Work Text:
The house is painted yellow. Peeling. Sunshine, daffodil yellow with grey underneath, peeking through. One story, front steps half-collapsed. Dean unfolds from the front seat, where he gets to sit beside John while Sam is always, always consigned to the back, and looks around. Sam, who has spent the drive with his head in a book, taking in the landscape for the first time. Rust-red cliffs rising on all sides of them, rough and jagged and unforgiving. Bright blue sky and a blinding sun reflecting off all those red rocks. And their house against it all, yellow.
“Did you see the signs coming in?” Dean asks, unloading their bags. John is jiggling his keys jammed in the front door.
“Wasn’t looking.” It has only been a day but Sam’s voice feels rusty from un-use.
“Uranium-mining capital of the country right here,” Dean laughs, “and they’re proud of it.”
“I wonder if it’s in the water,” Sam says, and Dean rolls his eyes.
Sam decides that he doesn’t like yellow.
When they drive into a new town, right when they pull into the parking lot or the layby or the driveway of the place they would all be staying, Sam chooses a new favorite color. Right between that moment between when John turns in and when he turns the keys to kill the ignition. It has to be specific, more than “red” or “green,” it can’t be a repetition or any other place, and he has to stick to it .The color is the foundation of the new person he will be—he knows that wil usually only be a for a few weeks, up to a few months, that the character he is drawing doesn’t need that much definition, except that one day, and he never knew what day it was, it will be forever. They would stay forever. There was something about shrugging off that character, with his failings and his cruelties and his myriad mistakes, leaving them crumpled like an old coat at the side of the road, that he relied on as much as anything. Less than his brother. More than his father. His second-favorite thing in the world.
***
The next morning, Sam hears voices from the other room. Their dad is talking to Dean, giving him some kind of list. But it is still early, and no one comes to wake him, and Sam slips back into sleep.
He wakes again with the bright sunlight glaring in his face. No curtains on the windows. No clouds to block the sun. He wanders into the living room, rubbing his eyes, and Dean says “dad’s gone,” before Sam is even fully awake, and that’s that.
Dean hands him a cup of instant soup.
“This isn’t breakfast,”
“It’s this or nothing, baby brother.”
“I’ll take the soup,”
Dean laughs.
“And some coffee. Please.”
“You don’t drink coffee,” Dean scoffs, and its true. He doesn’t drink coffee, it is bitter and sour and they never have any milk, but Dean drinks it and so does John, so Sam says,
“I do now,” and puts out his hand.
Dean shrugs and pours scalding water from a pan into the cuppa soup and ground coffee crystals. Sam shakes away thoughts of radioactive water, or lead paint, takes his liquid breakfast and goes to sit on the porch. The air smells hot, sun baking onto the rocks, nothing green or growing or shading them from the brightness. The coffee burns his tongue and he is almost grateful because it tastes so awful. He takes another sip, managing not to shudder, and opens his eyes to see Dean raising his eyebrow at him.
“Delicious,” Sam chokes, and Dean laughs a long, pure laugh. Sam glares at him and then laughs too, feeling his chest loosen. So, dad is gone again. So, the house is yellow. So what.
***
Time passes, first slowly and strangely, with every new day uncertain, then more quickly as their days start to follow a pattern. School in in its last month but Sam goes everyday, takes finals in subjects he never studied, sits in the back row and keeps his head down and fills his tray at lunch so he won’t go to bed hungry. Dean picks up an apprentice job at the auto shop in town, comes home with his hands and jeans covered in grease and smelling like diesel and sweat, falls asleep early and exhausted and then wakes Sam up for school at six am. They hitch a ride into the larger town down in the other side of the canyon and buy a crackly twelve-inch television, and some dishes for the kitchen, and cheap gingham cloth to staple over the windows. Sam ends up in a second-semester culinary science class and starts bringing home recipes, making his own last-minute substitutions based on what they have, insisting that Dean buy better-quality salt and butter and the occasional green vegetable.
***
Dean comes home with grease on his hands and smears them on the kitchen towels. Thats never coming out. Sam wants to put the cloth to his face and inhale but instead he sighs, says,
“You’re washing those,” even though they both know Dean won’t.
“I brought the fish,” Dean says instead. “The one you wanted was crazy expensive so I got flounder.”
“Sure,” Sam keeps chopping onions. They never make him cry. He is starting to think that’s a big joke that people play, that they really are always just sad. “That’ll be fine.” He doesn’t know, doesn't know anything, made this recipe in class and has been dying to try it out again. Working with his hands, with flames, and coming out with something that makes people happy. Not the pointlessness of class and not the death that drips from his hands every other time, but something warm and filling that makes Dean smile. The recipe is supposed to have trout.
“What even is a flounder?” Dean asks, popping open one of the bottles of beer he keeps in the fridge with his keyring. He always makes a face when he drinks it, not realizing Sam sees it. Dad drinks a beer in the evening. Unless he’s dead, then he doesn’t do anything. “It is a fish, right?”
“Yeah,” Sam finally turns around, wiping off his hands. Deans lips are wrapped around the neck of the bottle. Sam almost looks away, instead widens his eyes and stares straight at Dean until his brother blushes and looks down. “It’s a flat fish.”
