(no subject)

[oselle]

Remember that thing I said about not wanting to write any fanfic in this universe? Yeah, neither do I.

Thursday Night

Every Thursday night it was the same goddamned thing.

Motel or cabin or trailer park, Dean never missed an episode. Even last month when he was in the hospital, he’d made Sam blow five bucks on the TV rental, although he’d been so strung out on painkillers he could hardly see the damn thing. And Sam had sat there and listened to him bitch, as always. Dean was on a roll that night because he hadn’t been able to light up so he’d had nothing to do but piss and bitch and slur a stream of obscenities at the tube. What the fuck though, Sam had just been happy to see him awake and alert enough to be pissed off at the TV, instead of just lying there looking like someone had run him through a combine thresher. Dean Winchester was way past his ninth life and Sam didn’t think he had too many more left in him, but Dean had a way of surprising folks, always had.

No surprises tonight though, just the usual Thursday-night ritual, Dean slumped in front of the TV in a split-open vinyl chair, a Camel smoldering away between his fingers. Behind him, Sam was face-down on the bed, trying to catch some shut-eye before they had to head out for the night’s job. He could have slept through the TV but he couldn’t sleep through Dean’s outbursts, which came down as regular as the rain on the window.

“Stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” Dean muttered. The words came out thick and fuzzy because the left side of his face was still swelled up from the job two nights ago when that bloodsucker in the graveyard had slammed Dean against those mausoleum steps and before Sam had even had a chance to think, Fuck, back to the hospital, Dean had staked that fucking thing, practically gutted it. By the time they had burned it, half of Dean’s face was already looking like the goddamn Elephant Man’s and he’d sat up all night chewing Excedrins while Sam went out for fresh ice.

“Unfuckingbelievable. Who writes this shit?”

“Dean.”

“Sonofafuckingbitch.”

“Dean!” Sam repeated, almost shouting this time because he knew Dean could hardly hear a damn thing out of his right ear.

“What?”

“Why do you keep watching it? You say the same fucking thing every week.”

“Because it’s the same fucking piece of shit every week.”

“That’s my point.”

Dean didn’t answer, just made a noise through his teeth, a “you don’t fucking get it, Sam,” noise that ended the discussion right there.

Sam heard the striker wheel on Dean’s lighter and then there was silence from his end, nothing but the voices of those two Hollywood prettyboys who were somehow supposed to be them, and wasn’t it a fuck-all funny world when someone’s playing you on television and using your name and you can’t do a goddamned thing about it? When Dean was really in the bag he’d start ranting about suing that guy, that guy he’d drunkenly spilled his guts to in a bar in Los Angeles, but how the fuck are you gonna sue anyone when you’ve got no money, no Social Security number, hell, you don’t even fucking exist? Who the fuck would ever believe them anyway?

“Why the fuck are they still driving the same car?” Dean snapped and that was a big sticking point with Dean because he still missed that car and the night they’d had to ditch it down that embankment into the LaGrange had been one of the only times Sam had seen his brother cry. Not like those two pussies on the show, who seemed to be turning on the waterworks every ten minutes.

Three times, Sam had seen his brother cry, just three times in a lifetime. The car. The night when Sam had finally woken up at the hospital in Louisiana. And after Dad died. Sam had tried to keep Dean away from the TV for that one but no dice and Dean had sat there in rigid, smoky silence, all the usual bitches and complaints unspoken to the very end of the hour, because most of it had been way too close for comfort.

Close but no cigar, as they say, neither one of them had waltzed out of the hospital, in fact it had been an awfully long time before either one of them had even seen the outside of the building and by then Dad’s body had been long gone. They hadn’t had the money to do anything with it and they’d both been too wrecked to make any arrangements so the hospital had taken care of things and neither Sam nor Dean had wanted to know the details. But no one wants to see that on TV, they want to see a pair of overpaid actors who pretend to take a licking and keep on ticking and look like a couple of fairy fashion models while they’re doing it.

