SPN fic: "Parts of Speech"
PT's Cylon-osity is clearly rubbing off on me. This one's been a very long time in the making, since before the finale.
Title: Parts of Speech
Author: mona1347 (with generous help, as always, from poisontaster. The "adverb" section, in particular, would not exist without her talking to me late one night, literally in the dark, with me under the covers and Dean!muse crying in my lap.)
Word Count: 2,866
Rating: A for Angst. No sex (sorry), some language. Dean gen-fic basically (WTF is up with all the GEN I'm writing lately? Returning to my roots? Nostalgia?)
Warnings/Spoilers: None. Pre-series.
A/N: Uh, so upon completing her outstanding beta for this piece, poisontaster had this to say: "I don't even have the words to describe what a h0r you are, but I take deep satisfaction in that I won't be the only one broken by this. There will be tears before dawn, mark my words."
So, um, take that as a warning or something.
Summary: When Sammy left, Dean had to learn all the ways to speak again.
Wonder if
I will wander out
Test my tether to
See if I'm still free
From you
Steady as it comes
Right down
To you
I've said it all
So maybe we're a bliss
Of another kind
Lately I'm into circuitry
What it means to be
Made of you but not enough for you
~ 'Bliss,' Tori Amos
When Sammy left, Dean had to learn all the ways to speak again.
conjunction
Dean liked "and". It was a good, solid word. Sam and Dean. Some amalgam, like they had their own secret name that meant the two of them together...Samandean. Then other words came.
I can stay "or" I can be happy.
I love you, Dean, "but" I want to have a life.
Dean has loved exactly three people in his entire life.
One is dead, one left him and the last could barely stand to look at him because he was just a "Dean" now; the broken and chipped half of a formerly matched set. Dean could no longer do what he was born and bred to do; take care of Sammy. Not if Sam walked away. Not if Sam refused him, called him "Daddy's little fucking lieutenant" and blew away to a foreign land called "college" and "normal".
verb
Dean was comfortable with verbs. He remembered his 4th grade teacher calling them "doing words" and he'd thought, "Yeah. I like that." He generally didn't have the same use for words that Sam did, for talking and whining and reasoning and arguing, but those "doing words" he liked a lot.
Punch. Kick. Spin. Hit. Throw. Run. Fuck. Shoot. Stab. Kill. Hurt. Leave.
Well. Maybe not all of them.
Three days after Sam left, Dean went to New York City for two weeks. Dad, scowling and shut tight, sent him on a job in Connecticut, exactly in the opposite direction from Sam. As far across the continent as he could get. The old man was more perceptive than he liked to let on and he must have known the temptation would be too great to go to Palo Alto, drag Sam back or beg for peace or any number of things Dean might do if he'd gone anywhere farther west than the Rocky Mountains.
Those old New England biddies who'd been burned at the stake for being run of the mill village weirdos were pissy bitches, that's for sure. He had two new scars (careless mistakes) because of them and had to make an unscheduled stop late one night at James’ old farmhouse to re-up on ammo. James didn't ask any questions, didn't ask about Sam and didn't ask Dean to stay. Dean figured that his father called ahead and told him. James was always a classy bastard like that.
He drove south, figuring that in a state this small, he'd run into I-95 again eventually. He drove through several frighteningly picturesque towns, one after another quaintly beautiful screen of lies to cover up the darkness.
Normal wasn't real, why the fuck did Sam want something so not-real?
A little over an hour later, Dean merged onto the interstate and followed it back west through the metropolitan sprawl that ceased to be New England and started to be New York well before the state line. He shut off his cell phone, locked it in the glove box and parked his car somewhere in New Rochelle. He grabbed his duffel and got on a commuter train into the city because fucked if he was going to mess with his baby's brakes that way and put her in danger of all those lunatic cabbies.
Dean arrived at Grand Central and got straight on the subway. Rode it up the first line to arrive and back down again, shoulder pressed hard against the dirty-metal smell of the vibrating wall.
He did that for almost three days; bought hot dogs, chips and soda from vendors, nudged back against the press of bodies during rush hour, felt anonymous skin and sweat against his own, touching people who'd never remember his face if they'd ever really seen it at all. Dean rode the trains as long and as far as he could. He slept under a bench at night, his face rubbing against the nylon of his bag, head cradled against the wood and metal hardness of his weaponry.
