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Supernatural 01x02
”You wanna tell me what's going on in that freaky head of yours?”
“Dean—”
“No, you're not fine. You're like a powder keg, man, it's not like you. I'm supposed to be the belligerent one, remember?”
*
Change was never instantaneous.
Well, except for when it was. A demon could change everything you knew before you even knew it.
Sam stomped on the brakes, bringing his brother's car to a jerky halt.
“Hey! Take it easy on her.”
“Shut it, passenger princess.” From the corner of his eye, he caught Dean's frown.
“Sammy, driving's a privilege, not a right.” Dean's frown deepened. “And if you're gonna make demands like that, you could at least say please.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Sam hit the gas, jerking the car to life when the light turned green with the same roughness he'd brought it to a stop.
“I swear, Sammy, the minute this car's parked, it's over for you.” There was little threat in Dean's voice despite his words of warning.
Still, when Sam pulled into the parking lot of the motel, he didn't take any chances. He put the Impala into park in record time, leaping out and slamming the door shut so hard the car shook.
“So that's the way you wanna play it, huh?” Dean said, exiting the car a moment later. He was moving with a deliberateness that made Sam double check his brother's actual movements matched what he was telegraphing.
“Play what, Dean?” Sam raised an eyebrow. “What's the game?”
“Ha. Grab your stuff and let's check in.” Dean jerked his head towards the trunk of the car.
Sam did as he was told, locking up after he'd retrieved his duffel bag and turning for the entrance of the motel.
“Ah, not so fast.” Dean stepped in front of him and held out his hand. “My car, my keys. Hand ‘em over, Sammy.”
Sam made a face, but tossed the keys over. “Control freak.”
Dean snatched them out of the air with ease.
*
Things weren't any better inside.
Sam still felt antsy, even after he'd showered off the remains of their journey. There was a dark, restless sort of energy that thrummed beneath his skin and made his muscles tense, undoing the relaxation gotten by the steam at hot water in the shower. It was a volatile sort of vigor that was liable to spark if rubbed the wrong way.
Tugging a shirt over his head, Sam let out a heavy exhale, trying to expel some of what was making him so off-kilter.
It didn't work.
Across the room, Dean cleared his throat. Sam scowled when he met his gaze and saw a look of knowing in his face.
“Shut up,” he said preemptively.
“What'd you do with my lil brother, huh?” Dean asked, folding the newspaper he'd been reading and setting it on the circular table filling a corner of their room.
“Dean, it's been two years, don't you think a little change's normal?” Sam flopped onto the bed.
“It's been two years, sure, but the change in front of me? That's not from you going to college, that's from seeing your girlfriend die.”
Sam flinched.
“Easy.” Dean pushed himself back in his chair back, watching him closely.
“I'm not gonna explode.”
“Sure.” Dean looked doubtful.
“I'm not, and if you'd quit worrying, you'd see it for yourself.”
“It's my job to worry,” Dean gave him a stupid little smirk, the one he wore right before being more of a pain in the ass than usual. “I'm your brother.”
“Well, one brother to another, you can fuck off.” Sam crossed his arms over his chest. “You don't need to worry because everything's fine.”
“That's exactly what someone who's not fine would say.”
“No, someone who's not fine would say, ‘I'm not fine.’”
“That's what you'd think.”
“I'm. Fine,” Sam ground out. “Quit asking.”
“Can't when I can see you working yourself up.” Dean reached for the newspaper he'd been reading. “Wanna go for a run?”
“Since when do you run?” Sam asked flatly.
“Never,” his brother said easily. “But I'll try it if it makes you look less ‘I'll-kill-you-if-you-move-wrong.’”
Sam’s scowl went unnoticed; Dean had unfolded the newspaper, already engrossed in, well, whatever it was the tiny middle-of-nowhere town they'd stopped in had to write about.
He wasn't sure what came over him next.
Maybe it was lack of sleep, maybe it was Jessica's death. Or maybe, and most probably, it was the way Dean's gaze was fixed dead-center on an ad for pest control that told Sam his older brother wasn't actually reading, but waiting for him to spill his guts.
