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Sam’s frayed voice has been ricocheting around Dean’s head for hours now; his words lost to the heat of the moment but his desperate, clawing fury keeping Dean bleeding in the dark of his absence. He hears the slam of the front door, too - rippling through his core as Dad’s voice chased Sam’s right into a wall, breaking where Sam could no longer hear it; would possibly never hear it again.
Dean’s knuckles are a calamity, his fingers aflame as he tips his drink refill down his throat.
You had one fucking job, Dad had said, the shattered glass underfoot crunching like the grind of Dean’s teeth in his skull as Dad got up close. His finger lanced through Dean’s sternum. You failed me. You failed your brother. What good are you? Why can’t you ever just do what I say?
And Dean had been unable to speak through the burning in his eyes and nose and chest, which was just as well, because his only thought was, I did everything like you said. Unbearably childish, considering Dean knew Dad wasn’t talking to him, not entirely. He was never fucking talking to just him.
Leave me, Dad said to nobody, misshapen with grief, as Dean faded into the wallpaper. You leave me too.
There are text messages on the blurry screen of Dean’s cell phone, from Sam.
tell him I love him. tomorrow.
And, im at bus stop now if.
If Dean doesn’t breathe he’ll crush his phone in his fist, pitch his glass to the floor, throttle an innocent stranger to the point of concussion as his feelings rip him from his body. He’s so angry he wants to scream and scream and never stop; wants to call Sam back to them through a bullhorn, except Dad’s voice wasn’t strong enough to do it, so why would Dean’s be?
Stupid ungrateful too-good-for-us bitch, gonna get yourself killed out there, fuck you, what’s wrong with you, why don’t you ever listen, you ruined everything, I hated you from the day you were born.
Sam might still be at the bus stop. Dean could catch up to him; could sidle up to him in the car and coax him safely inside, try for the soft touch that used to work, in the days when Dad made Sam cry and Sam would toddle straight to Dean for comfort. The days long before Sam started transforming into someone thorny and withdrawn and unfamiliar, snapping his teeth at Dad and Dean both, secretly scheming to undo them.
Dean’s fingers shake as he thumbs open his messages again, the world blurring even further as he pictures it - feels himself waking up to no Sam, to Dad minus Sam - and is overcome with a swell of fresh emotion so strong that it makes his stomach turn over.
dean please, says the last message he’d received.
Dean can be enough. He has to be enough, because the look in Sam’s eyes before he ran out the door is seared into Dean’s mind. And because Dean is tired - so, so tired of following Sam; probably had been all along.
Dean writes his response with his jaw clenched, channeling Sam’s own hatred to use against him, to plug up the hole he’d left in the fabric of their reality.
have a nice life.
Then he scrubs the tears from his face, and orders another round, and starts to turn over his new job in his head, his former primary function dissolving in the pit of his stomach as its replacement clumsily takes shape from bits of Dad that snag in the rushing current of his thoughts.
Just me, Dean thinks, experimental, and by the time the bartender cuts him off and he’s swaying into the vastness of the night, he’s almost managed to convince himself that it’s a good thing.
Sam doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting on the bench, backpack gnawing at his spine and messenger bag pulling at his left shoulder, wet nose raw in the cold, eyes throbbing in time with his heart. One bus has already come and gone without him, his phone silent and unsympathetic in his hand; his frantically-typed pleas netting him nothing. There had been an older woman waiting with him, a while ago, and she had offered him a tissue. She’d asked, Who hurt you, baby? And he had howled like something inhuman, his cheek still stinging where Dad had slapped him.
He couldn’t have been more than five minutes from the house before his knees started wobbling like they wanted to buckle, and a choking torrent of regret very nearly made him turn around. What if Dad was right? What if the Real World would take one look at him and flick him back towards Dad’s sullen ghost-ship of a car immediately; back into the vise-tight arms of the only two people who could ever… but they didn’t. The night wouldn’t have burst into excruciating splinters, if they did. It wasn’t like Sam hadn’t warned them beforehand, loudly and often. You never listen to me, he’d screamed, mid-maelstrom, head and throat pulsing with his efforts to be heard over Dad, over…
“Don’t,” Sam murmurs to himself out loud, getting up to pace, to distract himself from the molten crackling of his ribs, the waves seething in his stomach. Some stupid, meek, docile-little-brother part of him that had somehow survived years of his attempts to stamp it to death had been quietly convinced that Dean would help him. That as soon as Big Brother finally realized that Sam was serious, he’d… what, talk to Dad on Sam’s behalf? Valiantly defend Sam’s right to higher education? Drive Sam to the bus stop when Dad kicked him out, give him a parting wink and a parting smile and a parting proud of you, dude? Fucking preposterous - Sam sees that now. Those saccharine slices of fantasy were inspired by a distinct facet of Dean: his startlingly sweet hugs and purposefully slobbery kisses and just-rough-enough cartoon-character noogies and watch your step, Sammy; quit starvin’ yourself, Sammy; you can pick the channel, Sammy; his grins huge and ecstatic and instinctively pointed at Sam when Dad looked away after complimenting his aim, or when he bragged all lascivious about a new girl he was seeing - always performatively conspiratorial about it, always you and me, kid, the roles the two of them played as easy as breathing, or at least it seemed that way for Dean most of the time; it was only Sam who was broken, who didn’t belong to the succession of lifeless rooms or to the moody car or to the neverending hunt, who’d started to feel emptier inside than the sky was dark on nights when Dad and Dean left him. And that is the problem. There’s no big-brother Dean without little-brother Sam. He can’t have love if he can’t play his role.
