A/N: This has been a long time coming!
1990
There is a battered green book on the edge of the librarian's desk, with little fluted edges of cardboard splitting open at the corners. Dean eyes it listlessly while Sammy chatters on in an endless stream about how he'll be "very 'sponsible" with the books, and please, can he just have a card?
Seven years old, and the kid's already concerned with school assignments and getting library cards. The librarian's face is already softening, getting that mother look that always stings Dean like a splinter under his thumbnail. He stands up straighter, puts on a winsome look of his own to pair with Sammy's, and says, "Our dad's a traveling salesman, and he may not have time to stop by—can't you overlook the parental permission, just this time?"
It works. Dean grits his teeth under her warm-eyed gaze, and nudges the beaming Sammy.
"Say thanks, Sam."
"Thank you," Sam says, rapturously. His dimples do the rest of the work for him.
"Alright, sweetheart. What book do you want first?"
The ragged-edged green book on the desk keeps drawing Dean's eye, though he doesn't know why. But Dean's eleven, he's not a nerd, and so he can't say anything about it.
Fortunately, he doesn't have to. Sammy points. "That one, please?"
The embossed black letters on the front say, The Hobbit.
…
Sam is scared of Gollum. Dean lies next to him in the motel double bed, feeling all of the circulation in his right hand cut off because Sam has it in a death grip.
"His eyes, Dean."
"He's not real, Sam." At least Dad isn't back yet, so Dean has a few more hours to make up an explanation that he wasn't trying to screw around, honest, Dad, he just read Sammy a dumb book—
Except it wasn't dumb. It was pretty cool in parts, with the trolls and the goblins in the high stony mountains. Sam just had to get freaked out by a slimy little creature, hardly the scariest thing Dean's ever heard of, and now Dad will be pissed and Dean will have to return the book without finishing it and…
Worst of all, Dean can't stop thinking, if Sam can't handle this, how is he ever supposed to know about hunting?
Dean rolls over, wriggling his hand out of Sam's grip for a second. "He's not real, Sam," he repeats, a little more harshly this time. "He's just a little dumb gecko in a cave. I bet Bilbo wins the riddle game. We'd know, if you'd have let me finish the chapter!"
Sam lies very still for a moment, then sits up in bed. The tag is sticking up out of the back of his Superman t-shirt. "Finish it. Finish the chapter." It's weird how Sam does that, just switches from sniffly little kid to determined and serious, setting his mind to a task.
Dean folds his arms over his chest and stares at the stain in the ceiling that's shaped kind of like Minnesota. "No. You'll just get scared again."
"Will not."
"Will too."
"Will not!" Sam retorts, getting a little shrieky at the end.
"Will too, baby."
That does it. Sam reaches out and pinches him viciously.
Dean socks him with a pillow. "Ouch, dude! If you don't want to get called a baby, don't pinch like one!"
"Babies don't pinch," Sam mumbles.
"You did. You were a pinchy little bitch." But Dean's done fighting, so he sits up, flicks on the light, and grabs the book off the nightstand. "OK, I read this, and I don't want to hear a single 'nother peep out of you about Gollum or his shiny eyes or anything. Got it?"
"I got it." Sam, indignation forgotten, snuggles back against the headboard.
Dean sighs and starts reading.
1994
"He wrote other books!"
"What?" Dean is under the Impala's hood. The sun is warm and the air is golden-brown with dust. It's always like this at Bobby's, calm and home-like, even though Dad's absence seems to be hiding around every corner.
Sam pauses, shifting his backpack more comfortably on his shoulders. He always spits out the ending of his story when he gets excited, instead of starting where he should. "Tolkien. You know, The Hobbit? There were sequels."
Of course Dean wouldn't have heard of them. Dean stopped paying attention to school reading lists some years ago now. Still, Sam thinks he looks interested.
"He wrote The Lord of the Rings. I got all three of them at the drugstore."
"What were you doing at the drugstore?"
"I went with Bobby. He needed some dogfood."
"Huh. Three books, you said?" Dean wipes his hands on his jeans. It's July, and so Dean's face is practically a constellation of freckles. Dad's been gone three weeks, but he needed to keep a low profile so he took one of Bobby's rigs. That way, Dean gets to tune up the Impala.
The things Dean loves, Sam thinks. It doesn't seem fair that he never gets to have them all in one place. The more Sam learns about their life, though, ever since that fateful Christmas, the more he realizes that nothing about the world fits together the way it should.
"There's three books." The paperback covers are weird, Sam will admit, and Dean mocks them, but he looks over the offerings with interest.
"Ok, dork. You're reading these ones, though."
Sam deflates. He'd thought, just like those years ago when he was a little kid, in the motel—he'd thought this would be something they would share.
Dean stares at him like he's gone crazy. "What're you waiting for? Pull up a crate and start reading."
Sam grins.