That had almost been the end of it, after Dad died, they almost hadn’t gone back into the life. But they had both wanted revenge and while they’d laid low after getting out of the hospital it hadn’t been long before they were back on the road and there was never any talk of getting out after that. They were both too old and neither one of them really knew how to do anything else anymore, and the life had a hold over them that they never talked about with each other or with anyone else. They were all the same, all the hunters, always bitching about how they wanted out but then diving right back in for more until they were either dead or so fucked up there was nothing left of them but a little twisted wreckage in a wheelchair or hospital bed.

Adrenaline junkies, Sam sometimes thought, but there was more to it than that. You dropped out of the world after a while. The world lived by daylight, went to jobs in offices and factories and shopping malls, ate Scram Slam breakfasts at Denny’s before heading off to church. You lived the life long enough and you never felt right in the world again because you knew. You knew that the thing that went bump in the night was real, that there was a monster in the closet, that something unspeakable was always lurking just outside the corner of your eyesight, the thing you never wanted to turn around fast enough to see. The hunter’s job was to see it, to face it head on, and how the hell were you ever going back to the world after that?

Dean had never even tried, but Sam had, up until that night when Dean had turned up at his apartment on Vesper Street in Portland.

Dean had been twenty-six then and had still looked more or less like his old self, like the Dean that Sam had grown up with. He hadn’t yet gotten beaten half to death too many times to count, and though he was four years older than Sam, he had looked like such a kid standing there, awkward and jumpy in Sam’s apartment, refusing to take off his coat. Sam, lying face down on a bed in a stark motel room nearly ten years later, could see that night as clearly as Dean, behind him, was seeing that crazy make-believe crap on television. A Nor’easter had been bearing down all night and how the hell Dean had ever gotten through that weather was beyond Sam but there he had been, an unwelcome apparition from out of the howling night and the past.

Dad’s missing, he had said bluntly, his teeth still chattering. The car had skidded into a snow bank and gotten stuck and Dean had walked halfway across Portland to get to Sam’s place.

What the fuck do you want me to do about that? Sam had asked, because he hadn’t even seen Dad in four years and back then, he had pretty much expected -- and hoped -- that he never would. He’d gotten a real job, gotten a girlfriend, was almost finished up with school -- Cumberland County Community College, where the fuck they’d gotten that Stanford business, Sam would never know. Guess old 4C hadn’t sounded too impressive to the guys who wrote that shit.

I want you to help me, Dean had said, and that had done it because Dean had never asked for help in his entire life and Sam had realized that Dean was completely alone and scared shitless. What else could he have done? What would anyone have done?

For that whole first year, Sam had kept thinking he’d go back. But he’d always known that there was nothing to go back to. Vesper Street was still there, and 4C, but the apartment house had burned down, taking half the goddamn block and Sam’s entire life with it. Dean was the only thing left and for all of Dean’s insane, reckless commitment to look out for Sam, Sam knew that he was the one who had to look out for Dean. There was no one else to do it. There never had been.

That piece of shit on television, that piece of shit that some Hollywood fucker had gotten rich on after listening to a battle-scarred drunk ramble on all night about demons and vampires and hunters...that piece of shit got most of it wrong, but it sometimes, sometimes got that right.

“Hey, Sam?”

“Hmm?”

“What do you suppose those two guys are doing tonight?”

Banging starlets, Sam thought wearily. He rolled over. Dean was looking at him over the back of the vinyl chair. A pall of smoke skirled between them, blurring the scars on Dean’s face. For just a moment, he looked like that kid who had come in from the storm on Vesper Street.

“I don’t know, man” Sam answered.

“Yeah, me neither,” Dean said. “Can’t even imagine.”

Behind him, on the tube, the credits were rolling. A voiceover promo for the local affiliate’s ten o’clock news was on. Dean looked at his watch.

“Guess we better get going.”

“Yeah.”

Dean snapped off the TV. Sam made a final ammo check. They let themselves out into the rainy night, the job, the life.