Dean stayed in the dark, lived underground.
He stopped mainlining coffee. Stopped drinking it entirely, just cold-turkey, and leaned there each day, slumped in the dirty plastic-covered seat against the rumbling curve of the train car, and throbbed with the pain in his head, drowsed with sluggish nothingness coursing through his veins.
When yet another still-drunk party girl almost threw up in his lap early in the morning of the third day, Dean realized that stopping "doing words" just meant he had the time to think. Things kept happening, all around you, even if you were doing nothing at all. He thought, deep down, maybe that's why he came here.
There were verbs even underneath New York City.
Dean didn't see the famous skyline until midmorning on that third day. Usually he hated super-cities like this, hated how crowded and noisy they were. But this time, he found the constant activity comforting. White noise for his brain. He lost himself in the anonymity and grime.
He didn't need to lie in a place like this because no one ever asked him any questions. No one made mindless small talk or "made'ja feel welcome." No one remembered his face and no one ever asked his name. A million bodies moving through space and time, a million lives that had nothing to do with him at all.
Dean couldn't be all alone with himself. Couldn't deal just then with living as someone else in a small town. The crushing weight of "missing Sam" - the "verb-ness" of it -- meant he couldn’t be anything but Not Fine and he needed to be invisible for that.
preposition
Dean liked to sit somewhere -- there were a million somewheres in New York; benches, stoops, barstools, fire escapes, big rocks in a park, overturned milk crates and gutters -- and watch all the people around him. Outside of him. Near to him.
All these people who weren't Sam. Sam who belonged to him. Sam who was inside him, of him, for him.
Far from him.
noun
thing
Dean never had a lot of things. Not since all his clothes and toys and books and games and Theodore the Stuffed Bear burned up with his mother. Two nights later, Dean was wrapped around Baby Sammy in his crib. It was too small for both of them but Dean made it work by holding very still and curling carefully tight around Sam’s small squirmy body. He listened to his father not-sleeping -- sometimes muttering, sometimes making sounds Dean would think were crying noises except that his Daddy was a big grownup and Daddy’s don’t cry.
Dean counted each wispy hair on the back of Sammy’s mostly-bald head and thought, Please God. It’s okay if you keep Theodore and my checkers and my t-ball set and my football and all that stuff but please let me keep Sammy and Daddy and bring Mommy back. You can keep all that stuff if I can have Sammy and Daddy and Mommy, okay? Thank you. Love, Dean Winchester.”
That was before he learned that you can never get people back, you could only try to keep hold of them to begin with. That all he could do was hold on to Sam and Dad with all he had. That was before he realized that God had nothing to do with what happened to his Mother and all his unimportant things. That God probably had very little to do with much of what happened in the world if the evidence of what he’d seen by the time he started Kindergarten meant anything at all.
Dean owned what he could fit in his car and had a more compact version of those things - the ones that he considered essentials -- that fit into a long duffel bag. It was a long bag mostly because of the shotgun. He took this bag with him whenever he left his car for a period longer than a few hours.
If he ever lost any of it, which sometimes happened, he didn't feel anything but irritation at the trouble it would be to acquire a replacement.
place
Dean had been a lot of places and he had a story for each one.
Here was where he ate that undercooked barbeque that gave him food poisoning. Where fifteen year old Sam laid cool towels on his head and emptied and cleaned the motel garbage can over and over so Dean wouldn’t have to lurch to the bathroom each time he threw up.
Dean was so sick he couldn’t even move or think and Sam read him things out of his boring old books, stolen from a hundred different small town libraries. Stuff about the Crusades and slash and burn agriculture that let Dean drift in and out of sleep, listening to the soft rise and fall of Sam’s voice, let him lean into the long-fingered touch ghosting through his hair without shame.
