Work Text:
"But one day we woke to disgrace; our house
a coldness of rooms, each nursing
a thickening cyst of dust and gloom.
We had not been home in our hearts for months."
2005
Pink dawn soaks the sky, above the deserted parking lot, as Dean sits in the Impala, sleepless. A tan leaf rips itself away from the tree hanging above him, landing with a slap on the windshield. The emptiness in the seat beside him is a tangible presence, filling the car and Dean’s throat. He is seized by the sudden need for air, and stumbles out of the door in one motion, his knees cracking on the tarmac.
A swell of conflicting emotions threatens to snap his ribcage, leaving the fractured pieces of bone to embed themselves in his heart. How could Sam just leave like that? Did all their shared life together on the road mean nothing? Did Dad, did Dean mean nothing to him?
Maybe Dean did (maybe he’s nothing, useless, a failure, a disgrace-).
Kneeling in the parking lot, as his eyes sting like someone’s stabbing a needle into the corners, Dean wonders if, trapped as the mediator, he has successfully managed only to alienate both of his only family members. Dad was right. It was all his fault.
He’d failed. He had one job, that he’s carried around for years, the comfortable weight of a rifle, though not as carefully as he should. “Watch out for Sammy.”
And now Sammy, running off, like a piece of Dean’s still beating heart, dripping blood all over the place, is out there. At Stanford. In the real world. Where Dean can’t watch his back, can’t get over the gigantic lump of anger (betrayal) in his throat to pick up the phone.
Dean can kid himself as much as he wants, but he knows he’s mainly been angry at himself. Because he can run and drive and dive into as many Hunts as he wants, but he’ll never escape the fact that he knew. He knew it was going to happen before it did.
()()()
"And how our words changed. Dead flies in a web.
How they stiffened and blackened. Cherished italics
suddenly sour on our tongues, obscenities
spraying themselves on the wall in my head"
2002
The tearing of the envelope interrupts Dean, about to take the reheated lasagne out of the oven, as the sliver of a moon peers through the thin, moth-eaten curtains. Sammy is sitting on the rickety table in the falling-down house they were squatting in, with black cracks snaking all over it. Dean is about to remind him for the millionth time to stop absentmindedly sitting on it, the freakishly tall giant, when he catches sight of Sam’s face.
His eyes swallow the letter hungrily, like he is searching for a saviour. Dean raises an eyebrow, dumping the repurposed oil-rag he was going to use to take out the tray on top of the temperamental oven.
“Sammy?”
Sam gasps quietly, unheeding. There is a crackle, as his grip tightens on the sheet, his knuckles turning as white as it. He holds it reverently, like he’s been locked in a closet his whole life, and has suddenly come across a key. His eyes are suddenly glistening, and a few tears slip out, so it looks like his face is glowing. But nothing is brighter than his smile.
“Dean. I got in.”
“What?”
Sam stares at him, as though he can’t quite process the huge thought in his head and Dean at the same time.
“I got in. To Stanford.”
Dean’s heart pumps loudly in his ears, just once, like a gigantic swallow.
“What?” he says, softly, striding toward his brother and snatching the letter out of his hand.
“Samuel Winchester, we are glad to be able to offer you a full-ride scholarship to Stanford University…”
Dean’s first reaction is to laugh gleefully, slapping Sam on the back.
“Way to go Sammy! Show those rich-kids you’re smarter than them!”
Sam’s face splits as he grins back at him, all light. Pride flashes in Dean’s chest, then, so strongly, that he has to catch onto the table himself to keep his balance.
Sam stands up from the table, a little giddily, and in that gesture, Dean can see him slipping off thousands of motel beds, when Dean had pulled the stones from his bleeding knee with tweezers, or stitched him up after Hunts as he grew older; he can see him standing proudly at his High School Graduation (until he noticed John’s conspicuous absence, that was).
Sam’s expression dims a little, then, though. He fixes his eyes on one of the hairline fractures in the plaster opposite them, and honestly, the question asks does not even occur to Dean, as he turns away toward the oven.
“So should I go?”
Pause.
“No.”
Dean scoffs instinctively, and then wishes he could take it back. Especially the something that hardened in Sam’s eyes, like he wished he hadn’t asked. The burnt lasagne soured in their mouths. The word had fallen silently to the floorboards between them, and it stays there for the next few days, staring up at them, accusing.
()()()
"Woke to your clothes like a corpse on the floor,
the small deaths of lightbulbs pining all day
in my ears, their echoes audible tears;
nothing we would not do to make it worse"
2002
The air in the Motel room as Dean shoves open the door, aching from his hunt the night before, is stale, heavy with something he couldn’t understand. Dust and cigarette smoke floats, mingling into a thickening mixture in front of his face. Darkness fills the room, only a sliver of light hiding at the edge of the curtains.
