Chapter Text
1 Year Earlier
“Let’s run away tonight.”
Sam’s voice is quiet where it breaks through the darkness, a whisper, like a pebble dropped in a lake. Tentative, testing the waters, soft enough to allow Dean plausible deniability if he wants to pretend he’s too close to sleep to hear it.
It’s tempting, that pretense. Dean is tired. He’s always tired. But right now he’s tired in a different way, in a way that is deeper and truer than what he feels on a regular basis.
Bone-tired.
That’s what he calls it, in his head, the times when he gets like this. Bone-tired. Not because the tiredness is heavy enough to seep down to his bones.
The tiredness is always heavy enough to seep down to his bones.
No, bone-tired is different. Bone-tired is when the tiredness seems to come from his bones, leeching out from his deepest parts and leaking into his bloodstream.
It’s like there is poison, inherent within him. Poison that slows him, dulls him, muddles his mind, muffles his heart. He doesn’t know how it got inside him to begin with. He doesn’t have any idea how to get it out. He can only watch helplessly as the bad days beat the fissures wider, like an angry fist against cracking glass.
The poison trickles out from the fissures like ink, and dyes his whole existence grey.
He doesn’t have the energy to think straight, when he’s bone-tired. He doesn’t even have the energy to feel.
He’s bone-tired, tonight.
He’s bone-tired.
His clients were rough, and John was angry with him, and he’s been hit so many times that his whole body feels like one big bruise.
Yet stumbling back to the tiny room he shares with Sam, he’d felt no swell of gratefulness. Collapsing onto the ground besides Sam’s bed, his usual wave of relief was nowhere to be found.
The capacity to even care that they day is finally over had been drained out of him. The energy he’d need to appreciate his repose is energy he just doesn’t have.
So when Sam’s lilting voice breaks through his haze of near unconsciousness, it’s hard to find the will to respond.
“Let’s run away tonight.”
The words are sweet and bright, a promise of their own shared secret.
Yet said so quietly, so unobtrusively, in a tone made to be ignored.
It’s intentional, Dean knows. Sam speaks softly most nights, to keep away the demons that might be alerted by the noise. But this tone, barely audible, is reserved for when Dean is bone-tired.
Sam can always tell, somehow, though Dean would never say a word about it.
But he can tell, and he responds, offering Dean a conversation without demanding his attention. Do you want to talk? he’s asking, so quietly that Dean can answer by just pretending not to hear.
It’s this more than anything that has Dean’s eyes fluttering open, that has the corner of his mouth being tugged upwards.
Against his poisoned will, he feels a dull pulse of fondness in his heart.
“To where?” Dean murmurs back, and he hears Sam shift in his bed above him.
From his spot on the ground, Dean stares up at the mattress until he sees the outline of a messy haired head peek over it.
The little light in the room glints off of Sam’s big eyes, like pretty stones shine in a creek.
“Dunno,” he says. “It’s your turn, anyway.”
“Can’t choose tonight,” Dean replies. “Too tired.”
He hears Sam sigh. Or maybe he’s just breathing.
“The moon.”
An amused sound pushes its way out of Dean’s stomach, something that could have been a laugh, if it hadn’t lacked the energy.
“The moon?”
“Why not?”
“How are we gonna get there?”
“That’s not part of it.”
Dean makes a skeptical sound.
Sam’s bedframe creeks, and Dean watches as his silhouette rises a little, like the boy is pushing himself up on his arms.
“It’s not, Dean. We never talk about how we would get anywhere.”
And that’s true, Dean supposes, and feels an uncomfortable twist in his gut.
They never talk about how they would get to the places they dream about. Even when they talk about running off to the next town, or the woods, or just over the hill they can see from their window.
It’s all equally impossible.
So it doesn’t matter.
“Alright,” Dean acquiesces, and tries to push the aching twist of reality aside. “The moon, then. What’s the moon like? Why are we running away to it?”
“Hmm,” Sam hums. “I don’t know. It’s pretty.”
“Could we even stand on the moon? What’s it made of, clouds?”
Sam scoffs.
“It’s a rock, Dean. It’s like a mini planet.”
He says it like this is something everyone knows, which Dean knows for a fact it is not.
“Where did you learn about what the moon’s made out of?”
“I read it in a pamphlet.”
The fondness in Dean’s heart grows stronger.
“Oh, of course.”
