Supernatural Fic: the moon is gold and silvery

Title: the moon is gold and silvery
Author: ygrawn
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R, adult content
Category: Angst, SamandDean
Timeline/Spoilers: Spoilers for AHBL Parts 1 & 2.
Word Count: 3400
Author's Notes: Not for the faint of heart, folks.
Summary: Sam worries he might just run them off the road. Late, late at night, he doesn’t worry. He wonders.




********

June is the highway, straight and true, June is leaving, saying goodbye, beginning again, thank God, time to move, move on, time to travel away and about, time to live, now.

“Dean?” Sam cuts his eyes to the passenger seat. “Where to?”

Dean appears to consider the question carefully, and then gives his underwhelming answer.

Sam considers arguing, mostly for the hell of it, just because he can, because Dean’s year is up and he’s still alive and they can argue with each other for the rest of ever, or at least until Sam gets tired of it.

But Sam settles his sunglasses, sits up straight and drives.

Just drives.

********

Sam is tapping an aimless beat on the yellow Formica tabletop. He can feel Dean’s irritated gaze somewhere between his jaw and his jugular. It’s a powerful gaze, but Sam’s ridden it out before.

Their food is taking too long and they have miles to go without the promise of sleep. Oregon is another two time zones away, far enough to make their hustle pointless, but they’re pretty sure there’s a mermaid on the loose, killing tourists (although Dean did point out that there aren’t many of them in Oregon) so they’re burning rubber, attempting to out-run time. And a mermaid.

“We’ll get to see the ocean,” Sam comments.

Dean just glares some more.

Sam stops tapping and their food arrives. Or maybe their food arrives and he stops tapping. Either way, on both accounts Dean is pleased.

The waitress gives Sam a strange look. He ignores her and devours the eggs. They’re grey, the yolk is a mustard shade and they’re disgusting.

********

Sam gets worried, late at night, when Dean is still and silent for more than a few minutes at a time that his brother has died in his sleep.

It’s stupid and irrational but Sam sits up with his breath trapped in his throat, panic ripping through his body like an infection with no cure because Dean, Dean has always been two steps from the edge, a heartbeat away from tipping over, never more so than last year and there are no guarantees, not any, that Dean will keep living just because the deadline has passed.

They are rarely that lucky and never that safe.

Sam usually gets up and prods Dean. His brother wakes up cursing and slaps Sam around for his trouble and calls him some pretty filthy names. Even half-asleep Dean hits hard.

Sam doesn’t mind.

********

Oregon is a bust. No mermaid.

Two days later, outside of Seattle, they come across a merry band of vampires and kill them. It feels good, solid, grounding, real.

The kind of real only hot blood and the solid crunch of death can give a person.

********

Dean’s quieter than normal for most of June, long enough for Sam to get worried. But the miles pass by, giving Dean time to put himself together, time to untangle and unravel the miracle of his continued life.

Or maybe he’s just humming Zeppelin to himself for almost thirty days.

Either way, after the vampires he starts talking again, frequently, often, the sound of his voice warm honey, some panacea for Sam’s fears, a perfect, wonderful hymn to Sam.

********

July is good, free, warm.

They don’t cross the Mississippi but stay west. There are desert ghosts and a fledging witch in Baton Rogue, and, to Dean’s delight, a greed goblin in Las Vegas.

Sam hates Las Vegas, its glitter and light. Other people see glamour, but to Sam there’s something stark about it, something artificial that drives him to seek shadows and darkness. But Dean loves it.

After they kill the goblin Sam gives Dean half a day to play whatever, then they leave, the Strip a distant memory, the rest of Nevada blessedly dark and lifeless.

Dean doesn’t win anything. He doesn’t lose either.

********

Sam cries silently in a pink bathroom in New Mexico one night while Dean lies sleeping in the next room. Every cell, every inch of him shakes and quivers with relief and misery. He is exhausted and it’s only July.

Sam keeps his hands over his eyes because he cannot, does not – will not – see.

********

The bottom of California is okay, safe. And they don’t have much call to go to L.A. Thank God. L.A. is seventeen kinds of hell, with monstrous traffic for added fun.

In late August though, they have to drive through Palo Alto to get to a new job. They wage a silent argument for two days until Sam blurts out, “I’m not leaving Dean. I’m not!”