He clears his suddenly dry throat, and flips on the light. The bulb swings above the scene like a hanged man. It reveals clothes strewn all over the floor, the beds. The fabric is twisted, tortured, and the blanket is flung from the mattress, leaving it naked, cold.
John is sat, smoking, with a tumbler of whisky, a black hunched shape on the end of Dean’s bed. He is silent, and the deadness of it clatters to the floor. Rage simmers around him, as though the air could waver.
Dean swallows.
It looks like a storm has blown through the room, taking whatever it could carry, hands thrumming with taut anger.
Something freezing reaches into Dean’s chest and clutches at his heart. Sam’s duffel is gone.
“Dad. Where’s Sam.”
A scoff. No reply.
Dean blinks. He squeezes his eyes shut so hard it hurts. The duffel is still gone. Gone. His heart stammers.
Sam’s books, which normally lie in a few small piles at the foot of his bed, where Dean is forever tripping over them, are gone.
“Sammy? Sam!”
Sam’s wallet, with his IDs, and some cash from hustling pool, is gone from the bedside table, which is clinically clean.
“Sammy!”
His voice comes out strained, weak, caught and crushed by some invisible hand. He didn’t speak for a year after Mum died.
He breathes out, shakily, bringing his hands up to hold his trembling mouth together. It starts to rain outside, a little.
“Okay. Okay. He can’t have got far-“
John hurls the whisky glass, which smashes into the wall beside Dean’s head, brown liquid spraying the wall behind him. A shard stings his cheek, and a drop of blood slides down it.
Dean hardly ever sees the deep anger in John’s eyes, unless Sam is involved, as he stands there, huge chest heaving. They look like huge pits to Dean as he stares, paralysed, at his father, and it crosses his mind he may be possessed.
Until he speaks. His voice is low, but steeped in vitriol.
“Don’t you fucking get it? He’s gone. To Stanford.”
John says College the way Dean would say Demons. Dean doesn’t have the energy to look surprised, even as a pit of betrayal silently tears itself open in his stomach.
John’s eyes smoulder, and Dean knows John is angry at Sam, not him, and that if he were here Dean would have to stop them killing each other, but right now he is choked with the scent of Flagstaff (Sam is gone and it’s Dean’s fault-).
The lightbulb whines and goes out.
()()()
"and worse. Into the night with the wrong language,
waving and pointing, the shadows of hands
huge in the bedroom. Dreamed of a naked crawl
from a dead place over the other; both of us. Woke."
2002
One of the nights inbetween, John is passed out drunk on the couch, as the storm slaps the flimsy walls of the Motel, the wind picking up. Those nights, breathing in tandem in a collection of freezing Motel beds, are sullied to the Dean of now, kneeling next to the Impala, like Memory, that great artist, has brushed over them again and rotted everything with the toxic idea that Sam was plotting his escape even then.
When they were young, but not too young, because by that time Sam knew where Dad went every night, Dean would stick a foot out of the side of his bed, when they weren’t sharing. It got freezing, but Sammy needed to know he was still there. That’s Dean, always there.
It is approaching two in the morning, but neither of them are asleep. John had just burst in, shouting about something unintelligible, and making them both shoot up and cock their guns, before collapsing by the door.
Sam, the first to control his breathing, had scoffed, and turned over, leaving Dean to help John stumble to the bathroom, pour some water down his throat, and settle him on the tainted couch.
Dean hopes Sam hadn’t heard John slurring out for Mary. The name is like a grenade when Dad is around, and like a small, inanimate, sculpture of glass that Dean tries his best to breathe life into for Sam when he isn’t.
As they lie there, listening to the thunder stagger through the sky, and the rain pummel ground, Sam’s breath hitches, noticeable to even a half-asleep Dean.
“Dean?”
“Yeah, Sammy.”
Sam clearly gulps down whatever he was going to release to the stained Motel ceiling, or if he whispers something, Dean misses it under the flapping of the blinds, like birds straining to be set free.
He kicks his foot out, though, as he falls asleep.
()()()
"Woke to an absence of grace; the still-life
of a meal, untouched, wine-bottle, empty, ashtray,
full. In our sullen kitchen, the fridge
hardened its cool heart, selfish as art, hummed."
The air in the motel room in the next town after the house where they squatted (Sam had once compared John’s moving them to “an Olympic sport”) and also received the Stanford letter burning a hole in Sam’s duffel, is thick with the things they can’t talk about, lurking in corners like cobwebs. Sam’s been looking a bit peaky, lately, like the air’s been getting to him, or something’s been sucking him dry inside.
