E-MAIL: eli @ popullus.net
RATING: PG-13
POSTED: May 19, 2006
SUMMARY: He didn't want to be there. He wanted to be gone. He wanted Sam to want to be gone.
NOTES: Lead-in to 1.16 (Shadow). This is actually the first story I started in this fandom, way back in January. Would have been nice if I had been able to get it into shape before Shadow aired, but life without challenge is boring. Title courtesy of Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (full quote at the end). Thanks to Pouncer for the early look that pointed out I was wandering, and to Ossian for seriously being my hero.
DISCLAIMER: Read
There was nothing right about it. Not driving to California, not not-stopping to look or to find or to hunt on the way, not being so driven. Dad didn't just up and disappear, and Dean didn't just up and freak out. It wasn't right. Something was...there was something...
Louisiana was gone in a flash. Left behind him, too much hell floating and people mucking around in it to make staying worthwhile anyway, because yeah, evil loved disasters, but it would have been like firing off a pellet gun in a room full of werewolves: shitty odds. And he had to be elsewhere.
Texas took fucking forever to get through, and that motel, Jesus, he'd have gotten better air conditioning in his car. New Mexico and Arizona might as well have been the same state, one vast track through nothing until you hit something and tried not to fall off the edge. States were for sights and towns, and he wasn't in them for either. Even the sky was too big, laying mile after mile out in his face like it had nothing better to do.
Dean stayed way inland until he hit San Jose, and then it was straight up through strip mall land to college town USA, complete with a main street designed to keep kids from going off their rockers or fleeing permanently to San Francisco. Welcome to Palo Alto, all the big and bright Stanford red said.
He didn't want to be there. He wanted to be gone. He wanted Sam to want to be gone.
The attack gave him hope; no one kept that form up if they didn't want to keep it. One look at Jessica tore the hope away; it was Sam's look at her, really, because that right there, that was want.
Dean drove Sam back after Constance and did it without riding him about how they'd fit just right, maybe stronger as two than they had been as three and a hell of a lot better than it had ever been as one. It was so right, and Dean knew the difference between hopes and dreams.
He didn't listen to the silence, either, listening instead to the rumble of the Impala all the way. When a high clanking started deep in the back, Dean threatened to drive right over the damn brother who'd driven his car into a goddamn house. A sharp grin carried Sam's suggestion that someone more familiar with the car would be more likely to spot the problem if he were down there. Dean punched him, a quick, light tap to the shoulder, and the noise stopped right about when he'd figured it would.
And then the sky fell down again, right on their heads again, and suddenly, hell, suddenly Sam wanted almost what Dean wanted.
~~
"Tell me, Sammy," Dean never said, not once in any of their many miles, "would I have gotten a call from some Stanford grief counselor if I hadn't hauled your fool ass out from under those flames?"
"Jess. She asked, 'Your brother Dean?' She knew, you'd told her. But did you explain?" he always caught himself before asking. "Did I get a sentence or a story?"
"You never expected me to listen when you said, 'Just stay away,' did you?" That one almost slipped out, part-way through one flat state. When Sam woke two hours later, he went straight into bitch mode at seeing Dean still behind the wheel. Dean just jerked his chin at the dregs of the coffee in the cup between his thighs.
~~
They never divided action up into assignments. Sam's flavor of sincere worked for some folks, Dean's worked for others, and when they approached a job, a person, a couple, a family, they just did what they did. That meant switching things up sometimes, moving aside for the other when faces or talk shut down, but one step back always seemed to make room for at least two forward, so it was all fine any which way things went.
Instinct, but more than that, family. At least that was how Dean figured it; a theory that formed even before he got Sam to bank that thought of vengeance now, now, now. And until Kansas, it was really what Dean wanted Dad there to see.
They never did a whole lot of talking, either. Hard bursts of it when it was necessary to dig into the mess that had always been Sam's head, kick some sense into him, sure. That was as easy to deal out when Sam was 10 as when he was 22. He would go silent or pushy -- or the two at once, which almost guaranteed a fresh set bruises on both of them for a while -- and Dean was pretty confident about knowing when to tease and distract Sam past whatever bug had taken up residence, and when to look him in the eyes and say he understood, it sucked, but damn it, cut this crap out now.
Moody worked for Sam. It worked for all kinds of people. Other people. Dean got pissed off, he got grumpy, he got annoyed, and with those, it had always been just fine to let Sam feel like he had to get Dean out of them. Sam usually managed it, too, and Dean was aware enough to recognize his own tactics turned against him. The deep worries, though, the ones that made him happy to escape into sleep, Dean didn't let Sam see. There hadn't been the luxury, and there really had never been any point to it, and--
Hell. He hadn't used to let Sam see.
Maybe it was the house that did it. From the moment Sam had jumped up and hit him with going back, whatever the reason, God knows Dean had had every reason to be off his stride. But maybe after looking down into Mom's eyes -- he'd had to look down -- and seeing something there in addition to the love... Maybe that was what did it.
Whatever. He had it locked down.
