SPN FIC - My Brother Thinks He's A...
Over the years, a couple of people have asked me to explore what's going on with Other!Sam in the Djinn World. And I always thought, "Yeah, yeah, what's to tell? He's in law school, he's engaged, everything's hunky dory." Except that he's got this brother who's acting more and more weird.
So...what happens with that Sam, if he cares enough about his misfit brother to accompany him to that warehouse in Joliet? And what happens if...there's nothing there?
Dean has Mom's silver knife in his hand. It stopped dripping what Dean claims is lamb's blood a while ago. Now it's just gooey, streaked dark in the dim light from the street lamps outside.
CHARACTERS: Sam and Dean (from What Is and What Should Never Be)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2242 words
MY BROTHER THINKS HE'S A...
By Carol Davis
Three or four times, Sam tries to ask, but each time Dean hushes him, a look of growing exasperation on his face.
There's something else there, too, writ large in Dean's clenched jaw and unblinking gaze, something that's a little too close to panic for Sam's taste.
Maybe, it's a little too close to bugshit crazy.
Through all of it, all this nonsense, this skulking through an abandoned warehouse in the middle of the night, searching for something Dean insists is there, Dean says nothing.
Not a word.
Years ago, they did something like this - but it was in their grandparents' garage, maybe fifty feet from the warmth and security of the house. With summer heat and the smell of cut grass and their grandmother's roses drifting through the open door, they crept and whispered, searching tirelessly for The Bad Guys.
The neighbors' cat played that role a few times.
"Dean," Sam whispers to the middle of his brother's back as they make their way up the stairs. "Dean."
His brother ignores him.
There's no one here, not now, at least; but it's possible the homeless have taken refuge here now and then, have made beds for themselves in the heaps of old, damp cardboard shoved into the corners, or have simply cowered inside for a little while to escape the weather. There are rats and mice, of course, maybe some bats, and birds. A whole legion of roaches, Sam figures.
Dean has Mom's silver knife in his hand. It stopped dripping what Dean claims is lamb's blood a while ago. Now it's just gooey, streaked dark in the dim light from the street lamps outside.
Where ARE we? Sam wonders.
Not in Kansas any more, Dean told him.
When Sam tires of this, of the skulking around, of thinking there might actually be someone - or something - here, that Dean needs to be protected from whomever that might be (or from himself, Sam thinks with a heart that's sunk lower and lower with every step he's taken), when he just can't go along with this any longer, Sam sits down on the corner of a dusty old metal desk and watches his brother make believe.
God, Dean, he thinks. My God.
He'd call someone, but Dean threw his phone out the car window while they were still in Lawrence. Of course, they might still be in Lawrence; it's possible that after Sam drifted off to sleep, Dean doubled back, so that they're as close to home as they were all those years ago, stalking a pissed-off cat through the cobwebs in Grandpa Samuel's garage.
Really, though, Sam doesn't think so.
They're a long, long way from home.
And this man, the one carrying a gooey silver knife - this isn't the brother he used to know.
It takes more than an hour for Dean to surrender to what Sam knew to be true from a couple of minutes after they walked in the door: there is no one here.
There is nothing here.
"Son of a bitch," Dean murmurs, and now his expression is different. Disappointed, somehow. Bewildered.
He sits, then, in a dusty castered chair that protests his weight with a creak.
"What did you -" Sam begins.
From across the room, Dean glances at him. His shoulders are slumped, his fingers curled around the knife as if, now that he no longer has a use for it, he hasn't decided whether to hold on to it or toss it aside.
This isn't the brother Sam knew. For a moment, he silently repeats what he told himself all evening, all the while he lay awake in his old bedroom with Jess, staring up at the ceiling: he doesn't want to know this man.
But this is…
This is his brother.
He asks, quietly, firmly, "What did you think was here?"
Dean looks down at the knife, at something that was, up until a few hours ago, simply part of Mom's wedding silver, something taken out of its box only on special occasions. Thanksgiving, a bridal shower for a friend, Mom and Dad's 25th anniversary. Dean runs his thumb along the soiled blade, scuffing away some of the congealed blood. "I don't know," he mutters.
But he did know. Or thought he did. That's weighing on him now, making him sink farther down into the chair, as if he's got a dentist's lead apron draped over his shoulders.
For a minute Sam stays where he is, though he's not entirely sure why. Tired, he thinks, although he slept for a good long while in the car, while Dean was driving from Lawrence to wherever in the world this is.
Finally, he gets up from the old desk.
Stands close to it, too tired, too muzzy-headed, to know what to do next.