Dean, hopeless, helpless, hapless Dean, who thinks Sam should go back to law school now that the yellow-eyed demon is dead and Dean is not, Dean is mad until they get to San Francisco, and then he’s just secretly glad, thrilled, surprised.

Oh, who is Sam kidding? Dean is not anything but his usual self.

********

Texas, Texas is forever. Texas is another country entirely and Sam is fine with that.

They could hunt in Texas the rest of their lives and never touch the damn edges of the state.

Dean likes the food, Sam likes the weird and wonderful creatures – the way that Texas evil is some other breed, some category all its own – and they dip in and out and through Texas for most of September.

September feels like it should: warm, lazy, with winter some distant, impossible dream. September makes Sam feel like they’ll make it to January, through February, to May.

He’ll make it. He has to.

********

But is October is bad.

October is a straight up disaster.

It’s Sam’s fault.

********

Sam is well enough by the time November rolls around to notice the cold weather has arrived unheralded and settled in for a lengthy visit.

They’re holed up in West Virginia of all damn places, mining and madness country, and Sam has no idea how they got there.

It would be terrifying but Dean is with him, beside him, so the world is upright and nothing else matters.

The last month comes back to him in segments as they swing up past Washington D.C., New York, into New England and its apt and welcome freezing and malcontent misery. He was sick, normal sick and nothing more sinister, but it was enough to knock him over for most of October.

Someone helped him. A woman with cool hands and dark hair and a calm voice, a woman who tied a tourniquet and called for…

No, that can’t be right because he was with Dean, or rather, Dean was with him the whole time.

The whole time.

November is like stretching tall for a whole month, although he gets tired easy, even up to Thanksgiving, which isn’t so good with all the driving he’s doing. Sam worries he might just run them off the road.

Late, late at night, he doesn’t worry. He wonders.

********

They stay cold in December.

Dean doesn’t like it but given the way things are, Sam gets to call the shots and Dean gets to bitch about it and Sam gets to ignore him when it suits.

Sam likes the idea that they might follow the seasons just for once. He always tired quickly of their nomad’s seasons, the weather as changeable as the scenery as they fish-tailed across the country, looping back on themselves constantly.

Now more than ever, Sam likes routine, he likes structure. It keeps them alive, it keeps everything straight in Sam’s mind, which is somehow harder after October, and it keeps them together.

Christmas is quiet.

This time last year Sam was falling over himself trying to pretend that it wasn’t potentially Dean’s last Christmas, that it was just another day, another of the thousands they had left because denial had got him all the way through summer and fall and fucked if he was going to give it up now.

And Dean was holding them both together because he was Dean and that was what he did.

They sleep late this year and eat lunch at a festively decorated, sparsely populated diner. They do not watch It’s a Wonderful Life. Because it isn’t.

The waitress at the empty diner looks at him funny. He ignores her. He’s hungry. He’ll eat all the food he ordered. Sam ignores Dean too, sitting across the booth, crying, pale-faced.

Well of course he’s different, what the hell else did anyone expect?

********

January is colder. And harder. January is dead.

There are days so bleak they don’t stir from bed. January, the newest part of the year, has traditionally been their slowest. Even the Impala slows down, hibernates.

They talk a lot.

About nothing really, and that’s the best part. It’s the kind of stuff they’ve always talked about, total bullshit, dares and half-exaggerated tales, Dad’s time in the marines, Sam’s second day at school when he told the teacher he could see ghosts, that girl in Syracuse who ripped out a chunk of Dean’s hair when he went down on her and Dean told Dad that Sam had pulled it out during a fight and Sam got grounded for a month.

Sam can’t remember that teacher’s name, or whether it was really Syracuse. Dean’s no help and Sam gets mad, stupid mad and yells at Dean for the rest of the day.

It matters. Memories are all they have.

He cuts himself on New Year’s Eve, accidentally, when he breaks a mirror. It’s a deep, nasty cut, but Sam doesn’t bother to get it stitched. He’s had worse and what’s another scar for the collection? Dean says that chicks dig scars. Chicks mostly dig Dean’s scars, but that’s because they come attached to Dean.

Sam broke the mirror when he smashed it with his fist, accidentally.

Fitting really, that he should greet the brand new year with his own blood.

