Fic: Thinking about What a Friend Had Said, PG (WIP!) 1/?
Thinking about What a Friend Had Said
Warnings: Language
Summary: Follows Hoping for Replacement, WIP. Sam and Dean are reborn into a universe where Sam is the older brother. This has consequences.
Note: I've been having very little luck writing the next scene of this so I'm breaking my own rule about posting unfinished fics (the rule is NOT TO DO IT) and am going to let you guys have a look at it.
Thinking about What a Friend Had Said
Sam was halfway to the door, trying to simultaneously shrug into his jacket, fumble for his keys, and shove his feet into his boots. He was supposed to be at work in ten minutes and even at a flat-out run it would take fifteen to get to the bar’s back door. He was going to be late. There was nothing he could do about it. He was just going to have to be late.
His attempt to fling himself through the open door was curtailed by his brother stepping directly into his path, one hand up, arm straight, shoving something nearly into Sam’s face. Sam yelped, jerked back and nearly executed a pirouette trying not to mow his brother down. Dean scowled and shoved the offending object closer.
“Dude,” Sam snatched it away from him, “What?”
“It’s cold out,” was all Dean said. He walked away.
Sam stared at his hand. He was technically clutching two items-a pair of new, soft gloves. He could barely remember the last time he’d owned gloves. Ten years ago? Fifteen? Mary kept buying them for him, and he kept ‘losing’ them in increasingly creative ways. Eventually she’d given up, and not just on the gloves. But he’d hardly ever had gloves in his last trip around the life cycle of Sam Winchester, and rebirth didn’t make him any more inclined to willingly subject himself to the fumble-fingered inability to grab anything smaller than a brick that wearing gloves entailed.
The only time he’d willingly worn them had been in his first childhood, when he’d inherited a pair from Dean. He’d worn them even though he wound up cutting the fingers out during a brutal week of survivalist training in Olympia. He’d lost them eventually anyway, though not deliberately.
He finished shoving his boots on his feet and tied them hurriedly and glanced into the kitchen where Dean was staring fixedly into the refrigerator, his back to Sam. Sam knew that Dean still didn’t really understand the source of his random urges to take care of his (technically) older brother. It wasn’t that strange for him to react like this, stoically pretending he’d done nothing at all.
Sam fumbled his keys out of his pocket, shoved one glove in its place, and opened the door.
“Thanks, man!” he called, and his little brother spun around, eyes suddenly blazing, and pointed an accusing finger.
“Wear them! Wear ‘em or your fingers’ll fall off!”
Sam flinched. He waved the hand still clutching the apartment keys. “Okay okay!”
“Wear then or else!”
“I will! I’ll wear them! Jesus, okay!”
He hated that after twenty-five years as the eldest, a note of little-brother whine still occasionally crept into his voice.
He shoved one glove on and slammed the door harder than necessary. Ran a hand over his bristle-short hair before pulling on the other.
He grimaced at the sensation of his hands being swallowed by giant pillows. But Dean was right. Outside it was cold as the slopes of certain parts of Hell. Fifteen minutes walking through it, at eight o’clock, in the dark, was enough to make the skin of Sam’s face try to crawl down to the warm of his collar. He stepped out of the apartment building and it was like being hit in the face with an ice fist. His hands clenched instinctively, waiting for the bite of cold on his fingers that always accompanied these walks from home to work, but it didn’t come.
He set off at a near-jog, and the thought curled briefly through his head that maybe Dean would buy him a hat too, if he asked.
_______________
The bar closed at 2:30 and Sam had a set of bruised knuckles and a new gash on his cheek. He took a few minutes in the shitty employee restroom to slap a bandage over the wound, then pulled his new gloves on and jogged home to the apartment he shared with his brother.
Dean had moved in almost a year ago. Neither of them did much birthday celebrating, but Sam was wondering if he should buy a pie or at least a cupcake or something to celebrate Dean’s arrival. On the other hand Dean would probably bitch about the expense, so maybe just a pat on the head to piss him off would be the way to go.
