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The summer dries harsh around them, the kind of unbearable heat that gets caught in the throat, that’s nowhere near humid but feels like it anyway—sweat slicking bright over lanky, whipcord limbs, soaking through t-shirts. Salt film on palms.
Sam and Dean are ten and fourteen, melting haphazard over motel floorboards and stripped-bare mattresses, window cranked open for a dead breeze. Catching nothing. “Sun’s loud,” says Sammy, stick-thin fragile, sprawled out shirtless. He tucks his chin and watches his ribcage swell with breath, cut out sharp against skin. “‘S like—pulsing. In my head.”
“That’s heat exhaustion, dipstick.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Yeah, well—getting there.” Can’t do much about it, though. No AC. The tap water tastes funny, old pipes and metal. Warm. It’s a maybe thing—maybe it’ll chase the peachy fever-spots off Sam’s cheeks, maybe it’ll just make ‘em both sick. Vending machine out front’s a better bet, but it’s farther away and they’re broke.
“I’m going to the pool,” is half war strategy for the heat, half a childish demand, bossy (too confident, Sammy, Dean’s thinking, for a kid who doesn’t even own swim trunks), and either way Sam doesn’t wait up for a response. He gets pissy—like, especially pissy—whenever the weather turns funky, too hot or cold or in any way inconvenient. Pissier than that, even, when it’s another shifty neighborhood they’ve been locked up in, alone, Dean always kinda wondering whether it’d be a bigger deal on the news if one of them got stabbed in a back alley or did the stabbing themselves.
By habit, he always goes armed, when he and Sam get hungry enough to decide, y’know, screw Dad, they need groceries. Can’t really hunker down in an empty motel room, doors locked no matter what, for more’n half a week.
They strip down to boxers at the side of some craphole of a pool, and Sam slithers in with toes pointed, all polite. Kind of like he’s tryna slip quietly through a church congregation of ants and flies, floating dead in the water. Dean run-and-jumps it, drenches Sam in stale water and leaf pulp. Sam, if he’s ever asked, doesn’t shriek. Doesn’t. Spits up a mouthful of pool, lukewarm, comes flailing after Dean, but the kid’s got a temper like a signal pistol, the kind that snaps hot and fades fast.
Doesn’t take a lot to get him laughing instead of punching—a hundred odd pounds of little brother on his head, and Dean goes under no problem, bobs back up more soggy than refreshed, lets an appeased Sammy hang off his shoulders while he swims a lap.
“You’re a tiny pest,” he gripes.
His brother is a skeleton, wire-sharp, bony enough to strangle when he snakes arms and legs around Dean’s torso— “judge me by size, do you, Dean?” —and Dean dunks him, decides right-there, right-then they’re gonna find out who can last the longest underwater.
Sam’s an old soul.
Older, even—practically geriatric—whenever fall lurches in, rakes up the summer heat and scatters it in pieces, leaves everything browned and brittle. So Dean looks for cases down south, starting sometime in October, November. Depends how cold the Bunker gets how fast, how much skittish fidgeting Sam’s doing under how many layers of clothing. It’s the big brother intuition in him that sizes it all up, gets the feeling that decent temperatures help, even if Sam says nothing.
Dean gets the feeling that the motels do, too—something about the transient nature of them, the drifting, seems to fit Sam’s headspace better. Because Sam, he's got his dissociative states, the ceramic-stiff glaze that creeps into his eyes sometimes, the way he’ll periodically gut that Spartan room of his and repack everything he owns in his duffel, like he’s gonna make a run for it. Like he doesn’t understand how to take up space anymore. Whole nine yards.
Dean can’t always figure out what triggers him.
Thinks the foundation for this was laid decades ago, when his baby baby brother first got ripped out of a house on fire, never really learned to settle without the phantom of a sword, gun, whatever dangled over his head. Sooner or later, you’re gonna get kicked outta town, just wait and see.
They’re just facts of life. Garlic’s useless on vamps, I-80 is total hell on the brain, and Sam’s a runner because John and Dean, they built him that way.
The motel Dean finds is crap. Typical.
