Archive of Our Own

On October 18th, 2005, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department was notified by a local emergency call center that a body had been found in a shallow grave off of rural historic route 66.

A local farmer, going by the name of Alexander P. Fletchley (though none of them considered even for a second that this was his real name) had been the one to stumble across it. His hound, sniffing for bucks, had howled and pulled the man's arm right out of the socket, leading old Fletchley right to the body of one John Doe.

“One hand sticking up," he’d said, spreading his fingers, "like it was planted there." Marked with a twig cross bound together in twine.  

His cause of death? A gunshot wound. Like the barrel of the gun had been shoved up through his mouth. No bullet found anywhere. The body, weirdly enough to interest Dr. Jones at the Springfield coroner's office, had been doused in kerosene. She guesses that the assailant had been planning to burn the victim but, in an act of remorse, had buried him instead.

Based on the body’s rot patterns, she can say that he’d been buried there a week, dead for only slightly longer. There had been a fight: the victim had a nose fracture, as well as a number of fractures in the hands, and internal bleeding of the abdomen.

The coroner’s office sent out notices for identification. Teary-eyed loved ones came and went, peering through the glass into the morgue, looking for birthmarks and childhood scars, pleading to stay just one more moment. Dr. Jones turned them all away, eventually, even the ones who said they knew deep, deep in their hearts this was Thomas, José, George, Elias. That despite the unrecognizable remains they knew in their soul who it was.

But no one ever came to know dear old John Doe. The fact of the matter was, the man who killed him didn’t even know the body had been discovered. He'd hightailed it out of Illinois days ago and hoped that snow or rain or falling leaves would cover the body for him and that, come time for the summer months to roll on in, the kudzu would overflow from the forest and envelop John Doe’s body.

He had worse monsters to hunt, anyway.

Hundreds of miles to the south and a few months later, Sam and Dean Winchester find themselves in a sticky-floored, neon-glowing bar. 

Its a standing table, back-booth type of place with dim lights and a mirror behind the bar. Pool tables and a payphone inside, bowls of peanuts or popcorn or Cracker Jacks on each table. Men and women with red, white, and blue paisley bandanas tucked here and tied there: a grand patriarchal nativity scene laid out in broken bottles. Holy is the mounted fish on the wall and holy is the winner of the Two Foot Hot Dog Eating Challenge, whose smiling and grainy photograph presides just as easily as a crucified saint over the payphone, scarred with scribbled numbers.

And me, a stain, Sam thinks of himself. Or maybe that's just the PBR talking. With Palo Alto freshly in his rearview, the wound is still festering. His fury is alive and piques at random times. Here, in a place which used to be their place of worship, the anger tumbles out of him in reaching blue ribbons. A bar like this his father would’ve named chapel or supper; “I’m heading to service,” with a laugh.

If Jessica were alive. If he had never left that night. If there was no such thing as Kansas.

They just wrapped up a haunting in some lonely church out here. It ended with only one death, a police officer who, in the ghost’s defense, had been an asshole, and the two of them were grabbing a drink before turning in. They hadn’t even booked a room yet, the dopamine rush from killing the ghosts was still pumping in Dean when they saw this place and he had to pull over.

This is how the night would go: Dean, sinking four shots of corn liquor with the grad student home for Thanksgiving, would be asked home. A gazelle of a woman in her lipliner lips and permed-out hair and soft arms, Hey, sugar, how about we get out of here?

Dean would come over and clap a hand to his shoulder and say something lame and Sam would roll his eyes and ask whether he needed to hitch back to the motel or not. And then off they would gallop together until whatever hour came that Dean turned back into a pumpkin.

Sam would head back to the room and crack open the book he snagged from the last library they passed through. This time it was something about interspecies communication among trees: thick walls of text on how the big trees would sometimes die early to let the younger trees, who they viewed as kin, live on. It has a big, yellow WITHDRAWN sticker wrapping around the spine.

Now, he's already drifted away from the booth that had Sam folded himself into when they first arrived. He’s buried in a fat stack of smudged-ink local newspapers and tabloids, searching for demonic omens, wet rings from the bottles making a pattern across the paper. He wets the tip of the pen on his tongue and tastes ink. A woman in red boots and tattoos sucks on a lime wedge and gives him a wink. Outside, the breeze is light, Sam knows, but inside, the air is thick with beer belching and musk and the clacking of cue balls. This Arizona heat is hanging on like a tick, he jots down in his legal pad.

Though bars like this were smattered all through Palo Alto and reside like a fungus on most every roadside, he always veered Jess away, saying that the cheap beer was never worth a knife in the gut when really it was just the memories twisting into him; Doing his homework in the car outside with just the streetlights to write by; In high school, running away again and again and always ending up right back at a place like this. They usually let him use the phone, at least. Dean picked him up this once time, both of them completely wasted. Nearly drove them off a bridge.

He looks up at where he’s been keeping track of his brother, huddled at the bar. His back’s to him, but he knows it’s his brother because the light is shining dully in that familiar way off their dad’s leather jacket, the scratched brown turning pinkpurple at his shoulders beneath the Miller Lite sign. The alcoholic burn.

He’s sipping from something cheap in brown glass and talking with someone. He turns his head and Sam can see he’s wearing that shrink-wrapped smile and rolls his eyes. At least when dad was around Dean would stand more still, have more focus. Be worried about getting smacked upside the head for acting like he was worth more than he was.