Whatever it was, Sam didn't like it.
Snagging one of his boots off the ground, he hurled it just shy of Dean's head. It struck the wall behind him hard, leaving a dark scuff mark on the faded wallpaper and a distinctly heel-shaped dent in the plaster.
“Jesus!” Dean jerked out of the chair, looking first at Sam, then the wall, then the boot, then back to Sam. “What was that for?”
“Emotional regulation,” Sam said testily. “Anger management. Call it what you will. Isn't that what you want? For me to express my emotions?”
“Well, yeah, dude, but not like that.” Dean stared at him, wide-eyed with his head cocked to the side like he was dealing with a wild animal instead of his baby brother.
Sam narrowed his eyes, reaching for the second boot.
“Oh no you don't.” Dean crossed the room, catching Sam's wrist before he could send his other boot in a trajectory similar to the first.
It was a brief but decisive struggle that ended with Dean seated on the bed and Sam sprawled across his lap. The boot had ended up back on the ground just out of Sam's reach. He'd kept in shape at Stanford, but Dean had the advantage of two solid years of hunting to Sam's none since he'd gone away to college.
“I'm all for you having a tantrum, if that's what you gotta do, Sammy,” Dean said, keeping him over his lap easily like Sam wasn't fighting like hellcat to escape. “But we're traveling on a limited budget, so you're gonna be a dear and not add destruction of property charges to our tab while you're at it.”
“A little dent in the wall's hardly ‘destruction of property.’”
“Yeah, somehow I don't think the owner's gonna agree,” Dean said, a hint of pathetic moroseness slipping into his voice. “Did you see the look he gave us?”
“Since when've you been the goody-two shoes?” He kicked his legs wildly, hoping to throw Dean's center off balance and wriggle away.
“Since you decided to chuck yours at my head.” Dean sounded unfairly composed, as though wrangling taller-than-him little brothers took no more effort than plucking an abandoned pigeon feather from a tuft of grass.
“Only one,” Sam said, sulky he'd even felt the need to clarify. Then, after he'd given an especially vigorous kick that ended with Dean trapping his legs between his own, “Hey!”
“Dude,” Dean began, “I'm not letting you kick me in the face just ‘cause you're having a lil hissy fit. Speaking of, are you gonna be done soon, or do you need help? I'm kinda hungry.”
Sam swore, fluently.
“I'll take that as one ‘help-me-please,’” his older brother said, smacking his hand down hard against the seat of Sam's sweats.
Sam opened his mouth, ready to voice one of the many cutting retorts that had sprung to mind—
Dean's hand cut him off, dusting his rear with brisk, stinging reminders that that wasn't how it worked when dangling over his brother's knee like he was eleven and in trouble all over again.
(“Reading’s good ‘n’ all, Sammy, but you gotta rest up, too. We've been on the go for over a day now, and we're gonna be just as busy after I'm through with you. So next time maybe sleep before you hit the books, ‘kay?”)
“Dean,” he whined when he'd finally found his voice. “What the hell is your problem?”
“Think that's a question you should be asking yourself, bud,” Dean said, swatting the undercurve of Sam's bottom hard enough to draw out a yelp.
“Nothing,” Sam insisted, going for indignation but landing on a snarl. “Nothing, and if you'd just believe me already—”
“Oh, please. That's just insulting.”
And damn if Dean's hand didn't hurt. Sam shifted what little he could over his brother's lap. It didn't much help; Dean didn't once miss his target, nor did he give indication Sam's efforts were even remotely close to success.
“You're gonna tell me after all these years you think you can hide behind a lie?” For the first time that evening, he could hear a hint of annoyance in Dean's voice. “Well sorry to tell ya, but some things don't change so easy, Sammy.”
“Christo,” he gasped after an especially hard swat. “Christo, Christo.”
“Sorry, buddy, no demons here. I checked.” Dean sounded vaguely amused.
That was just unfair. Dean was at least supposed to sound remorseful about what he was doing.
“Well?” Dean asked, after what seemed like an eternity.
“I don't think that,” Sam ground out, trying to ignore how much his brother toasting his ass hurt.
“So what is it then?”
