East Coast Gazette

Flicker pt 2/?

SPN Spoilers ahead!

*

Dean kisses Sam until Sam feels boneless and docile and agreeable, with Dean murmuring things into the skin at the corners of Sam’s mouth, his smile sun sweet and burning like citrus against Sam’s tongue. Sam feels like a cat, purring, and when Dean finally does pull away, it’s to say “You okay?” and “I’m here, babe,” and “Mornin’, sunshine.” And so Sam lets Dean lead him by the hand down the hallway, into a sun-drenched living room with still more books, let’s Dean sit him down at a blond wood kitchen table and give him coffee, to brush a fond hand over the crown of Sam’s head.

It feels like Sunday mornings: slow, sunken in honey.

“What’s going on, Sam?” Dean says, tugging out a carton of eggs and peering at Sam over the top of his glasses. “You’re acting weird.”

Everythings wrong, Sam thinks. “I’m not acting weird,” he says.

Dean gives him The Look. “You called me—from the bedroom.”

Sam squares his shoulders, leans back in the kitchen chair. There’re a row of cookbooks on a shelf over the sink, and a dying basil plant by the window; this looks like a room Sam always wanted to have, and maybe he can have it now.

“I didn’t know where you were,” Sam says, too carefully, because he could still be wrong.

“I was a whole 100 yards down the hall getting coffee,” Dean shoots back, frowning—he comes closer, poking Sam in the chest with the long end of a spatula. “You sure you’re not having nightmares again?” he asks.

“No,” Sam retorts, picking up his steaming mug and taking a sip. It’s terrible, and Sam thinks, only Dean could make coffee this bad. “And I’m not drunk either.”

“Yeah, drink your joe,” Dean says, and cracks eggs into a bowl, searches round for a fork. Sam has seen the line of Dean’s back almost every day of his entire life, and he knows—the way he knows the edges of his own body—how Dean’s shoulders look when he beats an egg, when he wakes up, when Dean looks away, out a window, as they’re cruising down a rural highway in the middle of nowhere. Sam knows Dean.

He takes another sip of coffee and watches Dean scramble eggs, watches Dean make toast and microwave bacon and casually flick on the TV, humming something by God damn Kansas under his breath as the morning news announcer chirps, “It’s another beautiful Saturday in Boston—and we can anticipate highs in the lower 50s today and plenty of sun.”

*

Somewhere between eggs and bacon and coffee and lunch, Sam tells Dean that he dreamed he was being attacked by a djinn, which as stupid as it sounds is better than telling Dean he was attacked by a djinn.

“In no way do I want you to interpret this as me discouraging you from fawning over my stuff,” Dean says through a mouthful of toast, “but maybe you should quit reading my books right before bed.”

Sam forces himself to snap his jaw shut, so he doesn’t ask anything stupid like, “You write?” and “Books? You write books?” and thinks to himself, “Damn genies.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Sam finally manages, forcing down another mouthful of Dean’s coffee until the taste hits him full in the face like a semi and he snaps the mug down and says, “Okay, Dean—you are never allowed to make coffee again.”

Scowling, Dean snaps, “There’s nothing wrong with my coffee.”

“People in prison get better coffee than this,” Sam argues. They do. He knows for a fact.

“People in prison also get ass-shanked in the shower,” Dean ripostes.

Sam looks at him for a long time, torn. “I don’t even know what that is,” he admits finally. “Is that a threat? I don’t even know what that was supposed to mean.”

Dean gulps down the rest of his mug, as if to prove some sort of point. Sam’s seen Dean eat sandwiches he’s found in motels and chicken cordon bleu from roadside diners, so it doesn’t prove anything other than the fact that Dean’s stomach acids should be studied by the CDC for possible medicinal properties.

“That means I’m going to be late for my meeting with my editor, and that you,” Dean says, pushing himself up from the table and leaning close—close enough to press an absent kiss to the corner of Sam’s mouth, and it makes Sam murmur a little, babble quietly in tongues to feel that: the chapped skin of Dean’s mouth with intent, “are a bitch.”

“Jerk,” Sam answers, reflexive, but even before horror can sink in, Dean’s wandering down the hall back to the bedroom—to their bedroom, calling over his shoulder:

“You love it. Don’t lie.”

Sam stares into his coffee cup, thumbs on the rims. “Yeah,” he admits. “I guess I do.”

*

Dean disappears from the apartment in a clatter of footsteps and yelling, “I’ll be back by seven at the latest, so I better see dinner on the table,” and when Sam yells back, knee-jerk, “Make yourself dinner, ass,” he says, horrified, “Oh my God, we’re married.” He waits just long enough to see Dean heading down the street from the living room window before he runs back into the bedroom—starts rifling around the desk, the dresser.