He rubbed his freezing nose as he climbed the dark green stairwell to the apartment. The rest of the tenants worked odd hours but none as late as Sam, and he was used to having the empty halls to himself as he dragged his weary body home in the small hours. This fact had a lot to do with his reaction when he mounted the stairs and opened the door to the hall leading to his apartment, and saw a dark shadow loitering there.
“Hey!” he shouted, through the door and yanking his gloves off as he strode forward. “Who the hell are you?”
In this lifetime, he’d never killed a man. Never done worse than bludgeoned the faces of a few drunks and, in his early days, taught a few playground bullies some important life lessons. But he’d never lost that feral, half-crazed menace that a lifetime of hunting bred into a person, and most of the time it was enough to intimidate whatever unfortunate soul he got in his sights.
The person in the hall rocked back, but only a step. And now that he was close enough, Sam could see who it was in the poor light.
“Shit,” he said, “It’s you.”
He was getting too old for this.
_______________
Sam made coffee, because it was the sort of thing a son did for his long-absent father. He didn’t make good coffee, though, because that was the sort of thing Sam Winchester did for the man who had walked out on Mary and on Dean (and technically, he supposed, on himself) fifteen years ago without a second glance. He didn’t sit at the table either, but leaned against the counter and watched the man, doubly a stranger, grown more alien in the intervening years than he was even when he lived in their little house and tried to make a life in a world without angelic intervention.
The night outside the apartment was huge and mostly silent. Cars passed by only occasionally. The streetlights blinked from green to red to yellow, glaring on the cheap blinds.
“You look…good,” John said, after a full eight minutes of uncomfortable silence had passed. Sam snorted at him over his coffee.
“No I don’t,” he said, “I look like a thug. I look like what I am.”
John made a pained expression at that. Sam had been ten when he left, this time around. He wondered how the man remembered him. Sam hadn’t really made an effort to behave like a normal child even back then, and he suspected that John, like Mary, had probably been a little afraid of him.
He watched John’s eyes wander from the bandage on his cheek to the bruises on his knuckles to his close-cropped hair and faintly scarred forehead. Sam wondered if he seemed intimidating. He hoped so.
“What do you want, John?” he asked, voice brisk and almost light. He had no real anger toward the man, for his own sake at least. John and Mary were never meant to be together. Without the conspiracies of heaven to force their love, the marriage fell apart. It was right for him to leave. What was less right, Sam considered, was his lack of contact with his younger son after he did so. It may have been a John Winchester sort of thing to do, but even fifteen years later it grated on Sam’s sense of right and wrong.
John stared down at his own coffee. He’d taken all of one sip. He was thinner than Sam could ever remember seeing him, pale but not sallow, and his hair was trimmed. He had no beard.
He said, “I’m sick, so-Sam.”
“Hm,” was all Sam said.
“I might-the doctor says it could be terminal.”
Sam regarded him. The silence stretched.
Finally: “You’d better not be here for to ask for some kind of organ donation.”
John winced. “What? No, I-” he paused. “I guess kind of I deserve that.”
Sam put down his mug, gently. “Is that what you guess? Is it, John?”
John said, “I remarried.”
The words were quiet, clipped. Sam couldn’t tell if they were supposed to wound or if there was an edge of pride to John’s voice. He didn’t know how to read the man.
“Congratulations,” he said drily.
John grimaced.
“I didn’t come because…I don’t want anything from you, s…Sam. I just. Um.” He got up, crossed to the window. Sam watched him. He could stop John if he wanted. Put him on the floor, throw him out the door on his ass. Instead, he let him open the blinds, and peer out into the night.
“I told her…what happened. What I did. I…she didn’t know. She never knew. That I was married before. That I had. She didn’t know about you. Until, after the diagnosis. Then I told her everything.”
Sam blinked, and stood up a little straighter. His knuckle knocks against the side of his coffee cup; cold.
“‘She?’ Who? Your new wife?”
“Well.” He didn’t turn away from the window but Sam could see his eyes in the reflection. “It’s been over a decade, now.”
“That’s right,” Sam said softly. “It has.”
And John had nothing to say to that. Which was for the best.
