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There's gonna come a day when you'll feel better
You'll rise up free and easy on that day
And float from branch to branch, lighter than the air
Just when that day is coming, who can say? Who can say?
-Up the Wolves (The Mountain Goats)
Sam sits on the beach and lets his loneliness mingle with the Pacific’s. He takes a deep breath and the salt fills his lungs. For all his dad’s talk of protection (and for all the holy water he’s been forced to drink) this is the first time in his life he’s ever felt pure. He likes the way the sea stretches – gray and flat like a mirror on its side – likes the thought that there is nothing except water and whales between him and Japan. No roads, no motels, no cars, no monsters. No dead moms, no drunk dads, no Deans.
That thought doesn’t make him feel as guilty as it used to.
“Sam, you want a marshmallow? Fire’s nearly ready.”
“Um,” Sam casts a doubtful eye over the smoking pile of sticks that Jess and Brady are crouching around. He’s glad he didn’t offer to help; they would’ve had too many questions about how easy it was for him. “Maybe in a minute. I’m just gonna go on a walk. Wanna be alone for a bit.”
“Whatever,” Brady shrugs.
“Don’t go too far,” Jess says, smiling. “Or we’ll have eaten them all.”
“I won’t,” Sam laughs, kicking his shoes off. “I’m just gonna get my feet wet. Maybe look at the stars.”
He wanders down towards the shoreline, letting their teasing and swearing get carried away with the wind. His feet sink into the sand if he stands still for too long, the waves are gentle over his ankles. The sea pulls, just a little, but he ignores it for now. The beach curves a little and he follows the line of the sea until Jess and Brady are hidden behind a sandy jut of coast.
When he’s sure they can’t see him anymore he wades up to his knees. Now he’s actually standing in them the waves are strong enough to sway him from side to side. He lets them, it feels like dancing. He closes his eyes and stretches his arms out. The sea moves his body, the wind moves his hair, the water laps at the places where Dean and Dad used to be. The places Sam himself is only beginning to fill.
He loves it, these wide empty spaces inside him. It’d been scary at first – all this room inside for himself he’d never had before. He remembers his first few nights in his dorm, the wrong snoring from the bed beside him, the strange twisting anxiety threatening like vomit in the back of his throat. He remembers taking the battery out his phone so he couldn’t call – or be called.
It had taken months for them to leave him. Months before John stopped whispering warnings in his ear. Even longer for Dean’s bad jokes and worse singing to stop echoing around his head. He thought that they never would; had accepted that to be free was to be haunted.
One day, however, he’d come home, and he hadn’t locked the door. And he hadn’t noticed, and he hadn’t cared. He’d found himself humming a Led Zeppelin song and it hadn’t hurt him. He stopped reaching for a gun that wasn’t under his pillow, forgot to keep up with the electrical storms.
“It’s funny,” he says to the Pacific. “I never even had a room to myself before this and now I’ve got a whole state. And I’m lonely, but I love it. Who even am I anymore? Can’t be a rebellious son when your father’s disowned you. You can’t be the little brother to a ghost. Nobody here knows what I’ve left. They only know who I am, not who I’m trying not to be…” he trails off, a little embarrassed to be talking to the sea.
When had he stopped? Being a hunter. When had he stopped? Being John Winchester’s son. When had he stopped? Caring. When had he stopped? Being what they wanted him to be. When had he started to become himself?
He doesn’t know when it happened, only that it had.
Sam looks at his hands, and for the first time they’re his. He tries to curl his fingers round an invisible gun. The movement is stiff and unnatural. He feels like he’s high though he hasn’t smoked all day. California does that to him, sometimes.
Standing in the Pacific Ocean, stars above him like holes, Sam thinks he could dissolve into foam right now and be happy.
His phone rings.
*
Dean wonders when he became too lonely to be haunted. He’s got a disassembled shotgun shell in his hand, and he tips the salt over his forearm and rubs it in, trying to prove to himself that he won’t just vanish.
“Nope,” he says, mostly because he can’t remember the last time he spoke out loud. His voice is lost in the wind. He doesn’t know why he bothered. “Still fucking here. For all the good it’s doing me.”
He holds his hand out and the wind takes the salt like it took his words. The Pacific can have them both. Not that it will notice.
He’s sitting on the bonnet of the car, pointed pointlessly towards the invisible beach. The sea is dark and dead in front of him, the moon and the stars obscured by clouds. He fumbles for his cigarettes, desperate for some kind of light.
His hands are shaking but it’s cold enough that he can pretend that’s the reason why. It takes a couple tries for the flame to stay, the wind prying its way through cracks in his fingers as he cups his hands around his face.