Absent-mindedly, Sam turns back to his shuffle of papers. At the top of the stack is a Daily Tribune they picked up from a town called Why where there was just the one gas station and the one flashing yellow light and a post office that was more a shack than any sort of office he’d ever seen. They report on acres of agave plants sprouting, fully grown, seemingly overnight in the Sonoran Desert. Janice Juan-Manuel says (rather poetically, Sam appreciates) that while it is being accepted as a “blessing on the whole” by most of the community, a few fringe organizations have begun to stock their bunkers, have begun to whisper devil at the “frequency of flies swarming”. Sam’s mind seizes on the idea. The Demon, he thinks in a flash of hot air.

They could turn in now and leave early to get there the next afternoon. Hell, why not just drive there right now. Maybe dad would pick up on the same story and this will be the spot to find him. If it isn’t demons, it must be some sort of sorcery or good luck charm or wish that will go wrong. All it would take is a breath of a wish, a cry of hope in a bundle of magic and their father would jump on it like fire to brush. Maybe they’ll go as Fish and Wildlife agents or park rangers, both of which he knows Dean hates impersonating. This makes Sam grin and hurry to gather all the loose papers together.

He slings his bag across his shoulders and heads over to the bar, where Dean has disappeared. Looking around, there are two empty shot glasses and a beer bottle next to a few crumpled bills where he saw Dean sitting, but he’s nowhere to be seen amongst the throngs of drinkers. He makes eye contact with the mustached man behind the bar, tipping up his chin in question. The bartender breaks away from his spirited conversation with three young men at the end who call and jeer in protest.

“The guy who was sitting here before, did you see where he went?” Sam asks, leaning in a little and raising his voice to be heard.

The guy braces his thick arms on the sturdy counter and looks him up and down. He has tan skin and shiny black hair tucked behind his ears. A pale shirt with pearl buttons wraps around his round stomach.

“I’m his brother.” Sam continues when the man says nothing.

“Pisser,” The guy answers, nodding and pointing him toward the back, through all the booths and tables and the popcorn and peanuts and the swaying women. The square of wood where couples are dancing to latin music. The sweating men gazing up hopefully at the corner television, yelling "yes, yes, yes, yes!" as the ball gets closer to the goal. A chorus of desire.

He strides through all this into the dark hallway of the bathroom, finds one locked, and pounds on the door until it opens and a short woman exits, pushing past him and giving him a dirty look. Sam smiles apologetically but pulls on the other door, only to realize its a broom closet. Grunting in annoyance, he peeks into the last bathroom. Empty. No toilet seat. Graffitied walls: sarah 444-7893 sucks cock and GOD LOVES YOU and a confession, i’m not getting anywhere in this fucking life.

“Goddamn it.” Sam sighs in frustration, backing up and leaning against the wall. His bag slides off his shoulder and falls to the floor. In this little alcove there are a few dusty family photos, signed rodeo star headshots from the 70’s. State fair ribbons for pickles and calf roping and cotton thread. There's a picture of a young boy holding a long gun, his father standing behind him with one large hand resting on his shoulder. Dead javelina at their feet. They’re beaming. Sam swallows the lump in his throat.

High and dry. How the hell am I going to get home? Sam thinks disparagingly. Right before realizing that there isn’t anywhere for him to go. That no one is expecting him. Giving Dean’s cell a cursory ring, an error message answers back. Dead. Thought so. He hangs up as the little voice says please call back again la—.

He’ll just wait around until Dean gets back. He’s done it so many times it's basically a hobby. And if he doesn’t show up he might just need to hitch his way somewhere. Or try to break into the car, maybe, if it's still out there. And what— hot wire it? God, Dean would freak. But right now? Really? When dad is already gone? Dean disappears into the starless nothing at this hour and doesn't even leave word with the bartender?

Unless…? He didn’t even check.

Sam bustles back to the bar. He glances over at his booth, still empty. Looks around at the cramped space and sees no trace of him. Searching over the heads of men, some standing, some sitting, some with hats, all talking loudly, he tries to get the attention of the guy with the pearl buttons. It's like this place is swelling with people. Insistent chatter. Hyena laughs. Gulps and twisted faces full of bitter liquor.

“Hey,” Sam calls to him.

“Heyyy," mocks one of the men in a girlish voice, turning around to him. It's the guys that the bartender was talking to earlier. “You found your man yet?” A few of his friends laugh a little. Mostly they’re focused on a game of quarters.

Ignoring them, he signals to the bartender again. He’s being chattered at by some middle-aged women at the end of the bar and pouring a long line of tequila into a glass which shimmers with light. He answers and they blush in delight, hollering.

“Hey!” He barks, louder.

Through the fog of cigarette smoke the bartender looks over his shoulder to Sam. The man mouths, what? Shaking his head a little.

“My brother? Did he leave a note?” Sam asks, pointing to the bathrooms behind him, miming writing something down.

One of the women trails a lacquered fingernail down the man’s forearm. The bartender’s brows furrow and he points with the bottle back toward the bathroom. Confused, Sam puts his hands in the air. The guy points more insistently. His mustached mouth makes the shape of the words right there, then returns to serving the women.

