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Living on the road, the unremarkable becomes magical. A tree growing up through an old silo. A controlled burn slowly billowing smoke above a glowing field. An abandoned plot slowly filling with dandelions.
Sam knows the joy of freshly paved asphalt. The frustration of cheap chip seal fixes. The sadness of a graying highway.
Sam knows the roads. The interstate, the byways, the gravel shortcuts. By the time he gets to Stanford—the bus swooping south on I-29, then west on I-70—Sam’s spent more time on the interstate than on a bed.
Sam's first story books are billboards. As their dad urges the Impala faster and further and harder, the billboards race by and Dean reads to his baby brother the snippets of words he knows and makes up stories for ones he doesn't.
After Dad discards his carseat—earlier, probably, than he should—Sam watches them too. He can’t read, hasn’t started kindergarten yet, but he learns the difference between local and chain advertisements by the radius of the logos.
Dean likes the insurance representative ones the best, quietly spinning worlds of evil sorcerers and kind mothers and large families. Sam gets excited when there’s signs for caves. For whatever reason, the more cave signs they pass as they reach town, the longer Dad disappears.
Everyone else says that the highway becomes a parking lot when there’s standstill traffic, grumbling about an accident or construction. But even at twenty, Sam calls it a playground. Jess laughs when he says it, stuck behind an oversized load on their way north to her parent’s place in the mountains, but still kisses him on the cheek when he slips out the passenger seat.
As a kid, Dean and him would play tag in the ditch between the highway and farmland. They’d hopscotch over the dashed white line. Now, Sam paces along the double yellow, tempting fate as the south-bound traffic rushes past.
He learns the alphabet through the Sign Game. Dean traces out all the letters he's learned watching Sesame Street on the back of a Wal-Mart receipt, and he and Sam call out whichever letters they see on billboards and road signs and license plates in receipt order. For the longest time, Sam thought r and s were switched in position, to the point of knocking out a second grader who sang the alphabet song too loud. The kid dropped to the gravel because Sam's double digits and knows better than to pull his punches.
The guidance counselor teaches him the song in her office in between fruitless calls to his dad. Sam doesn't tell her that the number is to an empty motel room. He does tell her several variations of Authorized Vehicles Only that mark off every patch of dirt connecting the two directions of the traffic. When you get far enough away from civilization, no one bothers putting up billboards, so it's either catch the no U-turn signs or wait another 50 miles for a v.
Every time they enter a new state, Dad scoffs at the Buckle Up, It’s the Law! signs. Each state puts their own spin on it, as if jazzing it up will makes a fucking difference. They cover state borders more thoroughly than roadkill.
Their home is a 1967 Chevy Impala, built the year before the dumbass government mandated over-the-shoulder seat belts in goddamn passenger vehicles. Or so Dad says.
As they drive, Sam likes to hold his army men up against the window, raising them up and down to make it look like they're running across the power lines to their next mission.
Mile markers are Sam's number line. He learns to count 20 first: the number of exits they need to pass after leaving town before he can tell Dad he's hungry.
He can tell time because sometimes Dean presses his too-big watch into Sam’s hand and whispers Pretend to be asleep until the big hand is on the three before they get in the car.
The shifter alpha has Bobby John. It’s shit, Sam knows it, Dean knows it. Even Samuel is in a shittier mood.
Dean mutters At least we didn’t have to potty train him. Probably trying to make himself feel better.
Sam's mind wanders as they walk toward the car, thinking about how difficult it would be to potty train a kid with the kind of lives they live. Except, his dad must have done just that.
How did I even get potty trained? he wonders aloud. It’s no surprise he doesn’t remember. There’s a lot of things missing these days, especially from when they were kids.
Dean doesn’t respond, his pace quickening.
Sam nudges him and Dean shakes himself, eyes flicking to Sam briefly. Wouldn't say you were potty trained Dean responds, face red so much as Dad decided ammunition was a better use of space than your pull ups. Told you to tell me when you had to piss and we’d pull over. ‘ventually you learned to hold it ‘til we could make it to a gas station. He says it like it’s shameful, like it’s his fault that Sam used to piss on the side of the road. Like Sam doesn’t do so now from time to time, not caring if there's a tree to cover him or not.
When Sam is eight, Dad’s in a good mood despite them being in Kansas. Dean spots a sign for the largest ball of twine and Dad pulls off. Sam remembers thinking that if they said it was the largest ball of anything, he’d believe them.