Dean turns to stare at him, jaw tight, eyes half-closed, as if he wants to see Sam and yet not see him.
"Get some breakfast?" Sam suggests.
He was angry yesterday. Mildly peeved, at first, then more and more so, because of the midnight phone call, and Dean's drinking, and Dean's having forgotten Mom's birthday; because of Dean's stalking around the restaurant, claiming to have seen…something. His wanting to keep the evening going until he was shitfaced and falling down, loud and clumsy, nobody that anyone who wasn't hammered would want anything to do with.
Why Carmen wants anything to do with Dean, Sam has no idea.
Dean used to be nothing more than quirky - fond of beer and porn and bad jokes, lazier than Mom and Dad should have let him get away with, unrepentant when he crossed the line, slept with Rachel, swiped Sam's brand-new credit card. And sometimes, absence does make Sam's heart grow a little fonder of his brother; two thousand miles of distance, and hearing from Dean only once in a blue moon, sometimes convinces him that Dean's not a bad guy, he's just…quirky. Just Dean. He means no harm to anyone. Won't ever amount to much, but that hardly makes him unique.
The past couple of years, though…
Jesus. The past couple of years. Why an intelligent, hard-working woman like Carmen wants anything to do with Dean is a mystery.
He's…
Sitting over there, slumped in an old chair that lists heavily to one side, he looks like a little kid. Like someone, or something, has betrayed him terribly.
Like the world has failed him.
Like everything he's ever known has failed him.
"Where are we, Dean?" Sam asks.
Dean shrugs, then says, more to the floor in front of his boots than to Sam, "Illinois. Joliet. Illinois."
To the best of Sam's knowledge, Dean has never been to Joliet, Illinois. Not before now, anyway. Hell, to the best of Sam's knowledge, Dean's never been more than a hundred miles from Lawrence. He'd have no way of knowing this warehouse was here, unless he found it on the Internet - and the only thing Dean ever finds on the Internet is porn.
"Dean - what -"
Dean doesn't answer. He stares at the dirty floor, the silver knife dangling loosely between his fingers.
Who ARE you? Ever since…
Dad, Sam thinks.
According to Mom, Dean no longer remembers what happened to Dad. He doesn't remember that he found Dad lying in the middle of the living room floor, that instead of calling 911 he tried CPR himself, tried to wrestle Dad around on the floor, tried to get him up onto the couch, as if lying somewhere soft would have encouraged Dad to reconsider, to give up on being dead.
The mailman heard Dean sobbing from the front porch, through the door Dean had left open, and made the call, brought the paramedics.
No one's ever tried to blame Dean. No one at all.
Except Dean himself.
Apparently, he's crossed the line from "tried" to "succeeded." And this, apparently, is what you get when you can't accept what's real.
When you feel like you failed.
When you feel like you were too little, too late.
You try to hunt someone - or something - in an old, abandoned building hundreds of miles from home, in a city you've never seen before.
You see things, hear things.
You try to invent a world that's different from the one you're in. You give in to bugshit crazy, because, apparently, that's the easiest route to take.
Or, maybe, it's the one that hurts a little less.
You break.
For what seems like a long time, Sam considers turning away from Dean, making his way quickly down the stairs and out the door. Dean's got the car keys, but Joliet (as far as Sam knows) is a good-sized city. They've got a bus station, certainly, and he's got money in his wallet, and a credit card. He can get back to Lawrence, back to Jess, and forget this midnight trip ever happened. Leaving Dean here by himself might not be the fair thing to do, not when Dean looks so beaten-down, so lost - but Dean brought this on himself. Dean drove them here in the middle of the night, and, presumably, he can find his way home.
For what seems like a long time, Sam tries to convince himself that he doesn't care whether Dean ever gets home or not.
It doesn't work.
The sun's up now, and slowly but steadily, the light is changing around them, chasing away some of the shadows. It's doing nothing to make the upstairs of this long-abandoned warehouse look any more appealing, but they won't be here much longer. There's no reason to stay, now that Dean understands there's nothing here.
You understand that, right?
Nose wrinkling against a sneeze, Sam crosses the few yards between the desk and Dean and crouches down in front of his brother, makes himself something close to the size he used to be, back when he'd follow Dean into the shadows of Grandpa's garage, aiming to track down and banish an enemy tomcat.
There was something in Dean's expression yesterday - something Sam couldn't remember having seen for a long time. It's not there now, in the exhaustion and bewilderment (and not a little sadness) that's drawing Dean down, making him look like he wants to curl up into a ball and make all of this go away.
Yesterday, Dean wanted to fix things. Wanted them to be brothers again.
