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“What’s this?” Sammy asks, rolling around the bottle in his hand that Dean just pressed to his chest, pretending as if he doesn’t recognise it.
“My aftershave, dude. So you can pick up chicks. Trust me, they’ll be falling at your feet left and right when you smell like this.”
A soft laugh of disbelief echoes in the air, and Sammy smiles for half a second, revealing the top row of his teeth as the rare sound reaches Dean’s ears. He doesn’t look up at Dean, trying to pretend like this means nothing to him.
“And in case you miss me.” He teases, lightly punching Sammy in the left shoulder. The joke makes Sammy finally look at him, his mouth becoming tight-lipped, his eyes hiding something, trying to keep himself guarded. It's becoming more and more clear that this isn't his Sammy anymore. He looks down at the space between them.
It takes him a few moments of waiting to realise that Sammy isn’t going to come back with some snarky comment – ‘you’re the most forgettable guy I’ve ever known’ or something similar – or to call him an idiot, and he likely never will again. Dean feels a lump in his throat, and he looks up at Sammy – up, what an awful thought – trying to find a way to fix the awkward silence.
Why couldn’t Sammy just stay the same for a little longer? Why couldn’t he just accept that he’s a Winchester, and that college isn’t for him? Why couldn't he stay small and innocent forever?
Why does it have to be this way?
Some part of him wishes he could follow Sammy all the way to California and live under his bed to keep him safe, but dad needs him just as much; the world needs him just as much.
He looks at a tiny bloodstain on Sammy’s shirt to try and distract himself from the things that he shouldn’t be feeling – but he keeps wishing, and wishing, and wishing. He should be angry like dad, then maybe this wouldn’t hurt so much.
Sammy is choosing to leave, choosing to abandon him and everything they have ever done. There’s no assimilating into the real world for people like them, and he’ll come crawling back in a week and dad will be mad but he’ll forgive Sammy because they’re family, and everything will go back to normal. That’s how it should go.
None of this is fair.
There’s not long before Sammy has to leave, but as Dean weighs the options in his mind, the seconds seem to tick by faster, and he doesn’t know what to say; should he beg to come along? Or beg Sammy to stay? Or tell him that he’s never welcome back home again? Or should he just let him leave?
Maybe Sammy just hates him. Maybe he should have tried harder to make Sammy need him.
He remembers holding his baby brother in his arms for so many years that the memories are etched into his mind like the ink of a tattoo, but now the boy is taller than him, and smarter than him, and braver than him, and he’s looking at Dean as though he means nothing.
But he doesn’t give the aftershave bottle back, so that must mean something, right?
If he could just close his eyes long enough to make those memories real again, then they wouldn’t be here right now, and Dean wouldn’t hate Sammy’s guts while simultaneously loving him more than anything else in this shit world.
Without Sammy to light the way, he has nothing to guide him through the darkness.
Without Sammy who is he?
He wants to reach out and hold Sammy again, to be able to curl around his whole body like he once could, and feel those tiny hands wrap around his as he carries him to the end of the earth.
He remembers the exact day that Sammy stopped hugging him back, leaving Dean to wait hopefully for months for his Sammy to come back again, until that hope died and he finally accepted that Sammy wasn’t tiny anymore. He wants nothing more than to hug him one last time – this has to be the last time they'll ever be together, because he’s probably going to die without him here.
Then, in the blink of an eye, Sammy is stuffing the aftershave into his jacket and picking up his bag and walking to his bus that will take him to California – to certain doom. He looks back at Dean one final time before boarding the bus, and Dean puts on a brave face and waves to him, praying to god that maybe he’ll change his mind at the last second.
Even when the bus departs from the station, and even when it’s a mile down the road, and even when the sun begins to set, Dean thinks that Sammy is going to come back and surprise him. Maybe the letter from Stanford was just a joke, and soon the bus will turn around and Dean will be mad at his brother but he’ll forgive him. He waits for someone to save him from his statue-like position, but in the end he is the one to drag himself from his spot he found himself glued to.
He drives ‘home’ on autopilot, slamming his foot on the gas until it can't go any further, turning corners much too late, only half paying attention to the road. The only reason he doesn’t go diving head first into the trees is because he made Sammy promise to call every day, and because he and dad would be pissed at him for dying.
It only takes a few hours before Dean misses Sammy, when he finally sits down in the empty hotel room and looks to the empty bed beside him, blaming his watery eyes on the lingering smell of cigarette smoke on the walls.
