fic: it's only easy if you know the answer
BECAUSE I CAN.
It's Only Easy if You Know the Answer
PG-13, 900 words, 4x17 AU
You were born with half a heart.
After you walk out, you run out, because you just committed a random act of violence against company property and all you could think was that you wished it were against somebody’s face. Before today your record was clean, you were a good kid growing up, but you figure if you’re going for a life of crime you might as well embrace it.
You always knew how to hotwire a car, you realise. You’d just forgotten it.
First instinct takes you to Dean’s Prius, all the way up ‘til your hand is on the door and then there is the sensation of something crawling down your spine. The car in your dreams is black and sleek and uncomfortably familiar, and you spend five minutes jogging around the block looking for it, but it’s nowhere to be seen.
The police are almost certainly looking for you.
You may have dreamt that part.
But then again, your dreams keep coming true.
One day later and seven hundred miles away, you get a room in Kansas City and realise you don’t have Dean Smith’s number. You never even thought to ask. You felt like you already had it.
He went to Stanford, you remember. You grew up in Palo Alto, still have family down there. Maybe you and him were connected from the start.
The start of what? you wonder.
You call your mom, and the number’s not recognised. Dad, the number’s not recognised. Aunt Pamela, not recognised, but now you can remember the feel of her blood slipping between your fingers and you’re not surprised at all.
There is something wrong inside of you.
Sam Wesson was a quiet, unambitious guy who wanted nothing more from life than an okay job and an okay home and an okay sports team to support sometimes. He only moved to Ohio after his fiancée walked out on him, saying it’s like you’re not even a real person.
Sam Wesson was never angry about anything in his life, and you are nothing but.
You’d say you’re being driven slowly out of your mind, only you’re not sure it was ever your mind to begin with.
The first time you meet a demon (and it’s not really the first at all), you raise a hand without knowing what you’re doing and then you watch it burn.
“Where’s your brother?” the demon laughs as it dies.
Sam Wesson was an only child.
You have to salt and burn and bury the host body afterwards, and someone used to help you do this. Someone used to keep you from ever killing anyone at all.
Sandover Bridge and Iron company is very sorry that it cannot help with your enquiries, but nobody called Dean Smith ever worked there a couple of months ago.
Dean Smith never worked anywhere.
After you take out a nest of vampires in Austin feeling exactly like you’ve done this hunt before, you go to the first bar you find and get as drunk as you can. You’re a couple drinks beyond that, staring at a crack in the restroom mirror, when a guy in a trenchcoat steps into the reflection.
“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I,” you say. It’s not really a question at all.
“Yes,” he says, and then, “I’m sorry, Sam. I did not know what was planned.”
“Yeah, me neither,” you tell the guy’s mirror image.
“It was beyond my control,” he says- regretful, childlike eyes- “and it is beyond my power to change it back.”
You have no idea what he’s talking about, but you know you should and that’s enough to break the drunken, schizophrenic camel’s back. He’s already disappeared when you spin around, fist raised. If he were ever there at all.
You slam your fist into the mirror instead, and it shatters.
A spider-web of faces stare back out at you, none of them yours.
You pass out in the backseat of your stolen car and dream of Dean Smith screaming.
It’s a week before you sleep again, after that.
A month later, it is May and you see him. It’s the first time and the last time and like every goddamn time.
Everywhere you go, you wind up back in Kansas, and you’re walking back to your motel to mull over the latest case when the car of your dreams slides by like an oil slick, black and shining.
The driver is Dean, but not Dean Smith, and he’s wearing leather and his face is pale and you know, intimately, exactly how alone he feels. His eyes are on the road and he doesn’t look up.
Your voice has gone.
“Come back,” you whisper, once you remember how to move again and Dean’s a mile away already.
You run after him, but not fast enough.
A girl with white eyes is following you.
There is this hole inside of you and it just keeps getting deeper, like your soul is one big, slow-mo implosion. You are the gravitational collapse of a dying star. There is an end to this tunnel and maybe you’ll come out of it a supernova and maybe you’ll come out of it a black hole.
This is what your life has been leading up to.
Maybe you won’t come out at all.
Here is a riddle.
The answer is: one.
