Route 66 (Team Angst)
Title: Cardinal Directions
Author: caelumi
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Wordcount: 3,227
Notes: Very vague spoliers for the end of S2; love to chichiri_no_da for the beta and stroking.
The thing is, sometimes Dean hates Sam.
When he's laying in a motel bed in Chicago, sweat sticking him to the starchy sheets and the air conditioner in the window merely one rat's ass of an ugly decoration - all of it purchased by a credit card with someone else's name on it - Dean thinks this is not my life.
But it is. Because wherever he goes, there he is.
Sam's in sunny California. He's helping married couples get un-married, telling husbands that they don't need the Lexuses and the sixty inch televisions because they'll have joint custody of the kids. Sam goes home at night in a BMW to a house with five bedrooms and gourmet coffee in the pantry.
Dean goes home at night to a car that rust is starting to claim and walk-in kitchens where nine times out of ten the single-cup coffee makers are broken. He could have a house if he could hold down a job.
Pesky thing about a job is that they expect him to be there everyday.
Used to be that the apologetic owners, usually balding men, mostly overweight in the due-for-a-heart-attack-in-ten-years kinda way, would take him into the office with a you're a good man, Dean. You work hard when you're here but you're unreliable. I'm sorry.
Used to be that he missed work for legitimate reasons. Poltergeist. Black dog. Fucking leprechauns.
Now the garage owners, the grease-clad fifty-something men that his Dad would have grown in to if not for the fire - men one carjack away from a hernia and five steaks away from an angioplasty but happy to be there - they look at Dean and they see bloodshot eyes and can smell the sourness that lingers for a day or two after a binge. They see a liability.
Now they let him go without an apology.
The motel in Countyside, Illinois is called the Wishing Well. Dean does odd jobs for the owner, a small, cane-bound old woman who calls him sugar and actually has blue hair. It's shit that her Super is always M.I.A. for: leaky showerheads, running toilets, blown fuses, clogged gutters. She bakes him cookies and the chocolate chips burn the roof of his mouth and stain his fingers and taste like a childhood he didn’t have.
The sign below THE WISHING WELL says Welcome to Old Route 66 in a fit of epileptic wiring and Dean fixes that for her, too. That night he stands in the steady glow of the proclamation and works his way through a six pack. He's seen the map on the wall of the lobby, the one that shows this hotel on a snaking red line labeled Mother Road. It passes right through seven states before slipping into southern California. In the morning the road uncurls with the sunrise and Dean has warm cookies on the front seat as he pushes the Impala a little further.
His brother has two kids. Dean's seen them, seen pictures. The first is a boy that looks so much like Dad that Dean can hardly hold the pictures without having his hands shake. The second is a girl with dark curls and dimples that will knock boys dead some day.
Sam always looks so happy in the pictures he sends to Dean's PO boxes, his California return address printed in familiar handwriting in the left corner of the envelopes. A genuine smile and dimples of his own - on the beach, dunes in the background, everybody in jeans and white shirts, barefoot; or in the studio, black turtlenecks. Professional photos with rounded edges and names and childrens' ages penned in on the back. Sam's hair is shorter. It's strange to see his ears.
Sam looks happy and Dean's left to hate himself as he fists his dick like it's a crime. In a diner bathroom, eggs and bacon getting cold waiting at the table for him, and he's in a stall biting his lip to keep quiet as he jerks off to the sight of Sam's ears.
He's careful not to get semen on the picture. He tucks it back under the Impala's visor where the others are, the gathered proof of a life that Dean can't manage.
But he's happy for his brother.
The voicemails are months apart, and Dean never picks up the phone when it rings with the Pasadena, California area code that he can't quite bring himself to program into his cell as Sam.
Hey, Dean. Pause. I just wanted to see how you were doing, you know. Haven't heard from you in a while. Things are good here. Dogs bark in the background. Christina's business is really picking up. Maria just lost her first tooth and Brandon made MVP on his Little League - hey, Dean? Call me. A giggle and the sound of running feet. Sam's attention is something Dean can hear, slipping away. Please.