There was where Sam broke his arm. Where he was so brave and small and kept his tears from falling so that they shimmered on his eyelashes, glimmered in a film that magnified and reflected the strange green-brown color of his eyes. They hadn’t been there long enough for Sammy to make any friends (Dean had stopped bothering unless said "friends" would potentially suck his cock) so Dean signed Sam’s cast over and over, a little more every day in differently colored pens and markers and crayons, until it looked like overlapping layers of graffiti. Until the white plaster was covered in spidery sixteen year old boy handwriting; Dean’s name and Sam’s name and all the aliases they’d had that Dean could remember. Band logos and dirty limericks and filthy words strung together in sentences that made no sense and “Samuel Winchester wears girl’s underwear” in the spot just under Sam's elbow where no matter how he twisted, no matter how much gangly length he'd stretched into in the past months, Sammy couldn’t see it.
person
There were so many goddamn people in New York and none of them were the right one.
People and music and voices and things that made no sense, that wound in and around each other until it all became white noise. Sliced-up glimpses of a dozen lives' dramas unfolding on every block. Banging pipes and hissing steam and squawking car horns. Burbling languages he didn't understand and shoving bodies, swirling with fabric against his thieving fingertips.
pronoun
We. Us.
You. I. Him. Me.
Mine.
adverb
Dean missed Sam like the ocean would miss the heavens if it turned its face away, if the sky and sea no longer reflected off one another, bouncing blue and grey and pink and orange light-waves back and forth until no one could know where the colors came from to start with.
Dean reeked of tequila. The motel room floor smelled like a hundred thousand shoes. It smelled like dirt and come and piss. These ugly awful choked sounds forced themselves between his lips; Dean couldn't even understand how it could really be him making those noises.
He was scared. He was so fucking scared. He was alone. He'd never been alone.
Sam won't talk to him.
God, he wanted to call Sam, just hear his voice. Sam never said not to call him, right? He didn't say anything at all. Maybe he was waiting for Dean to make the first move. Maybe if Dean just called him…
Sam didn't pick up. Dean breathed into the voice mail for a full minute before throwing the cheap, white, plastic phone against the wall. He thought that probably hung it up.
Dean didn't like to modify his verbs. He does what he does and shuts up about it. If he had to explain it, describe it, qualify and quantify it, he's not doing it right.
Modifying a verb is like modifying a gun. It can make it better, deadlier. Or it can make it useless for what it was designed to do. You could quite easily fuck it all up, make it backfire in your face.
Lovingly. Protectively. Responsibly.
Softly. Gently.
Secretly.
Adverbs were in Dean's heart. He didn't let adverbs go very often. They lived inside him, mostly.
adjective
Adjectives were the hardest.
He was just Dean now. Not Sam's brother Dean. Not The Protector Dean. Not even Dean, The Hunter.
Dean wondered if he’d gone colorblind. He saw things and knew they were a color, but he couldn't quite make it out or give a name to it.
He got jerk chicken from the little storefront (the awning was painted in three fat stripes of what he thought was black, red and green but he couldn't be sure) next to the motel and he could taste all the colors of spice in it but he couldn't... he just didn't...
Dean felt hollowed out, a shell. He wondered if everything that modified him was erased along with the constant of Sam's scent in the air around him.
interjection
The old woman's skin was the thin yellow-brown of worn parchment.
She wore a blindingly lime green skirt suit with a matching veiled hat that extended far beyond the circle of space occupied by her shoulders and hips. Her arms and legs were tiny and thin, rickety like an old wooden chair. Dean couldn't imagine how someone could stand and walk and pick things up and put them back down with limbs that spindly.
He'd gotten into the same cab she did, from opposite sides. He just stared at her for a minute, wondering what to do, but she didn't even look at Dean. Just told the driver where she was going and the driver just went. She didn't seem to see him at all and Dean wondered if she was blind. Then she started to speak and he knew she was definitely full-tilt, batshit crazy.
The whole time they jerked and swerved through mid-day traffic she talked to herself. The cabbie ignored her in that outstanding New Yorker way of dismissing all the wild shit that went on around them because if they stopped for every little piece of insanity that crossed their path, they'd never do anything else.
Her huge plastic glasses magnified her eyes, the effect merging with her spindly limbs into something insectoid and almost holy.
