SPN FIC - In the Mirror
In honor of a certain Mr. Winchester's birthday -- there's no cake, but there's angst. And fruit cocktail. Coda to 5.11, but not spoilery for that ep.
They say the first step toward solving a problem is admitting you have one.
That's a load of crap.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: A mention of the major event in 5.10 (so, Australians, beware)
LENGTH: 1987 words
IN THE MIRROR
By Carol Davis
They say the first step toward solving a problem is admitting you have one.
That's a load of crap.
Every damn motel room, every place he's gone chasing after sleep in since Cas dragged him up out of the Pit, had a mirror. His car's got three. He's used 'em all. He's considered his reflection in plate-glass windows and water glasses and knife blades and those big round mirrors in drugstores, and if anybody on the planet, anybody at all, could look at that sorry-ass specimen and think there's no problem there…
It started back when he was a kid.
But that's an old song. He's got a new one, now.
Sam glances over at him from shotgun and raises an eyebrow but doesn't say anything. Yeah, you can be grateful for small mercies. He's grateful for this one. Grateful that Sam's pretty much left him the hell alone.
Grateful he said no to Jo Harvelle every time she asked, because if they'd been a thing…
If they'd been a thing. And she died.
"Hey," Sam says.
Dean reaches for the volume knob on the radio, but Sam knocks his hand away. Dean glowers at him, turns his own version of a bitchface up to full bore, and feels like yanking the wheel out of its mount and beating Sam into pulp with it when Sam gives him that look that says he's trying to tolerate this. Tolerate Dean.
Sam fucking sleeps at night.
They don't need gas, but when they come up to a filling station with a mini-mart Dean pulls into the lot, finds a spot away from the security lights, and keys the Impala down into a chugging, then ticking, almost-silence. He offers no explanation before he pops out of the car and strides across the lot to the store, blinking at the bright fluorescents inside.
He should have stopped in the woods. Gone walking off into the nonreflecting dark.
Maybe there's something in him that wants him to keep looking, keep considering that slump-shouldered shell - and that's all he is, any more, just a shell - as if it'll all of a sudden start talking to him, the way he talked to himself in the dreamroot world, or when frigging Zachariah played Back to the Future with him. The coolers along the walls are all glass-fronted, so he finds an aisle in the middle of the store and parks himself there, considering cans of cling peaches and boxes of instant oatmeal. All of it's a blur after a minute, all bright colors and bold lettering, and he stops understanding what it all means, what they're trying to sell him.
There's a guy behind the counter, older than Dean. Mid-thirties, maybe. Probably thinks his life sucks some Technicolor ass because he's working in a Texaco mini-mart at ten-thirty at night, watching some sitcom on a little portable TV.
The guy sees Dean studying him. Asks, "Help you with something?" in a bored voice.
Dean's got a gun tucked up against the small of his back. For a second or two he lets his mind slide into "What if?" and wonders what kind of shit would go down if he waved the piece around a little and told the guy to empty the register. He used to wonder that when he was a kid, when he'd remember convenience store robberies on TV, the way they went all different degrees of bad (and sometimes good, sometimes not bad at all), and would figure he knew what those idiots did wrong.
He wondered, sometimes, in the chattering silence of his mind, exactly what would happen if he robbed the frigging store. If they'd end up with some cash, for once, or if he'd end up with a hole in him, leaving Dad and Sam behind to figure out where they went wrong.
He tries to think of something he wants.
Anything.
"You got -" he starts, and his mouth is dry and chalky. Drywall, he thinks. Like he works in a friggin' drywall factory.
"What?"
They'd just bring him back. If the guy whipped a sawed-off up from underneath the counter and blew a hole in him. He'd be dead for… Well, he wonders sometimes how long he'd be dead for, before Cas, or that asswipe Zach, or somebody maybe higher up on the food chain shined him up and brought him back again.
He wonders where he'd be in the meantime.
Sam's there beside him all of a sudden, like Sam's a friggin' angel, or a relative of that Bewitched chick, and because each new day just brings some permutations of the same old shit, Sam's making a face at him. Like if Sam lives to be eight thousand years old, like Noah, he's never gonna be able to figure Dean out, and he stopped being genuinely interested in trying back when he was six.
"Fruit cocktail?" Sam says.
That makes no sense until Dean looks down at his hand and sees that he's not holding a gun, he's holding a can of fruit cocktail.
"Whatever," he mutters.
"You wanted fruit cocktail."
They liked fruit cocktail, back when they were kids. Fought over who got to pick the cherries out.
The guy behind the counter is watching them. For good reason, Dean figures, because he and Sam both look…
Smudgy.