Sometimes Dean doesn't call back because it makes him angry, those sounds of another life in the background. The life that Sam thinks is so wonderful. The life that Sam picked over him. But most of the time Dean's just ashamed of what Sam will, in turn, hear behind his own voice. The highway. The rattle of a rented air conditioner. A jukebox playing something horribly cowboy-maudlin. Or the bitterness in between his I'm fine and How're you?
All the sounds that Sam was so happy to leave behind.
DALE'S OLE "66" Barber Shop is white floor white wall and Dean just closes his eyes while a man takes a straight razor to his neck. It's not trust. The whole place smells of sweat and the blue disinfectant that fills the jars lining the counter. The low murmur of a conversation between men slinks around the room and it's cheap camaraderie but Dean soaks it in.
Like their Dad before him, he's starting to go prematurely grey. Along his jaw Dean is beginning to cultivate the look of having stood too long near the salt breeze of an ocean, white overwhelming the dirty blonde and even reddish stubble. The short hair near his temples isn't quite there, but it's close.
Sam's pictures show hair as dark as ever. The only wear in those brown strands is from the sun, and maybe a little honest salt water breeze. Dean knows that his brother still keeps his face smooth by choice. He sits there in Joplin, Missouri, listening to men that have bonded over baseball statistics, and wonders if Sam's wife knows that her husband's stubble is too soft to even burn skin.
Of course she does. But Dean does, too.
He drives straight through Kansas. There's thirteen miles of two lane road and all Dean wants to do is get it in his rearview. Here the empty passenger seat feels irredeemable. Here he feels like a victim of his upbringing and as much as Dean easily piles blame at Sam's feet, he can't burden his Dad's memory with the same.
It's so easy to blame Sam. It's been years, but Dean can still recite word for word the arguments, old and frayed with wear.
Don't you want something more? Don't you want a better life than this?
No.
And, yes.
So in Dean's version of the story it is always Sam walking away. It's a trend, Sammy turning to California when his family ceases being good enough. When Dad, and then Dean, become brick walls between him and the world he knows is on the other side. He lifts his nose and smells what he calls life. It's out there - growing, changing, shifting, and Dean isn't. He's that brick wall and brick walls are only good for standing still.
Sam walks away. Heads west. All his life, Dean thinks, they've been traveling west. Sam goes first and then he follows.
Oklahoma is the biggest stretch of backwater nothing that Dean has ever seen. In the middle of the summer it's dead brown, flat in every direction. Even the clouds roll flat, like they don't want to show up the dirt. Nothing sticks out. When he was fifteen Sam taught him about Darwinism and Dean thinks it's too bad that natural selection doesn't work with states.
Proof of that is the Redneck Junk Store. 120 feet of pure redneck junk! Dean has to go in, and ends up walking 120 feet in a minute and a half and then filling out an Application for Employment using the name Lynard Skynard. They call him the next day and ask him if he wants the job. Pays $5.15 an hour.
Dean asks, joking, if it comes with an employee health plan.
They ask him if he's healthy.
He says, sure.
They say, then why do you need a health plan?
Dean wonders the same thing. That kind of stability is for guys like Sam, white collar and baby seats. Guys like Sam. He tells them he'll take the job, but points the Impala toward Texas. Her timing belt is starting to tick softly.
There are still girls. Blondes and redheads; he's sworn off brunettes. Dean might be going grey but his charm's intact. He fucks them in motel beds and bar bathrooms, clothes on so that he can leave when he's done, before he starts thinking that this isn't what he wants.
The first time he and Sam have sex it's awful. It's teeth and fumbling hands and Dean comes way too soon to even be able to play it off. Sam laughs at him and it's possible that Dean's never heard anything as wonderful, because he has three hundred and sixteen days left until the terms on his life come due and for forty-nine days he hasn't seen even a flicker of a smile on his brother's face.
