does your daddy have a shotgun?
from this edge of the world
The hills rise up behind them: green, soft, wet even at half past noon, like he could walk up them barefoot and by the time he reached the top, his feet would be clean, dewy, new again. The land rolls for a long while to the west, but on this side of the road there’s nothing but sun and concrete patched by yellow-brown dirt. They pulled off the exit two miles back, and the little diner they’re walking up to is the only building he’s seen since then. The windows are small and the tables old, Formica cracked and fading. Cheap. Dean props his elbows up on the long wooden counter running down the middle of the small room and leans forward, smiling at the only waitress working the place. It feels like one of those family businesses, if it can even be called a business, alone and small out here; Sam closes his eyes for a second, tries to breathe out the sudden exhaustion. He can hear the high laughter of a child coming from the back of the house. It rises above the quiet scraping of pot bottoms against burners and fork tines against knives, punctuates the smell of slow-cooked gravy and pop of the waitress’s gum.
Sam opens his eyes again.
She’s young, seventeen at best, fresh-faced and sweet like the cheerleaders at Sam’s last high school were, but her lips are pink without the gloss and the sleeves of her shirt are a little too tight around the arms. He likes her in that way only strangers can like or dislike each other, and when she smiles at them like they’re the best things she seen all day, he smiles back. Sees how her hair curls against the back of her neck, the color of it like sun shining through a pitcher of maple syrup.
Sam’s reminded of these things, sometimes. Or maybe he’s just spent too many breakfasts sitting across from or next to Dean, spreading his hands on the wiped white table tops, counting the packets of Sweet-n-Low, lining up the napkin dispenser with the salt and sugar shakers and waiting, waiting. (He wonders how many hours of a person’s life are spent waiting every year - is it days? Weeks? Because every minute spent at a stoplight or in line or sitting in cheap restaurants is another minute he wants Dean to have, another minute Dean could’ve been doing - something, the kind of something that carried a little weight, a little meaning.)
They sit at the bar on wooden stools, Dean fiddling with the bracelets on his wrist and Sam watching. He watches all the time now, the way Dean used to watch him when he wasn’t looking, and he knows it pisses Dean off after a while, but Sam’s selfish with this and he can’t - won’t stop. He doesn’t remember their mother, and he only had those few weeks to relearn the set of his dad’s shoulders, his voice, his eyes when he wouldn’t speak. A few weeks. Most of it has slipped away already, and Sam hates himself for knowing by heart four different Latin passages to conjure a vengeful spirit, the painful inner details of running a deposition workshop and the philosophical overlaps and divergences between Descartes and Socrates, but not remembering which gun was John Winchester’s favorite, if he was still wearing his wedding ring on a chain around his neck when - he thinks Dean remembers. No, he knows Dean does. Dean would: he still wears shirts that belonged to their dad, listens to the same songs, and Sam, Sam who has already let the imprints of both his parents fade, Sam will be damned if he lets his brother go the same way.
He watches while they wait: there’s a lot about Dean people skip over because they think they can get him pinned down and categorized with one glance. Most of the women they meet - bartenders, secretaries, daughters, sisters - linger on the eyes, the easy smile, and never see the faint scars nor the hard line his mouth gets sometimes, the one that hints at a capacity for ruthlessness, some kind of terror. But they don’t see how soft his face gets, either, when he’s happy, the way the skin at the corners of his eyes folds, the little boy excitement that seeps into his voice. They don’t see too much at all, and for a long time, neither did Sam - tried not to, went from not wanting to forgetting how, maybe, but he still has another ten months to make up for that. Ten months to find himself more time.
The girl comes back with a wad of napkins, plastic cutlery, and two Styrofoam containers Sam cracks open as Dean pays. Turkey meat with slices of white bread and a generously messy ladle of gravy on top, potatoes and peas and French fries. It smells good; the peas are bright green and smooth in the way frozen ones rarely are, and if they were the type to revisit places, he’d want to come back here. Thanks, he hears Dean say, and you have a nice day now. She waves, sweet and guileless with none of that finger waggling bullshit girls do when they try to flirt, and Sam wonders where she’ll be five years from now, ten. If she’ll go to school and get a job in the city, or if she’ll still be serving turkey meals made from scratch on the side of a lonely country road, and if she’ll mind.
The sunlight is thick and the pavement hot when they step outside again, Dean shading his eyes with one hand and jingling the keys with his other. Sam understands, now, why Dean always glanced his way from time to time, unthinking and natural. Because part of it was making sure he was okay, keeping him safe, but a lot more had to do with the rest, with how Dean must have known that Sam would leave him years before he himself did. And so Dean had looked and touched and tattooed that knowledge below his skin, scratched it into his bones, synchronized it with the steady, relentless squeeze of his heart and lungs, burned it deep and vicious and hurting inside himself so that he would never, ever be rid of it, so that it was a pain he could not be surprised by. He had done it before Sam left and he did it after Sam came back, as if he was always ready to wake up one morning alone again.
“You want a camera?” Dean asks in the car, turning the keys. “Starin’ at me like you’d never met me before back there.”
“No, just.” Sam pauses. There are some things he has to say, things that can’t be left unsaid the way most everything is between them, things fifteen years of schooling never gave him the words for. “I know you, all right? Like, like I know my own hands, like - “
This would have been a lie two years ago, but it’s not now, and maybe Dean at twenty-five is a lot less inscrutable than Dean at twenty-two, but Dean has always been Dean, and it’s more that Sam didn’t notice a lot of things back then.
“I won’t,” he says, curling his hand around the open collar of Dean’s jacket. “I won’t, I won’t,” and he doesn’t have to say the rest for Dean to know what he means. There’s a long silence, Dean’s fingers coming to rest around his wrist, and then Dean says, Hey, hey, soft and low like when they were only children and Sam used to wake up with nightmares, the normal kind, and Okay and I trust you. They drive into the hills, under their shadows, gaining elevation slowly, and Sam wonders what kind of secrets are resting between those trees, in places always dark and quiet, wonders what they’ll find and how he’ll keep himself from forgetting, if he’ll have to.
there's a high probability i completely violated canon somewhere up there (apologies, apologies), but. you know. those winchester boys can hook you in real fast.