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Sam throws his hand out the window. Dean’s going ten over the limit and the deep green of the pines on either side of the one-way road smear into one solid blur.
The outside gust pushes his hand backwards when he stretches his fingers out, palm forward, feeling speed, viscerally. Like an aircraft, he turns his hand to the side and lets the wind make waves with the slightest dip of his fingers.
Dean’s humming. A song from a few gas-stops back where they bought the local paper. Three pages thin, news, sport, classifieds, two obits. Suicides, under normal circumstances. That’s how it goes in towns with more buildings than inhabitants.
Sam tips his head back, sitting low in his seat so his knees are pressing hard into the glovebox, looks at his brother.
Dean and green worked like Dean and leather, like Dean and roadside coffee, like Dean and miles of straight road. The pines all around, backdrop to Dean and his scarred hands on the wheel, the cut of his jaw, the rough of stubble - a few days late to shaving. There’s a mark there, at the hinge, tucked into the soft spot where his neck meets. Pulse point.
Sam put it there, slid his thumbs under his brother’s chin and tipped his head back. Dean had let him do it. He can still feel it like a phantom taste on his tongue.
He’s caught up in it. This one small mark that he put there with his own mouth, flickering in and out of visibility as the sun darts between the trees. Leather brown, sunset orange and brunswick green. Sam thinks about cause and effect. He loves his brother, his brother lets him do unsanctimonious things. Sam twitches his fingers, his whole arm lifts. Dean has a bruise on his neck that Sam put there with his mouth, his chest tightens.
The world is one green pipeline outside the car.
Dean must feel Sam’s eyes on him, like he knows when Sam is in the room, or when Sam is in trouble, or when Sam is in one of his moods. The sixth sense developed after decades of putting Sam first. There was a three year break in between and Sam thinks that Dean must have felt like he had gone blind. Lost a crucial part of what once made him get up and go. They don’t talk about it. They’ve lost each other in an almost orderly split now anyway. It’s familiar to them both.
Dean looks at Sam whose head is still lolled back lazy against the seat. His brother smiles and calls him a creep and Sam smiles because his brother smiles and Dean’s contagious in every way of the word.
Dean pokes him in the ribs with his index finger, blunt force against the vulnerable part of him, he feels it ache and Sam snatches Dean’s hand before he can escape, holds his palm against his side like a heat-pack. Leaves it there while they talk about something trivial.
A diner in Missouri that they stopped at once and never again. Creepy but not in the haunted-by-the-murdered-head-chef kind of way.
“I can excuse the five foot concrete chicken out the front but only because it was in the bed of an El Camino.” Dean says, gesturing with his hand on the wheel.
“That doesn’t make it worse? Disrespecting a classic?”
“Nah, man that just makes it art .”
“What did it then?” Sam asks, “All the chicken paraphernalia?”
“Fuck, it was obscene. Remember the anthropomorphic one on the bench out the front? Like those outdated McDonald’s benches that they had to take down because Ronald was giving kids nightmares or whatever.”
“Should have got a photo with it.”
“Yeah, you should have sat on it’s lap, Sammy. Could have put it in a postcard for Bobby.”
Sam snickers. Brings his arm back inside when they get close enough to the car coming the opposite direction. One-lane back roads a game of guessing how far his brother will push pulling aside, waiting until the last moment to share the road.
Dean pulls the car onto the soft shoulder, only slowing to the original speed limit as the truck blinks by. Sam can feel the vibration of gravel under the wheels, reverberating like a growl, shaking through them. Juddering where Sam has a hand over his brother’s. Dean keeps her steady, one-handed.
“Chicken steak was good though,” his brother says when there’s solid asphalt under the wheels again.
Their road is an all encompassing green. Pine stretched tall, millions of branches all singularly reaching up and up and up. Green is go, green is growth, green is safety, green is his brother and the blotted colour the mark on his neck will be in a few days time.