He licks Sam's dimples and starts over.
It takes two years for Sam to want something more. We could get a house.
They're brothers, not boyfriends. This is not a suburban fairytale. Sam walks out and slams the door behind him so hard that the frame rattles and Dean swears he can hear the Texan stucco cracking. Everything's stucco here - the diners, gas stations, motels. The wall scrapes his back bloody when Sam comes back and fucks him against it. He doesn't apologize, and neither does Dean.
In Tucumcari, New Mexico, Dean calls Sam.
Dean?
It sounds so much like disbelief that it hurts.
Hey, Sammy. Guess where I am? It's too late and he knows from Sam's voice that his brother was asleep. He's still a hour ahead of California but it's too late here, too. It smacks of jealousy that he says, Did I wake Christina? There's a long pause and a quiet shuffling before his brother speaks up again.
Where are you? He says he's at the Blue Swallow Motel, where the Route 66 sign is painted right onto the cream cement side of the building, bigger than half his body. Sam's quiet because he knows what Dean's doing. Even half-asleep he hasn't forgotten the way his brother works. The Blue Swallow saw Day 366; Sam neatly sidesteps the trip down memory lane. You okay, Dean?
It's so easy for Sam to say you okay? and really ask are you hurt? drunk? just being an asshole?
It's not so easy for Dean to say yes and not mean yes, yes, yes. He tells Sam it's good to hear his voice and his brother sighs instead of answering, because Dean's slurring his words.
Arizona brings desert and sunrises that make Dean regret drinking. The leather interior of the Impala, already cracked in places, seems to slowly split further as it bakes. The car idles low as he pulls it into the ROCK SHOP and cement dinosaurs watch the spot-rusted muscle car with grinning teeth. Dean grins back.
He had been a kid here. He and Sammy and Dad. Dad lets his boys run and yell and is as unaffected by their energy - built up from hours cramped in the car - as he is by the heat. Their father sits in the shade of a dinosaur and eats a sandwich from a deli across the road as Dean tries to talk Sammy into climbing the T-Rex.
Everything from that memory is lost now, even the deli, but the dinosaurs are still standing. Still grinning.
He pays cash for a tiny brown geode that the tag labels citrine. Sam used to love these. The fifty is sweaty and thin from being in his wallet and the girl behind the counter smiles when he tells her to keep the change. She's tan from the sun in the same way he is - burn turned brown. Her freckles aren't as dark as his but Dean figures that's a matter of age. She is too young for him but it's the heat that makes him walk away without trying.
The sun off the citrine rock flecks the interior of the car in gold stars. When Dean crosses into California and can smell the Pacific he feels ashamed enough to toss it into the backseat.
The miles in the Golden State seem longer than any of the ones before. At a gas station in Pasadena Dean shoulders his way into a crippled phone booth and drags a finger through the White Pages, black print smearing onto his skin. He'd thrown out the envelopes with his brother's return address for the same reason he hasn't programmed Sam's California phone number into his phone. There are five Winchesters in Pasadena, California. Dean tears out the page.
Dean expects a mansion - something trendy with a multi-million dollar price tag still hanging from the front knob - so he's surprised to see a simple but elegant Spanish two story in an neighborhood full of trees. There's evidence of a family here: colorful chalk drawings on the sidewalk, faded from too long without rain, and a soccer net pushed to the side of the yard.
Uncle Dean is something that he'll never get used to. Maria, he's pretty sure, has a six year-old's crush on him. She invites him to a tea-party with enough stuffed animals that he feels like a stranger and threatens to bring him to school as her show-and-tell.
Brandon fires one enthusiastic car question after another whenever they're in the same room. He doesn't asks him to do fatherly things - toss a ball, help with homework - but instead seems to look up to Dean as a fount of information about the wide outside world. Dean thinks that someday Sam will get to find out how Dad felt when he left for Stanford.