It still feels weird to smoke so openly, without having to sneak round the back of motels or bars. He doesn’t like it, all this space he’s been left with. The world is too big, and there are too many fucking ghosts in it and when did he become one of them?
The road behind him stretches like a rope around the mountain. Straight and deliberate; it had taunted him with its purpose. Like it knew, somehow, that he wasn’t trying to go anywhere. The ghost wouldn’t show up. He hadn’t passed another car in hours; his whole world had shrunk to the white lines and the sound of tyres. The side of the mountain was calling him. He’d strained his eyes for anything living, anything new, to distract him and when nothing had appeared he’d pulled into the side of the road.
He's not sure how long he’s been sitting here. He’s not sure he cares.
Dean looks out into the world and hates it with every fibre of his being.
He wants to yell so loudly that the wind will stop, and the sea will shake and everything will turn to look at him. He wants the world to hold its breath while the Oregon coastline crushes him. He wants to die, but only if something will notice. He wants his dad to call him, he wants his brother sitting next to him.
“It’s not fucking fair,” he says, and then he tries to laugh. The wind takes it all.
It would be easy, so easy, to make it look like an accident. The ghost, the road, the side of the mountain still scorched by the last unlucky bastard. John wouldn’t need to suspect anything. A quick detour, a routine salt and burn, and he’d be avenged. So much easier than his mom.
“Don’t,” he hisses out to himself, digs his fingers into the meat of his thigh. “Don’t make it make sense.”
Normally he’s better at not letting himself go there, but he’s been alone for so long. And it’s there, growing inside him, the cold and undeniable certainty that there’s nothing left for him here. It’s festered in his stomach for months, spreading its poison through his blood, eating away at his bones. He’s dust inside, he thinks. He must be, otherwise it wouldn’t feel like this.
“It’s not fair,” he whispers to the night. It’s a childish thought, he knows, but it’s all he has right now. “Please, just fucking…tell me I need to be here. Tell me not to go.”
He waits for something, for God, the moon, the wind, the world, to respond. He waits for his phone to ring. The sea whispers like the dead. The shame rises up, bile and smoke. He begged, and nothing cared.
His fingers find his phone before his brain realises it, and he hits the speed dial he’s forced himself to ignore for a year.
It rings.
*
The artificial tones don’t belong on the beach. That’s the only reason Sam actually answers it. He doesn’t even look at the screen he just needs it to shut up.
“Hey,” he says, “I’m sorry but –”
“Sammy?”
“Dean?”
They both fall silent. Sam thinks about hanging up. Dean speaks before he works up the courage.
“Shit. I thought it’d go to voicemail.”
“Oh,” is all Sam can say. “Um…sorry I’m up, I guess?”
“S’ok,” Dean should laugh here, make a joke about him being a nerd, but he doesn’t. “What’re you doing?
“I’m, um, I’m on a beach.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. My friend Brady, he has a car, and we drove up Route 101 towards Santa Cruz. It’s, uh, it’s nice. Peaceful.”
“No kidding,” Dean does actually laugh at that, though it gets lost in static as the wind blows in the background. “I’m up on the 101 in Oregon. Weather’s shit here though.”
“You’re in Oregon?” Sam’s shoulders twinge and he realises they’re hunched up at his ears. “Why?”
“Just some ghost pancaking drivers near Florence.”
“Right. Is Dad with you?”
“Dad,” Dean snorts. “No. He’s off chasing demons in Nebraska or some shit. Left me with the ghosts, as usual.”
“Oh,” Sam’s taken aback by the bitterness in Dean’s voice – it’s not like Dean normally lets himself feel anything but reverence towards John. He wonders why he had to leave before Dean grew a spine. “Look, is there a reason you called?”
“Hmm? Yeah. S’been a while since we talked, hasn’t it, Sammy?”
“It’s Sam.”
“Like a year.”
“Yeah, about that.”
“I still don’t get it. How easy it was for you to just walk away.”
“Dean,” Sam pinches the bridge of his knows between two fingers. He wants to go back to the waves. “I’m not the one who made that choice.”
“He didn’t mean it.”
“Don’t defend him!” Sam can’t help but shout the last bit. It echoes off the sea and he flinches. Dean too, he imagines, on his own bit of coast a few hundred miles north, is probably holding the phone away from his ear. He forces himself to take a deep breath. “Is that why you called? To talk about Dad?”
“No,” Dean sighs. It’s unlike any sound Sam’s ever heard him make before. It’s so final. So completely devoid of anything. “I just…this stupid ghost won’t show up. I’ve been driving up and down the same stretch of highway for hours, right past the spot the last guy flipped his car and…I just can’t anymore, ok?”