“I'm not trying to do it,” Sam attempted to explain. “It's just—”
He broke off, swallowing hard.
Sam'd thought he'd done a decent enough job of feeling everything he needed to feel at Jessica's funeral. Sure, there was more to process, but that was what his subconscious was for, right? It'd take care of things for him just like how it used dreams to process what he'd experienced during the day, déjà vu to signal an illusion of memory, or even…
Man, who was he even kidding?
“It was my fault,” he found himself confessing, angry twists and kicks giving way to out-of-breath pants and shuddering shoulders. “Dean, she wouldn't've died if I hadn't—”
He choked back a sob.
“ —if she hadn't—if I hadn't—”
“Hey,” Dean cut it.
“She shouldn't've been there,” Sam gasped. The ache in his chest was expanding so quickly it threatened to eclipse him.
“Hey, listen to me.” There was an urgency in his brother's voice, but for the first time ever, it didn't rouse anything in him. “Sammy!”
And if it hadn't been for the sudden burst of pain across the back of his right thigh, maybe Sam would've been lost forever in that viscous, awful, all-encompassing feeling of guilt.
A matching blossom of pain spread across the back of his other thigh.
One matching pair became two became three and then Sam was gasping not because it hurt to be, but because Dean was an asshole who thought a spanking was the solution to getting him out of his head.
“You with me?” Dean asked. There was something about the way he said it that made Sam think it wasn't the first, or the second, or even the third time he'd asked him that question.
“Yeah,” Sam said. Something halfway between a hiccup and a cough rose in his throat. “‘M here. Ow.”
Dean's hands gentled, repositioning him so his chest no longer dangled over his thighs, but rested on the duvet-covered mattress instead.
“What happened with your girl, that wasn't your fault.” Dean's voice was oddly gentle. He worked his hand through Sam's hair, untangling still-damp-from-the-shower curls. “You might say it is, maybe you really think so. But Sammy, sometimes shitty things just happen and there's no hidden agenda behind it, no course of action you could've taken to make things turn out different.”
Any other time, Sam would've laughed, made some snarky comment back. This was, after all, macho, I'm-above-emotions Dean, trying to coax him, the most normal member of their messed up little family, out of guilt and into self-forgiveness.
But he didn't. Because every time he closed his eyes—and sometimes even when he didn't—the only thing rattling around his skull was Jessica.
Beautiful, sweet, killed-by-a-demon dead Jessica.
And it was all his fault.
Because if he'd been less of a coward, if he'd tried just a little less hard not to run from his upbringing, if he'd just listened to his own damn intuition, the voice in the back of his head telling him the dreams he'd had weren't the ordinary sort, the world would be out a demon, not a soon-to-be college grad.
“You don't know that,” he said quietly. His voice came out sad and broken even to his own ears.
“Well, what the hell makes you think otherwise?”
Sam clamped his jaw shut.
“Sammy…”
“I'm not ready to tell you,” he said, a little stiffly, a little sulkily, but decisively enough to make Dean back off. Because how was he supposed to explain the premonitions he'd had? That was some really freaky shit, for anyone, really, but hunters especially.
A moment of silent consideration followed, Dean's hand still gentle on the back of his head.
“But you're ready to not chuck your other boot at me if I let you up, right?” Dean teased when he finally spoke again.
Sam heaved a sigh, part relieved, part amused. “I guess.”
“Good, ‘cause I'm starving.” He gave Sam's hair one last ruffle, then pushed him off his lap.
“Hey!” He'd landed in an unceremonious heap.
“You've had enough coddling,” Dean said unrepentantly. Still, he grabbed Sam's wrist, tugging to help him to his feet. “There's a diner open late just around the corner. They got pie, you coming?”
Sam stared at him for a moment, then gave him a tentative grin. “Yeah, I'm coming.”
“Knew I could count on you, Sammy.” Dean clapped his shoulder, handing him the boot he hadn't managed to throw.
“It's ‘Sam.’”
“I'm your brother, I'll call you what I want.”
“Pie's on you.” Sam crossed the room to tug his other boot on.
“Pie's on dad's credit card.”
“Deal.”