Call CNN - I finished a fic that's not crack and doesn't feature muppets having sex.



Five things Sam wishes he didn’t know about himself.

The girl is nervous. No, more than that, Sam thinks, she’s scared. He reassures her that she’s safe now. The spirit is gone, he explains, and it won’t be back again. She nods her understanding but her eyes are still wide and shining with fear.

He notices that she moves slowly, cautiously, across the room until he is no longer between her and the apartment door and that she keeps flipping her cell phone open and closed again. I have to go, she says, my brother is coming over soon, people are expecting me, I must get to work. Lies tumble out and she’s making no sense, but Sam gets the message that she wants him gone. Whatever, he thinks, a thank-you would be nice.

As he reaches the door, he glimpses his reflection in the mirror on the hall closet. For a moment, he sees himself as she does – the sort of guy she would cross the street to avoid if she were walking alone, even in daylight.

He towers over her, tall and broad, with a bulk of muscle that strains against the worn cotton of his shirt and he knows he could restrain her with one hand. His clothes look like they’ve been slept in for a week, probably because they have, and the handle of his pistol is clearly visible above the waist of his jeans. He carries himself as if he’s expecting a fight and the scraped knuckles and faded bruises on his cheek suggest he often finds one.

Sam’s eyes meet her’s in the mirror. That’s not me, he wants to say. I’m just Sam. I played soccer when I was a kid and I was on the debate team. I went to college; I was going to be a lawyer. I had a girlfriend called Jess, and she said I was the gentlest guy she knew. We baked cookies together. I’m crap at telling jokes, but I love a good prank. I listen to what my brother calls droopy chick music, probably the same songs you’ve got on your iPod. And what I do now -- the violence, the killing -- well it’s what I do but it’s not who I am.

Sam looks into his own reflection and sees the lie in that.

***

Another crappy motel room, Sam thinks as he throws his duffle on the bed by the door. Not as bad as the last one which stank of stale sex and cigarette smoke and much better than the roach infected hole they squatted in last week.

He opens his bag, wrinkling his nose at the pile of crumpled clothes that are well overdue for the laundry. Sam sighs. Give them a day or two and they’d probably be ripe enough to walk there by themselves. At college, his friends thought it weird that he had an almost sacred ritual around his laundry, and that he rarely wore anything more than twice before washing it.

Speaking of washing, Sam can smell his own stink, and he wriggles a finger in his ear to pick out a gob of ectoplasm. But Dean has grabbed the first shower, as usual, so he decides to pop out and pick-up some food.

He finds a pizza joint called La Porchetta, which looks like it would pass a health inspection, if not a visit from Gordon Ramsay. Better than the microwaved tacos that he and Dean have subsisted on for the past few days. He places an order for a couple of deep dish versions of “Papa Gino’s Speciality” with extra sausage and double cheese and then wanders over to the minimart on the opposite corner where he picks up a six-pack, a couple of packs of Slim Jims and a box of mini Oreos. He always craves something sweet after a couple of beers. He’s almost out the door when he turns and heads back inside, picking up a couple of bottles of juice. Sometimes he thinks it’s a miracle he and Dean don’t get scurvy.

Sam drives back to the motel, chugging down the O.J. and picking at cheese from one of the pies. He stops in front of their room and pulls the key from the ignition.

He turns the key ring over in his hand. There are a dozen tiny keys to post boxes scattered across the country, a couple of master keys, an assortment of keys to doors closed forever, and the keys to the car. Dean’s keys.

Sam stares at them for a moment, and remembers when he used to have his own car and an apartment. When he wore clean clothes and ate food that didn’t come in boxes. Sam realises he doesn’t have even have any keys of his own anymore. At the thought he presses the ridges of the ignition key against the ball of his thumb until it hurts.

***

She smiles at Sam but he doesn’t smile back.

She is thirteen and her name is Andrea. To her friends she is Andi, for some long forgotten reason her little sister calls her Marmot, and when she was in trouble her mother calls her Andrea Rose Maynard.

Sam had found her MySpace page, and knew that she loved watching CSI and Bones and had already decided to be a forensic scientist when she grew up. Or possibly a dancer although she worried she wasn’t tall enough.

She adored Fall Out Boy and wished the boys at school were more like Pete or Patrick, but apparently they were all dicks, except some kid called Ace who was a bit weird but drew really cool cartoons and shit in little notebooks. He did some pictures of her and she thought that maybe he liked her.