They look like somebody drew them, and then messed up the drawing by rubbing their hand against it, whether by accident or not. Maybe that's only because Dean can't quite focus, that he's so far beyond overtired that the whole world's gone half a degree off clarity. Like he needs glasses. For all he knows, he does. He feels his mouth twitch, like some buried reflex is trying to force him to smile. Or somebody else is, somebody who's pulling his strings back behind the fake walls of the puppet show that is his life.
"There's half a bottle in the trunk," Sam murmurs, and it's not unkind.
Dean walks out of the store, Sam snagging the can of fruit out of his hand just before he reaches the double glass doors, each one of them turned reflective by the smooth dark that lies outside. He doesn't look at himself, keeps his gaze down, shoves his way through and tries to hear nothing but the clomp of his boots against asphalt as he crosses the lot to his car. She, too, tries to show him to himself but he looks away, looks deep into the nothing that lies beyond the lot, tries not to acknowledge that there's something there: a couple of picnic tables, a bunch of scrub brush.
Sam comes out a minute later and says nothing to Dean as he opens the car door and drops the can of fruit inside. He paid for it, the dumbass, he bought them a can of fruit cocktail that maybe they'll eat when there's nothing else available.
They don't have a can opener, Dean thinks. They don't own a can opener. A church key, yeah, but no can opener.
They used to.
Own a can opener.
"Maybe we ought to get a camper," Sam says, for no reason Dean can think of. "Tow it along behind."
He moves around the car, opening things, closing things. Dean pays him not very much attention, because he can't find it in him to care what Sam is doing. He's got no real reason to care what Sam is doing. They're not chasing anything. Not trying to plan anything. They're just here, in this place, wherever the hell this is.
It's like all those places Dad stopped at in the middle of the night, to get gas, get a cup of coffee, use the bathroom. No-name places that were just one bright light in the middle of a lot of darkness. Coffee, gas, sometimes a candy bar.
"I'll drive," Sam says.
And Dean says, "No."
"You need to give me the keys, 'cause I'm not gonna go fishing in your pocket."
Dean says it again, "No," because in the puppet-world of his life, he is supposed to say no. He is supposed to drive his car.
That's what he does.
But Sam, his whole face contorted like somebody gave it a wet-towel twist, shoves a hand down into the pocket of Dean's jeans, explodes out a lungful of air when he comes up with the keys, and takes a step away. "Get in," he says, and nods at the car. At the back door, which is standing open. But screw that, Dean thinks. He doesn't get banished to the back seat. Not any more. He tries to come up with a response, but his brain's floating around inside his head like flotsam in the middle of a big, flat sea.
Another car pulls into the lot then, its headlights sweeping the length of the Impala, illuminating for just a moment what Sam's constructed in the back seat. The old wool blankets they found in a place Dean can no longer remember. A pillow, and who the hell knows where that came from, either. "You need some sleep," Sam says, and puts his hands on Dean.
Dean shifts his weight.
"Dean," Sam says.
He can't fight. Not now. Wants to, but it's night, and he doesn't know where they are. So he stands staring at his brother, not moving, feeling the echo of Sam's touch and thinking of when they were little, when the back seat was their home, when they stole warmth from each other and once in a while talked each other to sleep.
The best he can do is give no sign of surrender other than crawling into the back seat and making a clumsy cocoon of the tattered gray blankets. The pillow has a familiar old stale stink to it but it's soft, and malleable; doesn't resist when he works it into a shape that will accommodate his head the way he likes. The back seat is nowhere near long enough for his height, not any more, but his knees bend without protest, form the V that will let him rest the soles of his boots against the door when Sam presses it shut.
There's a bump, a small shift in the pavement, as the Impala rolls away from the Texaco. Then there's music, kept low, a counterpoint to the hum and rumble of the big engine.
There's the aroma of coffee.
They're a few minutes gone when he thinks he hears Sam say quietly, "Just let go."
But maybe he imagined that.
Hell, maybe he imagined the whole thing. Maybe he's so far beyond tired that he's hallucinating. Again. Still.
They spent a lot of nights rolling through darkness because Dad thought an answer was out there. He never found it, but maybe he was right. Maybe they're all out there. The answers. Out there somewhere.
"What?" Sam asks softly from the front seat.
"Nothin'," Dean murmurs.
He can't see himself from where he's lying. If he shifts his gaze just a little he'll see the back of Sam's head. He does that for a while, watches the shaggy curve of Sam's head, which moves a tiny bit every time Sam takes a sip of his coffee.
There's a can of fruit cocktail riding shotgun, he thinks.
In the window above his feet, as they pass a streetlight or a storefront or some whatever something that's out there in the night, he sees a reflection of himself smiling. It's not full-on, and he suspects that if he could see himself clearly there'd be a lot that's worth turning away from. But, Jesus, there's a can of fruit cocktail riding shotgun.
He's not sure whether to laugh, or cry.
Instead, he simply lets go.
