They say that when you love someone, really love them, you no longer become annoyed by habits of theirs that in any other circumstance would make you put one or both of you in the ground. But this is also an idea that backfires wildly. Because when you do notice how loudly someone chews, or how often they seem to leave the coffee machine on even though they're not drinking it, even though you're not drinking it, you wonder—
Am I falling out of love with you?
Dean made a conscious effort to put the bottle of scotch down quietly, just in case. Sam still asleep in one of the twin beds of their hotel room, he didn't want to wake him up with a habit that was beginning to rear it's ugly head into his brothers consciousness. Still, the glass somehow echoed louder than before he'd been thinking about it.
Maybe he was falling out of love with himself.
He smiled a little bit at the thought and took a sip meant to linger. The walls around him stayed inanimate like a challenge for whether or not anything was real. Because sometimes when he's the only one awake, he wonders if he's dreaming. When he was a teenager, he used to sometimes dream that he needed to piss and every time he finally trudged through his mind to find a bathroom, he'd bolt upright in real life catching himself before he pissed the fucking bed in real life.
Sometimes life felt like that. Like an in between of dreaming and waking and putting his hands in front of his face, around a glass, counting seconds and trying to convince himself this was real. The hardest part is to explain his lack of need for factual evidence in moments like this. It would all bleed together into the illusion anyways.
If the walls could talk, it'd be more believable.
"Hey." Sam turned over, his voice half there and half catching up to himself from whatever Sam was still left in a dream. "What are you doing?"
He turned back to his glass and raised it in salute. "Having breakfast."
Sam's face twitched before his head rose and fell in what might have been mistaken for a nod, but it wasn't. It was a fight for later, it was picking your battles but not abandoning them, just sending them to a different school district until the bomb threat at this one has been assessed and disarmed accordingly.
He pushed the blankets into a pile towards the left side of the bed in the same movement of swinging his legs out onto the floor. He was still wearing the same clothes they'd been in from yesterday. Dirt on the bottom of his jeans and what was probably a layer of dirt around the neck of his tshirt. It didn't look dirty necessarily, but it felt that way. Like remnants of a life lived. Tangible actions you could see on your own body.
Maybe he should start wearing his clothes to bed. Maybe you had to sit in yourself long enough to own it before you could ever know it happened.
"Case?" Sam's body folded into the chair next to him, his knee hitting the underside of the table. "What's going on?"
Dean sighed grabbing to pull the paper at an angle between them. His finger pointing haphazardly at a headline - Body Discovered on Housing Development Land, Seventh Victim This Month.
The edge of the article wrinkled as he slid it back closer to Sam. "Seven bodies in a month."
"Ok."
"Ok? What that not enough for you? Aiming for double digits?"
Sam grabbed at the pages pulling it back toward him like Dean was about to steal it away all together. "No I'm just saying it doesn't sound like a case it just sounds like violen—"
"It sounds like a theme!"
The only thing worse than not getting across your anger in an argument is sounding mad when you're not. When you've pointed something inside yourself at someone else and you immediately want to overcompensate for the fact that you're now going to think there is something wrong until something comes along proving their isn't. Your mistake, your neurosis to bear.
It would be better if Sam just yelled back.
He rolled his shoulder reaching toward the table he had somehow found himself standing a few feet from and finished the last of what was in his glass. "Sorry."
Sam sighed giving half of a smile. "Dean—I'm just, worried about you. Ever since Bobby you've been looking for the next thing to kill. This just feels like that, a little."
It would have been better if he yelled.
The walls stayed silent, the nagging notion that reality is only relative to our own awareness of it made him feel like a killer. All the people he loved that had died, what if they were only dead because he'd stopped looking in their direction. If a tree falls in the forest and all of that—how horribly deadly it ends for someone you forget to turn towards.
"Yea, maybe I am just trying to let loose a little steam, work this shit out a bit. Bobby—" The name hung with nothing to connect to, no revenge, no greater good, only circumstance. "Bobby hurt." His eyes bore into Sam's wondering if they had the same thing twins shared, if this would be enough. "But this is still something we can stop. I don't care if it ends up being just a psycho with a chainsaw. I'll kill him too."
There was no saving this school. There was no disarming the bomb that now felt like a permanent resident in his heart that if you stopped it, you'd stop him too. The fights would need to move towns, not just schools. Everyone was falling out of love with love and still left with each other.
"Alright." Sam placed both hands on the table using the leverage to push himself up. He seemed so much taller than him, maybe he was shrinking. "Where are we going?"
Dean grabbed the bottle again, pouring three good shots into the glass before turning to walk toward the bathroom door.
"Charming."