A/N: I wanted to do a Sam-centric piece, because I want to find out what makes Sam tick. He's the most complicated character, I feel, to write, and I need to stop shying away from him. This is my character exploration, and I would looove any type of feedback.
They were on another highway, on every highway. Sam leaned his head heavily against the cool, hard window, and took in with drooping eyes the seeping night, the rising mists over passing marshes which obscured all but the bright, rain-slicked road.
I know about the things behind mists, Sam thought disinterestedly, and stifled a yawn. His brother's arrhythmic thumping on the wheel kept the time, and if Sam were to turn his head to look, he knew he'd find Dean's lips moving, wrapping around the words to the song playing quietly on the radio, thinking Sam asleep. The thought of it made a smile twitch over Sam's lips, a warm pressure well out of him, but he sagged closer to the door, a small grunt escaping his lips as he tried to shift to a more comfortable position in the cramped seat.
The thumping stopped for a moment, before resuming as before.
Eyes tilted a little downward now, Sam was confronted with the reality of the road, the black, mirror-like quality of it after a storm. The reflections didn't seem like distortions, just darker, more substantive. The Impala glided along over it, as did the other cars, never stopping lest it catch a sight of itself in the glass.
Dean said they were going home. The memory crept unwanted through his sleep-fogged mind, and Sam couldn't help that he didn't think of white walls or the bunker when it was said. He saw nothing, only a fog, a faint impression of happy families on TV talking over Christmas dinners he'd never tasted. A sort of yearning, a sort of frustration. Dean, he was sure, had a more concrete idea of the term, and he proved it through the rugs and the display cases, the happy way he'd putter around the bunker while Sam worked.
Dean wanted it to be his home as well, he knew, but it was Sam's room that remained Spartan-like and unlived-in while Dean, whom the road called to stronger than anyone, had his vinyl and memory foam. Had the photograph of the woman, a tangible memory to Dean and his father, whose sacrifice for him Sam had never known, but felt symbolically, as a weight in his bones. She was the first thing he'd ever destroyed. But also the first to have loved Dean, so he was able to smile at the way Dean kept her, and chose to root her in his own space.
The radio DJ changed the song to a softer melody, a love song. Dean's hum rasped over the notes inexpertly, unconsciously, and Sam imagined him blundering in his unconscious way into love and happiness. That's the way it would happen with him.
Maybe it was that the only home Sam had ever known was that road, bright and real, and endlessly driving ahead into more byways, more avenues. Though there was some instinct in him that told him the road wasn't his, that homes were meant to stop and settle in, to be a touchstone, a constant— Sam had never truly known constancy. Constancy was a Holy Grail.
So he'd left, to satisfy that instinct, to try on homes like shoes at the supermarket, shoes which never, ever fit. I always knew Bigfoot existed, Sam. He's been living with me most of my life. His shoes weren't large enough, the Impala wasn't large enough, and no home he'd ever inserted himself in had fit around him comfortably. He sometimes wondered if it was because he wasn't clean, that the only truth came from the black mirror of the road. The home Sam hated and feared.