if it happened, he’d thought for a long time), he would keep the details to himself.
He would own that. That one thing.
And Dean could go scratch.
“So am I wrong?” Dean persists. “High school. Didn’t happen.”
“Forget it, man.”
This same question, and Sam’s refusal to answer, turned into an ass-kicking more than once. Sparring, Dean called it when Dad questioned bloody noses and strange bruises and torn clothing. For all Dean’s doggedness, though, he’s never made any real attempt to uncover the answer. He’s never gone to any of the girls Sam dated, or any of Sam’s teammates, or anyone at all, to dig up some dirt about his kid brother. All he’s ever done was nag. And…spar.
And lay out chapter and verse of his own exploits.
All he’s ever done is be Dean.
“On the bus,” Sam says quietly.
“What?”
“The bus. To Stanford.”
“Dude,” Dean says. “You screwed somebody on the bus?”
“I met her on the bus.”
“Well,” Dean says. “You gotta be a little bit specific.”
“Where would I have sex on a bus? In the rest room?”
Dean considers that. Shrugs.
“Dude,” Sam tells him. “You know how much those rest rooms reek? Jesus.”
That prompts another shrug, this one conceding the point. Then Dean settles a little deeper into his nest of pillows, like Sam’s going to read him Goodnight Moon and tuck him in with his teddy bear.
“Name,” Dean says. “Gonna need a name.”
“Melissa,” Sam replies. “Her name was Melissa.”
* * *
She sticks out her hand. She has a solid handshake for a girl. A small, square hand, short nails, no jewelry, no nail polish.
“Sam.”
“Nice to meet you, Sam.”
* * *
“She hot?” Dean asks.
Sam lets his mind roll back. He can see her there, in the window seat, surrounded by her belongings like she lives on the bus, has made a little burrow, a warren, out of that one seat. “Painter’s overalls,” he says. “Dark t-shirt. Those sneakers like little kids wear - Keds. White Keds. She had her hair in a braid down her back.”
“So she was, what, some tofu-eating hippie chick.”
“No,” Sam says.
* * *
Her purse, or tote bag, or whatever you want to call it - it’s like a clown car. She’s got sandwiches in there, a big Thermos of soup, a deck of cards, several paperback books. A box of tampons, a hairbrush, a can of Lysol. A cellophane tube of Oreo cookies that she tears open and holds out to him. “Arizona,” she says. “Outside of Flagstaff. I’m coming back from my cousin’s wedding. What about you? Where’re you going?”
“Stanford.”
Her eyebrows go up. “Really? Good for you.”
“I got a scholarship.”
“Awesome,” she says. She means it.
* * *
“She made pottery,” Sam says. “Makes pottery,” he corrects himself, because he Googled her not long ago. After Ruby told him… After he found out about Mom’s friends. He Googled everyone he could think of. Becky and Zach and the others, the Baker’s Dozen from Stanford. Connie, from Scranton. Some of his teachers.
They’re all alive. All of them.
Hell has left them alone.
“Pottery-makin’ hippie chick,” Dean says. “She like poetry?”
“Shut up,” Sam tells him.
* * *
She has pictures, in a little album that she ferrets out of the purse. She brought them with her to show her relatives.
She makes all sorts of stuff. Plates and bowls and urns.
Like Demi Moore, in Ghost.
He starts to think about Demi Moore’s hands, coated with wet clay, moving smoothly over wet clay, and he has to scrunch a little in his seat. He’s got nothing to cover his lap with and he can feel himself start to blush. At least his jeans are baggy. He should have held on to her little photo album, shouldn’t have given it back to her, but that’s kind of…well, tacky. Camouflaging his boner with her pictures of the stuff she made.
She either doesn’t notice his problem, or she’s really good at pretending she doesn’t.
“Can you make a living that way?” he asks, then realizes that he’s being rude. It’s none of his business, how much money she makes.
“I work in a bookstore,” she says.
“Oh,” he says.
* * *
“Figures,” Dean says.
“Oh, bite me, would you? Why do you have to turn everything into a stereotype? What if I told you she was a Formula One driver?”
“I’d tell you you were full of shit.”
“Or, like, a…scientist.”
“At White Sands,” Dean smirks. “Wears a lab coat and glasses and works on top secret government shit.”
“Shut up. Would you? Just shut up.”
“You’re predictable, Sam.”
“I’m predictable? I could tell you she was anything, anything at all, and you’d find some way to turn it into a stereotype. ‘Yeah, that’s the kind of girl Sam goes for.’ People are people, Dean, not stereotypes.”
“Only got a month, Sam,” Dean says. “How long you gonna take to get to the sex?”
That makes the black hole in Sam’s gut start spinning again.
* * *
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess.”
He can’t tell her, no, they’re not proud of me. They told me I couldn’t go. That I needed to stay with them.
It makes him angry, thinking about Dad’s solid NO.
Fuck you, Dad, he thinks. I’m done.
She’s small enough that she can make herself comfortable in the limited confines of the seat. She’s got a pillow and a blanket, and around ten-thirty she arranges them in such a way that she can snuggle in to sleep. Sam’s got no pillow, no blanket, just his jacket. He smiles at her like everything’s cool, he can deal - and he can, pretty much. He’s slept under worse conditions than this. But it takes him a long time to drop off, and until he does, he watches her out of the corner of his eye, sometimes full-on. Watches her sleep.
He’s never slept this close to a girl. Woman. Not all night.
* * *
“The bus started to stink,” Sam says.
Dean smirks at him. “Started to?”
“Something… I don’t know what happened. The exhaust fumes really started to come up into the bus.”
* * *
He’s not sensitive to smells, not normally. He’s a guy who’s lived his whole life with other guys, and when Dad’s not paying attention, bathing isn’t something he and Dean worry a whole lot about. A couple of times, they’ve turned it into a contest: who can stink the worst. But the exhaust is making some of the other passengers really sick, and the sound of them puking into whatever receptacle they’ve gotten their hands on, plus the smell of the puking…
“Jesus,” he mutters, trying to draw into himself, find some kind of Zen space where he can block out what’s going on.
At first, he thinks Melissa’s not bothered. But no: she pulls a t-shirt out of her bag and breathes into that. She’ll be okay, because they’re only fifty or sixty miles outside of Flagstaff. If she can keep it together a little while longer, she’ll be home.
The driver ought to stop the bus.
Really.
But there’s nothing around here, and it’s hot out. If they stop here, and he shuts the engine off, they’ll have no air conditioning - not that it’s working well to begin with - and it’ll get hot in here pretty fast.
Then the bus’ll smell like fried puke.
God only knows how long it’ll take for another bus to get here. To rescue them. And maybe that one will smell just as bad.
There’s a stop coming up.
* * *
Part Two