Knows, somehow, as he does it, that that might be what the right someone wants him to do.
That that might be the second step.
* * * * *
They say the first step toward solving a problem is admitting you have one.
That's a load of crap.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: A mention of the major event in 5.10 (so, Australians, beware)
LENGTH: 1987 words
IN THE MIRROR
By Carol Davis
They say the first step toward solving a problem is admitting you have one.
That's a load of crap.
Every damn motel room, every place he's gone chasing after sleep in since Cas dragged him up out of the Pit, had a mirror. His car's got three. He's used 'em all. He's considered his reflection in plate-glass windows and water glasses and knife blades and those big round mirrors in drugstores, and if anybody on the planet, anybody at all, could look at that sorry-ass specimen and think there's no problem there…
It started back when he was a kid.
But that's an old song. He's got a new one, now.
Sam glances over at him from shotgun and raises an eyebrow but doesn't say anything. Yeah, you can be grateful for small mercies. He's grateful for this one. Grateful that Sam's pretty much left him the hell alone.
Grateful he said no to Jo Harvelle every time she asked, because if they'd been a thing…
If they'd been a thing. And she died.
"Hey," Sam says.
Dean reaches for the volume knob on the radio, but Sam knocks his hand away. Dean glowers at him, turns his own version of a bitchface up to full bore, and feels like yanking the wheel out of its mount and beating Sam into pulp with it when Sam gives him that look that says he's trying to tolerate this. Tolerate Dean.
Sam fucking sleeps at night.
They don't need gas, but when they come up to a filling station with a mini-mart Dean pulls into the lot, finds a spot away from the security lights, and keys the Impala down into a chugging, then ticking, almost-silence. He offers no explanation before he pops out of the car and strides across the lot to the store, blinking at the bright fluorescents inside.
He should have stopped in the woods. Gone walking off into the nonreflecting dark.
Maybe there's something in him that wants him to keep looking, keep considering that slump-shouldered shell - and that's all he is, any more, just a shell - as if it'll all of a sudden start talking to him, the way he talked to himself in the dreamroot world, or when frigging Zachariah played Back to the Future with him. The coolers along the walls are all glass-fronted, so he finds an aisle in the middle of the store and parks himself there, considering cans of cling peaches and boxes of instant oatmeal. All of it's a blur after a minute, all bright colors and bold lettering, and he stops understanding what it all means, what they're trying to sell him.
There's a guy behind the counter, older than Dean. Mid-thirties, maybe. Probably thinks his life sucks some Technicolor ass because he's working in a Texaco mini-mart at ten-thirty at night, watching some sitcom on a little portable TV.
The guy sees Dean studying him. Asks, "Help you with something?" in a bored voice.
Dean's got a gun tucked up against the small of his back. For a second or two he lets his mind slide into "What if?" and wonders what kind of shit would go down if he waved the piece around a little and told the guy to empty the register. He used to wonder that when he was a kid, when he'd remember convenience store robberies on TV, the way they went all different degrees of bad (and sometimes good, sometimes not bad at all), and would figure he knew what those idiots did wrong.
He wondered, sometimes, in the chattering silence of his mind, exactly what would happen if he robbed the frigging store. If they'd end up with some cash, for once, or if he'd end up with a hole in him, leaving Dad and Sam behind to figure out where they went wrong.
He tries to think of something he wants.
Anything.
"You got -" he starts, and his mouth is dry and chalky. Drywall, he thinks. Like he works in a friggin' drywall factory.
"What?"
They'd just bring him back. If the guy whipped a sawed-off up from underneath the counter and blew a hole in him. He'd be dead for… Well, he wonders sometimes how long he'd be dead for, before Cas, or that asswipe Zach, or somebody maybe higher up on the food chain shined him up and brought him back again.
He wonders where he'd be in the meantime.
Sam's there beside him all of a sudden, like Sam's a friggin' angel, or a relative of that Bewitched chick, and because each new day just brings some permutations of the same old shit, Sam's making a face at him. Like if Sam lives to be eight thousand years old, like Noah, he's never gonna be able to figure Dean out, and he stopped being genuinely interested in trying back when he was six.
"Fruit cocktail?" Sam says.
That makes no sense until Dean looks down at his hand and sees that he's not holding a gun, he's holding a can of fruit cocktail.
"Whatever," he mutters.
"You wanted fruit cocktail."
They liked fruit cocktail, back when they were kids. Fought over who got to pick the cherries out.
The guy behind the counter is watching them. For good reason, Dean figures, because he and Sam both look…
Smudgy.
They look like somebody drew them, and then messed up the drawing by rubbing their hand against it, whether by accident or not. Maybe that's only because Dean can't quite focus, that he's so far beyond overtired that the whole world's gone half a degree off clarity. Like he needs glasses. For all he knows, he does. He feels his mouth twitch, like some buried reflex is trying to force him to smile. Or somebody else is, somebody who's pulling his strings back behind the fake walls of the puppet show that is his life.
