SPN fic - There's a ghost in my mouth (girl!Sam/Dean, NC-17) (part two)
Part one: https://zelost-mind.livejournal.com/93333.html
In Darwin, Minnesota, Dean stops the car and tells her in no uncertain terms not to move from her seat. Sam walks down Main Street licking an ice-cream cone five minutes later, follows the crowds and finds herself in front of a familiar gazebo claiming to contain The World’s Biggest Ball of Twine! and in small print, (built by one person). She smirks, heads to the gift shop after playing photographer for a few minutes with happy couples and Scandinavian backpackers (who seem completely perplexed) and buys a lime green t-shirt bragging Darwin’s famous twine ball on the front. It’s Dean’s size.
Dean is staring straight ahead when she drops back in to the car, he doesn’t acknowledge her, just reaches for the ignition and she has to stop him - hand over the gift.
“I got you somethin’,” she points out uselessly. Dean stares at the t-shirt, blank faced.
“It’s your size,” she tries.
Dean decided at the age of nine (the first time they visited this town) that the Darwin twine ball was the lamest most rotten thing he had ever seen, and Sam, five years old and open to opinions, had agreed wholeheartedly. Sam knows, surer than she’s ever been about anything, that Dean will hate this shirt with a passion and she needs him to do her a solid and bitch her the fuck out about spending $39.99 of his hard earned bucks on this piece of pedaled trash.
She’s trying so fucking hard, and most days it’s like he doesn’t even know who she is anymore.
“Dean?” she says, watching him again, rapt. Inspecting for a clue that he’s alive in there somewhere. She has been blatantly misbehaving for about eight hundred miles now and he’s got nothing. He’s giving her nothing.
“Okay!” she finally snaps, tossing the shirt in to the foot-well, “just fuck you, Dean.”
He says nothing, shakes his head and starts the car and Sam seethes insides. She boils.
Dean gets drunk when they get in to Nebraska and stays drunk so they can’t leave for a while. Uncle Bobby comes out onto his porch, hat off and shotgun down when he recognises it’s their car kicking up dirt along his driveway. The dogs blaze out, circle Sam maniacally and when she feels Bobby’s arms around her and smells his familiar smell she starts crying like she’s never cried before in her life - like she’s never gonna stop. She doesn’t know where it all comes from, lava hot emotion spilling out of her.
“Come on inside, poptart,” he whispers, gravel timbre, his beard catching at her hair. They leave Dean sitting in the car with the engine idling, the dogs scuffing the paintwork trying like crazy to get in his window, to greet him.
They don’t see Dean for a couple of days and when he surfaces eventually he’s got a shiner that’s plum purple, so round and perfect it could be painted on. She overhears a conversation in the kitchen about his plans for their future that makes her break out in a cold sweat.
“You know you kids are welcome to stay here, I got room, Dean. As long as you need -”
“You know we’re not staying here, Bobby -”
“So you plan is... what, exactly? Drag your sister all over the country while you get drunk on cheap whiskey... forever?”
“She can stay. I - we haven’t talked about it. Sam can go to school - In the fall, she can go to school. I can’t. I can’t do this with her, too, Bobby.”
“Dean, you better think long and hard about how you wanna tell her that you’re planning on leaving her behind, ‘cause take it from me, she is not gonna like it any which way you put it -”
“She doesn’t have to like it - it’s not a choice she has. It’s what has to happen. I’m not gonna let her live the rest of her life out of roadside motels. She’s smart enough to look after herself and I can’t take care of her forever, she’s almost eighteen -”
“Are you hearing yourself, son? You wanna split up? She don’t get a choice? Lay off the sauce for a couple of days and then we can talk about this again, when you have a clear head -”
“I’m leaving in the morning, Bobby. I’ve had three months to think it through. I’m not a fucking trauma victim, okay. I can make my own decisions. Fuck you, alright?”
“Dean -”
“I’m leaving at sun up. You can tell Sam... You can tell her she needs to get on a bus to California in a week.”
The screen door slaps punctuating Dean’s exi and Bobby swears to himself, rattles around the kitchen. The scrape of a chair across the linoleum and then a deep, shaky sigh.
“Fucking Winchester,” Bobby mourns.
Sam sits against the chest in the hallway with a Rottweiler in her lap for an hour, and then she goes to pack her stuff.