She just kept talking, saying crazy, disjointed stuff. "How the hell did I get to this place? Did you bring me here? I was visiting my son Charles in Brooklyn. Not Mark. Mark is disappeared now, chil' done run off with that whore of a girl he made babies with. I told him… Are we in midtown? I haven't been in midtown in years now and... Which hospital is that? Where are you taking me? They put a paper bracelet on my arm the last time and I couldn't get it off for weeks after. One day it finally just came right off and almost went down my tub-drain, that's what; I'm never going back there again and I see…"
Dean shifted without really thinking about it. The leather of his jacket squeaked against the vinyl of the seat. The woman jumped and turned and actually saw him, looked him right in the face as if he'd just appeared. Jesus, she wasn't blind at all just…lost.
She said, staring straight into Dean's eyes, "Is there somebody here with me?"
He didn't want to scare her so he used his most soothing tone when he responded, "I'm just sitting in here next to you, ma'am."
"Who are you in here next to me, Pretty?"
Dean didn’t know the etiquette for this sort of situation and would probably ignore it if he did so he just stupidly replied, "I'm Dean."
She nodded like that was the right answer, put a withered brown hand over his and leaned into him -- he smelled old lady perfume and stale breath. "I'm just trying to find my way back to myself, Pretty. Just trying to find my way back. To myself, you understand?"
"Yes I do, ma’am,” Dean said, meeting her eyes seriously.
They rode to her destination with her thin, cool hand resting over his. He stepped slowly with her, holding her bird-boned arm gently, up the three flights of stairs to her small apartment. He fixed the busted lock on her front door, the drawer that "stuck funny" in the kitchen and tightened the leaky faucet that kept her awake at night. He left her with a warm cup of tea in her shaky hands. She brushed a light, dry kiss over his cheek and said, "You’re a good boy, Pretty. Run on home now."
"Yes, ma’am. I think I’ll do that."
He took another cab back to the motel to pick up his things. Rode the subway to Grand Central, took the Metro North back out to his car and then drove west with the windows rolled up to hold onto the scent of Sam, bled and sweated into the leather upholstery.
He drove 200 miles, breathing in the echoing scent of Sam, Sam, Sam until he felt him permeate deep into Dean’s every cell, into every microscopic corner of himself.
Title: Parts of Speech
Author: mona1347 (with generous help, as always, from poisontaster. The "adverb" section, in particular, would not exist without her talking to me late one night, literally in the dark, with me under the covers and Dean!muse crying in my lap.)
Word Count: 2,866
Rating: A for Angst. No sex (sorry), some language. Dean gen-fic basically (WTF is up with all the GEN I'm writing lately? Returning to my roots? Nostalgia?)
Warnings/Spoilers: None. Pre-series.
A/N: Uh, so upon completing her outstanding beta for this piece, poisontaster had this to say: "I don't even have the words to describe what a h0r you are, but I take deep satisfaction in that I won't be the only one broken by this. There will be tears before dawn, mark my words."
So, um, take that as a warning or something.
Summary: When Sammy left, Dean had to learn all the ways to speak again.
Wonder if
I will wander out
Test my tether to
See if I'm still free
From you
Steady as it comes
Right down
To you
I've said it all
So maybe we're a bliss
Of another kind
Lately I'm into circuitry
What it means to be
Made of you but not enough for you
~ 'Bliss,' Tori Amos
When Sammy left, Dean had to learn all the ways to speak again.
conjunction
Dean liked "and". It was a good, solid word. Sam and Dean. Some amalgam, like they had their own secret name that meant the two of them together...Samandean. Then other words came.
I can stay "or" I can be happy.
I love you, Dean, "but" I want to have a life.
Dean has loved exactly three people in his entire life.
One is dead, one left him and the last could barely stand to look at him because he was just a "Dean" now; the broken and chipped half of a formerly matched set. Dean could no longer do what he was born and bred to do; take care of Sammy. Not if Sam walked away. Not if Sam refused him, called him "Daddy's little fucking lieutenant" and blew away to a foreign land called "college" and "normal".
verb
Dean was comfortable with verbs. He remembered his 4th grade teacher calling them "doing words" and he'd thought, "Yeah. I like that." He generally didn't have the same use for words that Sam did, for talking and whining and reasoning and arguing, but those "doing words" he liked a lot.