He stayed by the window. Sam picked up his coffee mug, and took it to the sink. The clock on the microwave said 3:00 a.m.
“Did you come to make amends?” he asked, when the sound of coffee running down the drain had stopped.
John shook his head. Sam’s vision was getting a little fuzzy. He needed to sleep.
“I didn’t…I mean, I know I didn’t do right by you boys.”
“Or by Mary,” Sam supplied, because he knew John wasn’t going to say it.
John flushed a little. Sam guessed that the bad blood between them was still there. He’d often wondered if whoever had thrust Dean and himself out of their world and into this bizarre parallel existence forced John and Mary together, somehow, but left out the ‘eternal love and devotion’ part of the equation. It had made it harder to hate John when he’d considered that possibility. Sam knew what it was like to be a celestial gamepiece. He knew how badly it could screw with a person.
“Dean is…” Sam began, then trailed off. “I’m not sure you two meeting is a good idea.”
“Sam,” John began, and Sam waved a hand.
“Man, he was so…you don’t know. You’re his dad and you just took off. Not even a card at Christmas. He was messed up about it for a long time. He thought-he never said, but I know he thought it was something he did.”
John’s brow furrowed. “I’m your father too, you know.” He didn’t sound angry or hurt, just bemused.
Sam bit back the technically that nearly fell from his lips, and shrugged instead. “Whatever. But you showing up here, now, in the middle of the damn night-and what, you’re here because your wife made you come? That’s just…” he shook his head. “Why even show up at all?”
“Because I might die, Sam!” he nearly exploded, and Sam winced at the noise. He raised a hand, (large, rawboned), and they both fell silent. Listening.
“He’s here now and he’s asleep. I know you got in the habit of yelling and screaming in the middle of the damn night like a fool while you were married to Mary, but don’t bring that shit in here and expect me to stand for it. You’ve got a new family now, I bet you’ve got a darling towheaded son or daughter waiting for you to come home…” he caught the look on John’s face and smiled in triumph. “Maybe one of each. And isn’t that charming. How nice for you.”
“I screwed up,” John said, a little urgently, and his hands were on the back of the chair and Sam thought that maybe if he had a hat, he’d be clutching it in front of him. Like a shield. But there was no shield for John, not against Sam. “And I don’t know if I would’ve come, not if…if she hadn’t made me. But. It’s still right for me to try.”
Sam came out of the little kitchen, waving a dismissive hand. “When have you ever cared what was right? Don’t waste my time trying to appeal to my sympathy ‘cause I don’t have any.” He saw John blanch. And maybe…was that cruel? It was hard to be sure. Harder to remember that this version of John hasn’t seen, or done, half the things Sam’s real father had.
Maybe he was being a little harsh?
But Dean needed to be protected.
“Go away,” he said finally, wearily. “It’s three in the morning. Just…give me time. I’ll talk to him.” He ran a hand over his nearly shorn scalp. Sometimes he still expected to find thicker shagginess instead. John stood for several long minutes until finally, deflating, he turned and headed for the door.
Sam watched him. In the poor light he was a shape that should have been familiar, but wasn’t. Not really. The shoulders were wrong, the way he carried himself was alien. This John Winchester was thinner, softer, and less damaged than the one Sam remembered. He blinked and for a fraction of an instant he saw the shadow of the man he knew, side-by-side with this one, bigger and darker and fueled by vengeance.
That John (the real John, Sam thought, even though he knew it was unfair), never worried about whether what he was doing was Right. He didn’t have to. His world was defined by the razor-sharp edge between life and death. That John had a clarity this one had never known.
Sam realized, in that instant, that something had been taken taken from John, as well.
Sam said, softly, “It’s hard to face someone you never thought you’d see again.”
John paused, one hand reaching for the door. His shoulders stiffened, then sagged.
He was gone between one breath and the next. The door clicked softly. Sam stood watching the empty space, the grey planes of shadows, the echoes in the air. He scrubbed his face with both hands and turns toward the kitchen, intent on getting at least a few hours shuteye.
When Sam dropped his hands his brother was standing in the kitchen. Dean stared at him with wide, unblinking eyes.
