A/N: Another day, another one-shot. I really like writing about Sam and his understanding of what it means to have a home, it seems.
Reviews are love!
Sam has never quite known what home means.
He's seen its shadows, in the photograph of the family he barely recognizes, faded not so much by the passage of time as by the incompleteness of memory. He's heard its echoes in the whistle and sigh of cars on the highway at night, all going somewhere named and known.
There's a thousand snippets of memory that he's stitched together like a book, yet he can't help but feel that the most important pages are missing.
But he does his best to find them.
He presses his nose against a bundle of clean laundry, trying to trying to catch some layer of permanence and comfort under the too-clean, too-sharp scent of detergent.
Gasoline and metal, grease and leather and wool and must and sweat and blood are the smells he knows the best.
He scrutinizes the monotonous TV movies they catch on late-night reruns, stitched through with lines of static and fuzzy at the edges. Hears the laughter and tears and sugar-sweet lines.
But the laughter he knows is rarer, sweeter, in those quicksilver moments when Dad's face creases with something touching on happiness, and Dean's eyes light up with the smile he keeps just for them.
That must be what home is, Sam thinks. Thinks it for a long time, until day as well as night is too dark to see a way by, and getting out replaces old hopes in his heart.
"You walk out that door, don't you even think about coming back."
The light's gone in Dean's eyes, and Sam watches his world fall, fault lines shattering through uncertain ground.
He doesn't know where to look for home anymore. Knows it isn't here, and wonders if it's anywhere.
Jess decorates with taste and tact, asks for his opinion when she doesn't really need it.
He doesn't mind. He just sets out the old photograph with careful hands, with a reverence he'd thought was forgotten.
They smile at it together, a little too brightly, with her arms linked around his waist.
"It's perfect," Jess whispers, and Sam wants to agree, wants to say complete, but the picture's still faded, even in the gold haze of afternoon light.
Everything has changed, and changed again, the vast shifts and turns of a relentless world, but the traffic still whistles and sighs in the night the way it always has.
Sam rolls over, feels the grudging pop of his bad hip, and winces. Motel beds are hardly conducive to a restful night.
"What's eating you?" comes Dean's voice, a perennial combination of amusement and concern.
Sam means to dismiss the question—he's twenty-two, dammit, and a little insomnia never hurt anyone—but what he says is, "Sounds the same."
"Huh?"
"The cars."
He expects mockery, but Dean exhales, and says, "Yeah. Guess it does."
Sam twists the sheets around himself, turns so he's facing his brother. Dean's sitting half-on, half-off the other bed, one leg up with the threads of his jeans splintering open at the knee. He's got a knife in his hands, which he's sharpening. Or which he was sharpening, five minutes ago.
"It's just—everything's different—" Sam starts, and by that he means Jess, Jess, Jess, but for some reason the ache is less blinding tonight—"But it's the same. Same cars, same rooms, same food, same…"
"That's the life," Dean tells him, and Sam's surprised to see a little smile curving his brother's lips.
"It doesn't bother you?"
"Nope."
"Why not?"
"Reminds me of…well, us. Way back when," Dean says, and even though Sam feels far from completed, there's something about the way his brother's eyes light up when he smiles that makes him think of home.