Punch. Kick. Spin. Hit. Throw. Run. Fuck. Shoot. Stab. Kill. Hurt. Leave.
Well. Maybe not all of them.
Three days after Sam left, Dean went to New York City for two weeks. Dad, scowling and shut tight, sent him on a job in Connecticut, exactly in the opposite direction from Sam. As far across the continent as he could get. The old man was more perceptive than he liked to let on and he must have known the temptation would be too great to go to Palo Alto, drag Sam back or beg for peace or any number of things Dean might do if he'd gone anywhere farther west than the Rocky Mountains.
Those old New England biddies who'd been burned at the stake for being run of the mill village weirdos were pissy bitches, that's for sure. He had two new scars (careless mistakes) because of them and had to make an unscheduled stop late one night at James’ old farmhouse to re-up on ammo. James didn't ask any questions, didn't ask about Sam and didn't ask Dean to stay. Dean figured that his father called ahead and told him. James was always a classy bastard like that.
He drove south, figuring that in a state this small, he'd run into I-95 again eventually. He drove through several frighteningly picturesque towns, one after another quaintly beautiful screen of lies to cover up the darkness.
Normal wasn't real, why the fuck did Sam want something so not-real?
A little over an hour later, Dean merged onto the interstate and followed it back west through the metropolitan sprawl that ceased to be New England and started to be New York well before the state line. He shut off his cell phone, locked it in the glove box and parked his car somewhere in New Rochelle. He grabbed his duffel and got on a commuter train into the city because fucked if he was going to mess with his baby's brakes that way and put her in danger of all those lunatic cabbies.
Dean arrived at Grand Central and got straight on the subway. Rode it up the first line to arrive and back down again, shoulder pressed hard against the dirty-metal smell of the vibrating wall.
He did that for almost three days; bought hot dogs, chips and soda from vendors, nudged back against the press of bodies during rush hour, felt anonymous skin and sweat against his own, touching people who'd never remember his face if they'd ever really seen it at all. Dean rode the trains as long and as far as he could. He slept under a bench at night, his face rubbing against the nylon of his bag, head cradled against the wood and metal hardness of his weaponry.
Dean stayed in the dark, lived underground.
He stopped mainlining coffee. Stopped drinking it entirely, just cold-turkey, and leaned there each day, slumped in the dirty plastic-covered seat against the rumbling curve of the train car, and throbbed with the pain in his head, drowsed with sluggish nothingness coursing through his veins.
When yet another still-drunk party girl almost threw up in his lap early in the morning of the third day, Dean realized that stopping "doing words" just meant he had the time to think. Things kept happening, all around you, even if you were doing nothing at all. He thought, deep down, maybe that's why he came here.
There were verbs even underneath New York City.
Dean didn't see the famous skyline until midmorning on that third day. Usually he hated super-cities like this, hated how crowded and noisy they were. But this time, he found the constant activity comforting. White noise for his brain. He lost himself in the anonymity and grime.
He didn't need to lie in a place like this because no one ever asked him any questions. No one made mindless small talk or "made'ja feel welcome." No one remembered his face and no one ever asked his name. A million bodies moving through space and time, a million lives that had nothing to do with him at all.
Dean couldn't be all alone with himself. Couldn't deal just then with living as someone else in a small town. The crushing weight of "missing Sam" - the "verb-ness" of it -- meant he couldn’t be anything but Not Fine and he needed to be invisible for that.
preposition
Dean liked to sit somewhere -- there were a million somewheres in New York; benches, stoops, barstools, fire escapes, big rocks in a park, overturned milk crates and gutters -- and watch all the people around him. Outside of him. Near to him.
All these people who weren't Sam. Sam who belonged to him. Sam who was inside him, of him, for him.
Far from him.
noun
thing
Dean never had a lot of things. Not since all his clothes and toys and books and games and Theodore the Stuffed Bear burned up with his mother. Two nights later, Dean was wrapped around Baby Sammy in his crib. It was too small for both of them but Dean made it work by holding very still and curling carefully tight around Sam’s small squirmy body. He listened to his father not-sleeping -- sometimes muttering, sometimes making sounds Dean would think were crying noises except that his Daddy was a big grownup and Daddy’s don’t cry.