“Sam,” he said, voice cracking. “Sam.”
Part 2
Warnings: Language
Summary: Follows Hoping for Replacement, WIP. Sam and Dean are reborn into a universe where Sam is the older brother. This has consequences.
Note: I've been having very little luck writing the next scene of this so I'm breaking my own rule about posting unfinished fics (the rule is NOT TO DO IT) and am going to let you guys have a look at it.
Thinking about What a Friend Had Said
Sam was halfway to the door, trying to simultaneously shrug into his jacket, fumble for his keys, and shove his feet into his boots. He was supposed to be at work in ten minutes and even at a flat-out run it would take fifteen to get to the bar’s back door. He was going to be late. There was nothing he could do about it. He was just going to have to be late.
His attempt to fling himself through the open door was curtailed by his brother stepping directly into his path, one hand up, arm straight, shoving something nearly into Sam’s face. Sam yelped, jerked back and nearly executed a pirouette trying not to mow his brother down. Dean scowled and shoved the offending object closer.
“Dude,” Sam snatched it away from him, “What?”
“It’s cold out,” was all Dean said. He walked away.
Sam stared at his hand. He was technically clutching two items-a pair of new, soft gloves. He could barely remember the last time he’d owned gloves. Ten years ago? Fifteen? Mary kept buying them for him, and he kept ‘losing’ them in increasingly creative ways. Eventually she’d given up, and not just on the gloves. But he’d hardly ever had gloves in his last trip around the life cycle of Sam Winchester, and rebirth didn’t make him any more inclined to willingly subject himself to the fumble-fingered inability to grab anything smaller than a brick that wearing gloves entailed.
The only time he’d willingly worn them had been in his first childhood, when he’d inherited a pair from Dean. He’d worn them even though he wound up cutting the fingers out during a brutal week of survivalist training in Olympia. He’d lost them eventually anyway, though not deliberately.
He finished shoving his boots on his feet and tied them hurriedly and glanced into the kitchen where Dean was staring fixedly into the refrigerator, his back to Sam. Sam knew that Dean still didn’t really understand the source of his random urges to take care of his (technically) older brother. It wasn’t that strange for him to react like this, stoically pretending he’d done nothing at all.
Sam fumbled his keys out of his pocket, shoved one glove in its place, and opened the door.
“Thanks, man!” he called, and his little brother spun around, eyes suddenly blazing, and pointed an accusing finger.
“Wear them! Wear ‘em or your fingers’ll fall off!”
Sam flinched. He waved the hand still clutching the apartment keys. “Okay okay!”
“Wear then or else!”
“I will! I’ll wear them! Jesus, okay!”
He hated that after twenty-five years as the eldest, a note of little-brother whine still occasionally crept into his voice.
He shoved one glove on and slammed the door harder than necessary. Ran a hand over his bristle-short hair before pulling on the other.
He grimaced at the sensation of his hands being swallowed by giant pillows. But Dean was right. Outside it was cold as the slopes of certain parts of Hell. Fifteen minutes walking through it, at eight o’clock, in the dark, was enough to make the skin of Sam’s face try to crawl down to the warm of his collar. He stepped out of the apartment building and it was like being hit in the face with an ice fist. His hands clenched instinctively, waiting for the bite of cold on his fingers that always accompanied these walks from home to work, but it didn’t come.
He set off at a near-jog, and the thought curled briefly through his head that maybe Dean would buy him a hat too, if he asked.
_______________
The bar closed at 2:30 and Sam had a set of bruised knuckles and a new gash on his cheek. He took a few minutes in the shitty employee restroom to slap a bandage over the wound, then pulled his new gloves on and jogged home to the apartment he shared with his brother.
Dean had moved in almost a year ago. Neither of them did much birthday celebrating, but Sam was wondering if he should buy a pie or at least a cupcake or something to celebrate Dean’s arrival. On the other hand Dean would probably bitch about the expense, so maybe just a pat on the head to piss him off would be the way to go.