Wheeling around, Sam spots him. Through the net of faces, the tangles of bodies and chairs and tables, the clack of the pool tables which must be out there somewhere: there is Dean, wiping at the corner of his mouth with his thumb, coming in through the broom closet. He’s picked up something off the ground. A bag. Sam clutches at his side. His bag. Confused and knowing it belongs to Sam, Dean looks around until he sees his brother, standing still in the vibrating crowd.

Sam starts forward, relieved and annoyed and ready to fucking go to the Sonora, when someone else comes out of the closet behind him. A man. A man tucking his shirt into his pants discretely, looking around. Youngish. Shaved. With silver jewelry that sparkles even in the dark of the hallway. A man with and a coyote’s gait. A beautiful man.

From across the room, Dean watches the understanding begin to unfold on his little brother’s face. His knowing is like a flashlight beam that has turned onto him: Queer! Over here, I found one! Dean kicks himself, like fuck. Anybody could've seen them slip through that door together, anyone could be watching them right now. He should've known to leave well enough alone. Oh, but Jebediah— his shiny trophy buckle, just won that day. His confident shoulders. He was standing there at the bar looking at Dean like it wasn't a bottle his lips were wrapped around. And later, when Jeb sucked Dean's thumb into his mouth while there was still Illinois dirt under his fingernails and reached a hand down Dean's pants and grasped at him and Dean looked up to the ceiling, gasping—

Oh, hell, Dean thinks. Jeb’s barely out from behind the door before Dean gives him a sorrowful look, then shoots through the rush of people. If he hasn’t scored a ticket downstairs already, leaving Jeb behind in that place might just do it.

Sam follows in his brother’s dust cloud. He scrambles through the Dean-shaped holes in the crowd, not even bothering to excuse himself when he knocks glasses out of hands. The music is loud. Trumpets! More and more trumpets blaring! Men crying, No, no, no! in defeat as the ball is caught by goalie and punted across the field.

The door is just about to swing shut when Sam bursts through it into the dry, night air. He can hear insects chirping, frogs celebrating the end of another day. His footsteps crunch hastily along the dirt parking lot, packed with cars, trucks, and motorcycles. Agave plants forgotten.

Dean is hanging halfway inside the car already, his hand poised on the roof like he was waiting to see if Sam was going to come out. He’s aiming for casual, but Sam has always had to pick up on his ticks, the anxiety in the quirk of his mouth. His wide eyes. The stillness of potential flight.

“We're leaving. You need some sleep.” Dean says.

“I don’t—” Sam stammers.

“Get in the car.” Dean interrupts. His face is white. He’s hardly seen it this white before.

“No, you’re wasted. Give me the keys.” Sam answers incredulously and extends his arm over the roof of the car, palm up for the keys.

He shakes his head. “I’m not.” A hickey shines on the apple of his throat when he swallows. There's one buzzing streetlight out here, one empty Shell station with flickering letters. An endless stretch of empty road in both directions.

“But you were just—” Sam starts again but is cut off by the agonized expression on Dean’s face. Fucking some guy in a broom closet. Is what he doesn’t say. He thinks it might be in bad taste. Then worries that what he said might have put a bad taste in Dean’s mouth anyway. Sam shakes his head. Not sure what to say.

“Sam. I’m not,” He insists. “Get in the damn car.”

“I didn’t mean—” He tries to backtrack. Caught off guard, he clicks his mouth shut. “My bag?”

“Get. In. The car.” Dean grits out. And Sam gets in the car.

Later on in the impala with the loud beat of Page and Plant in the tape deck to drown out the pea-soup silence and the windows rolled up to keep it from spilling out onto the street, Sam wonders at Dean. He’s not sure. He’s just- he had never known. Not for sure. Shouldn’t he have known? Had they not grown up in each other’s pockets? Handcuffed to the same radiator? In the same drunk tank, talkin’ to the local wino, John?

He hadn’t thought of the possibility of Dean being attracted to guys in a really long time. Dean had always ripped comment after comment off his tongue on Sam’s hair, his taste in music, his brains, whatever; just latching onto what John said to rile him up. Mostly he’s just surprised because he had thought he understood Dean completely. Like, when he took John’s side in keeping Sam on the bench, in the dark one too many times, he saw Dean in his entirety. And decided he couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Did you know?” Dean asks out of the blue, a few miles later. He’s confrontational like a little kid. Like he’s seventeen again and demanding that the werewolves let Sammy go, like that one time. Serious, gruff. Insecure. Just a little desperate. He doesn’t need to say what he’s asking about.

Sam looks over at him through his bangs. He’s gripping the steering wheel something serious. The silver ring on his hand is digging into his finger.

He wants to say I did, but he has to deny it, too. He wants to yell at him that of course I knew, you idiot. But also… he didn’t, not completely. He wants to say that he knew, yes, but it felt like a dream! That childhood lasts forever and ever until its over, and suddenly you’re spending the whole rest of your life trying to reckon with what happened to you then.

“Yeah.” Sam concedes, finally. He watches Dean’s face go through a split second of some emotion: a nose twitch and his mouth twisting, then it’s over. He’s all bricked up again.

Empty desert and monumental rock formations whiz by, a jackal barks outside and rabbits get caught under the spinning wheels of an 18-wheeler, far away.

“Right.” He spits out. And that’s when Sam knows it was the wrong thing to say.

It’s just that there was this one time. Just this one fucking time when they were kids, and Sam had still been in the middle building next to the high school and the red bricks would get so hot in the June sun. And he saw Dean as a stranger for a split second.