“Flat freaks more like,” Dean saunters over to the sofa. He moves easily in his body, taking up space, something Sam with his new height feels like he is never going to learn how to do.
“Do you remember when I grabbed that fish at the aquarium?” Sam dumps the sauce into a pan and slides the flounder into the over. He memorizes the time on the clock and then forgets it when he looks back at Dean, lounging on the couch with his legs spread, “that venomous fish, pulled it right out to the water?”
Dean blinks.
“That was me,” he answers, “I did that.”
“No,” Sam shakes his head, “no I remember. Dad picked me up and I wouldn't let it go. My hand swelled up that night and you were afraid I was dying.”
“That was me,” Dean repeats, ‘”I grabbed the fish. You were four. I grabbed it and you screamed and you were the one who thought I was dying. You cried all night and wouldn’t go to bed.”
“But,” Sam falters, “but I remember. You took it out of my hands. You saved me.”
“You didn’t even touch it. Dad was holding you and he didn’t even see me do it.”
***
“Did you hear,” Sam starts talking before he even steps through the door, and when Dean looks up all he sees is the wood, is Sam’s backpack as he turns around and clicks it shut behind him, “about the dead man who walked into town?”
“Dead men can’t walk,” Dean says, even though they both know it isn’t true.
Sam drops his backpack and opens the fridge, pulls out the bottle of milk and fills a tall glass.
“Straight milk. That’s psychopath behavior,” Dean jerks his head at the glass of milk. Sam blinks, a split second of hurt passing over his face before he grins and takes a long sip. “What?”
“What?” Sam echoes back, milk on his upper lip.
“Nothing,” Dean answers. He must have imagined it. “You didn’t used to drink milk. Like, at all.”
“Well I do now.” Sam who changes his favorite color at the drop of a hat and will switch from loving a type of candy to refusing it completely. There isn’t a single day when Dean hasn’t seen him, hasn’t fed him at least one meal. He is like the walls, like the air. He is unknowable.
“What about the guy?” Dean rubs his hands over his face.
“You have grease on your cheeks,” Sam says. Dean swipes at his face again. Sam grins and looks away sharply.
“So the guy,” Dean prompts, “Dead?”
“Walked into town earlier today,” Sam drags over a chair from the table and sits facing Dean rather than beside him on the couch. His eyes sparkle. “Stood in the middle of main street and collapsed. But when they got to him, he was all dried up. Dessicated. And dead.”
“Like...vamps?” Dean raises his eyebrows.
“I don’t think so,” Sam rubs his tongue across his front teeth, into the slight gap between them. “More like all the water sucked out. Like a mummy. A walking mummy. Like the doctor said he should have been dead hours ago. Days.”
“Ooo-oo,” Dean coos in the tune of the spooky TV how they used to watch. Sam rolls his eyes. “Sounds like a job for the…well, us.”
“They’re saying it’s just what happens here though,” Sam’s forehead wrinkles. “Like at school. They’re saying that’s just the desert.”
“Everyone says that,” Dean scoffs. “Everything is just normal until it isn’t.”
“Yeah,” Sam tilts his head. “Could be true though.”
“Nah,” Dean shakes his head. “Walking into town days after he dies. Mummified. That ain’t natural.”
“No,” Sam agrees, “but this place. It isn’t natural here either.”
***
“Wow,” Dean says when he takes a bite of the baked flounder. On the television a frazzled nurse takes off her shirt and Dean doesn’t even look.
“Is that good?”
“Yeah.” Dean takes another bite, rolling it almost sensually in his mouth. “No shit. This is good. You might have a career.”
“Like as a chef?” Sam cautiously tries some. It is good.
“Like as a housewife, maybe.”
Sam rolls his eyes, hoping his cheeks don’t look as warm as they feel. “So,” he tips his head at the TV while squeezing onto the couch next to Dean, “what’s going on?”
The couch is barely two people wide and he feels Dean’s arm brush his every time he lifts his fork to take a bite. It should be annoying but it’s…fine. Dean points at the TV with his free hand.
“He’s a surgeon but he’s doing speed to stay awake, That’s why his hands are shaking. They’re sleeping together but she’s pregnant and not sure if its his, so she hasn’t told him. The patient is his boss’s mom, I don’t remember what’s wrong with her.”
“Is he going to kill her?” Sam sets down his water glass and tucks his feet up under him, leaning more of his weight against Dean’s side and realizing it feels cozy so he just stays there. It’s a cold, wet day and their house is drafty but Dean is warm and the dinner is warm and someone’s about to die on television.
“God, I hope so,” Dean answers, and they laugh in the same breath. They don’t have the same laugh, and Sam finds it odd sometimes. What happened, why did he turn out different? He wonders if mom taught Dean how to laugh and that’s why.
The patient’s heart rate drops right when Sam finishes eating. Two minutes of frantic movement and high pitched beeping later the drug-addled doctor pronounces her dead.
“Yesss!” Dean shouts, hands in the air like his team just got a touchdown. Sam is laughing again, out of breath, throws his arms in the air as well and Dean grabs his hand and waves it above his head. The doctor locks himself in the bathroom and swallows more uppers and Dean lets their hands drop, but doesn’t let go, and Sam lets their loosely twined fingers stay by his side. Warm. Easy. It feels so easy. On screen, the woman starts to sob.