…
"Frodo's whiny," Dean announces, definitively. They're almost through The Two Towers. "Sam, though. He was the real badass. Best namesake you could ask for, dude."
Sam smiles shyly, nothing to say in the face of an unusually direct compliment. He doesn't think on the irony of it until later, that Samwise Gamgee's whole purpose for being was to take care of Frodo.
Whiny or not.
1996
The dreams start shortly after Sam turns thirteen. He doesn't tell Dean about them, because Dean lives too large for life in too-small spaces, and he gives too much to Sam already. Sam doesn't need to tell him that he dreams of fire and death and black blood. Mostly, he doesn't remember much about those dreams anyway, just wakes with a headache and heaviness in his bones.
And yet everything about Sam's life seems to become more vivid, taut, untenable. School is his normality, his ambition, and Dad just rips it out of his hands time and again and tosses it aside like so much crumpled paper.
Sam gets angry. And Sam was a pissy little kid sometimes, he gets that, but this anger feels different. It's like black blood in his veins, and it's he wonders if it means he's growing up.
Dad doesn't leave them at Bobby's anymore, much. Sam misses the lazy summers. The few books he manages to lug with him in the bottom of his bag are precious. The words on the pages make them almost like origami, something folded up bigger than what it is.
As anger and dreams grow in Sam, something seems to change in Dean, too. He is seventeen, but he acts more like twenty-five. He has a string of girls in every town, and he knocks back as many beers as Dad does whenever he has the chance.
Sam, if he were asked, would trace the change to the summer when Dean first killed the werewolf, how it shifted back to thin, pale human form, rent and bloody and young.
Sam is not asked.
"Salt lines," Dad growls out. Sam barely looks at the time, the date. It is another week in another autumn, another crap rented house that they will only keep for a couple weeks. There is a vengeful spirit in someone's attic. It has been killing guests at a bed and breakfast. It rips out throats.
A two-man hunt, and they do not need Sam.
"Don't wait up," Dean says and slaps Sam on the shoulder. He even walks like Dad.
It's likely, Sam thinks, as the door slams shut, that Dean won't even graduate high school. The Impala grinds out of the driveway and Sam winces at the very familiarity of the sound, of the leaving.
Salt lines done, he remembers his books. The TV is on in the background, to make a semblance of conversation, but Sam cracks open Return of the King.
You deceive yourself. He would have stretched out his hand to this thing, and taking it he would have fallen. He would have kept it for his own, and when he returned you would not have known your son.
Sam is Faramir. Sam has always been Faramir, since the summer at Bobby's when the air was dusty, golden-brown.
The second son. No real memories of a mother, no golden smiles from the father whose eyes are set on higher sights.
Perhaps, though, there is no favorite son in this story. John Winchester lives for his mission, not for his children. Sam is thirteen and hates his father like most boys his age hate their fathers, only a little more.
Agitated, he turns pages.
A broken sword was on his knee. I saw many wounds on him. it was Boromir, my brother, dead. I knew his gear, his sword, his beloved face.
Dean, like Boromir, may be a sacrifice.
Sam falls asleep over his book, feeling sick.
…
Sam is standing in a river. Anxious, he looks for blood in the water, for the licking, wicked flames of his recent nightmares.
But this a green country. The sky is gold with morning light.
"Who are you?"
Sam spins around, almost falling off balance. He is not Dean; he never remembers to reach for a weapon first.
The stranger is young, with dark hair falling to his shoulders. He has a proud nose and serious gray eyes. He is dressed like—and Sam is a nerd, Sam has always been a nerd, so he knows—like a ranger. Green and brown leather. There is a short sword at his side.
"I am Sam."
"That is a strange name. What is your business in this land? How did you cross the Anduin?"
The Anduin. Sam's mind vaults rapidly—the trees taller than memory that line the riverbanks, the unknown river. The curious garb of the newcomer. And—there is a small silver tree traced on the curve of the leather collar.
Sam takes a wild guess. "Faramir?" he gasps.
The other's hand moves swiftly to his sword. "Who—"
Think fast, Sam orders himself, and says, "No, no! I'm a—a friend of Gand—of Mithrandir's." This said, hoping that the Grey Wizard is not the next to pop up, denying any such association. "He told me all about you."
Faramir is not much older than Sam, in this strange world. Maybe that is why his face clears and his hand falls from the hilt of his blade. "Oh," he says. "Forgive me. We are unused to friendly strangers."
"I'm only visiting, uh, briefly," Sam answers. This must be a dream, he realizes, but lately, who knows? He wades out the river, not daring to wonder what Faramir thinks of his faded plaid shirt and tattered jeans. Couldn't the dream-world have given him some armor?"
"Were you on the main road?"
"Yes. Detoured. Ran into a marauding band of—orcs."
The distrust creeps back into Faramir's eyes. "You. You're not even a man yet. You defeated a band of orcs?"