Bobby gives him a clean new notebook because he jabbers two weeks straight about wanting to journal like his dad. He isn’t sure what to write about and Dad never lets him look inside his own journal to practice reading.
To start, he makes a list of all the cities that share a name with their county, figuring it will be something fun to share if he ever starts third grade again. There’s Brookings in South Dakota. Champaign in Illinois. Erie in Pennsylvania.
On another page, he writes down all the mismatched city-state combinations. Montana, Wisconsin. New Mexico, Maryland. Alabama, New York. Oregon, Missouri. New York, Texas. Alaska, New Mexico.
He makes a tally for every time they cross the Mississippi River. 37 times that summer, mostly during their trek north to south from Memphis to Baton Rouge, never on the same stretch of road. Twice, they get to take a ferry and Sam begs to have the windows rolled down so he can listen to the water splash around them.
Dad doesn't let them swim in the Mississippi, even though he lets them splash around in the Ohio and Illinois and Missouri Rivers. Sam isn't sure what makes them different, but he vows to swim in it when he's older.
He never does.
Dean has an innate sense of direction. Sam always has to think about it. Where’s the sun? Where are they going? Which way did they come from? But Dean just always seems to know, like he's got a compass in his brain.
Once, when Sam is ten, the boy’s bathroom is closed. Dad’s filling up the tank, lit up from the blinking Sinclair sign. Their family has gas stations down to a science. Dean takes Sam to the bathroom, browses the shelves and pockets some jerky before joining Sam. He passes over the jerky because, as Dean claims, Sammy you still has pudgy cheeks and puppy dog eyes. No one's gonna bother a kid like you about shoplifting. They’ll go back to the car and Dean will finish filling up the tank while Dad uses the restroom and, hopefully, buys some dinner.
This time, Dean hesitates outside the door which makes Sam nervous. Dean doesn’t hesitate, not because of dumb Out of Order sign.
Eventually, Dean sends him into the girl’s bathroom instead. Inside the stall, there’s a red sticker. Are you safe? it asks with a number listed for some hotline. Something itches at Sam.
He knows it’s for girls and he knows he should put it out of his head with everything else that’s for girls. That’s what Dean does.
He memorizes the number just in case and doesn’t say anything about it to Dean or Dad, even though they must see it too.
His dad never uses his turn signal but he always flashes his brights to oncoming traffic after he passes a speed trap. And ain't that the John Winchester way? No regard to how he's endangering others, but the first to jump in when it’s someone else doing the hurting.
Dean teaches Sam the rainbow, the road a color palette. Red for stop, orange for road work, yellow for yield, green for exits, blue for hospitals.
For the longest time, Sam's favorite color is purple because it's so elusive. Purple is for Taco Bell and not much else. Dean tells him purple is a girl color, that he should like green instead. But green is all Sam ever sees: mile makers, soy beans, dollar stores. Just this once, he wants something special.
Among other things, brown is for camping. His dad prefers wildlife refuges over conservation areas or national forests. Says they’re emptier. Says he’s not fucking scared of bears or alligators or cougars and says Sam should man up.
The bravest thing Sam has ever witnessed in his eleven years is when Dean made his dad install seat belts. The afternoon of the fight, when they're camping a few yards from the bank of the Arkansas River, is also the scardest Sam has ever felt.
Dad sends him into the tent the minute Dean suggests it and Sam hears the slap before he gets the broken zipper to cooperate. Dad had said that he’d teach them to fish today, but Sam knows that’s not going to happen anymore.
He tries not to cry or to listen as his dad and his brother scream at each other. There’s no one for miles 'cuz wildlife refuges are always empty.
Sometime after the sun goes down, Dad drives away, not for the first time leaving them to withstand the elements.
Sam hopes he comes back before tomorrow. He hadn’t brought out his duffle bag, packed tight with his clothes and soap and hunting knife. Stupid. Dean’s bag is sitting just above his head, and Sam feels embarrassed that he’s going to have to borrow a too-big shirt in the morning.
A while later, Sam tentatively joins his brother outside. He makes lots of noise as he treads over, having heard the sniffles from across the river bank. Dean hates being caught crying.
The moon is bright, huge in a way that Sam would have been awed by if it didn’t illuminate a bruise darkening on Dean’s face.
They don’t say anything but Sam goes to hold Dean’s hand like he used to do when he was little. Dean doesn’t push him away.