Christina, tall, dark Christina, as Spanish as their home, has a cooler regard of him at first. So you're between jobs? But she ends up doting on him, baking cookies and asking for stories from when Sam was a child. She laughs easily, brightly, and often.
After the kids are put to bed, after Christina is asleep, after all the lights but a few are turned off, Dean and Sam sit on the back porch together. Their beers stand, sweating. The neighborhood is quiet. They are quiet.
Dean's hands dent the cushions of the padded, wicker couch to either side of Sam's broad shoulders. His brother looks good. Tanned, relaxed, happy, he looks like he's found where he belongs. The creases in his forehead are a little deeper, the lines around his eyes a little more visible, but older becomes Sam.
When Dean leans in to kiss his brother, Sam turns his head to the side.
Dean takes his ear instead - the ear he jerked off to once upon a time in a diner in Springfield. He tongues the soft, downy lobe and hears Sam's breath hiss softly inward though lips. Teeth scrape and a knee is pressed between Sam's legs and his brother responds with a jerk; hands jump to fist in Dean's shirt, the cotton pulling tight over his back as their mouths meet hard enough to hurt.
Sam tastes like beer and the spice from dinner. He tastes like life. He tastes like another damn chance.
No clothes are shed. Dean pushes his hand down the front of Sam's pants and works soft flesh hard. Blunt fingernails scrape over his stomach and back and goosebumps cascade down Dean's arms despite the sticky warmth of the night. Everything here is different but Sam is still nothing but Sam - large hands always needlessly gentle, mouth sloppy eager, smooth face pinkening from beard-burn. Dean presses himself down against his brother's thigh with a silent groan.
One of the dogs - Sam has two huskies, Duke and Lady - starts barking. The sound carries onto the porch and Sam's mouth parts from Dean's with a slick gasp. Hands that had pulled push and his brother is peeling away from him, standing on legs that Dean can see shaking, and walking away.
On the porch, Dean waits. The dog falls quiet a moment after the screen door bangs softly shut behind Sam.
He waits.
After too long Dean follows into the darkened house; the light over the stove glows a soft yellow. The dogs are asleep, Lady on the couch and Duke under the coffee table. Whatever he had tasted on Sam's mouth is gone, forgotten. Now it's only regret, disappointment, anger, those more familiar flavors.
He doesn't even bother to lock the bathroom door. Sitting on the closed toliet, flanked by the soft yellow handtowels that match the rug and the smell of lavender drifting from the handsoap, Dean twists his hand around his dick until he comes, fast and unsatisfied.
The tears that follow surprise him.
When Dean heads upstairs his hands and face are washed, but it doesn't matter. The hallway is dark, the kids' doors closed. As he passes the master bedroom he can hear the unmistakable sounds of sex.
The next morning Maria clings to him, little arms warm and tight around his neck. She pushes pleading words against his cheek, no and stay and please but breaks into laughter when he tickles her. She is shifted, Dean's chest to Christina's hip, and Sam's wife lays a gentle hand on the side of his neck when she kisses the corner of his mouth.
Come back soon. Like he's family.
Brandon doesn't hug him, but grins when Dean holds out his hand for a high-five.
Dean offers his brother a handshake. Sam hugs him, tight and hard and brief and Dean is winded. He tries to smile at his brother without looking betrayed. It's harder than he expected it to be.
Every mile east feels like a mile in the wrong direction.
In Atlantic, North Carolina, the motels are the same as anywhere else in the United States. The sheets are too stiff, the air conditioners are broken, and he has to buy coffee at the place down the road.
The pictures still come to one PO Box or another, round-edged and perfect. The Winchesters - Sam, Christina, Brandon, 9, and, Maria, 7 in Christina's handwriting.
The Impala's odometer is stationary now, 999,999. Dean sits on the cracked leather and doesn't need to look at the map in the empty passanger seat as he drives, the edges chittering softly in the breeze from the open window. It shows the 2,385 miles of Route 70 as a bright blue line running from east to west.
