author's note: in which the Winchesters spend a whole lot of time on the road. this is an AU with girl!Dean; romantic undertones.
Time passes differently on interstates, the hours melted with the soft feline purr of the engine, backseat scattered with crunched-up foil wrappers that will be discarded, quietly and without graces, at the next gas station. And her, everywhere, filling your skin, your lungs, there when you open your mouth and there when you close it.
The road isn't something you see, not really. This is your home base, this is what you know, and there's nothing else that comes close, you think. Counterfeit houses, they'll come falling down at some point, each and every one of them – but here, there are no walls to break, and the night air seeps in all the same. The road and the leisurely roll of music and the gray blue sky, those are your constants. And of course, there is the one that doesn't need to be said, not now, not ever, because whatever it is, this tangled-tied-up thing between you and her, it needs no words, it's yours to keep.
She may be the reason you lose track. It happens fast, this smudging-together of the days of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, they have no meaning here. Your tether is the sweet, unabashed sound of her voice, singing odes to hot blood and dark-eyed women, so strangely familiar in the half-space of early mornings. Some days you think you'll wake up and you'll be twelve again, five foot nothing, young enough to believe you could carve out something away from this life (but not away from her; never away from her). You were a fool then for believing you could uproot, tear up and out of this soil borne in blood and rock, and really nothing's changed, you're still a fool, only for different things now.
Outside, the landscape bleeds from green into gray into water into concrete. The land is yours for the taking, but you've trekked this ground before, conquered it yesterday, filed it away in that stone-cold mind of yours. When rain comes pattering down on the car windows, you watch the colors puddle and quaver and slip-slide off the glass. Trees watch you go by, and you've seen them all, shriveled black skeletons in the arms of winter, lush and dewy and green in fresh spring, showing off their plumage just to the two of you, a secret hidden in plain sight.
You read sometimes, when the rumbling quiet stretches between you and her like a cloud, and the world is mindless and large. You read library books that were never returned to their proper places on the shelf of crumbling one-story buildings, you read books of lore whose pages are running out of colors to turn, you read Stephen King and laugh about all the things that he gets wrong. You think about her while you read, more often than not, and you realize that books lie, because she is beautiful, but she's never been one to wield it like a knife—If anything, she uses it like a club, forceful and in-your-face like wood to the front teeth, and before you know it you've been brought to your knees. You read to her. She doesn't take her eyes off the road, and she interjects at inopportune moments, but she listens, her eyes bright and liquid and weightless. The two of you get through two autobiographies and one pulpy romance and a third of the way through a Murakami novel before she slaps it out of your hands and turns Zeppelin up to eleven.
You tell each other stories that have been beaten within an inch of their lives, and play I Spy and a million other road games whisked up just for hours like these, and she tells you terrible jokes that have you throwing your head back in thick laughter. There is no need for talk, there hasn't ever been, but that doesn't stop you.
Time makes an exception for diner food, and she knows the place with the best burgers for three hundred miles around, making a mental note of it, for when the two of you will inevitably be on this same stretch of evergreens. Maybe in a year, maybe longer, maybe next month. She collects numbers like candy, short sweet bursts that melt so easily on the tongue. You would be bothered if you didn't know her the way that you do. She orders bacon cheeseburgers and moans through mouthfuls of ground beef; you order salads and paper-bagged sandwiches for the road. Most of the time you eat without really tasting, eyes on your laptop screen, under she reaches over and lowers the lid.
Afterwards she and you pile back into the car, a little warmer and fuller, spirits considerably lifted. Night comes and goes, blink-and-you'll-miss-it, and though all laws of space and dimension say that you're too uncomfortably tall to lie sprawled-out in the backseat, it's still the best and only bed you've ever known, the smell of leather and gunpowder and her cheap shampoo lulling you into thick, dreamless sleep. These are your roads, asphalt under your nails and in the grit of your skin, and nothing, no small death or silent night, will take it from you.