***
“What did it feel like,” Sam asks, “the first time you killed someone?”
“It…I don’t remember,” Dean answers. “It’s not real, you know. They’re just monsters.”
“They still scream. They beg. They die.”
“I never.” Dean stops, takes a breath. “I never wanted you to have to do it. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Sam says, because what else is there to say?
“How did it feel to you?”
Sam looks out towards the horizon, the jagged cliffs clawing holes in the sky.
“It didn’t feel like anything.”
***
After school and before Dean gets home, Sam stops at the general store. A vast warehouse building at the heart of town, with its own bus stop, the store houses everything from pharmacy to school supplies to work boots to groceries. He starts responsibly, calculating the cost of fresh vegetables, white rice, and frozen chicken out of the twenty Dean had given him. Near the front, a local farmer has set up a makeshift table and is selling bushels of green beans. Sam puts on his brightest smile and manages to talk him down to a quart in exchange for two dollars and a promise that Sam would tell all his friends that the farmer also has free kittens.
He ponders bringing home a kitten, Dean’s furious face, hiding it under the bed or locked in their dad’s room. Luckily—or unluckily—they aren’t actually there in the store, so he moves on. And yes, he wonders about local vegetables, about the uranium refinery just outside of town, sitting perfectly upwind of the national park that Dean refuses to pay entry for. Leeching into the water. He has classmates whose fathers worked in the mines, men who couldn’t eat a full meal or collapsed from one drink too many at the cowboy bar in the center of town, who die young, who didn’t die young enough. No one talked about it.
Legitimate purchases made, Sam drifts towards the checkout. He chooses a chaotic line, stands behind a woman with two small children at her feet and one one her hip, all clamoring for bubble-gum and stickers as she juggles her wallet and packages of diapers and boxed mac and cheese. Sam drops two cans of soup, making sure they land on their sides and roll, and as he gathers them up again he reaches out and pockets three tubes of flavored chap stick. It is all over in less then five seconds.
Though this is by far not the first time, Sam still feels like he has electricity buzzing under his skin as he walks out of the doors with his secret collection burning in his pocket. In the back of the bus, bouncing over potholed roads, he pulls out his finds. Strawberry, marshmallow, and red cherry pie. Chapstick in bizarre flavors, as well as the nail polish that he sometimes takes when he is feeling brave, are a type of currency at the local school. People trade them for other flavors, for favors for food. Sam calculates he could get a week of lunches for this stash, but usually he prefers to go hungry and trade instead for secrets and social cache, and occasionally for the braided leather bracelets he is saving up to give to Dean for Christmas. Because Sam, this Sam who lives in the red-rock dessert and loves to cook and writes in blue pen, wants to be popular. Wants to be noticed. Enjoys watching classmates who have gone to school with the same small group since kindergarten fight each other to sit at his table.
He rolls the cherry pie between his fingers. Dean’s favorite food. For a second he thinks of giving it to him, Dean who would scoff and say he didn’t wear lipstick and was Sam fucking gay now? Instead, he twist the cap off, smears too much on his lips. The taste is artificial and way too sweet and when he presses his lips together, it feels almost like a kiss.
***
In the morning, Dean grunts over his coffee. Sam sips his own. The bitterness has gotten less over the weeks, or perhaps just more bearable. With the early summer heat shimmering up from the ground, the drink scorching his tongue feels almost good. Like being burned clean from the inside and the outside all at once. He imagines walking through the heat and out of the heat, letting all the rotten bits fall away like a snake slipping out of its skin on the red rocks, leaving nothing behind but a curling ghost. Dean walks to work with a bandana tied around his head, permanently stained with sweat in misshapen patches. One day they’ll get a car, Dean said over dinner the other night. With Sam’s eyes on their finances, he doesn’t think that some day is very likely, or very soon, but its a nice thing to talk about. A low truck with strong tires and then they’ll climb the mountains, and one day they’ll drive downstate and see the buffalo, even if they’re not quite free. Sam doesn’t believe in zoos, not after that time they had cornered a nest of vamps operating out of an old roadside menagerie and locked them in an empty cage until the sun came up. The screaming had blended with the mournful yowls of the lion in the next enclosure over, crazed with blood lust or simply mourning a good meal. But the buffalo weren’t really in a zoo, even if they weren’t really free, and Sam couldn’t wait to see something so big.
“You’ll get a summer job,” Dean has told him last time Sam brought up the money, “that’ll help.”
“Should we move?” Sam asks cautiously over coffee today. It’s been bothering him. Not much work available if you didn’t have a car and Sam doesn’t think he is much for being a ranch-hand anyway. School ends in two weeks.
“Move?” Dean repeats it like the idea is alien, something he has to turn over in his hands and try to understand. “But dad’s coming back here.”
As if that was that. And it was.
But today it is Sunday. Even in a heathen little mining and ranching town hidden in the mountains, Utah’s Mormon heritage still underlays every day life. Shops are closed on Sunday, even the auto shop, even when someone might need their car fixed. Maybe you just sit by the side of the road and contemplate God. In a back-alley downtown there is a hard liquor store but restaurants and bars serve only the weakest beer. That and the phenomenon of mixed sodas with cream that Sam is slowly discovering from his school friends. So, against their will, Sunday becomes a day of rest.