John has returned with a straightforward ghost hunt, for Dean. Solo. Normally he’d be thrilled. John’s touch clapping his shoulder after a Hunt-Well-Done is electric.
But Dean is reluctant to leave Sam. Since the letter, their conversation has stalled, but DeanandSam exist on a level where a single look can share everything they need. Dad hates it.
Dean is glad that he’s in a good mood tonight, because if John criticises it, with how volatile Sam is at the moment, he could even bust out the “Well if you were actually here-“, and Dean doesn’t want to deal with that tonight, especially if he’s got to stake the house out in the Impala. Dean loves that car to death, but the heating is non-existent. Chucking Sam his egg rolls, Dean remembers countless nights tucking his little brother into his side as their breath misted in the back.
But Dean heads out anyway, because he could never disobey a direct order. Sam follows him to the door as if tugged by an invisible string. Sam’s eyes, flicking to Dean’s after he sneaks a look at John on the couch, say “What if I just talked to him?”
Dean keeps his flat, but lets them widen a little as a spike of worry pierces his stomach. He shakes his head, minutely.
“No fucking way.”
Shutters close over Sam’s face, and Dean feels a little bad, because he’s still polishing the pride in his chest, but Sam’s a Winchester and that’s the way it is. Dean’s eyes don’t have the versatility to explain how much he wishes that that weren’t the case.
The door shuts.
()()()
"To a bowl of apples rotten to the core. Lame shoes
empty in the hall where our voices asked
for a message after the tone, the telephone
pressing its ear to distant, invisible lips."
2004
For the months after Sam leaves, Dean realises that emptiness takes up more space than presence. The Motel rooms expand in size, a huge chasm opening up.
A huge nothing has flooded Dean like a freezing mist, and sometimes he goes days without talking to anyone about anything unrelated to a Hunt. He throws himself into every fight, unprepared, unbothered about what happens to him. He comes out covered in blood and muck, stumbles back and downs John’s whisky until he cradles the phone, but never picks it up.
And yes, the thought has occurred to him. What’s the fucking point, without Sam? Maybe if he’s just a little too slow, he’ll be hit, and he won’t have to think about it anymore.
But, obviously, he doesn’t. A tingling sweeps up through him, if he thinks about that option too much, as if he’s standing too close to the edge of a cliff.
Dean tries to fill up the emptiness, with sex, and alcohol, and hunts.
But, obviously, he still feels hollowed out.
John, however, is mad. So angry that Dean thinks he must not have any more inside him, but clearly he’s under-estimated his father. He bangs doors, and he thwacks guns down on the table for Dean to clean and finally he slams Dean into the Impala, on a dirt-clearing-turned-carpark in the middle of a forest where they’ve been hunting a Wendigo.
Dean’s head has just had an unfortunate encounter with the cave wall, so he’s not exactly in a perfect frame of mind when John’s twisted face blurs in front of him, mixed with the shadows of evergreens behind him. They whirl a little, as the circle of steely sky bears down on them from above.
It feels like John himself is blurring too, because there’s Drill Sergeant John and Dad John, and Dean isn’t sure which one has a fistful of his shirt and yells,
“How could you be so fucking reckless?”
Dean can only shrug, and dip his mouth in a woozy smile, until John grabs his chin, the first time he’s touched him in months.
“I’ve already lost one son. Don’t make me lose another.”
Suddenly the emptiness inside Dean turns sharp, and tears prick at him a little.
“Dad, I want-"
“No, Dean. You need to grow out of this, right now. I’m counting on you.”
Dean stares into Dad’s desperate eyes, knowing that there is no room for any other answer than the one he gives
“Yes, sir.”
()()()
"And our garden bowing its head, vulnerable flowers
unseen in the dusk as we shouted in silhouette.
Woke to the screaming alarm, the banging door,
the house-plants trembling in their brittle soil. Total"
2005
Dean is still on his knees in the parking lot as the sun rises, and his cheeks are a little wet. He hasn’t seen Dad in one month, two weeks and four days. He stands up, slowly, and the amulet thwacks his chest like a reminder, because he can still see eight-year-old Sam thrusting his hand out with the parcel clutched in it.
He has a duty to bring the family back together, he knows, and while maybe Sam will slam the door in his face, Dean is never going to sit around while family could be in danger, and that’s just a fact.
He climbs into the Impala, and she creaks a little, in a kind of greeting. He places his hands on the wheel, and backs out of the carpark, and onto the road to Stanford. Sammy had better be ready for a surprise.
()()()
"Disgrace. Up in the dark to stand at the window,
counting the years to arrive there, faithless,
unpenitent. Woke to the meaningless stars, you
and me both, lost. Inconsolable vowels from the next room."