There’s silence for a while, then. Dean stares at the beam of dull white light that reaches out across the ceiling, coming from the very source they are so nonsensically discussing.
It creeps in through the space between the wall and the roof, where the beams weren’t fit together quite right.
The draft creeps in through that space as well.
Dean curls his thin fingers into his ratty blanket, and pulls it tighter around his body.
His skin prickles with goosebumps, and feels rough like sandpaper against the blanket tucked in around him.
“I want to go somewhere warm, though,” he says out of nowhere.
He hears Sam twisting in his own blanket on the bed.
“I know you do. I know you hate the cold.”
The serious tone with which the boy speaks makes Dean feel shy, suddenly, leaves him feeling abruptly exposed.
I know you hate the cold.
Dean knows Sam knows. Sam has seen him cry, enough times, as John has pushed him out the door into the bitter nighttime. He’s found him enough times curled behind the ale barrels in the morning, stiff and blue and half-dead.
He’s always so frantic, when he shakes Dean awake.
Dean used to think it’s because he’s late for his chores.
Recently, though, the panic on Sam’s face has made Dean wonder if Sam’s afraid he’ll one day find a corpse.
Recently, Dean’s been afraid of that too.
I know you hate the cold.
Unwarranted tears spring to his eyes, and Dean tries to brush them away discreetly, glad for the cover of night time.
In the dark, Dean can’t see where Sam is looking, but he feels the boy’s eyes piercing through him just the same.
Lying on his side, Dean draws his legs up to his chest like he wishes he could draw his words back into his mouth.
“Is it cold on the moon?” Dean asks.
He hates how vulnerable his voice sounds.
“No,” Sam says immediately. “Or, I don’t know. Let’s say it’s not.”
“Ok.”
“I think it’s warm like summertime.”
“Ok.”
Sam’s form, which had up till now been raised and visible to Dean, disappears. Dean hears the mattress rustle as Sam turns to lie flat on his back.
Sam sighs, a long, drawn out sound that seems too genuine to come from a nine year old boy.
Dean shuts his eyes.
He’s so tired.
His body throbs where he’s been hurt.
“I think it’s warm on the moon. And I think there’s lots of plants and stuff, with things that we could eat.”
“Ok,” Dean says again, without opening his eyes.
“The best thing about the moon is that there’s no one else there,” Sam continues. “So there’s no one to make us work or hit us or make you have sex with them. And you wouldn’t have to get up so early to do chores, because there’s no one around who could make you. And I could read all the time! And dad wouldn’t be there to get mad at me for it.”
“Can’t read if there’s no one around to write anything,” Dean mumbles, mostly into his blanket.
Sam still hears him.
He hums.
“That’s true.”
A pause.
“That’s ok, though, if it means we get left alone. That would be nice, Dean, wouldn’t it? To be left alone?”
Dean murmurs in agreement.
That would be nice, he thinks vaguely.
It would be nice, to live on the moon, with no one but Sam around.
He wouldn’t even mind if it was cold, if he and Sam were left alone.
It would be so nice, to be left alone.
His mind has gone fuzzy around the edges. His breathing starts to even out.
He’s halfway to unconsciousness when Sam’s voice breaks through the dark again.
“Dean?” he asks tentatively.
“Hmm?” Dean responds, a halfhearted effort at letting the boy know he’s still awake.
It takes Sam a while to respond again, long enough that Dean wonders if he’d dreamed his name being spoken.
Eventually the boy does continue, though, and just before Dean tilts over into sleep.
“Do you think we could do it, one day?”
Dean shifts, and then regrets it, because it puts pressure on his bruised ribs.
“Do what?”
“Run away.”
Slowly, Dean’s bleary eyes open, as his heart turns cold in his chest.
They’ve had this conversation before.
“No,” Dean says simply.
There’s no point in sugar coating the truth.
Sam sniffles, and Dean realizes with a pang that he must be crying a little.
Dean doesn’t know how long he’s been crying for.
“Why not?” Sam asks, and he sounds so much like the child he is.
Dean stares at the planks of wood that make up the floor besides him, then up at the ceiling, at the beam of white light.
“Because there’s nowhere like the moon, Sam,” he says quietly. “There’s nowhere like any of the places we dream about.”
“There should be.”
“But there isn’t. It’s all just more of the same.”
Another sniffle, from the bed besides and above him.
Dean feels a deep ache in his chest, but it’s strangely distant, strangely dulled.