~~
Dean's nightmares didn't shock him awake on a regular basis, rigid and gasping. What Dean dreaded in the nightmares that slid up close in the waking hours, it came when he least expected it. Call him stupid, but he never expected it right after the shotgun to the chest; pushed over to crazyland or not, you'd think that little moment would've expressed the hell out Sam's issues just fine.
Then Dad contacted them, finally. He called them. Sam was pissy about it, yeah, big surprise, but-- It just happened. Snap. Like that. Sam was stopped, up, out, standing there in the dark. So damn calm, saying, "That's what I want."
It was just another adjustment to make, Dean told himself as the engine roared to life again under his hand. Not correcting, not exactly. Adapting. Learning's always better than dying, and that's no joke.
Shoot up a couple inches, find a new center of balance. Break an ulna coming down wrong off a wall, grin so you don't bite your damn tongue when the Colt kicks. Lose your brother by degrees once, let him go, release him...
Dean didn't look back; not over his shoulder, not in the mirrors. He looked over three miles down, he had to pick up the map from the seat, and that was when his fist hit the steering wheel.
Ask once with love, dare once because of want, third time couldn't be a guilt trip to fill need.
~~
Not like Dean didn't know it before, but when Sam made a commitment, he went one hundred percent Winchester about it. He stuck to it -- and you -- like the NASA type of glue. Stubborn bastard.
See, Dean should have died with those kids safe and him cold in a basement. Kids safe. He'd held onto that into the black pain, the dark that turned into light that cut deep with its lingering.
In the light, though, Sam stuck hard. He planted himself there at Dean's side, as good as shouting a declaration that he had Dean's back. Twelve kinds of a pain in the ass.
Then other bodies started piling up, and Dean knew exactly what he was doing at the end when the dark came back, closing in, and he didn't grab for the one hope that he could've. He didn't run, even with knowing just what had put that look in Sam's eyes in the glaring hospital light, in the dusty motel gloom, in the rickety seat among all the faces and hopes and prayers: the sureness that he would be damned, dropped all the way down to the hard bottom of hell, if he couldn't make it so there was a tomorrow for his brother. Yeah, Dean recognized that feeling.
On that muddy night in the middle of the wrong kind of beliefs, Sam did have his back, and the reaper went its way with one last prize that Dean had no plans to ever cry over. Odds pointed at there being another coming along to take those Roy couldn't do a thing about, but the two of them were on the road again with more things needing their attention than a regret. Back to a fine state of normal.
There was a dryad in Oregon, a true bitch to reason with, but under the deal struck, there was now a very grateful tiny coastal town with pie that wouldn't ever be baked in a wood oven again. The ghost of a school teacher in Idaho only needed to be convinced that her job was indeed being covered just fine by the new guy, and poof, there she went on her way. And that eruption of brand new hot springs in South Dakota, well, those the feds should probably know about, because they would probably be able to do more than stand there and say, "Yep. That's water."
It was a solid couple of weeks, in Dean's opinion.
Still, "the same" it was not. Even after that night, that was just not what "normal" meant. Dean kept on staring down everything that came -- go on, we'll take you, c'mon! -- and then moving on, like always. Something new, some badness to take care of, some good to do every day. Fabulous. Never been better. But nothing ever stayed the same. Reality never would give a good goddamn what anyone wanted; Dean knew that, along with all kinds of things.
There came a day, an ordinary day, but with something lashing out and hitting Dean hard enough to break stone right then, settling in to bang away at him while Sam measured out miles with his thumb against a map. Something simple.
Adapting means not ignoring a lesson, means accepting it, especially when it kicks you where you live. And this lesson had been hanging there for a while now, poised just out of striking distance: what Sam wanted still wasn't what Dean wanted, not quite.
That was a hard one to swallow. It would be so easy to let it slide, God, Dean thought about letting it--
Fuck that. What he dreamed about was beating it down 'till it was whimpering and crawling, begging to get away.
Three times across the continent, they slept through so many miles, and Dean came fully awake in the flat field of Illinois. The grass and grain whipping by looked like more of the straight track that had led into Bloomington, but the way-too-early morning sun wasn't as kind as the cloudy night had been and that newspaper Sam had picked up at the university pointed north, not south.
Sam was humming along with something he'd picked up in Cheyenne. The guy had clutched at the counter, going into shock that he was getting rid of a tape...and even as Sam had told that tale, he'd been ducking, and Dean's whack had barely caught him on the side of the head.
It had a good guitar, Dean allowed while Sam tapped the beat into the wheel. At full volume, loud enough for the wind to quit carrying the bass away, it might not have been half bad.
Then Sam looked over and Dean didn't close his eyes, almost did, it would have been too late and damn it, he didn't want to have to. Sam frowned, a faint line of thought that didn't disappear when he shook off Dean's one-word offer to switch.
Not wanting to do any thinking, thanks, Dean put his head back again. The road started to curve, any change in direction obvious when they'd been going nowhere but straight, and Dean saw another sign for Dwight flash past, like you were going to miss the only thing taller than the horizon around here.
He took a deep breath. There were some things they both wanted.
Eyes on nothing but the white line blurring by, Dean tried to calculate how many more minutes made up the miles to whatever was tearing people to bloody pieces in Chicago.
+ + +
Title from: "Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances." -- Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
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