-
California. The place that Sam has dreamed about ever since he was forced to become a hunter, the place that he almost thought he would never see, believing that he would die alongside his brother by the time he reached this age. It's like a breath of fresh air after having his lungs filled with smoke for decades. It's the beginning of his real life.
Here, he doesn’t have to chase after demons or werewolves, and he doesn’t have to hear his dad yelling at him, and he doesn’t have to be anything but Sam.
He doesn't look back when the bus begins moving, facing the future, leaving the life of a Winchester behind forever, leaving the man he calls a father, leaving…
There's a hollow feeling in his chest for the whole drive, as though part of him has been left behind, but he just tells himself that he'll get over it, just like he gets over everything. No matter what, he can't look back.
When he finally arrives at the dorms, just before sunset, the excitement of it all manages to keep him distracted from the aching emptiness.
It's not until he has unpacked what little belongings he has – a few shirts, jeans, and books, the only things he has managed to hang onto after constantly moving – that he remembers the bottle of Dean's aftershave, feeling his breath stop for a moment. He takes his jacket off and places it on the bed, then ever so slowly reaches into the left pocket, wrapping his fingers around the familiar bottle.
He knows that there's no chance in Hell that he's gonna use it, but when he examines it and thinks about throwing it out, he can't bring himself to let it go. He's not sure why he even kept it instead of just shoving it back into Dean's hands the second it was forced upon him, when that should have been the easiest thing in the world for him.
It takes what feels like years of deliberation and staring at the bottle until he finally decides what to do with it.
He places it into an empty bottom drawer, then slams the drawer shut and sits down on the edge of his bed, hoping that he'll forget it's there.
And he does, for about a week.
He lasts for the six days he spends buying everything he needs for his classes and trying – and failing – to introduce himself to anyone but his new roommate – whom he has a silent agreement with not to talk unless absolutely necessary. Six days spent trying to move on.
He tries to keep himself busy from the moment he wakes to the moment he falls asleep, not wanting to waste even a second on the past except for when he calls Dean and they talk like strangers before quietly hanging up when the air becomes stale – usually after ten minutes, if they really stretch it out. Sometimes Sam catches himself holding the phone to his ear even after he hears the click, wishing that he could hear Dean for just a moment longer. But then he reminds himself that he's free, and he doesn’t want to go back to that life again.
Pretty soon he runs out of things to do before the year officially starts, and that makes things even harder. And he begins to remember the aftershave.
It's not fair, Sam shouldn't feel homesick when he's never had a home, and yet he misses some parts of his life before California. If you ignore all the supernatural stuff, some of it wasn't so bad.
He misses the endless roads and the music and the crappy hotels and the cold nights.
He misses things that he never thought he would ever want again, like beer and mud on his boots and blood congealed in his hair.
He misses the adrenaline, and the research, and the constant moving – how strange, when that was the thing he hated most.
He misses having someone by his side.
He misses…
He silently walks to the drawers opposite his bed, now not entirely empty and containing a few clothes that Sam didn't just inherit from his brother.
He bends his knees and opens the bottom drawer, staring at the bottle.
Though the internal battle between himself is a difficult one, the victor remains as the side of his mind that can't let go, holding the streak for over who knows how many years. He picks up the bottle and wanders to his bed.
For a few moments he just lays on his back and stares up at the ceiling as he holds the aftershave to his chest, hoping that maybe this will be enough to cure the aching of his hollow insides so that he can hide the past again as fast as he can.
But it's not enough.
After only 2 minutes, Sam takes the cap off of the bottle and sprays the aftershave into the air by his face, not even hesitating to breathe it in. All at once, the smells he used to hate dance on his nostrils, teasing him with the distant memory of his brother. Sam closes his eyes and breathes deeper; the cheap, musky, smell of fuel flowing through his lungs.
It's awful, but it brings him back to those shitty motel rooms, where he would lie awake and watch his brother sleep, waiting impatiently for September to finally arrive so he could escape. He had been so confident then, counting down the days, not thinking about what life with Dean would be like, ignoring the tiny voice nagging at him to stay.
Sam lifts his head off of the pillows and sprays the aftershave onto one of them, then lays back against it, closing his eyes and bringing his knees to his chest, remembering the years when he was small enough to fit into Dean's arms.
It's strange to him now, how easily he stopped himself from running to Dean's bed after every nightmare at a certain age, because now he has seen worse things than anything his brain could come with back then, and yet he wants to run all the way back into the safety of his brother's arms.
He hates to admit it, but he misses Dean.
He misses home, wherever that is.