"No." Sam manufactures a story with the kind of ease that has been getting all of the Winchesters out of tight scrapes for—well, forever, really. "That's how I got separated from my company. I managed to hide."
"Were they slain?"
Somewhere, Dad and Dean are still tracking a vengeful spirit. Sam suppresses a cold shiver. "No. No, I don't think so."
Faramir chews his lower lip. Sam guesses that he, too, is somewhat separated from his camp—though no doubt it cannot be far.
"Let me give you something to eat before you go on your way," Faramir offers. "I can build a small fire."
Smoke signals, Sam thinks, but does not say. To alert the rest of his company. Clever.
His feet are numb from the chill waters of the Anduin. Faramir builds a small fire and lights it with flint. Sam can do that too, but he doesn't mention it.
"Your voice and manner are strange," Faramir says, over some raisin-studded bread and hard cheese. He gestures at Sam's clothing. Sam figures that Faramir must not perceive him as a threat, which is a little damaging to his thirteen-year-old ego, but also the only reason he's still alive in dream-world.
"Have you ever been to Rivendell?" Sam asks.
"No."
That's what I was betting on. "Customs are different there."
"But you are not an elf."
"No," Sam sighs. His heart is bursting, even under these anonymous trees. Dream or no, he is here—to think that the White Tower is only miles away, that his feet are on the ground of a land that has never felt more real—"No, I'm not an elf. My father and brother and I are rangers in the North." It's not so very much of a lie.
Faramir's face lights up. "You have a brother?"
Sam leans forward, eager to answer, but the growl of the Impala splits open the river and the silent trees and he jolts upward, stiff-jointed and awake and deeply disappointed.
2001
Dean drives him to the bus station.
There's a whole lot they say, and a whole lot they don't. What they say is bitch-jerk-here's some money-thanks-don't thank me. What they don't say is, don't go-come with me-I need you.
Sam has one knapsack, three hundred dollars that are rightfully Dean's, and an acceptance letter to Stanford that's the newest, nicest thing he owns. It's tucked between the pages of Return of the King.
And as the bus groans and lurches forward, heartrending as a rollercoaster drop, Sam finds himself thinking of Faramir. His whole life is fading into bug-streaked review mirrors, fading sunlight, and a few old pictures tucked in his wallet, but Sam's head is full of fiction, pushing away the real.
Faramir, he remembers, was the only one of his family to survive.
…
It's a cruel irony that the movie they most wanted to see together is the one they don't. They've seen the crap cartoons. Sam remembers January, a simpler time (if only in name; he was already well into the college application process), when they were in some run-of-the-mill movie theater and the teaser for Fellowship came on. And Dean had gripped his arm, cutting off the circulation, practically, and said, "Dude, that looks freakin' awesome."
Sam is one of the only people who knows that Dean has always been a nerd.
So it—sort of sucks, really, that Sam is in a nice California movie theater, with too much popcorn balanced on his knee (because Dean is the one supposed to be eating it), ready to watch the world he's loved since seven come to life.
He scrolls through the numbers in his phone. Maybe he should send a text—just one text, it's almost Christmas, for God's sake—
"I have waited a long time for this," says a voice beside him, and Sam turns, startled. In the seat beside him is a distinguished, eccentric old man in a gray fedora. His eyes twinkle under hooded brows.
"Longtime fan?" Sam asks, to be polite.
"Since the beginning."
Sam nods, smiles, and then the curtains open.
Three hours later, he's dumbstruck. It's everything he's ever wanted—except for one thing. He wants to turn to Dean, to say, isn't it just like we imagined? But he can't, because Dean might be three miles away or three thousand, it's partly Sam's fault that he doesn't know.
Beside him, the old man sighs. Sam feels a sudden camaraderie—the warm, ephemeral bond of the audience.
"How about that?"
The old man smiles. "Quite something, wasn't it?"
"Yeah." It's Sam's turn to sigh. "I just—I wasn't supposed to see it on my own. My brother—we were going to see it together."
"A falling out?" Something about the man's tone sounds sympathetic rather than prying.
"More like a falling apart."
"Ah." His companion laces long, gnarled fingers together. "Well, young man. All I can say—the journey doesn't end here."
And before Sam can really answer, the lights flip on, and in the bustle of people getting up and leaving, the old man disappears.
It isn't until Return of the King hits theaters that Sam remembers that line, and gets a strange little chill down his spine, as though he's standing ankle-deep in a river.
2012
"You…realize you kind of just quoted Lord of the Rings, right?"
This, in the midst of everything, Sam knows: Dean still has a soft spot for Samwise Gamgee. And looking back on everything—on hell and hell again, death and taxes, the trials done and the Trials to come, Sam thinks of Faramir.
With only his brother in the picture, the picture changes.
Maybe after all, they are not quite the doomed family of Gondor. Perhaps they are more like two small beings in a great world, who climb a cragged mountainside.
Who make it to the end, if not past it.