Dean drags a broken lawn chair found in the garage out into the front yard, directly beneath the glare of the sun. Sam begins by reading in the slight shade of the front steps, but after a hour joins Dean sprawled on the hot sand—no grass, not here, not ever. There is something comforting about it, something safe, he feels like a lizard numbed and frozen all winter slowly coming to life.
***
The local library has two shelves of Agatha Christie books, which Sam checks out day after day, assuming they are filed in chronological order. They are not. But they are, in a way, comforting. To dive into the swamp of someone else’s complex and troubled family, trace the relationships and webs of deception and then come out the other side and sit in the living room with someone who has never once wanted to kill him, not really. To pick apart tangles of lies and deception and then have it all fall away at the end and have it all make sense, every lie unearthed, every clue explained. The kind of story you can sleep well after.
And then, as he nears the end of the shelf in mid summer, they shift. Lying awake in bed in the yellow puddle of light cast by a single lamp, while Dean snores and murmurs in his sleep on the next bed, Sam feels his breath tighten as one character then another on the island is murdered, really truly dead. He gasps out loud like a girl in a horror movie when the main narrator chokes to death hanging in a noose, no escape, no happily ever after for the romance set up nor prison nor justice for the killer.
Dean hears the gasp somewhere deep in sleep and bolts upright, turning to look at Sam before his eyes are fully open.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Sam feels himself blushing, knows it is small and insignificant and Dean probably thought he was being murdered himself, except the shock still sits heavy on him, except he does feel a tiny bit like he just died along with the character. “Just reading.”
“Nerd.” Dean lies back down and pulls a pillow over his face, but he stays turned on his side, watching Sam through half-closed eyes. Even in the dark after he turns out the lamp, Sam can feel him watching.
***
They have finished dinner and watched a James Bond movie, and Dean had even washed the dishes, and Bond had won like usual, when Sam picks up his latest book. A standard setup, the new marriage, the house with echoes of a haunting, the dead wife. Dean sits back down and flips on the TV, and Sam tucks his feet under him as an infomercial about blenders and fresh fruit plays softly. The bereaved man in the book grieves and wonders and pulls apart the threads.
He disappears into the story and it feels like standing at the top of a high cliff when the scene falls into flashback and the narrator he has been following through the whole story reveals that he is the killer, tells the story blood-drenched flashback, unrepentant.
“Should we be eating prickly pears?” Dean asks from somewhere very far away.
“He lied,” Sam says, trying the words out on his tongue. They don’t feel extreme enough. He had grieved for this man.
“Him?” Dean points at the television.
“No,” Sam shakes his head, not ready to laugh. “In my story.”
“Oh,” Dean shrugs. Continues after a minute. “People lie all the time.”
“In real life,” Sam counters. “In real life they lie to us. Not. I thought this was safe.”
“Safe?”
“You can’t just.” He pauses, feeling cold. “You can’t just lie like that.”
***
Dean cracks open a beer and Sam casually reaches out his hand for one, too. In the corner of his eye, Dean freezes for a second, then shrugs and hands it over. Sam swallows down a shudder, but the warmth in his throat feels so much like that first breathe of hot air in the morning when he opens the door. Dean is telling a story about a job gone wrong, a job that he and dad went on and left Sam in the hotel. Everything feels warm and fuzzy as he finishes off another beer and then a chocolate bar and licks his fingers. He catches Dean looking at him but his eyes flick away when Sam turns.
“Why wasn’t I there?’ he asks, voice sleepy.
“You were like,” Dean laughs, “like five.”
“So you just left me alone?” Sam’s voice comes out more accusing that he intended. He is having trouble moderating volume, the words in his ears so much louder than they are in his head.
“I mean you could. You know, look after yourself.”
There seems something wrong with that logic but Sam can’t grasp it. He shakes his head and says instead, “well don’t do it again.”
“I won’t.” Dean promises, his voice suddenly deadly serious. Sam grins at him. Dean is surrounded by a warm, yellow light. Sam laughs and stands up, then can’t think of where he’d rather go. He slides across the couch and pours himself into Dean’s lap like honey, head on his shoulder. He can feel the steady rise and fall of Dean’s chest, soothing. Don’t ever stop breathing, he thinks.
“You’re a messy drunk,” Dean says into his hair, says it with so much affection. Sam smiles. It doesn’t sound like a criticism when Dean says it.
Time goes liquid but eventually Dean laughs, easy and unforced.
“My legs are going to sleep. Anyway, time for us to go to sleep.”
“Yeah,” Sam tucks his face deeper into the crook of Dean’s neck, “sure.”
“Sure,” Dean repeats, then gets an arm under Sam’s knees and, with a groan, scoops him up and carries him across to the bedroom. He dumps Sam a little roughly on his bed and Sam bounces against the mattress, giggling. Dean moves to turn away and Sam grabs his wrist.
“No,” he whispers. “No. You said you wouldn't leave.”
Dean laughs like it isn’t really funny but sits back down.
“Okay,” he murmurs, “shove over,” and Sam rolls dutifully to the side so that Dean can fit next to him on the narrow twin bed. Dean is warm and solid next to him, real, not leaving. Sam fits his body against the hot line of Dean’s and feels his breath rising and falling in all the places they touch. He matches their breathing, and slowly slips into sleep.