He rubbed his freezing nose as he climbed the dark green stairwell to the apartment. The rest of the tenants worked odd hours but none as late as Sam, and he was used to having the empty halls to himself as he dragged his weary body home in the small hours. This fact had a lot to do with his reaction when he mounted the stairs and opened the door to the hall leading to his apartment, and saw a dark shadow loitering there.
“Hey!” he shouted, through the door and yanking his gloves off as he strode forward. “Who the hell are you?”
In this lifetime, he’d never killed a man. Never done worse than bludgeoned the faces of a few drunks and, in his early days, taught a few playground bullies some important life lessons. But he’d never lost that feral, half-crazed menace that a lifetime of hunting bred into a person, and most of the time it was enough to intimidate whatever unfortunate soul he got in his sights.
The person in the hall rocked back, but only a step. And now that he was close enough, Sam could see who it was in the poor light.
“Shit,” he said, “It’s you.”
He was getting too old for this.
_______________
Sam made coffee, because it was the sort of thing a son did for his long-absent father. He didn’t make good coffee, though, because that was the sort of thing Sam Winchester did for the man who had walked out on Mary and on Dean (and technically, he supposed, on himself) fifteen years ago without a second glance. He didn’t sit at the table either, but leaned against the counter and watched the man, doubly a stranger, grown more alien in the intervening years than he was even when he lived in their little house and tried to make a life in a world without angelic intervention.
The night outside the apartment was huge and mostly silent. Cars passed by only occasionally. The streetlights blinked from green to red to yellow, glaring on the cheap blinds.
“You look…good,” John said, after a full eight minutes of uncomfortable silence had passed. Sam snorted at him over his coffee.
“No I don’t,” he said, “I look like a thug. I look like what I am.”
John made a pained expression at that. Sam had been ten when he left, this time around. He wondered how the man remembered him. Sam hadn’t really made an effort to behave like a normal child even back then, and he suspected that John, like Mary, had probably been a little afraid of him.
He watched John’s eyes wander from the bandage on his cheek to the bruises on his knuckles to his close-cropped hair and faintly scarred forehead. Sam wondered if he seemed intimidating. He hoped so.
“What do you want, John?” he asked, voice brisk and almost light. He had no real anger toward the man, for his own sake at least. John and Mary were never meant to be together. Without the conspiracies of heaven to force their love, the marriage fell apart. It was right for him to leave. What was less right, Sam considered, was his lack of contact with his younger son after he did so. It may have been a John Winchester sort of thing to do, but even fifteen years later it grated on Sam’s sense of right and wrong.
John stared down at his own coffee. He’d taken all of one sip. He was thinner than Sam could ever remember seeing him, pale but not sallow, and his hair was trimmed. He had no beard.
He said, “I’m sick, so-Sam.”
“Hm,” was all Sam said.
“I might-the doctor says it could be terminal.”
Sam regarded him. The silence stretched.
Finally: “You’d better not be here for to ask for some kind of organ donation.”
John winced. “What? No, I-” he paused. “I guess kind of I deserve that.”
Sam put down his mug, gently. “Is that what you guess? Is it, John?”
John said, “I remarried.”
The words were quiet, clipped. Sam couldn’t tell if they were supposed to wound or if there was an edge of pride to John’s voice. He didn’t know how to read the man.
“Congratulations,” he said drily.
John grimaced.
“I didn’t come because…I don’t want anything from you, s…Sam. I just. Um.” He got up, crossed to the window. Sam watched him. He could stop John if he wanted. Put him on the floor, throw him out the door on his ass. Instead, he let him open the blinds, and peer out into the night.
“I told her…what happened. What I did. I…she didn’t know. She never knew. That I was married before. That I had. She didn’t know about you. Until, after the diagnosis. Then I told her everything.”
Sam blinked, and stood up a little straighter. His knuckle knocks against the side of his coffee cup; cold.
“‘She?’ Who? Your new wife?”
“Well.” He didn’t turn away from the window but Sam could see his eyes in the reflection. “It’s been over a decade, now.”
“That’s right,” Sam said softly. “It has.”
And John had nothing to say to that. Which was for the best.
He stayed by the window. Sam picked up his coffee mug, and took it to the sink. The clock on the microwave said 3:00 a.m.