Mattresses like paper stretched over springs, vomit-colored carpet, everything Dean tends to forget he hates. Everything he wants to salt-and-burn, full building demo, when Sam croaks, “tired, Dean,” collapses on his bed, and somehow manages to get comfortable. Sammy's got that ugly, nostalgic not-smile twitching on his face, tasting bitter, probably.
Knock it off; you used to drive me crazy whining about these motels, Dean wants to say, let loose some of the irrational anger curling in his stomach, and what the hell happened to you, except yeah, Hell happened. And Sam came back missing parts.
There are a lot of genuinely messed-up childhood memories in Sam’s head, the kind that nobody has business starting to feel fond about, but.
But. Here we are. At least it's not the Cage.
“Got a headache?” Dean asks. Routine. Of course there’s a headache.
His little brother gives a short jerk of a nod, throws an arm over his face, over the strain knotted deep through his forehead. The sun’s setting, cutting bronze and dirty through a gap between mildewed curtains. There’s something about the way it hits Sam’s arm, throws a shadow like a pit over the gaunt, yellow-bruised angles of eye sockets, cheekbones—
“You?”
“Dude, me?” Dean knows he’s good—not great, but enough—and rocks up on his toes, rolls his shoulders back. Feelin’ positively spry: look, Sammy. And sure, his joints do click, catch a little, but that’s old news; he knows the dull ache of it all will go down after a couple days’ rest, once his muscles quit cramping into rebar.
“I’m fantastic,” is what he settles on. “Less tenderized than you, at least,” and Sam gives a pitchy groan, indignant, so Dean eases off his brother’s ego. “Wendigo was one hell of a sprinter, Sammy, I’ll give you that. I’m impressed it took him so long to nail you.”
He gets flipped off for that, which—yeah. Understandable.
“Ibuprofen?”
Sammy switches to thumbs up, and Dean tries to grin. Feels like he should, it’s just—something. About the room, lit copper-dull, and his brother beat up and hurting, mind and body, discarded on a bed that belongs to no one. Dean’s got dust, grit, under his tongue, the rattle of the box AC twisting wire knots into his throat, all at once too much worry and touch and noise and—and nothing at all. The motel walls are crawling up around him, empty roads and skies zipping up from the vanishing point, and he needs out, dammit.
Right the hell now.
“Be back with some in fifteen, twenty,” Dean says, can’t know if the words creak out as strangled as they feel.
The Impala smells rank. Sweat. Exhaustion. No blood stench, no sweet-acid fumes from vomit or exposed viscera—he shouldn’t know that; no one should have to know something like that—and the sick relief of it catches him, hard, in the back of the knees. Just aches and bruises, today.
Just a taste of something—something different, something that makes Dean look at this life he’s always wanted for him and his brother, fought for, killed for, flips it on his head.
Feels like maybe he threw everything away, and got nothing. Had it backwards the whole time.
“Sure hope you’re takin’ a shower, Sasquatch,” he complains to nobody, rolls down a window and starts up his Baby. Black-grate fencing and a concrete pool deck stand bold and ugly at the corner of his eye, and he has this irrational moment of you know what, maybe hold that shower. Maybe we could—
I dunno.
He tracks down Sam’s pills in a grimy little pharmacy, flickering neon sign. Stocks up on toothpaste.
Stops in the junky parking lot of a secondhand place, doesn’t have the room in him to question it. The night’s getting a little chilly, a little dark, a soft and uncanny something crawling in and up his arms. So maybe he feels screwed-up, knocked out of place, throwing two pairs of rainbow-faded trunks onto a linoleum counter, no bag, ma’am, thanks. No receipt.
They haven’t tried this in a while. Haven’t been the right type of people for it.
Sammy’s still stretched-out on his bed, unwashed and deflated, when Dean eases himself back into the suffocating quiet of their motel room. He drops the pills smack on his little brother’s chest, elder sibling’s prerogative. Moves steady, telegraphed, after Sam startles upright, pushing the kid’s water bottle into his hand. There’s a whole book of creases to read in Sam’s face—waxy bags under eyes mean he’s worn out, mouth pinched tight means he’s a little antsy, eyebrows scrunching right up around that headache of his.