They were in a forested part of Nevada, just outside of some city but far enough away that the suburbs had dissolved into a carpet of urban sprawl, and the highways stretched into the horizon and each strip mall was an oasis. And Sam had been, what, fourteen? Eighth grade? And he had been walking the mile around the track, squinting against the sun with this other kid, a girl named Larissa, who had this swinging black hair that shone in the sun like a beetle and these dark, dark brown eyes. Sam felt stuck in them like amber as they walked around and around.

He liked Larissa because she talked a lot about normal stuff, like soccer practice and sleepovers. Plus, they had English together and so sometimes they would spend gym talking about the assigned reading. Ever since Dean hit junior year and started disappearing more often, spending less and less time with Sam and more time providing for him, there was less space for chatter, for fun. He couldn't remember the last time they went to an arcade together, when it was once so regular. They'd just stopped going one day. More talks like act tough and you’ll be tough instead. Dean saying take a shot at me, Sammy, slug me a good one.

Sam remembers they were talking about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He’d seen the movie a million times, but never read the book until that year. He remembers having just finished it.

“It’s way too hot out here, I feel like I’m about to burst,” Larissa groaned.

“Like a blister in the sun,” Sam had said.

Larissa answered,“Why don’t we get out of here, then?”

And, well, Sam had heard that phrase played out on the screen of exactly every television set in every nowhere motel room he had ever stayed in. Dean, always kicking back on the bed or microwaving plastic trays of mac and cheese, with a grin on his face and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He always laughed and shook his head at Sam because he thought that Sam was a know-nothing little kid, but Sammy knew. He knew what it meant to say let’s get out of here, baby, let’s go back to my place.

"Alright," Sam answered.

He followed Larissa off the track and across the parched grass to one of the small little brick buildings that held the extra kick balls and jump ropes and football practice stuff. They had huge dumpsters behind them. He fiddled with his fingers the whole way there, because he didn’t like Larissa in that way. Not in the way that Dean and dad would have thought, and would have been proud of him for. Not in the way that he’s always seen.

Because it had always been like that: girls are for being wanted and guys are supposed to want. Well, Sam was fourteen, sure, but he didn’t want to date Larissa. Not like he'd seen. Making out in the hallway, wet frenching in the movie theater and knocking the popcorn over. Mostly he admires her and wishes they were actually friends. Mostly he wishes they could hang out at the mall and get corn dogs from the food court and watch Matilda, which had just come out, even though they were too old for it.

He’d first seen her after the last bell had rung about a month before, when he’d been waiting outside of civics so that he and Dean could walk back to the motel together. She was decorating her friend's locker for her birthday, cutting pictures out of Teen Beat to stick on the outside of it. Another one of her friends had come up behind her and startled her and they laughed and their lip gloss sparkled under the fluorescents. Sam had let his shaggy hair flop over his face and let the moment pass between them.

Dean had ruffled it when he had picked him up that day, and told him he would have to cut it soon, didn’t want dad thinking some chick had replaced his son while he was gone.

So Larissa and a nervous Sam took refuge in the shade behind one of the buildings. He remembers how there was a patch of sweat on the back of his gray gym shirt and he had kept plucking at it. But when they got there, Larissa slid down the wall and sat against it. Sam was confused, but did the same. And together they stared into the forest behind the school, all pines and shrubbery. It smelled good out here, better than other places he’d been at this year or in the years past. For a few months they lived in a trailer next to a poultry farm. It always smelled like death and chicken shit. There was a sense of a still existing wilderness somewhere, here. It felt like the last stop, like a pocket in a giant’s pair of pants, like maybe not even God could see them there.

Larissa didn’t kiss him, didn’t even touch him. She rolled onto her front, feeling around under the dumpster looking for something. Sam looked around nervously. He could hear their gym teacher blowing his whistle. She brought out a pack of cigarettes and a red Bic lighter.

"Oh," Sam says stupidly. "Pall Malls."

"Yeah. Girl cigarettes." Larissa laughs. 

Dean says that too. But Dean would also say that those were the ones that Vonnegut smoked, and he would say that as he bummed one from whichever nice lady in mauve lipstick was staying in the room next door that month.

The pack was near empty and soft with use and Larissa’s brown eyes were questioning as she offered it to him.

"Madame," She joked. 

He colored, took one, held it experimentally in between his middle and pointer fingers. He held it in his mouth while she flicked the lighter to ignite its tip. He toked and coughed. Smiling, she slid one between her lips, lit it, then laid back against the cool brick. The smoke was rising all around her. She took a deep breath and looked terribly sad all of a sudden, like all the glitter and earth makeup and bubblegum perfume had risen up and away from her.

Her dark eyelashes fluttered. He took a drag from his and let his head clunk against the brick next to her. He stared up at the cloudless sky and tried not to cough against the rich taste of tobacco in his mouth.

Dean would kill him if he saw him doin’ this, which makes him take another drag, a smoother one, and his head goes all foggy. If John and Dean can be chimneys after a hunt, Sam can have one here, now. What is middle school if not three years fighting monsters?

He feels Larissa’s fingers brush his hand, the one resting on his knee, and he looks at them together, at her blue nail-polished fingers against his square ones that don’t quite feel like his own yet; iridescent.

“Do you like, believe in God, Sam?” Larissa asks him.