When he wakes, he is alone.
***
He has the house to himself this afternoon, school over and Dean still at work, the sun through the shades, warm and sweet. They’ve lived here forever. It’s been two months. A man died in the desert and Sam doesn’t even care, because that’s not his job anymore. He wanders around the house, reads, with a flicker of mischief he cracks open one of Dean’s beers and drinks half in one go. A lizard flickers up the wall and he wishes he could climb like that.
He wanders into the bedroom. Dean has left a crumpled flannel on the floor and Sam picks it up, sniffing to check if it should go in the closet or the hamper. He inhales and it smells of Dean, his sweat and his own spicy scent and the warmth of the sun and the sweetness of the air. Sam sits down on his own bed and breathes it in. Dean, wrapped in sunlight, Sam lays back with the cloth over his face and imagines it, not a scene exactly, just their life. Dean in the sunlight, on their porch, opening his arms to Sam. The softness of the cloth, of his embrace. Without thinking about it, he palms himself through his shorts.
The endless desert. Dean carrying him to bed last week. Sam groans and shoves a hand down the front of his boxers, head falling back against the headboard. Time slips by and a door opens somewhere but Sam doesn’t care, too high on his own pleasure. And then, much nearer, he hears a sudden intake of breath.
Eyes snapping open, he takes in Dean standing in the bedroom door, Dean in his sweaty tank top with his eyes still squinted from the sunlight. Dean, completely frozen in the doorway.
Time stands still, hours pass in a few seconds and Sam doesn’t make a decision exactly but it doesn’t feel wrong when he grins at Dean and deliberately starts stroking himself again. Dean’s mouth falls open. Sam is still clutching the dirty flannel in his hand and he watches Dean’s eyes flick to it. Every nerve ending is on fire, every second the most vivid he has ever lived. Sam feels his own heart speed up at the same rate as he watches Dean’s breath quicken, his cheeks flush. He is not screaming and he is not turning away.
Dean licks his lips and Sam feels a jolt through his whole body. Dean can’t keep his eyes still, flickering over every inch of Sam’s body, flicking away. Sam mimics him, running a pink tongue over his lips, and Dean very quietly groans and presses a hand to the front of his own jeans. A wave of pleasure hits Sam, more than he thinks he has ever felt, and he lets his head fall back against the headboard, his eyes slip closed.
His orgasm leaves him breathless, blinded, and he lies in the sun for a few minutes thinking nothing, feeling everything. When he prizes his eyes open, the door is empty.
Sam buttons up his shorts and tosses the flannel almost casually into the hamper. He feels relaxed and sleepy and alive. Dean isn’t in the living room, or the kitchen or on the porch.
He doesn’t come home for thirty-six hours.
***
When Dean walks in the door, Sam is sitting at the table forcing himself to chew on a piece of burnt toast. He feels sick, has felt sick since he found Dean gone. When his brother opens the door, he raises a hand in a wave but doesn’t meet Sam’s eyes, doesn’t even look at him as he crosses to the bathroom and turns the shower on high.
They dance around each other. Sam makes food and Dean slides away from him on the sofa. Dean looks into his face once and turns crimson and has a coughing fit. Finally, Sam opens his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he says, even though he doesn’t mean to say it, even though he isn’t, really.
“You didn't do anything,” Dean snaps, not looking at him.
“I mean, you-“
“Shut up,” Dean cuts him off, voice echoing off their blank walls, “not everything is about you. I had. I had a job.”
“Like…a hunting job.”
“Yeah,” Dean rolls his eyes, almost normal for half a second, “a real job.”
“And you didn’t bring me?” Sam says it before he can think. You promised, he thinks. Shut up, he thinks, and bites his own tongue until he can taste blood.
Dean doesn’t dignify that one with a response. Instead, he walks to the door.
“I think I’m gonna go out,” Dean mumbles, toeing on his boots. “Gonna make some…different friends.”
Sam lets him go.
***
Dean is flirting with the pretty girl behind the counter, making plans to meet at the end of her shift, determinedly not looking at Sam. Dean hasn’t looked him in the face for days. The girl laughs as Dean leans forward and brushes a lock of brown hair out of her eyes, a loud, raucous laugh that despite himself Sam finds charming. He tucks his own hair behind his ear. He fingers a tube of strawberry chap stick and eyes the chocolate bars. Dean opens his mouth and suddenly Sam can’t stand it any longer, turns on his heels and stalks into the parking lot, breathes in the hot diesel fumes and waits for his stomach to settle. He feels the plastic digging painfully into the palm of his clenched hand and realizes he is still holding the chap stick. He feels like tearing someone’s head off, maybe Dean’s, maybe his own if pressed, tendons snapping and flesh tearing, the crush of vertebrae Chopping the head off a vampire always takes him multiple strokes, messy and ragged and bloody. Ripping the head of a human would be easier he likes to think.
***
“So what about that guy?” Sam asks, handing Dean a plate of pasta. It’s not very good. The sauce separated and the noodles are overcooked, which is just how Dean likes them, but Sam kind of wants to throw it back into the pot and start again. Go back in time an hour. Go back two weeks.
“What guy?” Dean answers with his mouth full. Sam rolls his eyes.
“You know. All dried up.”