Dean counted each wispy hair on the back of Sammy’s mostly-bald head and thought, Please God. It’s okay if you keep Theodore and my checkers and my t-ball set and my football and all that stuff but please let me keep Sammy and Daddy and bring Mommy back. You can keep all that stuff if I can have Sammy and Daddy and Mommy, okay? Thank you. Love, Dean Winchester.”
That was before he learned that you can never get people back, you could only try to keep hold of them to begin with. That all he could do was hold on to Sam and Dad with all he had. That was before he realized that God had nothing to do with what happened to his Mother and all his unimportant things. That God probably had very little to do with much of what happened in the world if the evidence of what he’d seen by the time he started Kindergarten meant anything at all.
Dean owned what he could fit in his car and had a more compact version of those things - the ones that he considered essentials -- that fit into a long duffel bag. It was a long bag mostly because of the shotgun. He took this bag with him whenever he left his car for a period longer than a few hours.
If he ever lost any of it, which sometimes happened, he didn't feel anything but irritation at the trouble it would be to acquire a replacement.
place
Dean had been a lot of places and he had a story for each one.
Here was where he ate that undercooked barbeque that gave him food poisoning. Where fifteen year old Sam laid cool towels on his head and emptied and cleaned the motel garbage can over and over so Dean wouldn’t have to lurch to the bathroom each time he threw up.
Dean was so sick he couldn’t even move or think and Sam read him things out of his boring old books, stolen from a hundred different small town libraries. Stuff about the Crusades and slash and burn agriculture that let Dean drift in and out of sleep, listening to the soft rise and fall of Sam’s voice, let him lean into the long-fingered touch ghosting through his hair without shame.
There was where Sam broke his arm. Where he was so brave and small and kept his tears from falling so that they shimmered on his eyelashes, glimmered in a film that magnified and reflected the strange green-brown color of his eyes. They hadn’t been there long enough for Sammy to make any friends (Dean had stopped bothering unless said "friends" would potentially suck his cock) so Dean signed Sam’s cast over and over, a little more every day in differently colored pens and markers and crayons, until it looked like overlapping layers of graffiti. Until the white plaster was covered in spidery sixteen year old boy handwriting; Dean’s name and Sam’s name and all the aliases they’d had that Dean could remember. Band logos and dirty limericks and filthy words strung together in sentences that made no sense and “Samuel Winchester wears girl’s underwear” in the spot just under Sam's elbow where no matter how he twisted, no matter how much gangly length he'd stretched into in the past months, Sammy couldn’t see it.
person
There were so many goddamn people in New York and none of them were the right one.
People and music and voices and things that made no sense, that wound in and around each other until it all became white noise. Sliced-up glimpses of a dozen lives' dramas unfolding on every block. Banging pipes and hissing steam and squawking car horns. Burbling languages he didn't understand and shoving bodies, swirling with fabric against his thieving fingertips.
pronoun
We. Us.
You. I. Him. Me.
Mine.
adverb
Dean missed Sam like the ocean would miss the heavens if it turned its face away, if the sky and sea no longer reflected off one another, bouncing blue and grey and pink and orange light-waves back and forth until no one could know where the colors came from to start with.
Dean reeked of tequila. The motel room floor smelled like a hundred thousand shoes. It smelled like dirt and come and piss. These ugly awful choked sounds forced themselves between his lips; Dean couldn't even understand how it could really be him making those noises.
He was scared. He was so fucking scared. He was alone. He'd never been alone.
Sam won't talk to him.
God, he wanted to call Sam, just hear his voice. Sam never said not to call him, right? He didn't say anything at all. Maybe he was waiting for Dean to make the first move. Maybe if Dean just called him…
Sam didn't pick up. Dean breathed into the voice mail for a full minute before throwing the cheap, white, plastic phone against the wall. He thought that probably hung it up.
Dean didn't like to modify his verbs. He does what he does and shuts up about it. If he had to explain it, describe it, qualify and quantify it, he's not doing it right.