Author: caelumi
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Wordcount: 3,227
Notes: Very vague spoliers for the end of S2; love to chichiri_no_da for the beta and stroking.
The thing is, sometimes Dean hates Sam.
When he's laying in a motel bed in Chicago, sweat sticking him to the starchy sheets and the air conditioner in the window merely one rat's ass of an ugly decoration - all of it purchased by a credit card with someone else's name on it - Dean thinks this is not my life.
But it is. Because wherever he goes, there he is.
Sam's in sunny California. He's helping married couples get un-married, telling husbands that they don't need the Lexuses and the sixty inch televisions because they'll have joint custody of the kids. Sam goes home at night in a BMW to a house with five bedrooms and gourmet coffee in the pantry.
Dean goes home at night to a car that rust is starting to claim and walk-in kitchens where nine times out of ten the single-cup coffee makers are broken. He could have a house if he could hold down a job.
Pesky thing about a job is that they expect him to be there everyday.
Used to be that the apologetic owners, usually balding men, mostly overweight in the due-for-a-heart-attack-in-ten-years kinda way, would take him into the office with a you're a good man, Dean. You work hard when you're here but you're unreliable. I'm sorry.
Used to be that he missed work for legitimate reasons. Poltergeist. Black dog. Fucking leprechauns.
Now the garage owners, the grease-clad fifty-something men that his Dad would have grown in to if not for the fire - men one carjack away from a hernia and five steaks away from an angioplasty but happy to be there - they look at Dean and they see bloodshot eyes and can smell the sourness that lingers for a day or two after a binge. They see a liability.
Now they let him go without an apology.
The motel in Countyside, Illinois is called the Wishing Well. Dean does odd jobs for the owner, a small, cane-bound old woman who calls him sugar and actually has blue hair. It's shit that her Super is always M.I.A. for: leaky showerheads, running toilets, blown fuses, clogged gutters. She bakes him cookies and the chocolate chips burn the roof of his mouth and stain his fingers and taste like a childhood he didn’t have.
The sign below THE WISHING WELL says Welcome to Old Route 66 in a fit of epileptic wiring and Dean fixes that for her, too. That night he stands in the steady glow of the proclamation and works his way through a six pack. He's seen the map on the wall of the lobby, the one that shows this hotel on a snaking red line labeled Mother Road. It passes right through seven states before slipping into southern California. In the morning the road uncurls with the sunrise and Dean has warm cookies on the front seat as he pushes the Impala a little further.
His brother has two kids. Dean's seen them, seen pictures. The first is a boy that looks so much like Dad that Dean can hardly hold the pictures without having his hands shake. The second is a girl with dark curls and dimples that will knock boys dead some day.
Sam always looks so happy in the pictures he sends to Dean's PO boxes, his California return address printed in familiar handwriting in the left corner of the envelopes. A genuine smile and dimples of his own - on the beach, dunes in the background, everybody in jeans and white shirts, barefoot; or in the studio, black turtlenecks. Professional photos with rounded edges and names and childrens' ages penned in on the back. Sam's hair is shorter. It's strange to see his ears.
Sam looks happy and Dean's left to hate himself as he fists his dick like it's a crime. In a diner bathroom, eggs and bacon getting cold waiting at the table for him, and he's in a stall biting his lip to keep quiet as he jerks off to the sight of Sam's ears.
He's careful not to get semen on the picture. He tucks it back under the Impala's visor where the others are, the gathered proof of a life that Dean can't manage.
But he's happy for his brother.
The voicemails are months apart, and Dean never picks up the phone when it rings with the Pasadena, California area code that he can't quite bring himself to program into his cell as Sam.
Hey, Dean. Pause. I just wanted to see how you were doing, you know. Haven't heard from you in a while. Things are good here. Dogs bark in the background. Christina's business is really picking up. Maria just lost her first tooth and Brandon made MVP on his Little League - hey, Dean? Call me. A giggle and the sound of running feet. Sam's attention is something Dean can hear, slipping away. Please.
