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When he was little, what Sam wanted most was to find a sidewalk square of wet concrete and press his handprint into it.
He thought about it all the time. He had the whole thing worked out in his head: exactly how he’d do it, if he ever got the chance. He would push down steady, until the grey cement squelched up between his fingers, and peel his palm away carefully, so the impression he left would be perfect. He wouldn’t leave the spot for hours, not until he was sure the concrete would dry without anyone coming and stomping on it or smoothing it over. Afterwards, he would have cement under his fingernails for days.
What Dean wanted most was Mom back. Sam wanted that, too—quietly, crazily—but sometimes he wanted the handprint more. The smell of wet concrete was branded on his dreams, a flat and cold sting the back of his throat like menthol. He looked for some in every city they were in, dragging Dean on long walks without telling him why.
When he got older, he wrote on bathroom walls instead. Dad would’ve killed him if he'd known, but Sam was thirteen and they were drifting from town to town to town, state lines collecting like iron bands across his chest and pulling tight. He needed something. He made excuses to go into bathrooms alone, and in gas station stalls, he left marks.
They were never the same; he knew better than that. He went through the alphabet in a random order, then started with numbers, memorizing the whole string of symbols so he wouldn’t repeat any. He kept maps of his own and hunched over in the back seat, tracing the Impala’s path with cheap motel pens. Every place he left something, he marked a tiny star on his map, and wrote the exact location in code on the bottom of the paper. When the lines crossed too much and the maps started to look like spirographs, he bought new ones with quarters he found in vending machines.
He burned those maps when he went to Stanford, and he wishes now that he hadn’t. He can still remember how light they felt in his hand, paper almost worn through at the folds so that small towns or river bends were entirely eliminated.
Without them, there is no way to trace where he’s been. He is historyless. He can’t trust himself to remember it all correctly—senses can fool you and time warps everything, like a ripple in an old glass window. He didn’t need them at Stanford because there were calendars and pictures to keep time by, but here, he and Dean keep no pictures, because a hunter shouldn’t be seen, or heard. They keep no calendars, aside from the one in Dad's journal that tracks hunts, because hunters shouldn't be remembered, either.
Sam isn’t used to being nobody anymore. His brother doesn’t seem to mind, but Dean’s never tasted permanence like Sam has. Dean's never settled into a place and known that he could be there for years, learning every little thing about it and never getting tired of it. Sam can’t imagine that ever happening. Dean, growing roots, leaving the Impala in an office parking lot every day and going to company picnics in suits? No. Dean is wild, slipping away the minute you try to catch him. He wants to be forgotten, so he can stay free.
That’s not an easy thing to do, because they leave marks wherever they go. You can’t avoid it—you walk through a place and a piece of you gets left behind, whether you want it to or not. Head against the window, Sam imagines the shape the marks take. Scattered fingerprints smudged onto payphones, staples in telephone poles, gum on the sidewalk. Maybe shoe-scuffs in the dirt. There are marks in people, too, weird looks and nervous smiles, and those are harder to avoid. You can’t save anyone without talking, after all. You have to pick the stories that everyone tries to forget out of the wood paneling of smoky bars and the linoleum floors of uneasy houses.
The best you can do is get forgotten after, and the trick of that is to seam easily into someone’s life and leave just as quietly. You smile and you make eye contact; you let your voice hover around warm and friendly, and keep your body language open. Shoulders relaxed, chest forward, legs a comfortable distance apart—it’s not too hard to pick up, and once you practice, it’s almost second nature. Sam learned the mechanics from a battered book from the library in Phoenix, the summer they stayed there for two weeks straight. He learned the rest by watching people, which you do a lot of when you’re ten and getting shunted from place to place faster than it takes to learn anyone’s name. He's good at making people forget him.
Dean’s different. Sometimes he’s smoother than Sam, drawing the truth from people with his natural charisma, but most of the time he doesn’t have the patience Sam does. He never has. He’s never been a natural at relating to anyone, either, especially if he thinks they’re an idiot or he’s in a hurry. He’s almost never careful enough around the authorities, for example, and he’s trouble personified when confronted: sleazy, inconsiderate, and completely tactless. Not that he’s not like that usually; sleazy and tactless, at least—but Sam knows him better than to believe that Dean’s actually as selfish as he acts sometimes.