Dean can fuck himself if he thinks for one minute she wouldn’t follow him to the ends of the Earth or anywhere else. He’s so dumb she laughs out loud, a sob, as she shoves jeans and a Bible back in to her pack. She’s thought about school, long and hard, but it won’t make any difference. Dean is going to die hunting, just like their father, and no matter what degree she ends up with, how much of an education she has, nothing is going to change that.
She’s got this life, and she’s fucking sticking with it.
She lies on the hood of the car and feels the sun come up, let’s it heat her up like she’s a cold blooded creature until she hears him come out, heavy boots making the porch creak murderously.
“Sam...” he starts. Pauses. She twirls the car keys around one finger, sits up and puts her sneakers all over his precious grill, possessive as she can make herself, stares him right in the eye. She fucking dares him.
Sam learned everything she knows from Dean, and she is scared of nothing.
They last for a tense hour on the road and then Dean makes the mistake of opening his big mouth like she wants to hear anything he has to say.
“You should have stayed at Bobby’s -” he starts, in a tone that flips a switch in her brain, and all hell breaks loose. She punches him in the face, no time to think about it or check it or pull it, just straight in there and her knuckles are burning from his jawbone and Dean’s swearing furiously, car jumping and bouncing over dips and debris on the side of the road.
“What the fuck are you fucking doing, Sa -” Dean yells and she’s almost in his lap, clawing at his face, the car’s still gliding when they tumble out and she punches him right in the throat, lucky shot but it means he’s done for a minute and it gives her a chance to get on her feet, she watches him roll in the dirt - settle flat on his back. The car stalls itself a few feet away - goes dead and waits. Dean’s loyal steed; it would never leave them to do this alone.
Dean coughs out dirt. “What the fuck is your problem?” he says, toneless, quiet. Like he’s already forgiven her for assaulting him and running them off the road in broad daylight.
A million barbs fly through her mind, she wants to kick him, stomp all over him. It’s a fleeting feeling, subsides in seconds like a tide disappearing. Dean’s a lot of things but he’s far from stupid, he knows why she did this.
Sam swings a knee over him, settles on his stomach and gets a deja vu so strong it takes her out of her head for a second. Sharp rocks are cutting in to the palms of her hands up next to his ears and she leans in close enough that she can whisper but not so close that she’ll lose focus, she wants to be able to see his whole face.
“Get offa’ me,” he instructs perfunctorily. He doesn’t move a muscle, spread eagle, and neither does she.
“Don’t you ever leave me,” she drills. “How could you?” she demands, watching his eyes squeeze shut against the question. “Dean. How could you?”
Dean can do anything. He can run a two-minute mile, he can hit a moving target at sixty yards, in the dark, with any weapon you give him. He can hold his breath for almost three minutes. He can take rusted, random, engine parts and make a sleek, working, purring machine. He knows every word to every song on Zeppelin IIII . Dean is hungry, open. He can fuck like he was made for it - he can make her feel things, physically, that she does not have words to describe. Dean is beautiful, he’s powerful, resourceful. Dean is strong - strong minded, strong willed and he can bench two-fifty all day long without breaking a sweat.
“I don’t know what we’re gonna do, Sam,” he says, eyes opening up helpless and wet.
Dean has never before felt homeless, out here. Dean needs a job to do. Dean can’t fix this, and she realises that only now is he coming to terms with that.
“Okay,” Sam says. She sits back, brushes the reddening graze near his chin with her thumb, apologetic. “So, we’ll figure it out. We always do, don’t we?”
Dean nods, eager. Sam can feel the shift of a lifelong dynamic, a dangerous premature slide. She can taste it in the air. She is going to be their compass from now on. What she says goes, for the rest of their lives, if she wants.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she promises or warns.
There are patches of brown blood gluing Dean’s shirt to his elbows when he takes his jacket off, hours later, a tear in the knee of his jeans. His last un-ruined pair, finally ruined; it’s always only a matter of time.
They sit outside a diner at sundown, swapping milkshakes back and forth and Dean’s squinting at their car, the only one in the ‘lot.
“You’re doing a full detail on her next time we stop,” he decides, gesturing to his ripped jeans, the sandy-stains. Sam sits up straight in her chair, not sure if she’s ready or willing to accept his idea of discipline now. Her barely existent sense of hierarchy is dipping and colliding, she doesn’t know whether Dean’s pushing or testing.
“You owe Uncle Bobby a serious apology next time we stop,” she counters and knows immediately when he sags in his seat that it was the right way to respond.
They’re even.