“Did you come to make amends?” he asked, when the sound of coffee running down the drain had stopped.
John shook his head. Sam’s vision was getting a little fuzzy. He needed to sleep.
“I didn’t…I mean, I know I didn’t do right by you boys.”
“Or by Mary,” Sam supplied, because he knew John wasn’t going to say it.
John flushed a little. Sam guessed that the bad blood between them was still there. He’d often wondered if whoever had thrust Dean and himself out of their world and into this bizarre parallel existence forced John and Mary together, somehow, but left out the ‘eternal love and devotion’ part of the equation. It had made it harder to hate John when he’d considered that possibility. Sam knew what it was like to be a celestial gamepiece. He knew how badly it could screw with a person.
“Dean is…” Sam began, then trailed off. “I’m not sure you two meeting is a good idea.”
“Sam,” John began, and Sam waved a hand.
“Man, he was so…you don’t know. You’re his dad and you just took off. Not even a card at Christmas. He was messed up about it for a long time. He thought-he never said, but I know he thought it was something he did.”
John’s brow furrowed. “I’m your father too, you know.” He didn’t sound angry or hurt, just bemused.
Sam bit back the technically that nearly fell from his lips, and shrugged instead. “Whatever. But you showing up here, now, in the middle of the damn night-and what, you’re here because your wife made you come? That’s just…” he shook his head. “Why even show up at all?”
“Because I might die, Sam!” he nearly exploded, and Sam winced at the noise. He raised a hand, (large, rawboned), and they both fell silent. Listening.
“He’s here now and he’s asleep. I know you got in the habit of yelling and screaming in the middle of the damn night like a fool while you were married to Mary, but don’t bring that shit in here and expect me to stand for it. You’ve got a new family now, I bet you’ve got a darling towheaded son or daughter waiting for you to come home…” he caught the look on John’s face and smiled in triumph. “Maybe one of each. And isn’t that charming. How nice for you.”
“I screwed up,” John said, a little urgently, and his hands were on the back of the chair and Sam thought that maybe if he had a hat, he’d be clutching it in front of him. Like a shield. But there was no shield for John, not against Sam. “And I don’t know if I would’ve come, not if…if she hadn’t made me. But. It’s still right for me to try.”
Sam came out of the little kitchen, waving a dismissive hand. “When have you ever cared what was right? Don’t waste my time trying to appeal to my sympathy ‘cause I don’t have any.” He saw John blanch. And maybe…was that cruel? It was hard to be sure. Harder to remember that this version of John hasn’t seen, or done, half the things Sam’s real father had.
Maybe he was being a little harsh?
But Dean needed to be protected.
“Go away,” he said finally, wearily. “It’s three in the morning. Just…give me time. I’ll talk to him.” He ran a hand over his nearly shorn scalp. Sometimes he still expected to find thicker shagginess instead. John stood for several long minutes until finally, deflating, he turned and headed for the door.
Sam watched him. In the poor light he was a shape that should have been familiar, but wasn’t. Not really. The shoulders were wrong, the way he carried himself was alien. This John Winchester was thinner, softer, and less damaged than the one Sam remembered. He blinked and for a fraction of an instant he saw the shadow of the man he knew, side-by-side with this one, bigger and darker and fueled by vengeance.
That John (the real John, Sam thought, even though he knew it was unfair), never worried about whether what he was doing was Right. He didn’t have to. His world was defined by the razor-sharp edge between life and death. That John had a clarity this one had never known.
Sam realized, in that instant, that something had been taken taken from John, as well.
Sam said, softly, “It’s hard to face someone you never thought you’d see again.”
John paused, one hand reaching for the door. His shoulders stiffened, then sagged.
He was gone between one breath and the next. The door clicked softly. Sam stood watching the empty space, the grey planes of shadows, the echoes in the air. He scrubbed his face with both hands and turns toward the kitchen, intent on getting at least a few hours shuteye.
When Sam dropped his hands his brother was standing in the kitchen. Dean stared at him with wide, unblinking eyes.
“Sam,” he said, voice cracking. “Sam.”
Part 2