The Outsiders
The Impala stunk.
Dean couldn't worry about that smell now, couldn't let it gnaw at him even as his brother sunk down into himself, deflated.
Sam hadn't gone into shock, shut off all stimulus, it was that everything was just so wrong. Two days in and Sam wasn't processing. He'd breathe, inhale, exhale, but only occasionally. When Dean wasn't watching.
The acrid smoke still lingered about his nostrils, tanning the leather seats, infiltrating the vents. Dean wanted to gag, puke, blow his nose, but he had to be the strong one, the older brother. They're- Dean wasn't sure. Nevada? Utah? Somewhere where Hwy 6 had transformed into Hwy 93. Dean just went, kept going as long as there was a road to follow.
Leaving messages on his dad's voicemail from his own phone and at various pay phones. Those first days of leaving voicemails full of fear and panic and tactfully away from Sam's hearing. Later ones dulled and quiet- like giving a police report, hoping his father would answer to less panicked accounts. Dean couldn't process that either. That his father had shut down all communication beyond giving him the journal. Pulling over for the night, Dean hunkered down in a cactus themed motel. Sam went to bed immediately, not saying much.
Dean unconsciously salted the doors and windows, then decided to outline all the walls. Finally starting to relax, he took a shower, could smell the fire even days later, even there in the scalding water. He cranked it higher, scoured him with heat and soap, then with the stiff towels hung over the cracked towel rack. He was at a loss then. Decided that his father wasn't answering, not that he couldn't, had simply shut killed all communication.
And that angered him. On every level.
He didn't know what to do, how to process that spasm of negative emotion pulsing in his chest, so he just let it go. Crawled into bed, tossed, turned, couldn't sleep. Reached out and retrieved his father's journal from the tabletop.
Hadn't read the diary before, had seen it nightly his entire life when their father had been with them, but realized that he never really knew what had been methodically written into it.
Dean started with the first page. Felt a hard punch to his solar plexus when he realized that John hadn't begun it with his mother's death, but with his engagement to her. John had never been an emotional or sentimental type, but Dean knew his father well enough to see the hidden emotions of love and happy, even some fear buried beneath the terse words and some major misspellings. John's love was tempered, but it spilled out over the page. Dean wanted to skip ahead, to not know the fond intimacy of his parents' happiness, but knew that he couldn't read it without even this innocent time.
He read long into the night under the haze of a dim hotel lamp, shushing Sam across the room as his brother tossed in his sleep. Those old muscle memories of soothing and calming Sam came back easy, like it hadn't been four years or even a decade since he comforted Sam as a child in his sleep.
Twenty-six year old Dean wishing to give anything to go back to being four and warn his family of what was to come- an unspoken wish every year for his birthdays and on more than a few stars. Went back to the journal. Forced himself through the fire, the aftermath, the loss of the house, the restart of their lives without mother or home.
Ever the insomniac, he finally fell asleep right as John had put six year old Dean into first grade- the stress and fear of separating his oldest son from the family leaking out across the page. Dean, reading it as his father, superimposed the entries over his own memories. The banality of starting school, missing his brother, the near instant boredom of class, then a new class, and a new class after that. Dean had liked school well enough, but it was a bad match. Too many disruptions, distractions, fresh starts had kept him from concentrating, from really learning the foundations of a formal education. He had succeeded, but only by scraping through and a bit of intelligence that he had long since buried. After Sam started school, his interest waxed and waned even as Sam's own academic success blossomed despite their upbringing. Sam had excelled, and Dean had given him the ability to study and work hard.
There, in the neon drenched darkness of half-sleep, Dean resolved himself to being Sam's brother again. He could easily go back, go back to being an obnoxious nineteen year old again with a grumpy fifteen year old brother who desperately needed him to distract their father, to give Sam calmness and stability and soft words of encouragement. He would be that kid again, give that to Sam as they got through the loss of his happy, shiny future out in the real world.
Dean was going to erase the last four years as though they never happened. He would be Sam's big brother come hell or high water. He'd fake it just to give Sam that sense of normalcy, that ability to survive after the fire. And Dean knew he needed it too. Reverting was easy, always easier than trying to get his family to accept him. Let them have him as they wanted him to be. He wasn't sure how to do that anymore, but he could remember those days, his reactions, his personality through a haze of teenaged hormones and fights between father and brother.
He decided all of this as the wind picked up, dying, knowing that, even as he pretended to sleep, Sam was doing the same in his own bed. Sam in dark, seething anger and guilt. Dean in his own cold bed of sadness and remorse.
Morning came, both sleeping deeply, badly as the clerk came, kicked them out into an eleven AM morning sun burning. Thought about paying for another night, but Dean decided to get at least another two hundred miles between this room and the next. John had pulled the same trick right after Mary had died, and Dean agreed with the reasoning behind it. He couldn't be John, not fully, but he could be Dean.
Dean knew what he had to do to start over, to reclaim himself for his brother. As they were leaving, he popped the trunk, pulled out a white cardboard box from the secret, secret compartment.
"What's that?" Sam asked, finally coming out of his shell.
Dean opened it into himself, took one last happy memory of the books inside.
Pirsig, Vonnegut, Heller, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Bukowski, Bradbury: cheap paperbacks with tiny print.
"Nothing," he replied unexpectedly quiet. "Just some trash. And the girls" he explained, suddenly feeling betrayal against himself, killed the emotion. Flipped the box to show a Busty Asian Beauties magazine on the top, hiding the books beneath.
Sam's nose wrinkled, rolled his eyes in college level disgust at the obvious socio-economic exploitation of women, looked away. "Only you would have an entire box's worth of porn."
Dean plastered on a smile, super fake and tight. "I'll toss the trash beneath it- don't ask. But my girls are staying."
Sam tromped off in silence, slid into the front seat, yelping "I don't want to know!" through muffled glass.
Dean felt the smile loosen as he put the box back, realized he couldn't pull the trigger, couldn't just out and out throw his books into a trash can as though that's all they were to him. Inhaled, exhaled, decided to donate the books to a library or something. Except for his battered Joy of Cooking. He could be nineteen again for Sam, but Sam would have to accept him being twenty-six years old on some level.