Modifying a verb is like modifying a gun. It can make it better, deadlier. Or it can make it useless for what it was designed to do. You could quite easily fuck it all up, make it backfire in your face.
Lovingly. Protectively. Responsibly.
Softly. Gently.
Secretly.
Adverbs were in Dean's heart. He didn't let adverbs go very often. They lived inside him, mostly.
adjective
Adjectives were the hardest.
He was just Dean now. Not Sam's brother Dean. Not The Protector Dean. Not even Dean, The Hunter.
Dean wondered if he’d gone colorblind. He saw things and knew they were a color, but he couldn't quite make it out or give a name to it.
He got jerk chicken from the little storefront (the awning was painted in three fat stripes of what he thought was black, red and green but he couldn't be sure) next to the motel and he could taste all the colors of spice in it but he couldn't... he just didn't...
Dean felt hollowed out, a shell. He wondered if everything that modified him was erased along with the constant of Sam's scent in the air around him.
interjection
The old woman's skin was the thin yellow-brown of worn parchment.
She wore a blindingly lime green skirt suit with a matching veiled hat that extended far beyond the circle of space occupied by her shoulders and hips. Her arms and legs were tiny and thin, rickety like an old wooden chair. Dean couldn't imagine how someone could stand and walk and pick things up and put them back down with limbs that spindly.
He'd gotten into the same cab she did, from opposite sides. He just stared at her for a minute, wondering what to do, but she didn't even look at Dean. Just told the driver where she was going and the driver just went. She didn't seem to see him at all and Dean wondered if she was blind. Then she started to speak and he knew she was definitely full-tilt, batshit crazy.
The whole time they jerked and swerved through mid-day traffic she talked to herself. The cabbie ignored her in that outstanding New Yorker way of dismissing all the wild shit that went on around them because if they stopped for every little piece of insanity that crossed their path, they'd never do anything else.
Her huge plastic glasses magnified her eyes, the effect merging with her spindly limbs into something insectoid and almost holy.
She just kept talking, saying crazy, disjointed stuff. "How the hell did I get to this place? Did you bring me here? I was visiting my son Charles in Brooklyn. Not Mark. Mark is disappeared now, chil' done run off with that whore of a girl he made babies with. I told him… Are we in midtown? I haven't been in midtown in years now and... Which hospital is that? Where are you taking me? They put a paper bracelet on my arm the last time and I couldn't get it off for weeks after. One day it finally just came right off and almost went down my tub-drain, that's what; I'm never going back there again and I see…"
Dean shifted without really thinking about it. The leather of his jacket squeaked against the vinyl of the seat. The woman jumped and turned and actually saw him, looked him right in the face as if he'd just appeared. Jesus, she wasn't blind at all just…lost.
She said, staring straight into Dean's eyes, "Is there somebody here with me?"
He didn't want to scare her so he used his most soothing tone when he responded, "I'm just sitting in here next to you, ma'am."
"Who are you in here next to me, Pretty?"
Dean didn’t know the etiquette for this sort of situation and would probably ignore it if he did so he just stupidly replied, "I'm Dean."
She nodded like that was the right answer, put a withered brown hand over his and leaned into him -- he smelled old lady perfume and stale breath. "I'm just trying to find my way back to myself, Pretty. Just trying to find my way back. To myself, you understand?"
"Yes I do, ma’am,” Dean said, meeting her eyes seriously.
They rode to her destination with her thin, cool hand resting over his. He stepped slowly with her, holding her bird-boned arm gently, up the three flights of stairs to her small apartment. He fixed the busted lock on her front door, the drawer that "stuck funny" in the kitchen and tightened the leaky faucet that kept her awake at night. He left her with a warm cup of tea in her shaky hands. She brushed a light, dry kiss over his cheek and said, "You’re a good boy, Pretty. Run on home now."
"Yes, ma’am. I think I’ll do that."
He took another cab back to the motel to pick up his things. Rode the subway to Grand Central, took the Metro North back out to his car and then drove west with the windows rolled up to hold onto the scent of Sam, bled and sweated into the leather upholstery.
He drove 200 miles, breathing in the echoing scent of Sam, Sam, Sam until he felt him permeate deep into Dean’s every cell, into every microscopic corner of himself.