There was hope in Dean's expression yesterday.
It's not there now.
Years ago, they were inseparable. Dad taught Dean how to throw a ball, drive a car, flirt with a girl - but Dean taught Sam. Took great joy in teaching him, in having Sam tag along with him, in having Sam be there at his side. In having Sam be his brother.
That joy wasn't one-sided.
But now…
This is what it is to be broken, Sam thinks as he looks up at his brother's half-closed eyes, at the slump of his brother's shoulders, at the defeat that clings to him like the smell of old socks, and he begins to wonder how long it's been since Dean won at anything. Since anyone respected him. Thought of him as anything but a joke.
Dean looks down at him, for a moment, then away.
It's long enough for Sam to see in Dean's eyes the remains of something that used to be there. Of the brother who used to be his hero.
The brother who loved to make believe.
The brother who, just yesterday, asked him to care.
He will think, a couple of months from now, that it took the pale sunlight of a rainy morning falling through the filthy windows of an old warehouse in Joliet, Illinois, to illuminate a place he'd kept shuttered for a long time. Six years, he will realize: from the day he first announced he'd be going cross-country to Stanford, in California, to study law.
"They got that here," Dean told him. "You know. K.U."
What he said to Dean was, "Are you freaking kidding me?"
But this time, after he tells his brother, "Let's go home"…
This time, after he slides behind the wheel of his brother's car and drives them the eight hundred miles back to Lawrence…
This time, after he's explained to their mother and Jess and Carmen that, on impulse, he and Dean took a road trip together, just a few hours, for old times' sake…
This time, after he's washed the blood off their mother's silver knife and returned it to the wooden chest she keeps under the armoire…
This time, after he's located a doctor who will help them sort out what happened to Dad…
This time, when Dean summons courage enough to say to him, "Sammy? It's - they got that here, you know. The law school. I know it ain't as good, maybe, but it's -"
When what Dean means is, Please don't go.
This time, when Sam realizes that he needed to be shown how much his brother needed him; when he realizes that it's not just the loss of Dad that's taken away a piece of Dean's heart, that the brother he used to follow into a dusty, cobwebbed garage in search of Bad Guys is still there, somewhere…
He remembers the warehouse that, somehow, became more real than Dean's life.
When Dean smiles at him, this time, lopsided and tentative, already convincing himself that the answer is (again) no…
Sam tells him, instead, "I'm not going anywhere."
* * * * *
So...what happens with that Sam, if he cares enough about his misfit brother to accompany him to that warehouse in Joliet? And what happens if...there's nothing there?
Dean has Mom's silver knife in his hand. It stopped dripping what Dean claims is lamb's blood a while ago. Now it's just gooey, streaked dark in the dim light from the street lamps outside.
CHARACTERS: Sam and Dean (from What Is and What Should Never Be)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2242 words
MY BROTHER THINKS HE'S A...
By Carol Davis
Three or four times, Sam tries to ask, but each time Dean hushes him, a look of growing exasperation on his face.
There's something else there, too, writ large in Dean's clenched jaw and unblinking gaze, something that's a little too close to panic for Sam's taste.
Maybe, it's a little too close to bugshit crazy.
Through all of it, all this nonsense, this skulking through an abandoned warehouse in the middle of the night, searching for something Dean insists is there, Dean says nothing.
Not a word.
Years ago, they did something like this - but it was in their grandparents' garage, maybe fifty feet from the warmth and security of the house. With summer heat and the smell of cut grass and their grandmother's roses drifting through the open door, they crept and whispered, searching tirelessly for The Bad Guys.
The neighbors' cat played that role a few times.
"Dean," Sam whispers to the middle of his brother's back as they make their way up the stairs. "Dean."
His brother ignores him.
There's no one here, not now, at least; but it's possible the homeless have taken refuge here now and then, have made beds for themselves in the heaps of old, damp cardboard shoved into the corners, or have simply cowered inside for a little while to escape the weather. There are rats and mice, of course, maybe some bats, and birds. A whole legion of roaches, Sam figures.
Dean has Mom's silver knife in his hand. It stopped dripping what Dean claims is lamb's blood a while ago. Now it's just gooey, streaked dark in the dim light from the street lamps outside.
Where ARE we? Sam wonders.
Not in Kansas any more, Dean told him.
When Sam tires of this, of the skulking around, of thinking there might actually be someone - or something - here, that Dean needs to be protected from whomever that might be (or from himself, Sam thinks with a heart that's sunk lower and lower with every step he's taken), when he just can't go along with this any longer, Sam sits down on the corner of a dusty old metal desk and watches his brother make believe.