After Sam squeezes the trigger of the Colt, it only takes a fraction of a second before the bullet shatters her cheekbone just below her left eye. There is a sound like power lines crackling after a rainstorm, and she glows as if lit from within.

As she crumples to the ground, Sam lowers the gun, and then turns to leave. Dean grabs his arm but when Sam meets his gaze, he drops his hand. The demon had killed four people since it had possessed the girl, and they couldn’t risk her escaping but still Dean’s look is unsure, and maybe even a little fearful.

Sam knows Dean thinks something is wrong with him – the way he kills now without hesitation, let alone a half hour discussion about his moral quandaries and associated ethical dilemmas. He had feared for a while that there was something demonic growing within him, and maybe that would be better because then maybe some ritual would rid him of it.

The truth was he that he is filled with a very cold, and a very human, rage. So far, he’s directed it at demons and vampires, but sometimes he feels it surge in him, making him want to slaughter the people who sit in the diner while he and Dean have breakfast, or run the car through a crowd of people at a bus stop.

Because if Dean is going to die in five months, Sam doesn’t see why anyone else should live.

***

Sam doesn’t know how Dean can hear himself think, let alone carry on a conversation. The bar is packed; the music loud. Justin Timberlake is boasting about how he’s bringing sexy back, but Sam thinks Dean beat him to it.

Dean’s chatting to a girl, his usual type – curvaceous with full lips and a playful, naughty twinkle in her eyes. He can see Dean running his fingers lightly along her arm, pressing his knee against hers. He will be spinning her some tale, about how he’s a jet pilot or fashion photographer and she’ll know it’s a lie but she won’t care. He’s hot, he’s funny and she’s probably already wet just thinking about his mouth on her.

She leans in and whispers something to Dean. His eyes widen in mock surprise and he laughs.

Dean rarely laughs these days. Sam tries bad jokes, and embarrassing stories like the time at college he got his eyebrows shaved off, or stupid stuff like leaving a whoopee cushion on Bobby’s favorite chair, but the most he gets is a smirk or a maybe a chuckle. Yet this girl makes Dean laugh and the sound cuts through the noise in the bar, sweet and pure like a perfect note.

Dean glances towards him, gives him a smile and a nod. Sam gets the message and packs up his laptop. He’ll walk back to the motel, and lie awake, waiting for Dean to return in the early hours or maybe the next morning. Eyes still bright with lust, a blissful smile playing over kiss-swollen lips, Dean will tease him with snippets of the night’s adventures, punctuated by happy sighs.

These girls Dean picks up don’t know his real name. They don’t know that he likes two sugars in his coffee and hates carrots and can read Latin and some Ancient Greek and a bit of Aramaic. They wouldn’t believe that he’d saved the lives of dozens of people, and cried over the bodies of the ones he couldn’t. These girls don’t know that in less than three months he’ll be dead because he loves Sam so much he gave his life for him.

They can never know Dean like Sam knows him and yet, while it makes no sense, Sam is jealous that these strangers get to make Dean happy in a way he never can.

***

Even six months after, Sam occasionally finds himself at the passenger door of the Impala. Sometimes he barely pauses, just keeps walking round to the other side, pretending to himself that he needed to check that rear taillight. It’s just another papercut that sorrow leaves on his soul a thousand times a day.

Sometimes, Sam finds his hand on the door and before the realization of what he is doing dawns on him, he glances across the black sheen of the roof, puzzled for a moment as to why Dean’s not there looking back at him, with a smirk or an exasperated sigh, or just a look. Long before words on a page had made any sense to him, Sam had been able to read his brother. He had been fluent in Dean all his life, but it was a dead language now.

Last week, Sam opened the passenger door, slid into the seat and slammed the door shut, wincing because Dean hated it when he closed the door too hard. Then the reality of the empty space behind the steering wheel hit him, slamming his body hard against the seat. He was winded for a moment, unable to draw breath, and when he did the swallow of air came right back up on a tide of salt-water grief.

But the worst times sneak into Sam’s day, like old photos slipped in between the pages of a book. They are snapshots of his future, of his life going on, of him living, and loving without Dean. When he glimpses them, he knows that he’ll be okay and that this terrible pain will fade in time.

And for that he hates himself.