Chapter Text
And maybe someday we will meet,
(and maybe talk and not just speak)
Chapter One
WARNING: This is an English translation of one of my older fanfictions. You can read the original Italian version (full story) at this link.
The first time it happened—or at least the one he later categorized as such—Dean didn’t notice.
“God, I think you and I are gonna get the best sleep of our lives tonight, Sammy.”
He had said this as he collapsed his tired limbs onto the first bed that appeared in front of him that night. White Oak Motel, Lowndesboro.
Excluding two short stops at rest areas—quick and discreet, much more so than in the days when they were hunted by the FBI—they had been on the road for eleven hours straight.
Eleven hours with the sole objective of hiding away in this lost corner of Alabama.
No, it wasn't a planned destination from the start—but to Dean, it felt far enough from the Northern Indiana General Hospital, so it was more than fine.
Baby had been on his side, as always. His loyal companion in every chase, she had devoured miles and miles, sometimes brushing 75 miles per hour* without a hitch, and the sound of her engine on the cold asphalt was the perfect soundtrack for that moment, the best he could imagine.
Dean had been sixteen the last time crossing a state line had given him such a rush of adrenaline. Sixteen, with a twelve-year-old brother disguised as a girl that he had snuck out of a foster home in Oklahoma.
(Sam would be on every milk carton for the next ten days; they couldn't risk it).
“Oh, Samantha, you’re such an idiot! Did you really think I’d let those bastards take you away forever? Seriously, did you see them? Those idiots with my Sammy?”
(Just to mask the embarrassing way he had clutched him, choking back tears when he’d picked him up from that windowsill).
They could only try to pull something like that.
Just as that damn shrink had only tried to lock Sam behind the door of a maximum-security psychiatric ward, a sticky rage clung to Dean every time that image resurfaced in his mind.
His brother curled up beside him somehow amplified the feeling, and when it happened, his foot would slam on the gas with an impudence and defiance that Sam would have found disgraceful.
Sam, though, had slept almost the whole time, and Dean hadn’t disturbed him, except to get something into his stomach. Priorities.
A wool hat carefully placed on his head, gloves, and a series of 'Stay close to me; let’s get the food and get out' repeated aloud more than he was aware of.
Sam had let him do it, too tired to ask unnecessary questions.
He had eaten the double bacon cheeseburger Dean shoved under his nose without protest (an easily predictable outcome) and accepted the fries and strawberry milkshake.
He didn’t talk much. Just took bites and swallowed.
Every now and then, his head would wobble between the seat and the window, searching, with little success, for a comfortable spot to rest.
“That’s how I like it,” Dean had grinned, satisfied as he gathered the empty wrappers from Sam’s lap and added them to his own before tossing them out.
He had finished everything; he hadn’t expected such a miracle.
He should have been seriously happy, or at least, pretended to be—Sam would have appreciated it. In fact, he reflexively returned the smile, a tired, worn-out one.
He kept to himself the pang in his stomach upon realizing that none of the lines he had prepared to convince his brother to eat greasy, unhealthy junk food were needed.
Castiel might have healed his mind, but ten days of insomnia, torture, and starvation were still there. Like the fingernails missing and the burns on his temples.
Fixing it wasn’t going to be that easy. Dean should have figured that out before waking up that night—the very night he had sworn to sleep like a baby—eyes wide open, ears filled with the painful sound of his brother’s retching.
After all, he had started it. He was the one who had snatched Sam from the kingdom of the dead once.
And the knowledge that since then, every force in the universe seemed to compete in a sadistic race to reclaim what was stolen changes your perception of the world. You develop selective senses that always surprise you.
“Sam!”—just two, three suspicious coughs had been enough to wake Dean instantly, darting over to the bed beside his with a speed that, to Sam’s eyes, probably seemed like he had always been there.
“Sammy—hey. Hey, hey—turn over, come on—turn over!”
His voice accompanied his hands as they searched for Sam’s shoulders in the darkness, quickly rolling him to his side and holding him against the edge of the bed, allowing what was left of his cheeseburger to fall to the floor (and a bit onto his bare feet) instead of into his brother’s lungs.
Dean frowned, his face tightening into a grimace. His right hand had slipped between Sam's protruding shoulder blades, but touching them made the weight of responsibility feel even heavier.
Sam had lost a lot of weight, way too much. His was a kind of thinness that was frightening.