*******

February is more snow and Sam finally gives in to Dean’s endless bitching and heads for Florida.

He loathes Florida. Worse than Vegas. But at least it’s warm.

Without intending to, they hit a swamp monster, some King Midas touch-a-like, six ghosts, two zombies and a weeping woman all in the first three days after they cross the border.

Yeah, Sam hates Florida.

There are these girls in Florida, blonde nothings with short skirts and a self-esteem no bigger than a grasshopper because why else tan until you’re orange and wear those clothes? Some of them hit on him. It catches Sam by surprise, like a stitch or a loud noise. He just keeps drinking. They go away.

Except one girl, although she might just be drunker than him. She tells Sam this story, it’d make a kitten cry, or whatever, all about her twin sister dying of something horrible, too young, so unfair, such a pointless waste, and she’s lost without her, drunk in Florida in a short denim skirt without her.

It’s all a little too close top the bone for Sam. He could have been her. Two degrees north, one more day of rain, a few demons here or there, another couple of bullets either way and he would have been her. Except without the skirt.

He has another drink, because Florida fucking sucks.

He sleeps with her. Sympathy grief, fucking by association, projection, whatever. Sex never fixes anything except for those two sweet seconds when the world falls in on itself and there is not one single thought in Sam’s mind at all.

Sam thinks he’s getting him and Dean confused. The kitten thing is totally a Dean line and Dean’s never needed an excuse to sleep with anybody.

He breaks another mirror. The reflection is always empty.

********

March is all wrong. It’s on backwards. Every day is like waking up upside down. Sam thinks somebody should fix that.

They spend two weeks trying to solve a series of fires in Georgia. The fires are in abandoned buildings, thankfully, not nurseries because they are done with all that now.

They get their guy. They always do.

Dean is the one to work it out, to put the pieces together, so he’s insufferable for days, crowing repeatedly, choosing music for the car, getting the good beds, first showers, all that.

Sam hates him for a couple of minutes every day, but he still can’t quite shake the fear that Dean will disappear one morning without warning, so he doesn’t think bad thoughts too often.

Besides, when Dean is this way he’s alive, sparking all the way to his fingertips with irritating charm, swagger, arrogance, that hot, hard thing at the core of his brother that makes him Dean and not anyone else on the planet.

In Illinois, Sam spends hours cleaning their weapons, carefully, painstakingly. It matters that they be oiled, clean, efficient. What good is a hunter without a working weapon? How is Sam supposed to do his job if the guns aren’t clean?

They write on the last page of the journal they bought when Dad’s ran out of space. They discuss buying a new one. Sam doesn’t think there’s much left to write.

Hardly the time, anyway. And there’s no one left who cares.

********

April is gold.

Sunshine like Sam hasn’t seen before: every colour, light like magic, and he drives days at a time, following its passage across the sky, like a pilgrimage. He thinks he’ll get his fill eventually, but he keeps looking for more.

The world is coming back to itself, Sam thinks, spring unfurling across the country like the glorious gift that it is, and he can’t help but be infected by it.

He sleeps very little. Dean worries. Dean got green eyes, freckles and the worrying gene. But Dean’s hardly in a position to talk about keeping bad hours. He’s worse than Sam; he almost doesn’t sleep at all.

Sam’s finally got wise to the problem, and just doesn’t look in the mirror anymore. Nothing to break that way. And there are none so blind and all of that.

In Utah – a state he considered avoiding on principle alone – he gets cut killing a possessed grizzly bear. It’s his own stupid fault, forgetting he’d have no back-up, no Plan B, not with a fucking bear the size of the state itself.

Dean is madder than all hell, stomping about the place, repeating the same diatribe Sam has heard a hundred times this year alone, yelling about recklessness, and stupidity, none of it addressing the central fact that Sam is hurt because he does this killing gig on his own now and Dean just watches.

Sam lifts his good arm over his eyes, focuses on the pain, gives up to it, gives in to it, lets it live in him, feels it bloom like a bloodspot. He wakes up on the other side of it with less pain and a quiet, guilty Dean.

A bear. Of all the damn things. The bear might be an omen, a symbol, a sign of some kind, but Sam would have to be looking for that sort of thing, and he isn’t. Sam supposes it’s a once in one lifetime thing.

