On the morning he sees the Winchesters (witnesses Sam in all his lithe glory, Dean and the murderous way he holds his broad shoulders), Gary is living in rags between two buildings. It isn't much of a home. He found himself there on a tangent, having abandoned one leg, two fingers, and eight years of his life in Vietnam. Came back with dreams that make his arms shake, palms sweat: P-T-S-D, his wife had said right before she left him.
He served America, now he rots in its star-spangled desert.
At this moment, he's stranded in a small Wyoming town so dry, it's made those humid jungles into a strange dream.
Sandwiches!blinks the sign above him; somebody must've forgotten to switch it off for the night. Gary doesn't mind, the lullabye of red neon that much more comforting than the lime-wash of streetlamps or an utterly black Wyoming night. Gary's forgotten where the stars went, or why they don't appear for him anymore; something to do with how he watched his friends go down, Janet walk out on him for the last time. But that's old news.
It's near dawn now, the suggestion of daybreak staining the little street with all kinds of cobalt-deep sleepiness. Too early for the birds, too late for the stars (for they mustbe up there, he reasons) to be anything more than ghostly specks. Dead still, weathered shop awnings stiff as starched bedsheets. Across the street, the pawn shop's little American flag hangs limp.
Sandwiches! the sign blinks again, and red floods over Gary's body.
He sees them first in that crimson light.
They're walking in lockstep. One stranger has a leather jacket scarred as battle armor and a wicked-sweet smirk, eyes tracking ahead up the pavement, darting furtively around though there's hardly a car to crawl down the street this close to dawn. The other has greasy hair down to his shoulders, body narrow, thin, tucked under the other's arm. He's staring right into the ground like looking at his blue-jeans is the only thing in this town worth doing.
Instantly, something about the two of them sits uncomfortably with Gary, the potent combination of a strict Southern mama and rigorous army training giving him the wherewithal to pick up on the peculiar vibe they're giving off. Advancing up the block, the older boy glances down at the younger, shifts his shoulders and clings a little tighter with practiced strength— and Gary's seen it. A thing like lightning.
The boy with the greasy hair stops, scuffs his shoes on a weed-grown pavement crack, and looks up. "Dean," he says, shaking his head. "Can't keep walking. I swear."
Dean (a young man who fits his name, thinks Gary) lets his arm slide from where it rests across the back of the boy's neck, grazing across corduroy then back to his side.
"Hey there, Sammy. We'll get to Baby, don't you pout."
Sam just stares at his sneakers, and all of a sudden it hits Gary how young and ragged this boy is. His companion is. Bodies lanky and sapped-out like willow limbs, liable to bend but not to break.
Sam looks at Dean, Gary looks at them both, and the first sounds of waking birds rise up through the gaps between buildings.
It happens in a second. Sam is clipped, toppled, spread on the ground while Dean's hand waits an inch from where his warm arm used to be.
Gary double blinks; hornet yellow. The man's jacket is hornet yellow, curled on the ground with his bike's wheel-spoke ticking quietly in circles, Sam laid down next to him. The surprise-hot collision had happened in less than a second, just a drowsy miscalculation by a morning commuter with kids at home and another shift to work tonight. Probably blind to where Sam stood, swinging round from the little alleyway between the laundromat and the Chinese restaurant next door.
Dean leans slightly to one side, like how a tree shifts seconds before it's felled. Sam sits up and begins to inspect his elbows. Dean seems to take this as a sign of something Gary can't recognize, and changes the way he's standing; it's then, with that split second of tightening fists, that Gary knows Dean will kill the cyclist right there on the sidewalk.
The cyclist starts to rise from his hands and knees, helmet gleaming like an insect exoskeleton, spitting hasty apologies. Dean simply grabs him by his shoulders and hauls. There's a series of dull, fleshy thuds as Dean drives his knee into the cyclist's gut over and over, braced into the man with a hand on each shoulder so that his kneecap can drive under his ribs just right. A gold amulet bounces against Dean's chest with every grunt. Boots drag and scrabble over the pavement.
Then Gary sees Sam rising up behind Dean, a specter with scraped palms and a tired mouth.
"Dean, stop." He says, touching Dean's leather jacket with the tips of his fingers. Dean doesn't stop. The cyclist moans, too out of breath to do anything but take what Dean's giving him. A few little drops of crimson have appeared on his yellow jacket.