But a double bacon cheeseburger as the first meal after nearly ten days of fasting? Really? If anyone should be locked in an asylum, it was him!
“It’s okay; it’s okay…”
Maybe he’d said it when he first heard the sobs among the retching.
Or maybe he had been saying it all along and just hadn’t realized it.
(But no, he hadn’t said it because he saw the puddle on the center of the bed. The room was too dark, the moment too confusing, there was vomit everywhere—hell, until then, not even Sam knew exactly what had happened!)
Under Dean’s caresses, Sam stiffened. It was as if the fetal position he had curled into, some sort of protective cocoon, had suddenly lost its power to shield him.
As if he had hesitated, hesitated, hesitated, and in the end, had no choice but to surrender.
He clenched his teeth so tightly that Dean heard them crack. Air barely passed through.
“Get your hands off me, get—get these things off me!”
Dirty, claw-like fingers—more like bare tree branches than actual fingers—reached for his temples and tore off the bandages Dean had placed on the burns left by the electroshock when they began to look worse. Dean regretted doing it without Sam knowing.
“Alright, alright, I’ll do it, stay calm—they’re just bandages! I put them on earlier, while you were sleeping, don’t be scared, don’t—”
No. That wasn’t how it worked. It was instinctive to grab his hands and push them away from his head, but he needed to control his instincts from now on.
“Look: they’re in my hands, you feel that? Nothing’s there anymore! All gone, Sammy. All go—”
Because Sam found himself unprepared for that terror, completely thrown off balance.
With jerky, uncoordinated movements, he pushed himself up from the bed before Dean could react, and shoving him away as if he were burning, he wrestled free of the sheets and ran off (Dean was forever grateful that he had rushed for the bathroom door, not the front one).
“Sa-Sam!”
The thud of the door, his brother’s knees collapsing on the bathroom tiles, and then retching, more retching, this time dry—those that split your stomach in half but produce nothing, not even a drop of what you want to get rid of.
Dean paused at the bathroom doorway, silently leaning his back against the wall, and cursed himself.
Sam, however, couldn't know this.
With one arm draped over the toilet seat and his forehead pressed against the crook of his elbow, he was breathing heavily and loudly. And with every breath, Dean discarded one of the pathetic lines he’d wanted to say in a feeble attempt to fix things.
He turned on the light only when he heard nothing more coming from the darkness inside the bathroom.
He remained in the doorway, though; he didn’t dare enter.
Annoyed by the sudden brightness, Sam instinctively pulled his arms towards himself, crossing them over his face. He cast his tear-stained, offended eyes toward Dean, and to Dean, he seemed to see, under the sweat-soaked strands of hair, the face of the child he kept a few photos of somewhere in his wallet.
He recognized that look; it wasn’t the glassy gaze from those days; it was the same one he gave when he was little, when everything went to hell, when a hunt went wrong, or when he found out, yet again, they had to change schools and cities.
“I’ll fix everything, Sammy,” he used to say.
That it wasn’t true didn’t matter back then. It was just an excuse to hug him.
With his arms, he could still cover him from shoulder to shoulder; it was a nice feeling.
But now Sam had grown, and hugging him wasn’t an option.
The feeling he would experience in discovering that Sam had lost so much weight that he could wrap around him the same way would be different.
Dean swallowed something akin to bile.
“Actually, it takes a certain skill to down a double bacon cheeseburger like last night’s. All those years eating tofu and salads wrecked your stomach, brother... It’ll take time...”
Sam lifted his chin off his chest and raised his eyes. He parted his dirty mouth, giving the vague impression of someone who wanted to listen carefully to what Dean had to say.
It was just an impression, though; he knew that well.
Dean tried to get a vague idea of how much he was allowed to do at that moment, and sought the answer right there, in the blurred image of his brother, who was inflating and deflating his chest like a bird in winter, occasionally interrupted by wet, choking coughs.
Then, suddenly, something changed.
He blinked a couple of times; his eyes came alive and moved quickly. Almost as if he had really woken up now, his pupils seemed to focus for the first time on the surroundings. They scanned the room, the tall and imposing figure of his brother, then he lowered his head, looked at himself with the same astonishment of someone who suddenly remembered they had a body. An alien body, something that unsettled him.
He pushed his arms away from himself as if he were contaminated; his face twisted into an unexpected, yet at the moment incomprehensible, grimace of disgust.
(Later on, though, that very grimace would help Dean categorize this moment as ‘the moment Sam realized everything.’ A sort of X-moment, to put it briefly.)