God, Dean, he thinks. My God.
He'd call someone, but Dean threw his phone out the car window while they were still in Lawrence. Of course, they might still be in Lawrence; it's possible that after Sam drifted off to sleep, Dean doubled back, so that they're as close to home as they were all those years ago, stalking a pissed-off cat through the cobwebs in Grandpa Samuel's garage.
Really, though, Sam doesn't think so.
They're a long, long way from home.
And this man, the one carrying a gooey silver knife - this isn't the brother he used to know.
It takes more than an hour for Dean to surrender to what Sam knew to be true from a couple of minutes after they walked in the door: there is no one here.
There is nothing here.
"Son of a bitch," Dean murmurs, and now his expression is different. Disappointed, somehow. Bewildered.
He sits, then, in a dusty castered chair that protests his weight with a creak.
"What did you -" Sam begins.
From across the room, Dean glances at him. His shoulders are slumped, his fingers curled around the knife as if, now that he no longer has a use for it, he hasn't decided whether to hold on to it or toss it aside.
This isn't the brother Sam knew. For a moment, he silently repeats what he told himself all evening, all the while he lay awake in his old bedroom with Jess, staring up at the ceiling: he doesn't want to know this man.
But this is…
This is his brother.
He asks, quietly, firmly, "What did you think was here?"
Dean looks down at the knife, at something that was, up until a few hours ago, simply part of Mom's wedding silver, something taken out of its box only on special occasions. Thanksgiving, a bridal shower for a friend, Mom and Dad's 25th anniversary. Dean runs his thumb along the soiled blade, scuffing away some of the congealed blood. "I don't know," he mutters.
But he did know. Or thought he did. That's weighing on him now, making him sink farther down into the chair, as if he's got a dentist's lead apron draped over his shoulders.
For a minute Sam stays where he is, though he's not entirely sure why. Tired, he thinks, although he slept for a good long while in the car, while Dean was driving from Lawrence to wherever in the world this is.
Finally, he gets up from the old desk.
Stands close to it, too tired, too muzzy-headed, to know what to do next.
Dean turns to stare at him, jaw tight, eyes half-closed, as if he wants to see Sam and yet not see him.
"Get some breakfast?" Sam suggests.
He was angry yesterday. Mildly peeved, at first, then more and more so, because of the midnight phone call, and Dean's drinking, and Dean's having forgotten Mom's birthday; because of Dean's stalking around the restaurant, claiming to have seen…something. His wanting to keep the evening going until he was shitfaced and falling down, loud and clumsy, nobody that anyone who wasn't hammered would want anything to do with.
Why Carmen wants anything to do with Dean, Sam has no idea.
Dean used to be nothing more than quirky - fond of beer and porn and bad jokes, lazier than Mom and Dad should have let him get away with, unrepentant when he crossed the line, slept with Rachel, swiped Sam's brand-new credit card. And sometimes, absence does make Sam's heart grow a little fonder of his brother; two thousand miles of distance, and hearing from Dean only once in a blue moon, sometimes convinces him that Dean's not a bad guy, he's just…quirky. Just Dean. He means no harm to anyone. Won't ever amount to much, but that hardly makes him unique.
The past couple of years, though…
Jesus. The past couple of years. Why an intelligent, hard-working woman like Carmen wants anything to do with Dean is a mystery.
He's…
Sitting over there, slumped in an old chair that lists heavily to one side, he looks like a little kid. Like someone, or something, has betrayed him terribly.
Like the world has failed him.
Like everything he's ever known has failed him.
"Where are we, Dean?" Sam asks.
Dean shrugs, then says, more to the floor in front of his boots than to Sam, "Illinois. Joliet. Illinois."
To the best of Sam's knowledge, Dean has never been to Joliet, Illinois. Not before now, anyway. Hell, to the best of Sam's knowledge, Dean's never been more than a hundred miles from Lawrence. He'd have no way of knowing this warehouse was here, unless he found it on the Internet - and the only thing Dean ever finds on the Internet is porn.
"Dean - what -"
Dean doesn't answer. He stares at the dirty floor, the silver knife dangling loosely between his fingers.
Who ARE you? Ever since…
Dad, Sam thinks.
According to Mom, Dean no longer remembers what happened to Dad. He doesn't remember that he found Dad lying in the middle of the living room floor, that instead of calling 911 he tried CPR himself, tried to wrestle Dad around on the floor, tried to get him up onto the couch, as if lying somewhere soft would have encouraged Dad to reconsider, to give up on being dead.