“Sure,” Sam says, and it feels both like truth and not, and he takes another hit. His insides burn, and he hopes that it’s from the smoke.

Larissa rests her fingers on his and fiddles with the bracelet on her wrist, her cigarette burning and burning in her finger tips.

“Me too. You see this?” She jingles the bracelet at him. It’s a silver pendant of the Virgin Mary on a chain. He touches the shiny little oval, sees Mary’s head bent in prayer and all the stars around her; how holy she must feel. His fingertips prickle against the metal.

“My parents got it for me when I started 6th grade. They said that it’s a really hard part of a kid's life and that she would guide me when I’m confused.”

She pulls away and stares down at it, ashes her cigarette, then takes another bitter drag, holding the taste in her mouth as she thinks.

She looks back at Sam with that same glossy look of reflected blue skies in her dark eyes, and he realizes, with shame, that he had misinterpreted her completely, that they were completely the same after all.

“My family has something like that, too.” He says. She must feel just as lonely, just as God-abandoned, just as slimy in the skin of her ill-fitting suit.

“I come out here all the time,” Larissa says, and gestures out to the forest beyond them. “I live right around here, so I like to come and read or listen to music to be alone. There's this one spot where the moon comes through the trees all holy-like. My sister is always yelling at me about coming out here alone, though. So annoying.”

Sam had nodded along because, come on, he understood her pain. The weight of surveillance was heavy. But maybe he sided with Larissa’s sister, because it was then that he remembered that monsters spare no one, not grocery store clerks or mothers and certainly not young, God-fearing kids like Larissa. Like him.

“Don’t hate me, but I kinda agree with your sister.” Sam had said, despite knowing what a hypocrite he was. He was always itching to get gone, even then. Every open window and every open door to every house was suitable enough for a swan dive. He thought about running away every day, about walking until he fell off the earth.

“Because I’m a girl.” She said, a statement, not a question, and looked at him skeptically, raising one waxed eyebrow.

“Well, yeah…” Sam said sheepishly. Girls couldn’t defend themselves like guys could, after all. Or at least that's what dad said. But when was anything dad ever said right?

“Or... no. There can be dangerous people out there. And,” He thinks for a moment of changelings and werewolves and shtriga. “Animals, or something. Wolves, bears.”

“Don’t worry about me. The only people out in those woods are kids getting stoned.” She rolls her eyes and takes another drag of her Pall Mall, her voice getting nasally from the smoke as she speaks. “Like these guys right here,” She gestures with her cigarette hand and leans back against the wall.

There’s two teenage guys tromping through the undergrowth, running and leaping, basically flying through the trees. Unstoppable engines of spirit. One of them clutches a bong.

Or— wait. “Hey, that’s my brother,” Sam says, noticing the spiky hair and hearing the rumble of his laughter through the trees.

“I, uh, didn’t know he smoked pot.” He lies. She scoffs, like You think I care?

They had stayed at this motor inn in northwestern Florida for three weeks one time while their dad was off on a demon possession case. Every night after the first week, when he thought Sam was asleep, Dean would sneak out, only to come back to the room reeking of weed and chlorine.

And there it was, the private life that Sam ached for. To not be seen, to not be watched. He wanted to know what Dean was doing so badly. Even more, he wanted to leave and have that for himself.

The other guy was taller and tanner and wearing a white t-shirt that was too big for him; it billowed in the wind, smooth across his chest and untucked from his jeans. They walked and laughed and though Sam knew that Dean kept a gun in the waistband of his jeans and a lock-pick in his boot and a boxcutter in his inner jacket pocket and a switchblade in his outer, he looked so light.

Like there were no doors to unlock or shut or kick down, like there were no doors at all.

They sat at the base of a log together, facing away from the curious eyes they didn’t even know were watching.

Dean took a long pull from the bong and he didn’t look away while he did it, didn’t look away as he exhaled and passed it to the taller guy. When the other guy struggles to light a match they laugh! Eyes closed against the sun! Dean strikes one swiftly, and the other guy lets him. 

Shoulders pressed together, they stare out into the woods, into the silence. Suddenly and with surprising ease and no protest, Dean rests his head against the taller kid’s shoulder. He turns his face into it, breaths in the fabric there. That is when he feels Larissa prickle next to him. He doesn’t chance a glance at her, his face red. What it is...he isn’t sure. Because he may know every definition of freak, but he doesn’t know what to call this. The boy palms the crown of Dean’s head, stretching his fingers to hold it, to stroke it delicately, lovingly.

“I’m guessing you didn’t know about that, either?” Larissa asked.

Embarrassed, Sam stumbled up.

And it’s stupid. It’s so stupid, because they didn’t even kiss, or whatever. They had just sat there in silence. That’s what was so damning, maybe. The silence. The lack of movement. When had Dean ever been happy in the quiet?

“I’m gonna keep walking my mile.” He mumbled to Larissa.

Larissa rises clumsily and flicks her cherry cigarette butt into the brown grass. Sam had started marching away, back to the stupid track and to stupid monsters and the damn real world. Jumping out of God’s back pocket. 

“Wait! Is your brother….” Larissa had said, and Sam doesn’t even know if he imagined disgust in her voice or if it was really there, but either way he turns around and stares at her.

“Is he what?” He demands, suddenly feeling insanely protective of his older brother. Dean had been getting into trouble on Sam’s behalf for as long as he could remember. And usually Sam is goddamn annoyed by it, but for just this second he gets it. Like, maybe, you can love someone to the point of ruining another. To the point of ruining yourself, even.