And Dean missed it.

********

May.

May is the finish line, all thirty-one days, just like he promised.

The light of the sun is still fantastic, but he finds the moons of May more interesting still, the dark night he’s been craving all year. They travel at night now, hurtling towards their destination, the world narrowing and broadening all in the same moment. Like magic.

Sam, Sam is a believer now; he knows magic for real, he knows it in his bones. People can be conjured, images sustained simply through belief.

Sam’s arm still hurts from the bear, but not enough to stop him driving. And it doesn’t matter. Pain is a short-term thing now.

There are ghosts everywhere. Sometimes two a day, crawling out of the world’s woodwork, the dead gone mad, howling, trembling.

Dying, when Sam dispatches them without mercy, with barely a second thought.

It’s the last, least he can do.

Sam has to haul ass to get to Idaho and back to Kansas. That part he didn’t promise, ticking all the States off in one year, seeing the country one last time. He just wanted to see if he could. Except for Ohio, he’s made it and Ohio’s hardly worth crying over. And Hawaii and Alaska too.

He pokes Dean in the stomach as they cross the border. Dean lifts his shades so Sam can see him roll his eyes. Doesn’t matter. Sam would have known Dean was doing it anyway.

He rides the Impala into Lawrence. The old girl has held together with love, hope and prayer, some kind of mechanical miracle. Dean’s disapproval of Sam’s indifferent, ignorant treatment of the car fills the front seat.

Sam sleeps in the car rather than bother with a motel room, checking in, a credit card, people and their sharp eyes. He only chose Lawrence for the symmetry anyway. It began here, so the circle may as well swallow itself.

He’s hungry when he wakes, sunrise just gone, the day already underway and it makes him a little cross but he’s seen more sunrises than most people he supposes, driving away from trouble into strife at dawn, dusk, all hours of the night and day.

And he’s hungry like he hasn’t been for months and seeing the sunrise is poetic but pointless.

Sam walks, his body humming with the movement, blood thrumming, thumping, thrilling, thinning. There’s a diner, like the diners he’s lived in, grown up in, argued and laughed and yawned and loved Dean in, and lost in, imagined, pretended, conjured in.

The coffee is fresh, and he has two cups. He orders and the waitress looks at him strangely.

He’s going to eat it all.

First his healthy and sensible breakfast, the muesli like a revelation.

Then Dean’s greasy, disgusting, fatty breakfast, just the way Dean likes it.

When the waitress comes to collect the dishes, she is frowning with concern. She asks Sam if he is alright. He tells her honestly, deeply, certainly, that he is fine.

He is, he is, he is fine because 364 days have passed, his promise fulfilled, his year out, done, finished, not a moment too soon for the thin edge Sam’s been living on since at least Texas.

Sam is good, better than good, something he cannot explain to this woman with her bright blue dress and her faded brown eyes. He leaves the waitress a $200 tip.

Sam wanders for hours, through parks, near the university, through an industrial area, nowhere near the old house or the cemetery. Sam feels released, like a bird or some other winged creature; it’s just him and the glorious sky, the world falling away now in a hurry.

The moon rises, full, fallow, fatal. He goes back to the Impala. Dean is there, lounging insolently against the car’s hood. How lucky to have had Dean, his Dean, his brother with him.

Sam could conjure him anywhere, at any time, all year. He only lost Dean in October for a while, but grief can only be held off for so long and no one can see the long thin cuts on Sam’s arms, and it’s good there was that hotel maid to stop the bleeding and call the ambulance because Sam promised Dean a year, a whole year, that he would have his own last year, that he would not stop living just because Dean hadn’t beaten the demon, and cutting his wrists was cheating.

He smiles at Dean for the last time.

The moon is high and bright.

Sam has the gun, ready, waiting, loaded, clean, oiled, and perfect. Ready for the mission at hand.

It is a good moon, silver and gold and alive as they get to midnight. Dead too, from so far away.

Sam pats the dashboard of the Impala, once, twice, for love and in apology too because he is leaving her, the old loyal girl, the last relic of the family Winchester.

But Dean is waiting.

And Sam is finally coming.

********

End

On our anniversary
There’ll be someone else where you used to be
The world don’t care and yet it clings to me
And the moon is gold and silvery
—World Keeps Turning, Tom Waits