“Ah yeah, freeze dried Fred,” Dean takes another bite. Sam chokes and for a split second everything is normal.
“Sure,” Sam scoffs, like he wasn’t laughing.
“I don’t know,” Dean continues, “doesn’t really seem like our business. It hasn't happened again or anything. And dad’s not even here.”
Dad’s not even here. They’ve been floating like an unmoored boat for months.
“Do you think maybe we should..?”
“I’m heading out,” Dean cuts him off, leaving his half-full plate on the arm of the sofa, precariously balanced.
“Sure,” Sam says again, dully.
“Don’t get into too much trouble,” Dean tosses over his shoulder as he toes on his shoes.
“You could at least put your dishes in the sink,” Sam says to the closing door, which isn’t what he means at all.
***
Annie doesn’t spare him a look as she brushes past him in the door of the quick-mart across from their house, fixing her hair and tucking in her white uniform top. She has two minutes before five o’clock to lace up her apron, tuck away the flyaway hair, and take her place behind the counter in a room that smells of engine grease and cooking fat, and paste on a smile. Sam calculates that she will barely miss her third reprimand for arriving late in the two weeks she has been seeing his brother. He lingers outside the quick-mart, giving Dean some space in the house to compose himself. Breathing in the sour air. He pictures Annie taking her place behind the counter, out of breath and smiling, rolling up her sleeves and tossing her hair like she has a secret.
Sam has spent less and less time at home since Dean had started bringing Annie over. The single-story house has two bedrooms but the one with the queen bed still holds their father’s things, a wrinkled shirt draped over the chair, toothbrush on the nightstand, and somehow neither of them can move it. When he gets home, he will be angry. When he gets home, he will need a place to sleep. So they stay crammed in two twin beds in the other, smaller bedroom. Except, when Annie is there, there isn’t a space in the bedroom or the main room or the tiny bathroom where he can avoid hearing her voice. Where he isn’t intruding. And there should be plenty of places for him to go and kill an afternoon, but he always ends up back here, waiting in the parking lot at the end of their street, failing to read. Dean at home, in their bedroom with someone else, doing things that Sam has never tried and isn’t sure he wants to. It makes Sam's stomach twist up and makes him feel like he has columns of ants under his skin, steadily and constantly marching on, and the words on the page shift shape and change meaning to spell out things Sam doesn't want to think about.
A burly man in sweatpants eases himself down from the cabin of a huge, rusty-red truck advertising fresh pineapples, and Sam steps out of his way, inhaling the smell of cigarettes and sweat. He stands briefly transfixed by the man’s thick hands prodding the buttons of the ice machine—he has something blue under his fingernails and a five-dollar poker chip tattooed on the inside of his wrist. Why five dollars, Sam wonders as he at last heads down the one sidewalk-less block to their house. If you were going for a good luck charm, why not choose a hundred? Why only five?
“That was quick,” Dean is sprawled on the sofa, and unlit cigarette between his teeth, “do you just wait outside the door? Creep.”
He says it without feeling.
“No,” Sam answers, thinking he should wait an extra ten minutes next time, or would that too obviously be doing what Dean wanted? “And aren’t you supposed to actually light that? I mean, don’t, those things kill you. But you look pretty stupid.”
“Annie thinks I look cool,” Dean takes the cigarette out of his mouth and tries to wedge it back into the box, but the soggy end sticks to the cardboard. He gives up and tosses them both away, “anyways, its what you re supposed to do, after. You know,” he makes a face at Sam that is clearly a poor attempt to wiggle his eyebrows.
“Ugh,” Sam shudders dramatically, “gross.”
“What’s dinner tonight?” Dean asks.
“Pizza.”
Dean makes a sad face, like a little dog.
“Well if I can’t be in the house,” Sam shrugs, and turns away.
“No one said you can’t be in the house,” Dean calls after him Sam doesn’t answer. He walks across the creaky floor to the bathroom and shuts the door, surprisingly loud. He does actually feel a bit ill and scrunches his eyes closed, leaning against the sink. Dean sprawled out on the sofa, the messy bed and comforter lying on the ground. How he still has to sleep in that bedroom. He opens his eyes and leans his forehead on the mirror, watching the lines spider-webbing across the cracked sink. The cracks are larger, he swears, than when they moved in. He spreads his fingers and feels something under his hand, odd and out of place, looks down and finds three of Annie’s butterfly hair clips clustered at the edge of the basin. Annie always, without fail, fought a losing battle to keep her hair in place with at least ten, often more like twenty, small multicolored hair clips in the shape of butterflies with their wings spread. Sam picks up the ones by the sink and feels their cold bodies in his palm, bright green, fuchsia, and ruby red. If he keeps them until tomorrow, he can give them back at the store. Somehow, that would be okay, even though he can’t speak a word to her when she is in the house. The idea still gives him pause—despite his fascination with Annie’s schedule, her hair, her hands, he never really knows that to say to her. As a person, he finds her unremarkable, and yet the space she seems to take in their lives is huge even when she isn’t there.
He pinches the red clip in his fingers, snap snap, like a crocodile mouth. It makes a small but satisfying click. Annie usually wears a line of three to the left of her face, holding back her long bangs. Sam had refused John’s last three haircuts, and his own hair hangs long around his face, easy to lift up and pull back, sliding in a butterfly until it presses painfully against his scalp. He carefully adds the other two, taking care that they are all in a line, evenly spaced.