“You know what I mean,” Larissa had said with those big dark eyes. The place where she had flicked her cigarette butt was smoking, but Sam didn’t bother telling her to stamp it out. He saw her fists clenching and unclenching, the Virgin Mary dangling upside-down in disappointment. He wondered if that forest might catch on fire if he thought about it too hard.

“Just. I don’t mind.” She had pleaded with him, and he had deflated. He had been wrong about her again.

“Really?” Sam had asked skeptically.

“Are you okay with it?” She’d responded, like the answer really mattered to her.

“Well, yeah. Yeah.” Because that’s all Sam could say.

Larissa, the sun reaching them now that they’d walked around from the building that held the rubber kickballs and housed the huge dumpster and was the altar of cigarette confessionals, gave him a smile that even in all the years since, he’s never been able to parse.

They had walked back to the track in silence, and they didn’t talk about it again. They had just kept walking around in circles. And a few weeks later their father got back, and Dean told him that nothing had happened while he was away, that everything has been just peachy, Sir.

And it had been.

So it was then, that one moment where Sam saw Dean in a moment of...something. A moment of weakness, a moment without his filter for kid-brothers. A whole life lived in the walls. Scratching.

Because after that, Sam never saw it again. But he had looked for it everywhere. When John had come back and did end up poking fun at Sam’s hair for looking like a lady, which to their father was a grave insult, Sam looked to Dean, searched, and found nothing. He was all locked up, which made Sam angrier than ever. Screw him, if he was too much of a coward to stand up to their father about this.

Sam hadn’t known what to call it at the time, but his dad had always been peddling poison shit about people like Dean. He called them those folks.

Those folks: as in the people on the television dying everyday that they barely had time to take a glance at; the men who shake hands lightly and smile too much, with their pinkies popped for sipping from the rims of glasses; the women who chew too loud and take up too much space and would never take a comment from John; the people who exist in nebulous confidence with themselves, who exist as though reflected through a prism, the ones who Sam hasn’t seen and won’t meet until college. The people who act just a little bit to the left. Because that’s all Sam could ever identify those folks as. Now, though, he could see it in Dean. It was right there. Like, how had he never seen it so clearly before?

He reevaluated the last long, twenty two years of his life. Dean snuck out to smoke weed and swim in the motel pool and what else? Had there been a girl? A guy? Had they been in love? And how many people had there been? Had his big brother lived and died multiple lives within this one, worshipped many people, become polytheistic and heralding a bloody machete?

Had their four years of separation been as desperately lonely as Sam had always believed, or were there faces there. Some welcoming warmth from the coldness of their father which Dean denies, but falls into with regularity?

They pulled off I-40 in Winslow and the dry air took them to an inn. Dean booked a double while Sam waited outside by the car. The red sand of Arizona gleamed blue in the evening shade and he could feel the slow bustle of small-town life coming to a bookend.

Route 66 crossed through this town: a road steeped in Winchester-leaded gasoline runoff. Guiltily, Sam thought fondly of the last time he had been in Arizona; climbing the peaks, talking to the desert, angry and alone and young and free and the great western sky dotted with stars but absent of any watchful eyes.

The scrub brush and open heat, the motel notepad empty, for once, Sam having used up all the words shouting at the sky.

Upon settling into the room, Dean made a beeline for the bathroom and showered until the drought came back, then slid absolutely into bed, smelling of soap, and leaned over to switch the yellowing lamp off.

Sam felt like a little kid again. Not the one with a Greyhound ticket glued to his fingers but rather when he was younger, before it all. When Dean had first told him the Big Family Secret and he had believed Dean could punch the sun out of the sky if need be. When their father would be two weeks out on a three-day hunt and all he could do was crawl into bed with his big brother and watch cartoons until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, until he could forget they even had a father, which was easy to do at times like those.

In Winslow he tossed and turned and thought of what happened at the bar. Dean’s emotion in the room was stifling but Sam didn’t know if he was making it up or not, if he was sleeping or staring at the wall in resolute silence.

It tasted like anger, maybe, or frustration. Fear.

He got up once and took one of the five loose cigarettes out of the inside pocket of his Carhartt. He’d been carrying them since Palo Alto, scared that if they burned up, he would too. Under the awning he lit one and took a drag, let the comforting taste fill his mouth and relaxed his shoulders. Don't let those be what kill you. Something Jess said to him once, sometime after he had told her about growing up on the road. About his dad. The thought hits him with a jolt, and he immediately stamps it out on the Coke machine. It leaves a black circle in the O. There would have been tears had he not burned so many bodies since then.

He thought of Larissa and Nevada and the year 1996. Clinton. Vampire in Occoquan. José Ramos-Horta won the Nobel Peace Prize. Shifter in Toledo. Princess Diana got divorced. That giant plane crash off Long Island that their father had told them, from a friend of a friend of a friend, had been because of a haunting. John had no friends, Sam knew that now, and that the crash had been because of faulty wiring, not a ghost.

When he came back inside he took his shoes and his coat off and slid into the other bed next to Dean. He was nine, he was twenty two. He was in his dead mother’s womb.

Dean turned over and they faced each other in the silence.