"Dean! Stop it, you'll kill him." Sam's not so gentle now, yanking Dean back and into his thin chest, and Gary is surprised Sam doesn't get knocked down again. Maybe this has happened before. Gary doesn't want to think about that.
Dean rounds on Sam as the cyclist slumps to the ground, discarded, curling into the fetal position. Dean's got a wild look in his eye, heaving shoulders, and Gary waits for the adrenaline high to form itself into a haywire punch. Sam seems unfazed.
"Look right here," Sam says, "Eyes on me." His eyes are strange and soft as starts to push Dean against the nearest brick wall— and what? Gary doesn't get this, not anymore. Eyes on me. He thought Sam and Dean were soldiers, but Gary's mama used to say that. She'd murmur it when he, or his little sisters, were upset, hysterical, unable to focus on anything other than the enormity of their own emotions. She'd say it, then look him in the face in a way that let him know everything would pass.
All that Gary can think now is that Dean's some strange combination of little boy and frothing rottweiler, all heaving shoulders, clenching palms, white-steaming breath and delicately pinkened flesh. Gary watches as, in profile, Sam puts one hand on Dean's face.
Dean twists into the palm on his cheek, the fingers dry and gentle on his temple. His mouth bobs open and shut, like he's about to say something important; Gary shifts closer in his filthy quilt. Dean's voice is exertion-rough and barely audible. "Shit, Sammy," he says, "Always something to take you away from me." His mouth creases further. "Something always tryin' to take you."
Dean closes his eyes. Sam looks up at him, and nothing is more brilliant than his expression. A thing like lightning, like the Pleiades, like Orion who came after them, Sam's look is full of things that Gary can only dimly perceive. He's lost his ability to navigate the night sky by sight, after all.
He's pulled back to reality because, right before his eyes, Sam is leaning in slowly, close, closer—
A violent spike of wrong twists through Gary. He's not entirely sure what expletive he cried out into the morning air, but now both Sam and Dean are staring at him frozen faces. Shit. Sam eyes narrow, one hand twisting further into Dean's shirt. Suddenly, he yanks Dean off the wall and into his arms, pink lips moving next to Dean's ear in a whisper that Gary can't catch. Dean nods, still trembling.
Gary can only watch as they approach him; his body's too riddled with nightmares and the perpetual hangover of homelessness to flee from their danger. Palms sweating bullets, Gary nearly jumps out of his skin when Sam reaches down next to the pile of trash he's living in, letting go of Dean for a moment to draw something up out of the murk. An empty whisky bottle.
Sam is so close that Gary can see the whiteheads on his jawbone, the tendons in his red knuckles where they clutch across the glass neck, bottle poised in the air. Gary's fairly confident that he's going to die now, reasoning that Sam's just as eager for blood as his companion. He'll just be murdered at the hand of these crazy boys who should be too delicate to be soldiers, but aren't. He keeps his eyes open; if he's going to die of this, instead of from some jungle landmine, he'll damn well take it like man.
Instead, Sam twists his arm to the side. Thank God! The bottle explodes at Gary's feet, gunshot-supernova, and he watches the dirty alleyway give birth to galaxies of glass that wilt and die once more.
Gary's dumbfounded. "The fuck you lookin' at?" Sam spits at him, pushing Dean's head down gently as he guides the two of them away, like Dean shouldn't look at Gary a second longer.
Gary watches them march away down the street pressed closely together. His mind is shuddering with the adrenalin of near death, but on some level, he's pretty sure now that Sam and Dean couldn't walk another step without the other, and that he was just spared from a wrath of monstrous proportions. He hasn't got the faintest idea why, but he'll take the second chance.
He sees them crest the top of the hill, and suddenly he's left alone again, nothing but the motionless cyclist and the pavement's corona of glass to mark their passage. The whiskey bottle shards are still glimmering, liquid-looking and brilliant as the warm points where Sam and Dean had touched, like that look on Sam's face when Dean had closed his eyes; those boys had been so full of so constellations that even Gary, in his destitute rags, took note.
Grimy with whisky dregs and dirt, the glass slivers shimmer, pink with sunrise on the faded pavement.
Gary watches the stars. They haven't come out in a very long while.