*
It's Only Easy if You Know the Answer
PG-13, 900 words, 4x17 AU
- Snow Patrol - Tiny Little Fractures
You were born with half a heart.
After you walk out, you run out, because you just committed a random act of violence against company property and all you could think was that you wished it were against somebody’s face. Before today your record was clean, you were a good kid growing up, but you figure if you’re going for a life of crime you might as well embrace it.
You always knew how to hotwire a car, you realise. You’d just forgotten it.
First instinct takes you to Dean’s Prius, all the way up ‘til your hand is on the door and then there is the sensation of something crawling down your spine. The car in your dreams is black and sleek and uncomfortably familiar, and you spend five minutes jogging around the block looking for it, but it’s nowhere to be seen.
The police are almost certainly looking for you.
You may have dreamt that part.
But then again, your dreams keep coming true.
One day later and seven hundred miles away, you get a room in Kansas City and realise you don’t have Dean Smith’s number. You never even thought to ask. You felt like you already had it.
He went to Stanford, you remember. You grew up in Palo Alto, still have family down there. Maybe you and him were connected from the start.
The start of what? you wonder.
You call your mom, and the number’s not recognised. Dad, the number’s not recognised. Aunt Pamela, not recognised, but now you can remember the feel of her blood slipping between your fingers and you’re not surprised at all.
There is something wrong inside of you.
Sam Wesson was a quiet, unambitious guy who wanted nothing more from life than an okay job and an okay home and an okay sports team to support sometimes. He only moved to Ohio after his fiancée walked out on him, saying it’s like you’re not even a real person.
Sam Wesson was never angry about anything in his life, and you are nothing but.
You’d say you’re being driven slowly out of your mind, only you’re not sure it was ever your mind to begin with.
The first time you meet a demon (and it’s not really the first at all), you raise a hand without knowing what you’re doing and then you watch it burn.
“Where’s your brother?” the demon laughs as it dies.
Sam Wesson was an only child.
You have to salt and burn and bury the host body afterwards, and someone used to help you do this. Someone used to keep you from ever killing anyone at all.
Sandover Bridge and Iron company is very sorry that it cannot help with your enquiries, but nobody called Dean Smith ever worked there a couple of months ago.
Dean Smith never worked anywhere.
After you take out a nest of vampires in Austin feeling exactly like you’ve done this hunt before, you go to the first bar you find and get as drunk as you can. You’re a couple drinks beyond that, staring at a crack in the restroom mirror, when a guy in a trenchcoat steps into the reflection.
“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I,” you say. It’s not really a question at all.
“Yes,” he says, and then, “I’m sorry, Sam. I did not know what was planned.”
“Yeah, me neither,” you tell the guy’s mirror image.
“It was beyond my control,” he says- regretful, childlike eyes- “and it is beyond my power to change it back.”
You have no idea what he’s talking about, but you know you should and that’s enough to break the drunken, schizophrenic camel’s back. He’s already disappeared when you spin around, fist raised. If he were ever there at all.
You slam your fist into the mirror instead, and it shatters.
A spider-web of faces stare back out at you, none of them yours.
You pass out in the backseat of your stolen car and dream of Dean Smith screaming.
It’s a week before you sleep again, after that.
A month later, it is May and you see him. It’s the first time and the last time and like every goddamn time.
Everywhere you go, you wind up back in Kansas, and you’re walking back to your motel to mull over the latest case when the car of your dreams slides by like an oil slick, black and shining.
The driver is Dean, but not Dean Smith, and he’s wearing leather and his face is pale and you know, intimately, exactly how alone he feels. His eyes are on the road and he doesn’t look up.
Your voice has gone.
“Come back,” you whisper, once you remember how to move again and Dean’s a mile away already.
You run after him, but not fast enough.
A girl with white eyes is following you.
There is this hole inside of you and it just keeps getting deeper, like your soul is one big, slow-mo implosion. You are the gravitational collapse of a dying star. There is an end to this tunnel and maybe you’ll come out of it a supernova and maybe you’ll come out of it a black hole.
This is what your life has been leading up to.
Maybe you won’t come out at all.
Here is a riddle.
The answer is: one.
*