"There's half a bottle in the trunk," Sam murmurs, and it's not unkind.
Dean walks out of the store, Sam snagging the can of fruit out of his hand just before he reaches the double glass doors, each one of them turned reflective by the smooth dark that lies outside. He doesn't look at himself, keeps his gaze down, shoves his way through and tries to hear nothing but the clomp of his boots against asphalt as he crosses the lot to his car. She, too, tries to show him to himself but he looks away, looks deep into the nothing that lies beyond the lot, tries not to acknowledge that there's something there: a couple of picnic tables, a bunch of scrub brush.
Sam comes out a minute later and says nothing to Dean as he opens the car door and drops the can of fruit inside. He paid for it, the dumbass, he bought them a can of fruit cocktail that maybe they'll eat when there's nothing else available.
They don't have a can opener, Dean thinks. They don't own a can opener. A church key, yeah, but no can opener.
They used to.
Own a can opener.
"Maybe we ought to get a camper," Sam says, for no reason Dean can think of. "Tow it along behind."
He moves around the car, opening things, closing things. Dean pays him not very much attention, because he can't find it in him to care what Sam is doing. He's got no real reason to care what Sam is doing. They're not chasing anything. Not trying to plan anything. They're just here, in this place, wherever the hell this is.
It's like all those places Dad stopped at in the middle of the night, to get gas, get a cup of coffee, use the bathroom. No-name places that were just one bright light in the middle of a lot of darkness. Coffee, gas, sometimes a candy bar.
"I'll drive," Sam says.
And Dean says, "No."
"You need to give me the keys, 'cause I'm not gonna go fishing in your pocket."
Dean says it again, "No," because in the puppet-world of his life, he is supposed to say no. He is supposed to drive his car.
That's what he does.
But Sam, his whole face contorted like somebody gave it a wet-towel twist, shoves a hand down into the pocket of Dean's jeans, explodes out a lungful of air when he comes up with the keys, and takes a step away. "Get in," he says, and nods at the car. At the back door, which is standing open. But screw that, Dean thinks. He doesn't get banished to the back seat. Not any more. He tries to come up with a response, but his brain's floating around inside his head like flotsam in the middle of a big, flat sea.
Another car pulls into the lot then, its headlights sweeping the length of the Impala, illuminating for just a moment what Sam's constructed in the back seat. The old wool blankets they found in a place Dean can no longer remember. A pillow, and who the hell knows where that came from, either. "You need some sleep," Sam says, and puts his hands on Dean.
Dean shifts his weight.
"Dean," Sam says.
He can't fight. Not now. Wants to, but it's night, and he doesn't know where they are. So he stands staring at his brother, not moving, feeling the echo of Sam's touch and thinking of when they were little, when the back seat was their home, when they stole warmth from each other and once in a while talked each other to sleep.
The best he can do is give no sign of surrender other than crawling into the back seat and making a clumsy cocoon of the tattered gray blankets. The pillow has a familiar old stale stink to it but it's soft, and malleable; doesn't resist when he works it into a shape that will accommodate his head the way he likes. The back seat is nowhere near long enough for his height, not any more, but his knees bend without protest, form the V that will let him rest the soles of his boots against the door when Sam presses it shut.
There's a bump, a small shift in the pavement, as the Impala rolls away from the Texaco. Then there's music, kept low, a counterpoint to the hum and rumble of the big engine.
There's the aroma of coffee.
They're a few minutes gone when he thinks he hears Sam say quietly, "Just let go."
But maybe he imagined that.
Hell, maybe he imagined the whole thing. Maybe he's so far beyond tired that he's hallucinating. Again. Still.
They spent a lot of nights rolling through darkness because Dad thought an answer was out there. He never found it, but maybe he was right. Maybe they're all out there. The answers. Out there somewhere.
"What?" Sam asks softly from the front seat.
"Nothin'," Dean murmurs.
He can't see himself from where he's lying. If he shifts his gaze just a little he'll see the back of Sam's head. He does that for a while, watches the shaggy curve of Sam's head, which moves a tiny bit every time Sam takes a sip of his coffee.
There's a can of fruit cocktail riding shotgun, he thinks.
In the window above his feet, as they pass a streetlight or a storefront or some whatever something that's out there in the night, he sees a reflection of himself smiling. It's not full-on, and he suspects that if he could see himself clearly there'd be a lot that's worth turning away from. But, Jesus, there's a can of fruit cocktail riding shotgun.
He's not sure whether to laugh, or cry.
Instead, he simply lets go.
Knows, somehow, as he does it, that that might be what the right someone wants him to do.
That that might be the second step.
* * * * *