Sometimes Dean doesn't call back because it makes him angry, those sounds of another life in the background. The life that Sam thinks is so wonderful. The life that Sam picked over him. But most of the time Dean's just ashamed of what Sam will, in turn, hear behind his own voice. The highway. The rattle of a rented air conditioner. A jukebox playing something horribly cowboy-maudlin. Or the bitterness in between his I'm fine and How're you?
All the sounds that Sam was so happy to leave behind.
DALE'S OLE "66" Barber Shop is white floor white wall and Dean just closes his eyes while a man takes a straight razor to his neck. It's not trust. The whole place smells of sweat and the blue disinfectant that fills the jars lining the counter. The low murmur of a conversation between men slinks around the room and it's cheap camaraderie but Dean soaks it in.
Like their Dad before him, he's starting to go prematurely grey. Along his jaw Dean is beginning to cultivate the look of having stood too long near the salt breeze of an ocean, white overwhelming the dirty blonde and even reddish stubble. The short hair near his temples isn't quite there, but it's close.
Sam's pictures show hair as dark as ever. The only wear in those brown strands is from the sun, and maybe a little honest salt water breeze. Dean knows that his brother still keeps his face smooth by choice. He sits there in Joplin, Missouri, listening to men that have bonded over baseball statistics, and wonders if Sam's wife knows that her husband's stubble is too soft to even burn skin.
Of course she does. But Dean does, too.
He drives straight through Kansas. There's thirteen miles of two lane road and all Dean wants to do is get it in his rearview. Here the empty passenger seat feels irredeemable. Here he feels like a victim of his upbringing and as much as Dean easily piles blame at Sam's feet, he can't burden his Dad's memory with the same.
It's so easy to blame Sam. It's been years, but Dean can still recite word for word the arguments, old and frayed with wear.
Don't you want something more? Don't you want a better life than this?
No.
And, yes.
So in Dean's version of the story it is always Sam walking away. It's a trend, Sammy turning to California when his family ceases being good enough. When Dad, and then Dean, become brick walls between him and the world he knows is on the other side. He lifts his nose and smells what he calls life. It's out there - growing, changing, shifting, and Dean isn't. He's that brick wall and brick walls are only good for standing still.
Sam walks away. Heads west. All his life, Dean thinks, they've been traveling west. Sam goes first and then he follows.
Oklahoma is the biggest stretch of backwater nothing that Dean has ever seen. In the middle of the summer it's dead brown, flat in every direction. Even the clouds roll flat, like they don't want to show up the dirt. Nothing sticks out. When he was fifteen Sam taught him about Darwinism and Dean thinks it's too bad that natural selection doesn't work with states.
Proof of that is the Redneck Junk Store. 120 feet of pure redneck junk! Dean has to go in, and ends up walking 120 feet in a minute and a half and then filling out an Application for Employment using the name Lynard Skynard. They call him the next day and ask him if he wants the job. Pays $5.15 an hour.
Dean asks, joking, if it comes with an employee health plan.
They ask him if he's healthy.
He says, sure.
They say, then why do you need a health plan?
Dean wonders the same thing. That kind of stability is for guys like Sam, white collar and baby seats. Guys like Sam. He tells them he'll take the job, but points the Impala toward Texas. Her timing belt is starting to tick softly.
There are still girls. Blondes and redheads; he's sworn off brunettes. Dean might be going grey but his charm's intact. He fucks them in motel beds and bar bathrooms, clothes on so that he can leave when he's done, before he starts thinking that this isn't what he wants.
The first time he and Sam have sex it's awful. It's teeth and fumbling hands and Dean comes way too soon to even be able to play it off. Sam laughs at him and it's possible that Dean's never heard anything as wonderful, because he has three hundred and sixteen days left until the terms on his life come due and for forty-nine days he hasn't seen even a flicker of a smile on his brother's face.