“Dean…” This can’t be going where Sam thinks it’s going. “Maybe just leave it for the night?” He suggests, opting to ignore the subtext. “Find a motel and get some sleep. Dad’s not with you right? He won’t get mad if he doesn’t know.”
“Won’t make a fucking difference, Sammy. Trust me.” Dean stops, and Sam can hear him shifting – the metal of the impala creaking softly under him. “I’ve been sat trying to see the sea for fucking hours, trying to convince myself that there’s a point to any of the shit I do, but I can’t anymore. I just can’t. It’s like, no matter what I do, it turns out I’ve done it wrong. I let you go, and you ditch me. I follow Dad and he leaves me in the wind. I chase the ghosts he gives me across this fucking country until I’m one of them and I’ve got nothing to show for it. No family, no life, not even a fucking bed. And there’s nothing I can do or say to make the slightest bit of fucking difference to any of it. I’ve run out of lines, y’know?” Sam has to strain to hear him by the end, the croak of his voice lost in the Oregon wind and Californian waves.
“Dean,” he says, beginning to pace up and down – slow and awkward against the current. “Please, tell me you’re not saying that you’re going to…please tell me you’re safe.”
“Of course m’not fucking safe, Sammy, why do you think I called? I thought –” Dean’s voice cracks off. “I thought you’d be able to tell me I’m wrong.”
“Of course you’re wrong Dean! C’mon man, you’re only twenty-four! You haven’t run out of anything yet.”
“I feel so fuckin’ old Sammy. And so tired. I try to think about another twenty years of this, of anything, and it feels so damn long. I don’t know what to do.”
“Look,” Sam runs a hand through his hair, looks out at the endless Pacific and all its promises. He closes his eyes and forces himself to keep talking. “Why don’t you drive down south to California? We can get a drink, talk about it here?”
“That sounds real nice,” Dean sighs. “Not that you’d be offerin’ if I wasn’t about to kill myself, would you?”
“That’s not…”
“Don’t bother lyin’ Sammy, I can hear you grittin’ your teeth down the phone.”
“Ok, no,” Sam admits, the knots in his stomach tightening even further. “But I don’t want you to die. You’ve got to know that!”
“You don’t want me to die, you just don’t want me in your life.”
“That’s not fair Dean!” Sam can’t help but snap. “You can’t put everything on me like that, like your only choice is to be my brother or be dead. You don’t get to say stuff like that to me then wonder why I walked away. I can’t be that for you. There’s so much fucking more out here for you – for both of us! I don’t know why you can’t see that.”
There’s another long pause, Sam hears a small metallic click. He pictures Dean, alone in the dark, playing aimlessly with his lighter.
“I’m sorry,” Dean says eventually, his voice flat and dull. “You’re right, it wasn’t fair of me to call you. Moment of weakness. It won’t happen again.”
“Dean… don’t be like that. I’m glad you called; you can always call when you feel like this. And I miss you man, I really do, but…” I like missing you. I need to miss you more than I need you, he doesn’t say. He thinks Dean probably knows it anyway.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it.”
“What’re you gonna do now?”
“I dunno,” Dean sighs. “Watch the sunrise maybe? Find a motel. Hunt some ghosts.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Sure it does. Anyway, thanks for picking up. Good talk.”
“Yeah you –” Dean hangs up before he can finish.
Sam stares down at his phone, caught between the twin urges to hotwire Brady’s car and drive north and to throw his phone as far into the ocean as he can.
“Sam!” a voice calls and he turns.
Jess is splashing towards him, her shoes held in one hand. The wind blows her long hair across her face and carries the smell of smoke towards him. She makes him smile; he can’t help it.
“That sand dune is bigger than I thought. It’s already morning on the other side of it. Who were you talking to?” She asks as she reaches him.
“My brother,” he says, and her eyes widen in surprise.
“I thought you two didn’t talk.”
“We don’t. He was just…he was having a bad night is all,” he looks down at his phone and realises he’s clutching it so hard his fingers are turning white. He forces himself to relax, to put it back into his pocket. “He’s fine now. I think.”
“Ok…” Jess eyes him dubiously. “The fire is actually pretty hot now, and Brady’s got some hotdogs too. Do you want to head back?”
“Yeah,” Sam takes her hand, and she lets him pull her close as they start walking back along the coast. “That sounds nice.”
*
Dean puts the phone down. He finishes his cigarette and then lights another. It’s cold. He waits for the sun to rise.
He waits. Shivers. Smokes another cigarette. Shivers. Waits some more.
Eventually, he remembers he’s on the west coast and that the sun is behind him.
He gets into his car.
He drives any direction but south.