He needs details, explanations, he wants to know how any of this ever happened and why and why are they in Boston and since when does Dean write books. But instead of a wallet or a neatly-summarized list provided by his friendly neighborhood djinn, Sam finds a book on what he guesses is his side of the bed—opened and face-down on pages 57 and 58—by Dean Winchester titled Carnival.

He flips back to the beginning—before all the dog-eared pages and after the Library of Congress information—and creases down page one—realizes it was already folded before. When I read it the first time, Sam thinks crazily.

It starts:

It was six hundred degrees in the metal box of the Impala and the leather upholstery was starting to feel like sexual harassment. Even the wind blowing in the opened windows felt like a wall of steam, and outside on either side of the highway only half-abandoned farm shacks interrupted the land, cracked in heat. Jake ran one sweaty palm over his forehead, his upper lip, prickly from a day without shaving.

“It is too God damned hot,” he said, mostly to himself.

So of course Sam answered, “Which could be fixed if we got a new car.”

“We are not getting a new car,” Jake answered. He glared across the front seat. “This car is a classic. She and I have an understanding.”

Sam made Jake’s least favorite Bitch Face (TM). “Do you,” she said. “Then could you be good enough to pass a message to her and tell her to make the fucking AC work?”

Jake stroked a hand over the steering wheel comfortingly. “Don’t listen to her, baby,” he cooed. “She’s just jealous you got better curves than her.”

Sam turns the page with extreme prejudice. “Her,” he snarls. “I’ll kill him.”

*

Jake Winston and Samantha Holloway are driving away from a harrowing experience with faith healers when they come across a haunted carnival, and Sam spends most of the first 40 pages of the book cussing and freaking out because Dean is writing their God damned lives. Their other lives—in glowing technicolor, with sexual tension so deliberate and obvious it sparks neon off of the pages.

It’s the kind of airport paperback Sam used to read in between state-mandated sets of textbooks, between schools, curled up in the backseat of the Impala when he and his dad weren’t speaking to one another. It’s fast and furiously-paced and Dean obviously thinks the car is nearly as sexy as Samantha Holloway, and Sam can’t help but feel a little irrationally wronged about that—but in the grand scheme of things it’s so low on his list of things to worry about it barely registers.

Sam’s still reading—Jake and Samantha are having a fight Sam knows he and Dean had in Iowa once and also that he sounded nowhere near as gay as Dean has portrayed him—when he feels somebody drop a hand to the back of his neck.

“I thought I told you to stop reading that,” Dean murmurs.

When Sam blinks he realizes it’s late, that shadows have cast over the pages of the book and he’s reading by the light of the street lamps outside, faint orange—that the noise of cars and people drifting through the cracked-open window has harshened, the way sound at night gets sharper around the edges, echoing and jagged in the dark.

“What time is it,” Sam asks. He puts down the book—opened now at page 94—rubs his eyes.

“It’s like, 6:30, babe,” Dean says, fond, and runs his fingers through Sam’s hair, reaches over to flick on a lamp with his free hand. “You been reading all afternoon?”

If this were home—if this were the other them, Dean would ruffle his hair: irritating, affectionate, too many sharing bathrooms and hand-me-downs on the hot, unforgiving highways. Sam closes his eyes hard against that thought, because it was impossible there, but not here—Sam can’t help but think there aren’t impossibilities here.

“I guess,” Sam admits, and leans into Dean’s touch—his fingers kneading the tense muscles in Sam’s shoulders. “I got sucked in.”

“It’s because I’m a genius,” Dean assures him, laughing, and steps away, touch gone but still close, and Sam finds himself following like he’s trapped in Dean’s gravitational field—like he’s always been trapped in Dean’s orbit, helplessly drawn even when there was a continent between them.

“How was your meeting,” Sam asks, and he watches Dean make a grab for a cordless phone.

“It was good,” Dean says, glancing at Sam over his shoulder. “I’m ordering in—what are you in the mood for?”

Sam shrugs, leans against a counter. “I’m fine with anything.”

Dean leans over to dial in a number from a magnet on the fridge—and then pulls the door open to snatch a beer. He puts the phone between his shoulder and his ear and pops the top on a counter, and Sam wants to scold him for that, but he doesn’t know if he does that here—if that’s a brother thing or a whatever the hell this is thing, but Dean just gives Sam a preemptive don’t shit bricks about it look Sam would know from any version of Dean.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 11:35 pm and is filed under supernatural, wip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.