When John came back that first time after Sam learned the truth, he was wrecked from the hunt. He went about his routine, the Are you all still alive? Then, more importantly, Still human? Silver and salt and holy water despite not having seen a demon in years. Then the boots off and the drinking and him giving Dean a soft five-dollar bill and asking him to buy some smokes from the motel front desk, back when they did that.

Then the smoke-filled room and the television switched to Wheel of Fortune and Sam waiting, waiting, waiting for revelation. For John to manifest some sense of light…a goodness; to pull a sword out of his duffel bag and exclaim With this I will save us! For John to finish scribbling in that journal and for him to notice that Sammy was a real boy, now. But it never came. And Dean heated up three TV dinners in the microwave while Sam sat on the formica counter and watched his father disappoint him for the first and millionth time.

Tick, tick, tick; microwave minutes counting down. Tick, tick, tick; spin the wheel one more time! Inhale tobacco, inhale cheap scotch, inhale white turkey with gravy and peas.

“I don’t care if you’re gay, you know.” Sam whispers into the space between them, trying very hard to keep the frustration out of his voice. They’re curled up like two little pearls in an oyster.

“I figured, college boy. All educated and stuff…” Dean whispers back. 

“Dean,” Sam says, exasperated. It’s just like him to put this distance between them. He’s truly the son of John, son of emotional dissolution. “I really don’t. I’m happy for you, even. I didn’t mean to freak out. I was just…I thought I had a lead.”

Dean is silent, but Sam can see his mouth twist, his jaw work. He’s looking down, anywhere but at Sam.

“But why didn’t you tell me?” Upon whispering this, Dean’s jaw quits working. He heaves a breath. Sam can see him fighting the instinct to book it out of here, to turn the light or TV or microwave on.

He seems to make a decision on whether he’s going to ignore Sam or not, because he finally breaks the silence.

“You know Grandpa?” Dean whispers back, tension coiling in the hands clasped beneath his cheek.

“Grandpa Campbell?” Sam asks, surprised. Wondering how this has anything to do with anything. “He died before we were even born.”

“No, the other one. Dad’s. Henry.”

Sam’d never known he was even called Henry. “Kind of,” Sam says, confused as to where this was going.

“He told me about him one time. I mean, you know dad, he only tells us what we need to know.”

“Sure he does.” Sam bites.

“It had to be the summer of ‘89,” Dean continues, ignoring Sam’s pissy response. “I was nine or ten and school was out and dad was havin’ a real hard time looking after us. Because he had just got so used to us being in school all day, you know? So he got back from this hunt— of course this was before you knew about all that —and the room was wrecked. But we weren’t even there, we were down the hall with this nice old couple who were something, like, archeologists, and you wanted to see their coin collection—

"And so he goes banging on all the doors yellin’ his head off and he comes to the one we’re in and I hear his voice, ‘Dean Winchester’,” Dean pitches his voice down low and grumbly. "So I’m freaking out because he told me not to let you leave the room and the couple’s freaking out because they think they’re kidnappers or some shit, and so dad comes in and pulls us out and tears them a new one. Told us to wait for him back at the room.”

Dean pauses and lets out a breath right into Sam’s face. He can hardly remember this, seeing as he was only six, but he can remember their father’s grip on his arm. That eternal seatbelt. In 10th grade English they wrote poetry and Sam had compared it to kudzu; the way it strangles.

“And then what?” Sam whispers back, feeling, suddenly, like he’s just as young as he is in this story. Like Dean is reading to him in stilted phrases from a stolen library book again. He used to have to pause and sound-out words from The Lord of the Rings.

“So dad comes back and he starts yelling at me, really tearing into me. I don’t remember what he said, really, just that I was irresponsible and I didn’t know what they were or if they were, you know, dangerous.” Dean’s voice wavers for the first time. “But these two guys…”

“I don’t remember it being two guys.” Sam says into the silence Dean has left behind.

“Well, it was,” His brother says solemnly. Like he’s sorry for them now, quite simply. “They were.”

Dean barrels on, “I tested them and everything, just like dad taught me. I was careful, damn it. I wouldn’t have let you…” He shakes his head minutely. “Anyway. He starts telling me all this shit about shifters and demons and guys— folks —like that. How they’re… whatever. But I was so young I didn’t know what he was talking about, not really. So he tells you to wait in the room with the shotgun, that him and me were gonna take a drive and that we’d be back in half an hour, to not answer the phone or the door.

“In the car he’s quiet, real mad, you know? And I’m pissing myself, thinking he’s gonna send me away again or something. Then he starts talkin’ about this guy called Henry, tells me he would’a been our grandfather if the bastard hadn’t skipped out so long ago. And he told me that that’s what happens to boys who misbehave. People leave them in the night. And that that’s why he became a jarhead, so that he wouldn’t let his guard down or— or become a sissy, or so that no one would try and skip out in the middle of the night again. He said that I should consider myself lucky,” Dean whispers. “That he’d decided to come back from the hunt this time.

“Then he gave me a .35 and said I’d best been paying attention. And told me to get out of the car and walk back to the room.”

“And what did you do?” Sam asks. A blowout fight, the first of many, ten-years-old and already scratching at his restraints, he’s guessing. But then he remembers this is Dean he’s talking to. Dean whose eyes are intent on his for the first time this whole conversation, whose eyebrows are resolute.

“I walked back.”

