Work Text:
This brother you’re road-tripping with. How do you feel about him?
A ghost shot him. It used Sam’s body to do it. At least, that’s what he’s telling himself. It’s easier than anything else.
“Dude, I’m fine—” Sharp, bitten-off, Dean not wanting the first-aid kit. Dean not wanting Sam with the first-aid kit.
Rock-salt bruises. Pretty damn deep. They won’t kill you. Sam was an offered apology (another one), and Dean doesn’t want it. Want him.
Nothing left to do but hold back. Sam hunches helplessly on his own bed. This isn’t the ugliest motel he’s ever been in, but it rakes him over with despair.
You’d be surprised how many people say that to me, Sam, as if the simple fact of blood relation is the solution rather than the cause of their woes, psychological and otherwise. Do you know what lack of distance does to familial dysfunction? It worsens it. Think of all the unpleasantness that family dynamics breed. Resentment, paranoia, anxiety…all those steep like tea. Now, you came here, in the middle of what you’ve assured me is a vacation, desperate to seek help for your mental health. Why?
Sam would rather think about the rock-salt. The empty gun is—
It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him, it will never be him, no matter how obnoxious and short-sighted and stubborn and Dean Dean is, it will never be Sam who kills him.
He didn’t expect his brother not to know that.
He didn’t expect—
Doctor, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.
Am I?
Yeah. I mean, look, things aren’t always peachy between us. But he’s a solid guy. He’s looked out for me my whole life. He helped set me up for college (that’s true in a way) and he’s taught me most of what I know.
More than college?
Yeah. A hell of a lot more.
Sam, he isn’t here. He isn’t watching you. There’s no need to be so defensive.
Silence. Between them, that is. In the space where words should be, the clock ticks; something scuttles in the wall; the highway keens beyond their sight.
Sam gives up. He stretches out on the bed farthest from the door (this is still life with Dean—he does know that much) and watches his brother move through the shadows with half-shut eyes. There is Dean with a hand on the back of his neck; there is Dean breathing a pained breath, because sore ribs hurt like a mother, and there is Dean, gone to bed, too.
To sleep? Sam hopes. He doesn’t know, though, if his brother is still angry.
(Was Sam angry?)
Tonight, unlike all the other nights when anger kept him warm and fed and living, Sam wants rage and gunshot certainty to belong to someone else.
Before the phone rings: silence. Before the phone rings, and Dad?, and the way that changes them, again—Sam sleeps lightly, if at all.
(We’re brothers, he said to James Ellicot. Like that explained everything.)