Now that they're adults and can hustle pool and run credit card scams, they almost always bunk in a motel. But as kids, most nights were spent in the Impala or at another hunter's house. They kept the tent in the trunk of the Impala until it got busted up in a Rugarus hunt in Louisiana when he was twelve. They never replace the tent, but they still camp often enough.
His dad’s always preferred the campsites that are free or at least operate on an honors system, even if they never have running water. Dean usually gets sent to hike to the nearest gas station to fill up empty milk jugs with water. Dean’s always had a way with people. Knows how to use his little kid charm well into his teens and quickly adapts to using his flirtatious confidence once the last of his baby fat is gone.
Sam only catches glimpses of the way Dean is around other people, and he always feels bad for them. They did get to see the real Dean, his Dean.
Dad hits a fox, a squirrel, a bird, a turtle, and a cat. Only time he stops is when he hits a deer. It's still breathing when they walk back to where it's bleeding out half a mile down the road. Sam swears it's crying.
Dad makes Dean shoot it, put it out of its misery.
Sam wonders if Dad'll make Dean shoot him if he cries too much.
Dean and Sam had been asleep in the backseat when they hit the deer. They probably would have died if they hadn’t been seat belted in.
Dad mostly stays east of the Rockies, but he gets a DUI in Montana when Sam is fourteen and they spend the next six months in the Pacific Northwest. Sam loves it there: the trees, the rain, the beach. Around his fifteenth birthday, Dad catches wind of a demon in Oklahoma and they never go back.
Dad keeps three books in the Impala at all times: a road atlas, a yellow pages, and a boy scout handbook. He gets updated copies for the first two around January of each year, but the handbook is always the same 1969 edition. Sam’s read the whole thing cover to cover at least a hundred times because Dean always hogs the atlas.
It’s a habit Sam’s never bothered to kick, fixing his eyes to the side of the road to watch for county signs. When he was little, his dad would give him a treat if he could memorize all the counties they passed through in a day. Even now, he knows the series between Sioux Falls to Broken Bow better than his street address back in Palo Alto. It’s one of the few happy memories of his dad that he has, getting an ice cream and a pat on the shoulder at the end of a ten, twelve, fourteen hour drive. It felt like his dad actually cared for once about him using his head instead of his fists.
He mentions it to Dean once, when Dad is still missing and Sam is trying to convince himself he wants to find him.
Dean gets quiet and after some needling, he grumbles He did that to get you to shut up.
On days where the car jerks side to side, Sam checks for weigh stations. How hard the flags are blowing in the wind and which direction is the only reliable way for Sam to figure out if his dad is drunk.
Dad doesn't drive on Interstate 70 or Highways 10, 24, 32, 40, or 59. Pretty much any of the roads that pass through Lawrence. He avoids the whole state of Kansas when possible, which sucks because Kansas is Dean's favorite state. It would be Sam’s too, except that Dean hates it when Sam copies him even though it isn’t copying to just have the same opinion. Sam says he likes Colorado instead.
Most of the time Dean sits in the back seat with him, but as they get older he sits up front more and more often. His dad doesn't need directions, but sometimes he'll let Dean pick out the campsite from the road atlas.
All that changes after Dad finds out that Sam knows about monsters is that he has Dean read lore books to him from the front seat instead.
Sometimes, after Dean stops looking like a fucking twelve year old and cops no longer pull him over when he coasts down the interstate, Dad will pass out in the back seat and Sam will get to sit up front.
Dean never lets Sam pick the music, but he tells him to go wild with the AC controls.
When Sam is eleven, Dad’s in a good mood again and he drives two hours out of their way to visit the largest ball of twine in Darwin, Minnesota. He must not have a line on another hunt, because they spend the whole afternoon wandering around the tiny town.
Sam thinks the one in Kansas is bigger, or maybe he was just smaller then.
Some roads are better than others. Right before Bobby looks after Sam and Dean for the first time, a huge stretch of I-90 gets resurfaced. The next six years, Sam watches it gray with each visit, new potholes forming as water seeps into it and freezes in the winter. It gets resurfaced again a few months after Bobby dies, and Dean has avoided that road ever since.
It's strange, but a shitty potholed road is better than a shitty patched up one because at least then there's something to avoid.
Sam’s alarm clock is the sound of the rumble strips as his dad nods off just as the sun begins to rise. Dean likes to joke about the magic fingers vibrating beds, but there are some nights Sam can't sleep because the world is too still, no bumps in the road to rock him to sleep.
When Sam closes his eyes at night, he sees yellow and white lines stretching before him, an after image that never fades.