He lifts his eyes to his reflection in the mirror. The face staring back at him looks...different. Pretty. He doesn’t look at all like Annie—except, maybe, his brown eyes, the shape of his face. The bright colors stand out against his dark hair, the bare walls, one sweet bright thing. Maybe that’s how Dean sees Annie. He tilts his head, flicks his hair behind his ear the way she does, smiles with his mouth closed. His reflection smiles back. His reflection looks hungry.
***
One day, Dean doesn’t come home for dinner. The next day, he doesn’t come home again. Sam cooks and eats Dean’s portions until his stomach hurts. He falls asleep. looking at the empty bed. He’s not dead, Sam would know if he was dead. He would just know. He’s sure. On the next morning, Sam wakes up to a silence so loud it hurts his ears.
The house is empty. Again, always, their house is always empty these days. The dinner Sam cooked last night, left on a low simmer for hours waiting for Dean to come home, is congealed and burnt on the stove-top. The sun in peeking in the windows, scorching everything it touches. The low fog from last night has burned off and everything is clear in that hazy way it gets in the extreme heat. Everything is clear—Dean isn’t coming back. Like dad, he has found something else. Like dad, he is scared of Sam, can’t stand to be near him anymore. In the middle of the night Sam prays that he can wind back time, just a month, just to do the whole thing again but better. He would do it better this time. He wouldn't scare Dean, wouldn't disgust him. In the morning sunlight, he knows it doesn’t work like that.
Sam scrapes the pasta out of the pan into the trash. He washes all the dishes that have piled up on their coffee table and the counter, and then he scrubs the pots and pans. He goes into their room where Dean’s bed in still lying unmade, like he just tossed off the covers, like he’s coming back. Sam grits his teeth and strips the bed, throwing the blankets into a pile on the floor, wrestling off the fitted sheet and throwing it in hamper. Tomorrow, he’ll take them all to the laundromat, turn on the scalding water and wash every trace of Dean away. He’s left, the one thing he promised never to do. He’s left, just like everyone else.
The free morning paper, usually nothing but advertisements, has a photo of the dead man across the front. He is squeezed between the menu for a new Italian restaurant and a coupon for first-time skydivers. A three-sentence obituary is printed under the photo, which is a photo of the body, eyes closed but wrinkled and wrong, cheeks hollow. Sam wonders if you’re allowed to print that, if there is no other photo of the man from his lifetime. Alive, though, no one in town would know who he was. No one would care.
He was a university professor. He died “suddenly.” He had set off for a hike up past the railroad tracks, and disappeared for three days. He had fought with his wife. She hadn’t even called the police.
What would dad do? What would Dean do?
They would run, clearly. They would leave.
But they would also find out what had happened, because there was nothing in the world more important than finding evil and wiping it out. Not comfort and not promises and not even family. Sam packs a backpack and lets the door fall shut behind him.
***
Once, early on, he had persuaded Dean to go with him to see one of the world-famous natural stone arches. When they had arrived, Sam had stared up at the red rock, holding its impossible bridge shape high over their heads, and had laughed. It looked like something you would find in a water park, over the entrance to their biggest slide.
“It’s alright, I guess,” Dean had said as they turned away, and had taken Sam’s hand to help him down a particularly tricky bit of rock, and had held it all the way back to the car.
Sam crosses the railroad tracks where the man as last seen. He can see for miles in both directions and there is no train, but he still shivers a little while stepping over the rails. He hitches up his backpack and begins to climb.
For an hour, he follows the trail, sipping his water regularly and re-applying sunscreen when he rests. But the man wasn’t found on the trail. He didn’t walk easily in and out and he didn’t walk safe. Sam takes a breath of the burning air and spins around, eyes panning over the ridged horizon. No direction feels more right or wrong than any other. He spins again, half-dizzy with it, and sets off in the direction that his feet land.
The rhythm of walking and never quite catching his breath becomes natural, step after step, the rocks shimmering in the heat, like the world is underwater. Cacti coming straight up out of the stone, though he knows they are in fact clinging to the tiniest patch of dirt. Decayed matter, piling up accidentally in a crack in the rock, and life springing from it, vivid green and dangerous. We grow where we are planted, even when there is nothing to grow from.
He takes a swig from his bottle and finds it empty, a few last drops of water landing hot and gritty on his tongue. He swallows and it feels like swallowing dust, like choking on air. He breathes in and feels the superheated desert air in his windpipe, in his lungs, warming him from the inside out. He carefully tucks the bottle back in his bag. He keeps walking.
Time fades to a distant buzz. The sun crawls incrementally across the sky. Nothing moves, not hard rock or the stiff branches of the cacti or even the air. Every rise and pile of rocks looks them same and every one looks unfamiliar. If Sam were a thirsty creature hunting the land, well, he’d probably be asleep in his cave right now. But still he searches.
He drops his hands to the stone, hot to the touch, to scramble four-legged up a steep rise, and as he rounds the top there are animals, suddenly, licking the rock.