He licks Sam's dimples and starts over.
It takes two years for Sam to want something more. We could get a house.
They're brothers, not boyfriends. This is not a suburban fairytale. Sam walks out and slams the door behind him so hard that the frame rattles and Dean swears he can hear the Texan stucco cracking. Everything's stucco here - the diners, gas stations, motels. The wall scrapes his back bloody when Sam comes back and fucks him against it. He doesn't apologize, and neither does Dean.
In Tucumcari, New Mexico, Dean calls Sam.
Dean?
It sounds so much like disbelief that it hurts.
Hey, Sammy. Guess where I am? It's too late and he knows from Sam's voice that his brother was asleep. He's still a hour ahead of California but it's too late here, too. It smacks of jealousy that he says, Did I wake Christina? There's a long pause and a quiet shuffling before his brother speaks up again.
Where are you? He says he's at the Blue Swallow Motel, where the Route 66 sign is painted right onto the cream cement side of the building, bigger than half his body. Sam's quiet because he knows what Dean's doing. Even half-asleep he hasn't forgotten the way his brother works. The Blue Swallow saw Day 366; Sam neatly sidesteps the trip down memory lane. You okay, Dean?
It's so easy for Sam to say you okay? and really ask are you hurt? drunk? just being an asshole?
It's not so easy for Dean to say yes and not mean yes, yes, yes. He tells Sam it's good to hear his voice and his brother sighs instead of answering, because Dean's slurring his words.
Arizona brings desert and sunrises that make Dean regret drinking. The leather interior of the Impala, already cracked in places, seems to slowly split further as it bakes. The car idles low as he pulls it into the ROCK SHOP and cement dinosaurs watch the spot-rusted muscle car with grinning teeth. Dean grins back.
He had been a kid here. He and Sammy and Dad. Dad lets his boys run and yell and is as unaffected by their energy - built up from hours cramped in the car - as he is by the heat. Their father sits in the shade of a dinosaur and eats a sandwich from a deli across the road as Dean tries to talk Sammy into climbing the T-Rex.
Everything from that memory is lost now, even the deli, but the dinosaurs are still standing. Still grinning.
He pays cash for a tiny brown geode that the tag labels citrine. Sam used to love these. The fifty is sweaty and thin from being in his wallet and the girl behind the counter smiles when he tells her to keep the change. She's tan from the sun in the same way he is - burn turned brown. Her freckles aren't as dark as his but Dean figures that's a matter of age. She is too young for him but it's the heat that makes him walk away without trying.
The sun off the citrine rock flecks the interior of the car in gold stars. When Dean crosses into California and can smell the Pacific he feels ashamed enough to toss it into the backseat.
The miles in the Golden State seem longer than any of the ones before. At a gas station in Pasadena Dean shoulders his way into a crippled phone booth and drags a finger through the White Pages, black print smearing onto his skin. He'd thrown out the envelopes with his brother's return address for the same reason he hasn't programmed Sam's California phone number into his phone. There are five Winchesters in Pasadena, California. Dean tears out the page.
Dean expects a mansion - something trendy with a multi-million dollar price tag still hanging from the front knob - so he's surprised to see a simple but elegant Spanish two story in an neighborhood full of trees. There's evidence of a family here: colorful chalk drawings on the sidewalk, faded from too long without rain, and a soccer net pushed to the side of the yard.
Uncle Dean is something that he'll never get used to. Maria, he's pretty sure, has a six year-old's crush on him. She invites him to a tea-party with enough stuffed animals that he feels like a stranger and threatens to bring him to school as her show-and-tell.
Brandon fires one enthusiastic car question after another whenever they're in the same room. He doesn't asks him to do fatherly things - toss a ball, help with homework - but instead seems to look up to Dean as a fount of information about the wide outside world. Dean thinks that someday Sam will get to find out how Dad felt when he left for Stanford.
