Dear God, what is this thing? I think it's a song-fic? With introspection, where nothing really happens at all? Did someone slip me something?
Spoilers for 6.1, takes place before the episode. The worst language it's got is the word "freaking" but due to Guns'n'Roses references, there are some adult concepts.
The risk with writing a Sam POV piece so early in the season when we've been shown next to nothing about Sam's motivations is looking really stupid within the month, but I can't bring myself to care. Here's wildly inaccurate Sam musings! FTW!
Dean was okay. Sam had seen him smiling over a cold beer through the scope of his 50cal (unloaded) as he'd perched in an oak tree a half mile from Lisa Braeden's backyard. Dean-check done, Sam was back on the road to catch up to the Campbells.
Sam killed the radio, cutting off Toby Keith mid-heartbreak. He'd been listening to a lot of new country lately. Sam thought it was the degenerate inbred offspring of Johnny Cash and Justin Timberlake, but the cousins liked it, and it gave Sam material for conversations other than "so what's this we been hearing about you starting the Apocalypse?" and "how'd you manage to blow up that police station the second time you faked your death?" or even "how about a blood sample?"
Country was just another phase of Sam's ever-evolving musical tastes. As Sam's phases went, they'd been harmless.
He'd been raised on hard rock and hair metal from an age when most kids would have been singing along to Peter, Paul, and Mary, and while Dean never had a problem reclassifying bits of their lives from "Dad's" to "mine," from "homey" to "cool," to Sam, hard rock was Peter, Paul, and Mary, and when he got too old for Peter, Paul, and Mary, hard rock was no longer for him.
At Stanford, he'd discovered indie rock, or he and indie rock had discovered each-other. The kids at the record store dug his hair and thought his flannel shirts were ironic, indie bands wrote funky songs born from the heart of suburbia, and instead of dark colors, steel, marble angels, and dripping blood, indie fans' shirts had brains with legs on them. It was new. It was fun.
Still, when he found himself putting a sound-track to his new life, he'd end up with Meatloaf, not They Might Be Giants. Though he'd blazed his way out like a bat out of Hell, some nights he curled in his bed fearing and dreaming that he might go crawling back. Objects in the rear-view mirror always appeared closer than they were. He would do anything for love, but he wouldn't answer Jess's questions with more than a pained smile and a shrug.
Life on the road with Dean again was Zeppelin. Sam liked Zeppelin. It was multifaceted: at turns boisterous and driving, or wistful and mournful like a loon's cry. Not that Dean would appreciate that observation. But Zeppelin had a cruel streak: according to the folklore ballads that "Hangman" was based on, the condemned man was supposed to live.
When Sam lost Dean the first time, music hadn't been an issue. He'd listen to the news for traffic, turn it off when the stories went to politics or human interest, and then listen to the Impala, hoping to head off any maintenance issues before they slowed him down. To keep from wasting time letting his thoughts run around in bloody circles, every morning before a drive, he'd choose a new question about the Trickster: where it might be, what its motivations were, what the next move in the game could be. At the end of the day, after he'd tacked up his research in the next motel, he'd summarize his conclusions in his journal for future reference. Sam wished that that phase had been wiped from existence as well as that journal had.
The second time Dean died, Sam listened to all Dean's best-loved, staticky tapes whenever he wasn't too drunk to drive the Impala. Once he actually had been too drunk, but started her up anyway, and when the tape deck came on, he'd curled into fetal position, forgot where he'd been going, and stroked the leather while she idled the rest of the night. Later, Ruby found him and welcomed him to the jungle. Sam discovered for the first time the works of Guns'n'Roses that even John Winchester had deemed too offensive for growing boys, as he started with a little and a little wouldn't do it so a little got more and more, just trying to get a little better and a little better than before, dreaming of bringing Lilith to her knees. Ruby went from a nuisance to a necessity to his rocket queen, and Sam stepped aboard the night train, flying like an airplane, never to return, ready to crash and burn. Bottoms up.
When Dean came back from the dead, crashing and burning got downgraded to Plan B, and Sam stopped listening to Guns'n'Roses because Dean had religious objections to his Ipod. Sam thought life was Zeppelin again or AC/DC, but really it was Pink Floyd and he'd gone tone-deaf listening to Axl Rose scream about prostitution and heroin all summer. But how was he supposed to know when Dean was barely giving him the basic facts, like Sam wouldn't understand—when he'd been scoured by the same steel breeze Dean had, hadn't he? He felt the same bile in his throat; Dean wasn't the only one with a guilty past. They angels kept sweet-talking him, "come over here, boy, have a cigar," demanding that they pull together as a team, but Sam, they just wanted to run him through a shredder. Overnight, it felt like, a mile-high wall had mushroomed up like a fairy ring, and he only noticed when he found himself in the Panic Room, screaming for somebody, anybody, out there, as the worms ate into his brain. Divided, they fell.
Miraculously, they got a second chance with higher stakes. Sam thought the soundtrack was Bon Jovi, thought they'd found something to believe in to keep them rocking in the free world, or it was Aerosmith and they were back in the saddle again, living on the edge as they watched for the coming meltdown in the sky. Turned out it was still freaking Pink Floyd. Dean had finally met a hill too steep to climb, caught one too many bricks to the gut, and before Sam's eyes he'd hunkered down behind his walls and was thinking the unthinkable final solution as he waited for the worms to come. Castiel beat on Dean's walls with his fists, and Sam with his patience, but nothing they could do from the outside made so much as a crack until Dean had decided to look out.
Hell had its own musical heritage. Like Japanese concerts, it took some getting used to, but once Sam assimilated the tonal framework, some of the tunes stuck in his head worse than ad jingles. If he had talent, and a cat piano, he could still play them if he wanted to cause a stampede.
But right now, the soundtrack was Toby Keith. He'd get to Ann Arbor, and his extended family would be raising glasses against evil forces before the gun smoke even started to settle after their latest op. Sam still wasn't used to Toby Keith. He'd scrounged up most of the old Winchester Childhood Classics, but without the fuzz and burr of overused magnetic tape, they sounded scrubbed-raw and sterile. Not homey. He couldn't go home.
This afternoon, Dean had looked so much healthier. Every time Sam caught sight of him, he looked less sad. Every time, Sam saw his own exile paying off.
Sam tried the radio again, sick of country. There was jazz—but Sam had to admit, he wasn't sophisticated enough to get jazz. Classical had some monotonous harpsichord thing. MC Hammer, MIA, Taylor Swift, bubblegum popstar children . . . One more tap to the search button landed him on the classic rock station. The radio blared with drums and power chords as Ann Wilson belted out "-how do we keeeep it in the dark! And if we daaare to taste our weakness . . . how could we teeear ourselves a-part?"
His breath hitched and he slapped the radio off. Gabriel was dead, and nothing could possibly haunt this car. That was just coincidence. A deeply, deeply disturbing coincidence.
He wasn't going to be fighting monsters to chick rock now, was he?
A cat piano is an old joke, in the vein of 101 things to do with a dead cat jokes. Only it uses live cats. And nails on levers.
Hopefully you can't tell that I know next to nothing about indie rock or country. I was raised on classic hard rock and never moved beyond my parents' musical tastes (hey, there's a reason I'm obsessed with this show.)
The risk with writing a Sam POV piece so early in the season when we've been shown next to nothing about Sam's motivations is looking really stupid within the month, but I can't really bring myself to care. Here's wildly inaccurate Sam musings! FTW