“Thanks.”
Dean grins. Asks, gentle, “hey, Boo Radley, wanna go swimming?”
“I’m going to the pool,” proclaims another Sammy, the memory time-muted, Dean’s kid barely coming up to his chest, soul kaleidoscopic—
—brash and all-encompassing and colossal with self-knowing, and dammit, there’s no air left in the room; his brother is an explosion and Dean has no lungs to breathe—
—and nothing like the Sam he has now, hunched over on the crumpled edge of a crappy mattress. This Sam is too small to fill his body. This Sam is irrevocably broken, very little of his old wanting left in him, and has to be coaxed out of himself, piece by piece.
“I—” Sam trails off, squinty-eyed, confused. “Swimming?”
“Yeah.” Dean plops down on his own bed, feels the stupid thing screech under his weight. “Saw the motel pool, totally abandoned, thought it’d be fun. Suit up, dude.” He chucks swimming trunks at Sammy’s face, the smaller pair, because Sam’s tall but tends skinny, the jut of hip bones under his jeans not exactly screaming health. Not exactly unfamiliar, either.
Dean turns and strips, pulls the drawstrings on his baggy trunks as tight as they’ll go. Catches, a corner-of-his-eye thing, Sam peeling off his pants and flannel, dressing on slow autopilot. Sam leaves on his t-shirt.
They walk into a dying sun, goosebumps raising on Dean’s arms in waves, but it’s nothing he can’t put up with. He’s swinging his towel, has a moment of caring that the ends are trailing in the dirt—it passes. Sam’s got his wrapped tight around his shoulders, second skin, hiding all his scars. Gashes, burns, bites: hunter-marks. The puckered, silvery ladders of self-inflicted wounds Dean knows walk up from his wrists to shoulders. He wants to remind Sammy he can chill out, ain’t no one around to stare at them.
Doesn’t want to hear Sam say there’s still you.
The pool's gated but unlocked, looming, silently wondering who in their right mind would wanna step inside. A question of belonging, with no right answer.
Dean lowers himself into the water one inch at a time, feels eighty-plus years settle in his skeleton. “Not too cold,” he promises, and his age is nothing compared to Sammy’s as Dean holds out a hand, grips Sam wrist-to-wrist and eases him over the concrete lip of the pool. It’s all a little—nah, ‘s a lot more somber than Dean would prefer, but Sam complies, throws his towel to the side and steps in with shirt still on, so hey, if it works.
“C’mon, lock ‘em out, Sammy,” and there’s a moment, before Sam’s knees catch themselves, where Dean’s stumbling, only eyes above water, afraid they’re gonna tangle and tip over in the six-foot end like a couple’a morons.
“You okay?”
Sam folds arms across his chest, works a thumb over the ridge of some scar Dean can barely make out—underwater lighting sucks, chemical green—and nods. Temperature’s tolerable. No flashbacks impending. Then Sam dunks himself, just drops, and Dean has an irrational moment of aw hell, did he just pass out? before Sammy resurfaces.
He grouses that his “shorts are way too loose, Dean,” whipping soaked-flat hair off his face, and Sam’s fine, Sam’s talking, more plugged in than Dean’s seen him in days. Something eager in his eyes. He strikes off the wall, clips Dean in the ribs with a foot.
“They’re too—dude, you better not flash me.” Sam’s got a headstart on him, friggin’ longshanks, but Dean pushes water through his teeth, throws himself into breaststroke and goes right after him. “And it’s not like they had options at a thrift store—hey!”
Sam touches concrete at the shallow end, spins and paddles back past Dean. Should be too heavy to make a good swimmer, all dinosaur bones and lean muscle, nothing buoyant on him, but there’s something neat—almost elegant, though Dean shouldn’t be using words like elegant—about the way Sam threads himself through the water. Almost beautiful (Dammit.) in the sense that this is Dean’s little brother, his kid, awake and alive.
Dude pops back up looking like an abused mop, of course.
“Hey, Cousin Itt?”