Christina, tall, dark Christina, as Spanish as their home, has a cooler regard of him at first. So you're between jobs? But she ends up doting on him, baking cookies and asking for stories from when Sam was a child. She laughs easily, brightly, and often.
After the kids are put to bed, after Christina is asleep, after all the lights but a few are turned off, Dean and Sam sit on the back porch together. Their beers stand, sweating. The neighborhood is quiet. They are quiet.
Dean's hands dent the cushions of the padded, wicker couch to either side of Sam's broad shoulders. His brother looks good. Tanned, relaxed, happy, he looks like he's found where he belongs. The creases in his forehead are a little deeper, the lines around his eyes a little more visible, but older becomes Sam.
When Dean leans in to kiss his brother, Sam turns his head to the side.
Dean takes his ear instead - the ear he jerked off to once upon a time in a diner in Springfield. He tongues the soft, downy lobe and hears Sam's breath hiss softly inward though lips. Teeth scrape and a knee is pressed between Sam's legs and his brother responds with a jerk; hands jump to fist in Dean's shirt, the cotton pulling tight over his back as their mouths meet hard enough to hurt.
Sam tastes like beer and the spice from dinner. He tastes like life. He tastes like another damn chance.
No clothes are shed. Dean pushes his hand down the front of Sam's pants and works soft flesh hard. Blunt fingernails scrape over his stomach and back and goosebumps cascade down Dean's arms despite the sticky warmth of the night. Everything here is different but Sam is still nothing but Sam - large hands always needlessly gentle, mouth sloppy eager, smooth face pinkening from beard-burn. Dean presses himself down against his brother's thigh with a silent groan.
One of the dogs - Sam has two huskies, Duke and Lady - starts barking. The sound carries onto the porch and Sam's mouth parts from Dean's with a slick gasp. Hands that had pulled push and his brother is peeling away from him, standing on legs that Dean can see shaking, and walking away.
On the porch, Dean waits. The dog falls quiet a moment after the screen door bangs softly shut behind Sam.
He waits.
After too long Dean follows into the darkened house; the light over the stove glows a soft yellow. The dogs are asleep, Lady on the couch and Duke under the coffee table. Whatever he had tasted on Sam's mouth is gone, forgotten. Now it's only regret, disappointment, anger, those more familiar flavors.
He doesn't even bother to lock the bathroom door. Sitting on the closed toliet, flanked by the soft yellow handtowels that match the rug and the smell of lavender drifting from the handsoap, Dean twists his hand around his dick until he comes, fast and unsatisfied.
The tears that follow surprise him.
When Dean heads upstairs his hands and face are washed, but it doesn't matter. The hallway is dark, the kids' doors closed. As he passes the master bedroom he can hear the unmistakable sounds of sex.
The next morning Maria clings to him, little arms warm and tight around his neck. She pushes pleading words against his cheek, no and stay and please but breaks into laughter when he tickles her. She is shifted, Dean's chest to Christina's hip, and Sam's wife lays a gentle hand on the side of his neck when she kisses the corner of his mouth.
Come back soon. Like he's family.
Brandon doesn't hug him, but grins when Dean holds out his hand for a high-five.
Dean offers his brother a handshake. Sam hugs him, tight and hard and brief and Dean is winded. He tries to smile at his brother without looking betrayed. It's harder than he expected it to be.
Every mile east feels like a mile in the wrong direction.
In Atlantic, North Carolina, the motels are the same as anywhere else in the United States. The sheets are too stiff, the air conditioners are broken, and he has to buy coffee at the place down the road.
The pictures still come to one PO Box or another, round-edged and perfect. The Winchesters - Sam, Christina, Brandon, 9, and, Maria, 7 in Christina's handwriting.
The Impala's odometer is stationary now, 999,999. Dean sits on the cracked leather and doesn't need to look at the map in the empty passanger seat as he drives, the edges chittering softly in the breeze from the open window. It shows the 2,385 miles of Route 70 as a bright blue line running from east to west.