It feels like the ache of an old wound, like the throbbing he gets sometimes in his leg and ribs where they were broken and never healed right.
Bone-tired, Dean thinks again. He can feel it coming back, creeping through his veins. The poison is leeching out from inside him again, and he can’t feel more than a distant sadness at the hopelessness of their lives.
“One day you’ll grow up, Sammy,” Dean promises, helplessly. “One day you’ll inherit everything, and you’ll be in charge. I’ll take care of you, until then.”
Sam hiccups.
“And I’ll take care of you,” he insists, wetly. “I love you, Dean.”
“Sam,” Dean says, pained.
“I do. I love you.”
I’m just a slave, Sam. Just a whore.
But there’s no point in arguing. Sam is nine, and Dean looks after him. It’s natural that he feels affection towards him, right now.
“Like I said,” Dean whispers back. “You’ll grow up.”
And you’ll grow out of your attachment to me.
“I’ll take care of you when I’m a grown up, too,” Sam vows. “I won’t treat you like my dad does.”
The pain in Dean’s heart pulses like an open wound.
They both know the likelihood of Dean surviving until Sam inherits is basically zero.
And Dean knows, even if Sam doesn’t, that the likelihood of Sam still caring about Dean by that point is basically zero as well.
Dean pushes aside the childish longing he feels for the future Sam childishly promises him, and steadfastly ignores the hurt he feels when he thinks of Sam growing out of his fondness for him.
Don’t be stupid, Dean tells himself. You’re just a whore. He’s not supposed to love you. If he still thinks he loves you by the time he grows up, you didn’t do a good job raising him.
“Your dad treats me just fine,” Dean says, instead of anything else flying around in his head.
It’s the truth, anyway, though Sam never seems to be able to accept it.
Predictably, he doesn’t accept it now either.
“He beats you. He makes you work so much. He makes you have sex with people all the time.”
Dean shuts his eyes against the reality of his life, repeated back to him like an echo.
“It’s what I’m for, Sam.”
“That’s not true. That’s not true.”
“It is true.”
“No it’s not.”
“Yes, it-”
Dean cuts himself off, and sighs.
He’s so tired.
He’s so tired.
Let’s run away tonight.
There’s nowhere to run, even in their minds.
He wishes now that he’d pretended not to hear.
Above him, the moonbeam is still streaked across the ceiling, like a church bell taunting him with an empty promise of salvation.
On impulse, Dean lifts his hand, raising it towards the stripe of white above him, like he’s expecting it to reach back towards him.
Only a few feet in the air, his fingers break into the beam’s line of sight, and the light falls over his hand.
His skin looks strange and otherworldly, cast in the blue tones from the sky. The only thing illuminated in the darkness, he stares at his own hand as if it is something important.
But it’s not important.
It’s not important.
It’s still just his hand, brightly lit as it may be. It’s beautiful to look at. But there’s nothing there in the light to touch, nothing substantial that he could grab onto and keep with him once the night fades away.
He drops his arm back to his chest, and his shadow falls out of the ceiling streak.
“He’s the only one who wants me,” he whispers to the moonbeam.
His confession sounds lonely in the crooked room.
“There’s no moon to run away to, Sammy. And there’s no better life waiting for me when I grow up, if I grow up. There’s just- him. And the hope that he doesn’t get sick of me. So he can do what he wants with me, and he can take what he wants from me. And I’ll be grateful that he wants me at all. Because he’s the only one who does.”
Though nothing at all had happened, he cradles his light-touched hand in the other as if it had been burned.
“I’m sorry, Sammy. I wish things could be better for you now. But they will be better for you when you grow up. You’ll be safe, and happy. But, for me...this is the best it’s going to get, for me. I’m sorry if that makes you sad. You’ll care less about it, as you get older, if it makes you feel any better.”
He stops talking, after that, and stops looking at the moonbeam too.
It’s quiet for such a long time that Dean starts to wonder if Sam has fallen asleep, and after assuming he has, starts to wonder about whether he’s disappointed or not.
Sam hasn’t fallen asleep, though. He hasn’t fallen asleep, and when he finally speaks again his voice sounds as tired as Dean’s heart feels.
“I don’t think want to play the run away game, anymore.”
Dean shuts his eyes, bone-tired, and lets the day drop away like a canvas.
“Yeah. I don’t think I want to play the run away game anymore either.”