“Dean—?”
He lifted his head.
“Hey.”
Dean breathed a sigh of relief at hearing the hoarse sound of his name. Sure, it came out in the tone of a man about to communicate some misfortune, but it didn’t matter.
Because Dean had already eased the tension in his shoulders, and a smile had appeared on his lips.
But he was too optimistic to take that call as a sign of freedom.
He barely made a move to close the distance between them, but even the attempt was enough to make Sam startle, turning him into an even more nervous and terrified bundle than before.
He jerked back instantly.
His back hit the bathroom tiles behind him with a thud, and the hint of a scream left his lips; the rest he managed to stifle.
“Don’t--!”
He tried to catch his breath, to regain his composure. He closed his eyes, which he had just widened, and attempted to expel all the excess air he had inhaled through his nostrils.
The trembling had increased; in fact, it had become so apparent that it resembled an epileptic fit, and every attempt to speak was cut off in his throat before it could begin.
“Don’t come near me.”
Though whispered, the phrase did not lose any of the intimidating intent with which it had been conceived.
Dean’s lips parted in surprise. He did not recognize his brother in that fast, menacing hiss.
With his arm outstretched and the palm of his right hand wide open, Sam had stopped him like he used to do with demons back in the day.
Well – more or less. Back then, there wasn’t such terror in his face, but still...
Dean stopped. And he backed away. He returned just to the doorway, the demarcation line of a distance he acknowledged hadn’t yet been reached.
He couldn’t see himself, but he could already imagine how horrifying his furrowed brows and stunned look must have been for Sam.
He had to do something, but before he could even think of what to do, Sam spoke first.
“I’m fine—” Sam ran a hand over his face, then coughed again.
Dean had the impression that he was chattering his teeth.
“I’m fine. But don’t come near me.”
“Okay. Alright. I won’t come near you... calm down, Sammy. I won’t.”
He raised his open palms in a sign of surrender, and only then did Sam lower his outstretched arm.
He sniffed and lowered his teary eyes. He seemed frozen under that miserable oversized T-shirt that covered his bare legs.
“Are you sure you’re alright?”
Sam, in response, tried to force a smile, which he found so pathetic that he erased it immediately with a nervous, uneven grimace.
He didn’t try again. Nodding was simpler.
So he did. He nodded with his eyes down, shaking off a few tears with the motion, tears that made Dean wonder when the hell they had appeared.
Damn.
“Alright. Take a hot shower now; I’ll go get you some clean clothes.”
Calm, relaxed voice. Sam would never have believed it reflected his brother’s real emotions, but he didn’t need anything else at that moment, so it was fine.
“I’ll put them on the sink, okay?”
“Dean.”
“Yes?”
Sam’s lips were purple. He was literally freezing, but both of them had chosen to ignore this detail.
“Would you mind if we left after—?”
The crying was taking over again; it was like a monster twisting his face into something hideous, and against which Sam was losing his battle.
“—left here?”
His glossy eyes were full of everything.
They were the silent plea that Dean managed to catch.
“No...”
Dean shook his head, perhaps his gaze showed more concern than he hoped.
“No, I don’t mind, Sammy...”
Sam nodded and was quick to look elsewhere.
Dean knew well that way of biting the inside of his lower lip, so he decided not to wait for his brother's downfall.
“Take your shower now. I’ll wait outside.”
He left the bathroom and half-closed the door behind him.
Ten minutes later, when Sam came out of the bathroom feigning a freshness and confidence far from his true self, their duffel bags were already by the front door.
For some reason the Dean of that night didn’t bother to understand, Sam stayed for a while staring at the bed where he had slept.
He had the look of someone who returns to a place after realizing they had forgotten their wallet, and then upon a closer look, finds it.
He sighed and let his shoulders drop when something in that image of a bed filled with vomit seemed to relax him.
“I guess Mr. Philip De Maillard won’t get his deposit back this time, so what’s the point...”
Dean smirked as he tossed the credit card of an unsuspecting Philadelphia lawyer into the trash can and hurried to retrieve the two extra blankets from the top shelf of the wardrobe.
Before his brother could ask questions and scold him for his deplorable action, he opened the front door and headed towards the Impala parked right in front.
Sam, however, said nothing.
And that scared him to death.
“I’ll sit in the back.”
He mimicked the gesture by tilting his head sideways.