“Shuddup, Dean,” Sam sighs, slips back underwater to fix his hair, and Dean follows. Always follows.
His brother hangs in the water, suspended soft between pool lights and the rippling surface, hair a smokescreen of dark silk around his face. He’s too pale, too hardened, under the shirt he wears like armor, and for a useless moment, Dean loses himself in time.
Sees Sam walnut-brown and tiny, skin dirty with black scabs just starting to peel. There’s white daylight scorching iridescent through the water, and the Dean that’s hovering beside Sam is young, less weighed down, glowing with sunburn and a million stupid, summer freckles, face and shoulders. They’re wind-and-sand-chapped and smooth-faced and hyper. Trying for happy.
There’s a ghost of that little kid in Sammy still, if Dean really looks for it.
Something about the way he’s uncurling in the deep gut of the pool, for once not trying to hide this body he hates under three layers and slumped shoulders and the Bunker’s windowless shadows.
Like maybe he doesn’t feel so vulnerable here, on the run. So unclean.
Sammy, why don’t you ever come home with me? Dean doesn’t ask, but the thought’s already bubbled up in his head—raw and horrible and probably cruel—and won’t ever go away. He’s not looking to say stuff like that, eviscerate himself all over Sam every time there’s some disconnect between them.
He’s not.
And—and, yeah, he really shouldn’t be opening eyes or anything in this water, it’s that filthy. Reeks of musty chlorine. Dean pushes himself up, breaks the surface, filters the ice out of his chest.
Tackles Sam, when he finally wears out those whale-sized lungs of his and comes up to breathe, gigantor. It feels playful, pointless. Feels violent, feels like them, here, now. The fatigue fits, too, and Dean’s the first to tap out of their wrestling match, hoisting himself onto the pool deck, dangling his feet in the water.
The wind’s picking up.
A car crawls by, old clunker, one tail light out. “D’you ever look and—I dunno, wonder who’s in there?” Sam muses, the kinda question that’s got two or three others folded quiet, lurking, underneath it.
Do they ever wonder about us?
Do they see us?
Claustrophobia’s long gone. Dean is a man transparent, everything too big and yawning around him: the stars and the streets through the fence bars, all the dark places in the distance where Dean can’t see, but knows something’s there. All his old memories, stripped bare, all his terror about their future, and—and he feels all-at-once watched and unwatched. Doesn’t know which itches worse. “Nah,” he lies, shaking his head. “I don’t care.”
Sam shivers, pressed right up against Dean's side where he can't ignore it. Dean grabs at their towels, crumpled on the floor, wraps them both around Sam’s shoulders. Squeezes the nape of his little brother’s neck, can’t help but take the feverish heat of Sam’s skin as reassurance.
“Cold,” Sam hisses.
“Sorry.” He snatches his hand back, scuffs his raisin fingers together. “Didn’t notice. Y’know, if you take your shirt off, you’ll dry faster.” Knows the answer’s gonna be no, though, and the sour set of Sam’s face says he knows Dean knows, isn’t gonna waste energy responding. Dean grins back sharp, feels the shape of it fit easy on his mouth, easier than he’s managed for what seems like years.
They’re getting there.
Doesn’t matter that Dean’s not sure what there looks like yet. What matters is he took Sammy swimming today, and his brother smiled and laughed and existed, looking strong, a little content, even. And maybe they’ve lost what they could’ve had as kids—missed that turn on some highway, decades ago. Been killed off, made strangers to themselves, over and over again, long before that car crash pushed John headfirst into a demon deal and sent everything spiralling.
But, yeah. Okay. They’re getting... somewhere.
Go back, and someplace in all time, all space, there exists this moment like an island. Two kids who forgot their towels in the motel room, sprawling out on hot concrete to dry, giddy with exhaustion. Sammy’s got a puddle like a halo around his head, grabs at Dean’s hand, meshes their fingers together and lets himself breathe easy. And Dean’s thinking that here, with Sam, the world shrinks, becomes almost nothing around them.
Doesn’t matter what happens after.
Maybe this will manage to be eternal.