The mailman heard Dean sobbing from the front porch, through the door Dean had left open, and made the call, brought the paramedics.
No one's ever tried to blame Dean. No one at all.
Except Dean himself.
Apparently, he's crossed the line from "tried" to "succeeded." And this, apparently, is what you get when you can't accept what's real.
When you feel like you failed.
When you feel like you were too little, too late.
You try to hunt someone - or something - in an old, abandoned building hundreds of miles from home, in a city you've never seen before.
You see things, hear things.
You try to invent a world that's different from the one you're in. You give in to bugshit crazy, because, apparently, that's the easiest route to take.
Or, maybe, it's the one that hurts a little less.
You break.
For what seems like a long time, Sam considers turning away from Dean, making his way quickly down the stairs and out the door. Dean's got the car keys, but Joliet (as far as Sam knows) is a good-sized city. They've got a bus station, certainly, and he's got money in his wallet, and a credit card. He can get back to Lawrence, back to Jess, and forget this midnight trip ever happened. Leaving Dean here by himself might not be the fair thing to do, not when Dean looks so beaten-down, so lost - but Dean brought this on himself. Dean drove them here in the middle of the night, and, presumably, he can find his way home.
For what seems like a long time, Sam tries to convince himself that he doesn't care whether Dean ever gets home or not.
It doesn't work.
The sun's up now, and slowly but steadily, the light is changing around them, chasing away some of the shadows. It's doing nothing to make the upstairs of this long-abandoned warehouse look any more appealing, but they won't be here much longer. There's no reason to stay, now that Dean understands there's nothing here.
You understand that, right?
Nose wrinkling against a sneeze, Sam crosses the few yards between the desk and Dean and crouches down in front of his brother, makes himself something close to the size he used to be, back when he'd follow Dean into the shadows of Grandpa's garage, aiming to track down and banish an enemy tomcat.
There was something in Dean's expression yesterday - something Sam couldn't remember having seen for a long time. It's not there now, in the exhaustion and bewilderment (and not a little sadness) that's drawing Dean down, making him look like he wants to curl up into a ball and make all of this go away.
Yesterday, Dean wanted to fix things. Wanted them to be brothers again.
There was hope in Dean's expression yesterday.
It's not there now.
Years ago, they were inseparable. Dad taught Dean how to throw a ball, drive a car, flirt with a girl - but Dean taught Sam. Took great joy in teaching him, in having Sam tag along with him, in having Sam be there at his side. In having Sam be his brother.
That joy wasn't one-sided.
But now…
This is what it is to be broken, Sam thinks as he looks up at his brother's half-closed eyes, at the slump of his brother's shoulders, at the defeat that clings to him like the smell of old socks, and he begins to wonder how long it's been since Dean won at anything. Since anyone respected him. Thought of him as anything but a joke.
Dean looks down at him, for a moment, then away.
It's long enough for Sam to see in Dean's eyes the remains of something that used to be there. Of the brother who used to be his hero.
The brother who loved to make believe.
The brother who, just yesterday, asked him to care.
He will think, a couple of months from now, that it took the pale sunlight of a rainy morning falling through the filthy windows of an old warehouse in Joliet, Illinois, to illuminate a place he'd kept shuttered for a long time. Six years, he will realize: from the day he first announced he'd be going cross-country to Stanford, in California, to study law.
"They got that here," Dean told him. "You know. K.U."
What he said to Dean was, "Are you freaking kidding me?"
But this time, after he tells his brother, "Let's go home"…
This time, after he slides behind the wheel of his brother's car and drives them the eight hundred miles back to Lawrence…
This time, after he's explained to their mother and Jess and Carmen that, on impulse, he and Dean took a road trip together, just a few hours, for old times' sake…
This time, after he's washed the blood off their mother's silver knife and returned it to the wooden chest she keeps under the armoire…
This time, after he's located a doctor who will help them sort out what happened to Dad…
This time, when Dean summons courage enough to say to him, "Sammy? It's - they got that here, you know. The law school. I know it ain't as good, maybe, but it's -"
When what Dean means is, Please don't go.
This time, when Sam realizes that he needed to be shown how much his brother needed him; when he realizes that it's not just the loss of Dad that's taken away a piece of Dean's heart, that the brother he used to follow into a dusty, cobwebbed garage in search of Bad Guys is still there, somewhere…
He remembers the warehouse that, somehow, became more real than Dean's life.
When Dean smiles at him, this time, lopsided and tentative, already convincing himself that the answer is (again) no…
Sam tells him, instead, "I'm not going anywhere."
* * * * *