If Dean had been deluded that it was over, if his mind had even for a moment entertained the idea that the hot shower had washed away some of that night, well – the truth was now slapped in his face in all its blatant, undeniable clarity.
The awkwardness in Sam’s tone was more palpable than the frost that stung their faces once outside.
“I still have this weird feeling in my stomach, and I’d rather lie down...”
The umpteenth, utterly fake, smile of that night blended with the white smoke of condensation that accompanied his words.
Dean breathed, breathed again. He wanted to feel the icy air outline the shape of his lungs and feel it within himself, the weight of that night. He needed it, for many reasons.
Containing that nameless sensation growing inside and awakening his instincts was just one of many.
“Alright.”
The car radio wasn’t tuned to anything in particular. At Sam’s request, Dean had turned it on randomly at the exact moment he turned the key, so now the thin, trembling voice of Ronnie Spector singing Be My Baby filled the Impala, purely by chance.
Neither of them found it annoying, which was debatable.
Because it was that same little voice that had drowned out Dean's words when he asked, “Where should I take you? And don’t tell me ‘to the stars,’ otherwise I’ll leave you here!”* – and got no response from that cocoon (Thanks again for the blankets, Mr. De Maillard!) curled up in a fetal position on the back seats.
The volume was high; he was sure Sam hadn’t heard him.
But he didn’t want to insist on repeating the question either, after all, it wasn’t a question that needed an answer, so...
And then, it had been enough to take Interstate 20 for the conviction of having given Sam what he asked for to try to take hold, and Dean forced himself to believe it.
Sure! – He told himself that, after all, Sam was fine, that he’d probably fall asleep soon, that with time, real food, and the right amount of rest, Sam would soon return to being the same, lovable son of a bitch as always.
After all, it was like that – Christ, his brother had survived Hell! Was it really possible that PTSD could destroy him? Besides – what had he done so strange that night? Thrown up an indigestible cheeseburger and asked for some peace? Suggested leaving that godforsaken place where his brilliant brother had had the brilliant idea to book a room for the night?
Really, was he worrying about this?
Alabama...
He must have been really out of his mind to think of bringing him to a place like this!
Sam should be taken to Florida instead. Miami! That would be their next destination!
They’d get a room at the Best Western Atlantic Beach Resort and sip cocktails on the ocean shore for at least twenty days!
They had two, three credit cards that could easily cover the stay, so why not?
Images started flashing through his mind like scenes from a commercial for exotic vacations, and he found the idea exciting and promising. Yeah, it really was a good idea.
He didn’t know yet that the two of them would never set foot in Miami.
A Leviathan, disguised as a cooking class instructor, had committed a massacre in Wyoming, in a place not far from Cheyenne.
It seemed the remains of some of the students had been found by the police still soaked in sauce, surrounded by potatoes, onions, celery, and frozen peas.
Sure, it could have been the work of some 'ordinary' psychopath, but try convincing Sam of that.
“Let’s go check it out,” he had said, folding up the newspaper and getting up from the table at a gas station near Highland Home.
He didn’t even wait for Dean to finish his breakfast; the sausage nearly got stuck in his throat.
Sam, of course, didn’t have that problem. He hadn't ordered anything, and now he had a perfect excuse not to do so even within the ten minutes he'd asked the waitress for.
It wasn’t hard to imagine the bitch face he would have put on if Dean had even hinted at the idea that—maybe—some other hunter in the area could handle the case, so he didn’t even try.
But all of this would happen at dawn, and the Dean of that night was smiling at the dark road at two in the morning, reveling in the idyllic image of their twenty days of peace.
Without realizing it, he had started moving his lips and singing along to The Ronettes' chorus, embarrassingly off-key, but oh well.
If only that bitch Spector had sung a little louder to drown out his brother's muffled sobs, maybe he wouldn't have felt the pressing need to do it himself.
And maybe someday we will meet, (and maybe talk and not just speak) – end of chapter one.
--
Really old fanfiction, three chapters in total, and it will have a fairly open ending.
* Quote from Titanic, but you've all recognized it, come on. :3
It was supposed to be a one-shot, but then I saw that in my mind it was (as usual) becoming a monster, and to avoid ending up, as usual, never writing it, I decided to split it into chapters.
Thanks for reading! :)
The title comes from "Same Mistake" by James Blunt.
Of all the characters you've read about, I don't own a single one. They all belong to their rightful owners, and I'm just writing about them to give them a bit of trouble.