Dawn bloomed too early there, nothing to stop the sun as it rose over the earth, like it had since before the cowboys rolled out and the cities sprang up, awkward and unnatural in the bone bleached desert. Sun-stain encroached on the night from both ends, dusk creaking later and later and dawn reaching earlier until true night, blue-black private hush, was a little malnourished sliver and nothing more.
They were in Indian Springs. Forty highway miles from Sin City, one hundred further from anything else that mattered at all to two little boys who'd grown up three degrees south of familiarity and any type of permanence. Desperate boys, one still blind to the magnetic inevitability of the Winchester true north, the other struggling under its weight.
Sam had his birthday in a dirty house with skinny walls and a washed out demeanor baked into the way the floor slouched, how high noon swelled to fill all four rooms and stripped the interior to elements.
When they moved here two weeks ago and he installed himself (a duffle bag here and his imprint on a cot there) he thought about how the house was rootless, parceled straight onto fickle chaparral off the back of a truck. Probably in pieces. So he acknowledged the house, made peace with it, because it was foundationless and entirely ready to be broken down and moved by sudden disinterest or the next round of violent rains.
Sam waited patiently for his own flash flood, but turned twelve instead.
He woke up with sleep on his tongue.
Barefoot, he floated in the harshness of 7:15 sunlight, brushed his teeth partly 'cause he was good and partly because it was something Dean would never do, and contemplated a crick in his shoulder blade through his shirt. Dad was out working, had been for the past two days, and wasn't to be expected back for another two or so more. Selling what he could: vacuum cleaners, big brown encyclopedia sets, even Bibles when the three of them were scraping bottom. They were staying longer than usual in this little po-dunk town because Dad had some friends in the area, maybe even longer than three months (the previous record). Sam was okay with it, sort of.
A truck growled past on the road. Sam could see his sock tan against the orange peel-stick tile, and grimaced at the ribbons of tendon and bone rippling on the tops of his feet.
Still so small, so ugly, he reflected, but he was sort of okay with this, too, because Sam had come to terms with the fact that he was built in an unappealing way. Your age was just something to tell to strangers or to write on paper; it couldn't change what you were, he rationalized.
Runt.
"Whaddaya want, Sammy?"
Sam had set up his usual morning trifecta of toast-oatmeal-milk on their rickety mongrel of a kitchen table, watching Dean watch something on TV as he drank his coffee black, like Dad.
Then a tremendous roll of shoulders, and Dean had asked him just like that, the what do you scrunched out in a single claustrophobic breath sinking slowly down into a nickname Sam barely tolerated.
Sam watched Dean watch him, now.
Sam felt the words to be with you crawling up his throat lining and swallowed. Too needy.
"Have a day off."
The chair creaked as he stood, and as Sam turned to move he promptly cracked his little hip off the unfamiliar Formica countertop, leaving Dean laughing and wincing all at once.
Sam slunk around the table, limping temporality with the tingling embarrassment sparking in his joint, and Dean leaned back and purposefully brushed the back of his head on his little brother's bare arm, turned his head to follow him.
"Hey. Listen, we'll have a movie day or something, okay? Just you n' me."
"'kay."
Sam flopped on the broke-back loveseat as he heard Dean get up to call the local middle school, explain that his little brother was down with flu or fever.
Sam chewed on a thumbnail and debated the merits of horror flicks versus spaghetti westerns.
"So what'll it be, short stack?"
"Can't decide."
"Hey, it's a big decision, bro. Can't blow your movie choice."
The TV had four viable channels, one was playing Terminator. They settled in and that was what they watched.
Naturally, they got in two or three good action movies before everything went to shit; Sam couldn't remember a birthday that didn't have an aftertaste of salty tears or bitter disappointment, honestly.
The Impala's growl was familiar yet out of place, Dad home too early for the sound to be anything but bad news. Dean was halfway to the door in a flash, then towering over Sam, pushing him down into the couch – "Stay here, Sammy,"—then running away again down the shallow concrete steps that dropped into the gravel drive outside. Like hell, Sam would stay.
The black-blood across John's chest and thighs looked like the night to Sam, standing in his socks, skinny legs quivering in the doorway as he watched Dean collect their father from the Impala.
Everything was dim with never-ending dusk but there, Sam had found it; all of the nighttime in Nevada had been hid up inside his father's body (reasonable, one enigma inside another). He watched it crust into ebony patches on the placket of Dad's flannel shirt.
Artificial light stretched from the shotgun house, unmerciful; Sam's knees locked, knowing he couldn't distort something so rubyred into the darkness he craved, even if he tried. Sam wrenched his eyes to Dean's as the ragged pair pushed into the house, saw no surprise there.
Following numbly behind John's softly wheezing breaths, Sam left the door hanging open wide, not knowing or understanding this Dad who left blood on the carpet. The murmur of highway traffic drifted everywhere, Sam watching Dean helping Dad to lay down on the couch—John a heavy, injured man, table's toothpick legs too weak to support him – as John stared hard at the wall clock above Sam's head.
Sam remembered a piece of somber fatherly advice, his knee split open from a sharp cabinet corner: Focus on the center of the pain, Sam. Two way link there, between your body and your head. Push hard enough and you can blot out anything.
Sam supposed that Dad was doing that now; body strung tight as a guitar string, eyes trying to read something on the textured ceiling. Even to Sam, it seemed futile.
Dean wordlessly threw their stiff, old plaid blanket over John's legs, careful to tuck in the layers of wool that Sam was sure still smelled like him and Dean, still warm from swaddling them as they were showered in explosions from Die Hard, tinny gunshots from The Blues Brothers. Nights were deceptively cool, and wool was deceptively scratchy, so Dean had wrapped Sam with a fleece blanket stolen from the trunk before settling the plaid monster over them both. A shiver passed over Sam; Dad was bleeding everything he touched into a darker palette, and the blankets' textiles were damp and sticky-looking.
Dean pushed, coaxed Dad's shirt up from his armpits then over his head, collar catching around his nose then coming free with an unh.
Sam looked at his father's chest and saw cop-show gore.
"Sam," Dean said, "go get towels from the bathroom." His voice brooked no argument. It sounded like the time Sam had broken a lamp in a hotel in Des Moines, or the time after he had left Dean's side at some county fair and gotten lost for three whole hours. The fear in it stung Sam low in the gut.
When he went into the bathroom and came out again, three stiff and unsavory towels smashed against his chest, Dean was rummaging through one of their duffel bags. Dad was still staring right at the ceiling and lying on the couch like a corpse. We need to find pennies to put on his eyes, Sam's mythology-obsessed little mind said.
And that was how Sam discovered his father was not the man he thought he was. That his little oatmeal world of Dean and salesman Dad was real as the Nevada night, and twice as insubstantial.