They lie there in silence for a while, Sam too tired and thinking too much about everything that Dean’s told him. Information is like currency to guys like dad and Dean; it’s a risk to let some slip, it’s a risk to spend and not gain. But that’s what Dean is doing here, he’s spending and spending and spending. It’s something he’s never done before.

Sam wants to hold him, almost. Hug him like when they were kids and sharing a queen and John would be snoring through a thunderstorm, stupefied by liquor and visions of dead wives incarnate.

He wants to punch him, too. Or at least make him feel awful, clueless. He wishes that just once he could know something about their father before Dean does, before even their father does. It was nice at school during mock trials, the ones that weren’t even graded, just for practice, to be able to stick it to his classmates. To be able to outsmart them and out-logic them and turn them on their heads in every way that John and Dean had taught him to do, unwittingly, through their own cycles of communication and punishment.

He wants to argue with Dean about it, now. Tell him that he should have just opened the car door and jumped out as soon as John had started talking, no matter if they were burning a hot seventy-five in the asphalt. That he should have stood his ground, shouldn’t have relented. He wants to take him by the shoulders and yell at him, this is not the only way to be a good son.

“Me too, you know.” He says instead.

“You too, what?” Dean asks.

“I had a thing or two with— with guys before, at Stanford. Just to try it out,” He explains. Or five or six.

“‘Just to try—’ Christ,” Dean barks out a laugh that shakes the air in the entire room and rolls onto his back, pressing a palm to his face, covering his smiling mouth. “What would dad have said?”

“You mean what’s dad going to say. Once we find him.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, distantly, his hand rubbing a spot on his neck and the smile disappearing as fast as it grew, “Once we find him.”

“I can’t wait to see the look on his face. Do you think dad’s ever—.”

“I’m not telling him, Sammy,” Dean interrupts, not even hearing Sam, saying it to the ceiling. He rolls back onto his side so they’re facing each other again. “And you’re not either.”

“Why not?” Sam asks incredulously. “It would make him so mad Dean, it would totally be worth it.”

Dean shoots him a wide-eyed look, furrowing his brow in disbelief and rolling over to face the wall. What he doesn’t say is that he can’t, but that’s what Sam hears anyway. What he doesn’t say is a lot. Truckloads of paperback novels full of all the words Sam thought he knew lived in Dean. But it turns out they’re all blank, all glued together and scribbled on, if not torn out completely.

“Fine,” Sam relents, feeling like a jerk. “I guess it’s yours to tell.”

They lapse into another round of silence. Its a long one. Sam tries to fall asleep.

“You know that I have no idea what dad would say? If I ever told him I was… whatever.” Dean says hesitantly into the empty quiet. “I don’t know if he would have sent me away or denied it or given me a shiner. I don’t know if he would’a— if there’s any possibility he would’a just said whatever, you know?”

“I hate him.” Sam says.

“I know.”

“So damn much.”

“I know.” Like it pains him to say it.

“Don’t you ever just want to stop? Stop looking?” Sam asks. He can hear the click of Dean swallowing.

“He did the best he could.” Dean answers instead.

“He’s not here, Dean.” But Sam doesn’t know if what he means is that because John’s not here, he’s not doing the best he can, or if he’s trying to knock it into Dean’s skull that their father isn’t here, in this room. He can’t hear them. Can’t see inside their heads.

Then the air is quiet around them for a long while. He can hear Dean's breaths turn deep and even and figures that he’s passed out. Sam drifts off, feels in between it all, feels his eyelids sagging and the crisp sheets tugging him into sleep. Thirty-second dreams fly past his eyelids all in burnt umber and full of flames and blood and car crashes and kudzu. The roiling midwest and a highway cracking open.

Then, suddenly, so quietly that it could have come from the air conditioner drizzling away under the window— a voice.

“You are, though. And I am. You’re alive. But,” Sam hears a hint of a wet breath, or maybe he dreamed it. “I don’t know what to do. And if you do find him. Then… ” Even quieter now. A petal voice for petal people. Dream-Dean is a soft petal person and the wind is carrying him away.

“What will you think of me?” Another pause, longer this time. Another wet exhale. “I had to do it,”

But Sam doesn’t remember any of that.

The pipes in the motel walls settle around them, cradling the brothers in their bed, the other one empty and cold and awaiting an absent father just like always. Like forever. He swears he can hear the TV static crackle and the distant sounds of a microwave plate turning, solemnly reheating a plate for someone who’s just about to arrive late in the night.

Or maybe it’s just the red sand kicking up outside, beating against the dirty black paint of the Impala. Maybe it’s just their father waking, distantly, suddenly aware that something’s wrong. That it’s just as he feared and his sons are not who he molded them to be. The thought comforts Sam. He wants to tell Dean, if what you’re like is something that could cause John Winchester such disquiet, then it must be good and pure and holy.

And if you can be good, then I can be good someday, too.

And in the morning he startles awake at Dean pouring a cup of water on his head. And life is good.

John Doe gets buried in an unmarked grave at a small cemetery in one of rural Illinois’ many villages. They don’t know that he died ordering one son to kill the other, that he died with a foot to the stomach and a gun in his mouth and his oldest child telling him that he loves him. And hates him. And hates him. And loves him.

And that he had had tear tracks through the blood and grime on his cheeks, spider-webbing while he shoveled and cried, and that it had been the hottest October on record, ever. As if Hell was rising, cracking up through the asphalt, dream-like and wanting. And he couldn’t dig deep enough to put his father there.