Knows him, knew him. That throws him off, too: how he’s spent years away from Dean, not speaking to him, and yet five minutes back with him and it’s all the same as it used to be. The sound of Dean’s boots hitting the gravel or the shape of his silhouette in the early morning light or the slight heat from his arm, slung over the seat of the Impala—none of it’s a surprise, even though Sam feels like it should be. He still knows his brother. Four years away and Dean is still the same, getting frustrated when people won’t let him save them fast enough.
Why don’t you do it my way next time, asshole? Sam asks once as they drive away from a close call, thrumming with adrenaline. Your way gets us in a hell of a lot more trouble.
Dean snorts and tells Sam, I’m not about to wait around forever for someone to talk—I got a job to do, and I need the quick and dirty version of their story to get it done. He raises his eyebrows suggestively, and Sam rolls his eyes and turns to watch cornfields out the window.
He wants to tell Dean, I don’t just want to fade away after all this. I don’t want to be some muddy footprints and a collection of candy-bar wrappers in garbage cans. I want to be Sam Winchester, whole and true and unforgotten. I want to mean something. But how do you even start out saying something like that? So he doesn't.
The kind of marks Dean leaves in people are these: suspicious creases in the corners of mouths, fake numbers programmed into girls’ phones, and the empty wallets of pool players in dive bars. Split lips and black eyes, sometimes. Sam leaves troubled glances, coffee breath, and strange book request lists at local libraries; the kind of things that most people don’t even care about.
Sam misses not having to. He loved that about Stanford. He was allowed to be memorable, and for reality, not some made-up story with a fake ID to match. He could be Dave’s-roommate-Sam or Jess’s-boyfriend-Sam or always-in-the-law-library-guy. He didn’t have to live his life on the edge of other people’s, and he was good at it. He loved the freedom in it so much that there were some mornings he wanted to freeze time and never leave.
Sometimes—he never told Jess this—sometimes, he did want to leave.
He doesn’t think he really could have stayed in Stanford forever, though he wanted to. More than a hand in concrete and more than breathing, he wanted to wrap Jess up in his arms and just stay, fixed to one point in the map where nothing could harm them. Clean break, easy break. No more jokes about Winchester rifles and no fucked-up sense of duty.
But he grew up a wanderer, and that’s not something that’s so easy to stop. Montana sunsets, Arizona desert air, the Mississippi River and the Hudson Bay—Sam used to get cravings so fierce he’d sit on his hands to make sure he didn’t pick up his car keys and just go.
Some mornings it wasn’t even a place he’d want. Some mornings he didn’t think he’d be able to breathe for wanting to be headed anywhere in the Impala, the wind whipping at his face, filling his lungs while the heat of the sun peeled the skin from his nose and gave Dean new freckles.
Every place a piece of you gets left behind. And it calls to you, and calls and calls, quiet and insistent underneath everything. Sam has never met a siren, isn’t even sure they exist, but he thinks he knows what their song would sound like, aching in the points of his shoulders.
He would have gone back, though. If he’d gone somewhere, for a while, he would have gone back. Sometimes that’s what he thinks at her in his nightmares. She whispers flames at him and he says, I would have come back. I was coming back. Her eyes glaze and flicker and that’s all he can hold in his head.
She’s a persistent ache in his stomach, and his body curls around that ache, pulling into itself. He feels it on every inhale, and imagines he can’t breathe too deeply, or it will swallow him up.
Trying to be no one again is so strange, after her. He can’t remember how to do it. He remembers the rules of hunting, and of keeping your sanity—what's left of it—intact. How to mean nothing to everyone; that, he’s forgotten. So he tries not to think about it and does what he does know how to do. He talks, gentles people, shuts Dean up when he’s getting sarcastic. He switches to autopilot and gets the job done, hunched into the front seat of the car, ignoring his stomach and thinking vaguely about handprints in concrete.
Dean plays Zeppelin and Sabbath and somehow says I'm here for you without words.
*
Weeks or maybe months later, they hit the shapeshifter in St. Louis. Becky says, Must be lonely, and Sam opens his mouth to say Yeah before realizing, with a little shock, that he doesn't feel lonely. Not any more lonely than when he was at Stanford, at least.
