A/N This is a companion piece to He was a brute, a fiend, my brother. It's not necessary to read that, but the fics are related. It's probably be more fun if you read 'em together. But hey, you wanna be a rebel and not read them both, knock yourselves out. Keep questioning The Man! :) ~Sammy
Reticent, he awaits the silence
He doesn't do talks.
Talking is- It's hard. Putting words together in a way that's not leaving him vulnerable or angry is hard, because whenever he tries, he's either left floundering, trying to find a grip while tumbling off a smooth onyx cliff into a pit of weakness, or he lashes out, picking the harshest words he can find, the ones that stick and grow and infect like poison barbs, and he flings them at anyone in close proximity. He can't talk. Not really.
But he still tries.
God does he try.
He pulls the car over on the side of an empty road, even though he know that there'll be mud getting over the rims that'll be a bitch to clean off, because, despite what everyone thinks, Sam isn't the only perceptive one. He's been reading his brother's ticks ever since the kid could totter around on chubby little legs.
(And maybe purgatory dulled that ability a bit and hell dulled it a lot, until he's not sure he can read his brother anymore. Because somewhere along the way, Sam started being written in a different language, and he doesn't know this one yet, hasn't had the time to learn the ins and outs of this new Sam, and he feels like he's stuck studying a book that hasn't even decided what it's about yet. The once all-encompassing encyclopedia of Sam is gone, along with its facts and numbers and sureties that he spent a lifetime observing and memorizing and analyzing until he thought he knew his brother more than his brother knew himself. But that's gone. It's more of an incomplete manuscript to a novel now, with twists and turns and missing pages and rambles that need to be cut and edited and refined before they make any sense. He doesn't know how to read that. He doesn't know if he wants to.)
He pulls over to the side of the road anyway, and ignores the sacrilege to his baby because she's a car and his brother's here, and Sam may be a book that he can't read just yet, but the author's the same, and he knows that no matter what, some things are the same, always will be the same. He knows that that look, with he draw eyebrows and the wrinkle in that Cro-Magnon forehead and the little pout that his brother insist he doesn't do but he knows better about because hello, I raised you since you were in diapers, idiot, and he knows that that look means talk. So he pulls over. Because he's mad as hell at his brother, and half the time he's on the verge of just telling him to go back to his damn girl and his damn dog and his damn bungalow, but he still cares enough to pull over. Because, damnit, he's trying.
Sam sits still, not even looking away from the window and over at him, and he knows that that means (still means, always will mean) that there won't be any talk tonight. There'll be silence for the longest time, with the sound of crickets and cicadas humming over the deafening quiet, neither of them looking at the other, both just waiting. Waiting until one of them decides to break the unspoken agreement and speaks, or until the car starts up again, and they're back on the road, pretending that that momentary weakness never occurred.
Maybe there won't be a talk tonight. Maybe he won't get to end the talk with a punch hard enough to bruise or a hug tight enough to leave them breathless (And god he craves one of those, either one, maybe both), and maybe they'll just drive again, until they're both done blinking away tears that they never let fall. Maybe he won't have to choke down the tightness in his throat and tell his brother that he needs him (to stay, to leave, to just be Sam again damnit) in not so many words.
Maybe they'll just be silent tonight.
He's okay with that.
They'll practice talking some other time.
A/N Woah. I should've put an 'angst and sappy feelings' warning in the summary, huh? Let me know what you thought in a review! :) ~Sammy