No, he looks closer, hands still planted on the rock, palms raw. They are nosing for plants in those tiniest of cracks, the puff of warm air from their nostrils just slightly stirring the dust. Sam stares at them. The larger one, with huge, curling horns, a goatish narrow face, soft muzzle and big eyes. Her horns curl in nearly a full circle, back to front, like the creatures in the medieval illuminated texts he once spent a whole month puzzling over. Beside her are two smaller ones, lambs or calves, large ears and those knees that bend curiously backward.
The creatures keep grazing. Sam takes a step closer, then another, stands up to his full height. It feels odd to be on two feet again, unstable. Bighorn sheep, though they look nothing like the lambs in the pen behind the cheese shop. Notoriously shy, he remembers. Skittish. And he remembers feeling sympathy, an animal that startled and ran as soon as you looked at them. These don’t run. They don’t react to him at all.
Sam lets out a breath, takes in another. Nothing. The sheep keep on grazing, searching for some kind of life in the deadly heat. He wonders if they can see him, smell him, but they’re don’t seem to. He wonders then if he is dead, if he no longer exists. The mother sheep snorts softly, as if she is agreeing.
Sam watches them chew, watches them move slowly across the rock face, watches the way they nuzzle the ground as though they are in love with it. He puts out a hand to one of the lambs, hoping it will nuzzle his empty palm, too, but it walks on past. He tries to match his breath to theirs but they breathe too fast, move too slow. He lies down on the rock, hard beneath his head, and watches their silhouettes move across the sun. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them hours later, the sheep are gone.
The sun is lower in the sky but it’s no cooler, and Sam’s clothes stick to him where his body is pressed against the rock. He stumbles to his feet and doubles over as he feels a crashing wave of dizziness, hands on his knees, the sweat burning off immediately in the dry desert air. The dizziness passes and he lifts a hand over his eyes to peer around him. Long shadows cast by the rocks and mountains fall like canyons across the stone, the whole shape of the landscape changed by the evening light. It hurts to breathe the air. He opens his mouth and feels blood on his cracked lips, licks it away in search of any drop of moisture but it just tastes salty and hot on his tongue.
“Come and get me,” he shouts to the creature, somewhere out there, and his words echo back to him in mockery. He starts walking again, moving like water to follow the path of least resistance downhill. No one comes. He watches his feet take a hundred steps, a hundred more. When he looks up again the sun has sunk behind the mountains.
It dawns on him that there is no creature. That he is the creature. That you keep walking until your legs give out and no one reports you missing. That the killer is the people who won’t miss you, except they don’t notice, so the killer is no one. And so the world is safe. And so he has won.
His foot catches and he falls hard and tastes metal, thinks its blood and then opens his mouth again and realizes its the rail of a train track, flowing through the bottom of the canyon like a river. Entrenched meander, is what you call it when water wears down a landscape so much it creates a new shape. He rolls onto his back and stares up at the stars, so many stars spread out across the sky. The moos rises. Sam has stopped swallowing, has almost stopped breathing. The moon vanishes behind a cloud and he staggers to his feet, trying to follow it, trying to find it. He follows the tracks, stepping on the cross boards, one foot in front of the other. It’s safe. There is no creature. The world is safe.
The tracks turn into concrete and his feet hurt and the moon turns into a red neon sign and when he looks up at it he realizes its the gas station down the street from their house. Six dollars for a case of coke. Two ninety-six for a gallon of gas. No more stars.
The door to their house is still unlocked. It doesn’t feel strange because nothing feels strange anymore because nothing feels anything. He might be dead already. He might be missing.
Sam bends over the kitchen sink and drinks from the tap like an animal, greedy slurps loud in the silence, the liquid spilling down his front and over his cheeks. It tastes like nothing. It doesn’t even feel good.
He straightens up and stumbles to the bedroom door. Closed. He didn’t leave it closed, except the person who left the house was a different person, except he is dead. And there is the empty, stripped mattress, and there across the room is Dean, sprawled out on Sam’s bed, bare arms emerging from under the covers and thrown up over his head. Face pressed to Sam’s pillow.
“You were gone,” Sam says, the words feeling unnatural on his tongue like he is a creature that has forgotten how to speak. Dean startles and opens his eyes, turns his head. The room is dark and Sam can see every detail, every eyelash and crease across his face.
“No,” Dean answers, voice scratchy with sleep, “you were gone. You weren’t here.”
“Oh,” Sam says. Maybe it’s true.
“C’mere,” Dean whispers, and Sam steps forward and climbs into his arms. Dean’s skin is burning hot and his grip is too tight and Sam curls into his chest, closes his eyes and presses his face into Dean’s shirt. He feels like crying but no tears come. He feels like he might never cry again. Dean sighs into his hair and Dean’s breathing slows into sleep. Sam breathes, too, in the darkness and his heart beats hard enough that he kind of feels like he’s still dying but at least he’s not alone. He’s never been alone.
***
In the morning, Sam wakes still thirsty with Dean’s arms wrapped around him. The morning sun slants across the bed and they sprawl in it like lizards, like time has stopped moving.
“Hey,” Sam mouths.
“Hey” Dean breathes back. Its Sunday or its Monday and it doesn’t matter because everything is suspended. Sam drifts back to sleep staring into Dean eyes and wakes again later and Dean is still looking at him.
“So,” Dean says, and then the door bangs open and their father’s voice echoes down the hall.
“Boys,” he shouts, “I’m home.”