Who the fuck do you think you are, Dad had screamed back at Sam, smacking his half-drunk beer off the table as he rose, and the noise from the resulting shower of glass forced Sam’s voice into an earsplitting screech when he proclaimed, You don’t fucking own me!
In the moment, it had felt real, and righteous, and long overdue. Now, in the yawning silence - with his fingers going numb around the useless brick of his phone, with $250 in skipped-meal savings and skipped-class temp wages stuffed into the first and only wallet Dean had handed down to him, with a sprawling dorm-supplies checklist and a timeworn family photo burning a hole in the safest pocket of his messenger bag - it feels so fucking stupid that he can hardly breathe through the shame.
Dean hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t given Sam a single actual word to work with. He’d thrust plenty of them upon Sam before tonight, whenever the subject arose out of Dad’s earshot; usually, What are you, braindead? Dad’ll wring your neck just for asking. Usually, Shut the hell up about school, Sam, you’re giving me a headache. Not like you can’t drool into your dictionaries right here, where the monsters won’t shish-kebab your ass. Most of those loosely-termed conversations had taken place much earlier, when Sam really didn’t know any better. There is one, however, that is fresh enough and violent enough that the memory prickles painfully, sending a rogue wave of self-revulsion shuddering through Sam’s body.
Sam had been re-reading Forster’s A Room with a View that afternoon, he remembers, because Dean had grabbed it out of his hands and flung it across the room in his anger, and when Sam was inspecting it later he’d found half the pages bent out of shape, the binding along the aging book’s poor spine shedding flakes of papery skin when he ran his trembling fingers over it.
You think you’re so goddamn special, Dean had spat at him, his features warped by the wrathful glare that he usually reserved for the things they hunted. Get the fuck over it before someone makes you.
Dean had apologized, in his Dean way, by secretly planting a brand-new copy of the book over Sam’s damaged copy a week later. Sam had stared at its pristine edges and glossy, updated cover illustration; window overlooking a vibrant port, glowing white pages, foreword he hadn’t yet read. He’d thought about the bevy of ballpoint annotations - his own alongside those of two previous owners - that lived inside the stained and deformed pages of his original, now-redundant copy, and he’d burst into big ugly tears, clutching the books to his chest, telling himself it would be okay, because he was allowed to have both.
You’ll learn, Sammy, Dean used to say, when Sam was so upset with Dad after an aborted training session that he had to pace until he made himself dizzy to keep from screaming at the top of his lungs. There’s nothing like it, once it clicks. You’ll be better than me and I’ll be so fucking pissed at you, I’ll wish you’d never picked it up so it could just be me and Dad again.
Sam had felt like the smallest person in the world, then, frowning up at Dean through his hair, wrenching himself away with a snarl before Dean could undermine the weight of his words by pinching Sam’s too-round cheeks; a favorite gesture of his at the time, affectionate but disgustingly infantilizing, increasingly worth rejecting for the sake of Sam’s tremulous pride. Ironically, he feels exactly like that now, waiting all alone for the final bus of the night. He’d thought it would help. He’d thought he would feel tall.
I want Dean, Sam's heart whines, pitching drunkenly into his ribs. “You’re not a f-fucking baby,” he tells it, teeth chattering from the cold or the blooming spots of panic, voice sticking in his sore throat like a dull knife. He has a horrible feeling that if Dean chased him here, that if he put his hand on Sam’s shoulder or said, Sammy, or even just looked at him in the dark; eyes glinting, mouth and brow furrowed, Sam would collapse into him and cry and cry and cry, and he’d never dare to try anything this ambitious ever again, because Dean would see right through it.
He’s caught between two vacant roads at the moment, waiting for the sound of a rumbling engine - familiar or unfamiliar - to reanimate him, to send hope or dread or both sparking through his bones, because as long as the night remains still he is nothing but his wretched smallness; magnetized to the phone in his fist, ankles groaning with the effort of keeping him standing, a slowly failing beacon for the vessels that might land on either side of him.
He nearly drops his phone in shock when it chirps at him, sudden and obtrusive after so much deadness, and his heart is pounding savagely as his fingers slip over the buttons, because this is Dean, it has to be.
Four words.
Sam had offered Dean nine text messages, and three missed calls, and one letter hand-written on narrow-ruled paper and neatly folded and tucked into the pocket of Dean’s second-favorite flannel.
Dean had given Sam four conclusive words in return.
Sam is crying again, everything he’d been holding back breaking loose with an irreversible crack in his chest, and he’s wrung-dry by the time there’s a door opening in front of him, completely emptied of his tears and his romantic notions.
“Kid,” the bus driver calls to him, leaning tiredly over the wheel, her face wreathed in shadow beneath the brim of her cap. “You coming, or staying?”
And suddenly, the decision feels easy.