He misses his friends, of course, and Jess, and everything about California. But he missed Dean and Dad and everything when he was there, just as badly, as screwed up as that is. Either way he goes, he thinks, he's fucked; this is just switching around the people he misses.
And somehow, nothing’s felt as easy, painful, or inevitable as this in the last four years. Like this life was just waiting for him to click back into it. He wonders how the hell he can feel like that, because he and Dean and the whole situation are seriously fucked up, and suddenly remembers something he hasn't thought of for a long time.
When he was about six or seven, Dad stuck him and Dean in this motel in Oklahoma for a few nights while he wasted some evil spirit a few of nowhere-towns away. He left them with a couple grocery bags and orders not to leave the room, I mean it. Dean sat him in front of the TV and they had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner—Sam remembers because Dean cut the crusts off for him even though he said it was dumb to want them that way. They went to sleep in separate beds, because Dad wasn’t there taking up the other one. Sam stretched his arms all the way out to touch the sides of his, luxuriating in the space.
There was a thunderstorm in the middle of the night. Sam had a thing about thunderstorms back then: he kept thinking Dad was going to get stuck out in the middle of one and get struck by lightning and die, lit up and burning. He woke up to howling wind and couldn’t go back to sleep, so he just lay there in the big bed, gripping the blanket. A few minutes later, Dean’s voice came through the dark, asking him if he was okay.
Yes , he said, because Dean never got scared of thunderstorms.
Bull , Dean sighed, and got out of his bed. Come on Sammy, get up.
He tossed the pillows and one of the blankets on the floor, and spread another blanket over the space between the beds, anchored with some books. He got some of Dad’s salt and made a practiced circle, and set a shotgun within easy reach. Sam watched, flinching every time the window rattled.
When it was finished, Dean looked at Sam and said, Well? Get in.
It was warm in the little tunnel, and if Sam lay back on the lumpy pillows, he couldn’t hear the noise as well. Dean crawled in after him and settled in the empty space beside him. Okay, Sammy, he said. No one can get you while we’re in here, okay? Anyone tries, I’ll hurt them.
Okay, Sam said. And Dad’s not gonna . . .
No. He’ll come back.
It was dark and cramped, and Dean’s pointy elbow dug into his ribs, but Sam believed Dean when he said nothing could get them. He fell asleep right away.
He hasn’t thought about that in years, but here's that feeling of safety again, right up next to his skin like it never left.
He and Dean used to live in their own little world, just the two of them against everything else but Dad, and Sam feels himself settling back into it like letting out a breath. That’s not what families are supposed to be, he knows; you’re not supposed to exist in a little microcosm. But fuck it. That’s what his family is, and how they survive hunting. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t make sense unless you’ve lived it, but Sam’s tired of trying to make everything make sense for everyone else. Sometimes things just are.
He won’t be a hunter forever. He’s not like Dean or Dad: he can’t keep running himself so thin without something more solid to hold on to. But in the meantime, he’s not no one in the grand scheme of things. He’s Dean Winchester’s brother. Dean’s not going to forget him—didn’t forget him after years of Sam trying, still knows exactly what to say. Dean will always remember him.
He hugs Becky tightly, and takes one last look at her, and notices something. She looks a little different. Her eyes are brighter, or her feet more solidly planted on the ground. The funny thing is, he recognizes it. He hasn't been watching for it, but it's there all the same, another kind of mark he and his brother leave: the knowledge that shit is out there, yeah, but so are Sam and Dean Winchester.
Slowly, Sam thinks he is beginning to grow into the rhythm of it all again.
*
When they roll into the next town, Metallica low in the background and the rumble of the car like a heartbeat below him, he takes one long breath in and breathes one long breath out. Feels the shape of the place, the buildings and the streets that make up its body. Listens to a quiet breeze ruffling the big fat leaves of a sycamore nearby. Opens the door, unfolds his legs and pushes onto his feet—leans against the car and feels Dean close his side.
They’re parked next to a mailbox. Sam reaches out and presses a thumb into the gritty dust covering the list of collection times.
“Y’okay?” Dean asks, already on the street beside him and poised to walk towards the place they’re checking out. His brother’s shoulders look broad and strong in the bright afternoon sunlight, and Sam straightens his own to match.
“Yeah,” he says. He rubs the mark into a wider circle, so no one can pick out the print, and follows Dean down the street.