Heroes and zeros
Sammy's eyes are gritty and his throat's sore. He knows that's what he gets for crying himself to sleep like a big baby. But it wasn't fair last night, and this morning it still isn't fair: it's his eighth birthday, God damn it (and if Dad heard him saying that, even in his head, he'd be in so much trouble), and Dad won't be there to give him his present and make the day special. Because Dad called last night and said there was this spirit and people were dying and he had to check it out, and he was sorry, Sammy, but they'd celebrate when he got home.
Dean has always told him that birthdays were special. That's what Mom had said, he told Sammy. That on your birthday anything you wished for was possible. It might not come true straight away, Dean said, but because it was your special day whatever you wished for would come true some time.
Sammy wipes his nose on the sleeve of his pyjamas and turns over in bed. He wants to run away so his Dad will miss him and then he'll be sorry that some dumb spirit had been more important than Sammy's birthday. But he knows that if he runs away on his own, before he's big like Dean, the things in the dark will get him. That's why Dad always tells him to stick close to Dean. So Sammy kicks at the stupid flowery comforter in the stinky motel bedroom and wishes that soon he'll be big enough to run away so Dad will be sorry.
When Dean comes in with a plate on which there's a pile of pancakes and a candle stuck through the middle of them, he forgets his wish. Because while the pancakes are kind of lopsided and in danger of being submerged by a swimming pool's worth of maple syrup, and the flame on the candle's flickering like it's not going to last two more seconds, Dean's also got a brightly-wrapped parcel under his arm.
"Happy birthday, Sammy," he says, and then, "Urgh, that's gross," when Sammy blows out the candle, and maple syrup and wax and Sammy's spit end up on his shirt.
But Sammy doesn't care, because he's tearing into the parcel and Dean's only gone and done it, only gone and got him the Batman t-shirt that he's been wanting for so long. And Sammy pulls his pyjama top off and pulls the t-shirt on and eats pancakes and syrup in bed, and for those few moments Dean is as much his hero as Batman is.
"Hi, Sam."
Sam ducks his head and rushes past the group of giggling girls. He knows why they're there. They lay in wait for him every Tuesday. His friend Adam thinks he's a dork for not making more of the possibility, but what's the point when he knows it's not him they're interested in?
"Hey, Sam."
It's Cherry Hanson, the hottest girl in the whole school, and even knowing what she really wants isn't enough to prevent Sam slowing down and looking at her. She's wearing one of those tight tops that make the boys in the locker room talk about her, and swings her shining blonde hair back over her shoulder as she smiles at Sam.
"How was class?" she asks.
Sam's aware that Adam and all the other guys in hearing distance are staring at him, and it doesn't help his stumbling reply.
"Yeah, good, you know, Galbraith and consumer sovereignty," he says, and then closes his eyes because, like duh, Cherry Hanson, and he's talking economics.
"You going home now?" she asks. "I'll walk out with you."
And Sam knows, God he knows, the humiliation that's headed his way, but even so he's not man enough (or stupid enough) to turn her down. So he walks out the school with Cherry Hanson, and his street cred just went through the roof or down the pan, depending on which brain he's thinking with, and there's the Impala. Just like it is every Tuesday when Dean's got his half-day at the garage, sitting at the kerb, and Dean there in sunglasses and sleeveless black t-shirt, arm casually propped on the open window, looking cooler than cool.
"Oh hey, is that your ride?" Cherry asks. Like she didn't know. "Can I get a lift? My mom's running late today."
Sam has no choice but to follow the trail she's blazing towards the Impala, and then she's opening the door and sliding into the passenger seat, the seat that belongs to Sam. Dean turns to watch her, but Sam can't see his expression behind the sunglasses as he throws his pack in the back and folds himself in after it. And since when did he get relegated to riding in the back in his own brother's goddamn car? Since Cherry Hanson got in the front and started showing way more leg than she ever does at school, that's when. And Sam knows his brother is a horndog and he'll be lucky if he even remembers Sam's in the backseat long enough to drop him off at home before they start doing the dirty right there in front of him.
"Hi, I'm Cherry," she smiles, with the kind of promise that has her name on so many bathroom walls at school.
"Sure you are, sweetheart," Dean says.
"Cherry – um, she needs a lift home."
"Sammy," Dean drawls, and Sam wants to punch him because how many times does he need telling it's Sam. "You didn't tell me I'm giving your girlfriend here a ride."
"I'm not his -" Cherry starts, just as Sam says "I didn't -"
Blasting rock music cuts them both off as Dean starts up the car, and Sam catches a glimpse of dark shades in the mirror before Dean pulls away from the kerb, leaving Sam to sit miserably in the back seat, hating his life and his brother almost equally.
He can't hear what Dean's saying because of that damned AC/DC, but Cherry sure seems to like it if the way she's giggling is anything to go by, and she even manages some sort of accidental-looking move so that her skirt rides even higher up her thighs as her eyes wander all over Dean. And God, isn't it just Sam's luck that he's been at this school all of six weeks and he's going to be known as the guy whose brother's banging the hottest girl in school, when all he wants to do is turn up, do his stuff, turn in his homework, and go away again at the end of the day without anyone ever really noticing that he was there. Sam snatches his notepad out of his bag and starts on his homework with short, angry lines that press clear through the page.
He looks up when he feels the car pull over and come to a halt, and the music's turned down, leaving the sound of the engine throatier and sexier than Bon Scott could ever hope to be. And damn it, he hates that he knows his brother's music so well that he even knows who's in the damn bands.
Cherry's opening the door and sliding out of the seat, reluctantly, it seems, from the time it takes her to do so. Or maybe she's waiting for Dean to get out and come round and help her out. She'll be waiting a long time if she wants Dean to act like a gentleman, that's for sure. Sam knows that's not what she's interested in, anyway; she wants a bit of rough, a bad boy, and Dean's more than happy to play that role if it means he gets some. It's not like he's not done it before. And at that point Sam's brain stutters and he quickly goes back to economic theoriesbecause he's still traumatised by that time he walked into the room he and Dean shared and found Dean in bed with Kimberly Springer, the hottest girl at Sam's last-but-one school. Even though Kimberly was damn hot, he really, really doesn't want to remember anything that features his brother naked, let alone remember the slow, languid thrusts that had Kimberly moaning. He adds his prick to the list of things he hates, because it doesn't seem to want to forget.
Dean's got an arm draped casually over the back of the passenger seat and is leaning across, smiling up at Cherry in a way that has Sam wanting to slap the stupid smirk off his face.
She's closed the door but is leaning back in through the open window, and it sure as hell isn't by accident that she's giving Dean – and Sam – an eyeful as she passes a scrap of paper to Dean. From long experience, Sam just knows that it contains her phone number. Dean has enough scraps of paper with phone numbers on to start up a paper recycling business.
"Call me," she says, and it's not a request but a command, with the confidence that Dean will do whatever she wants because she knows she's beautiful.
Dean takes the note and smirks up at her. "Sweetheart," he says, "You know, if you want to ask Sammy here out, you don't need to do it through me."
And then Dean drives off, and Sammy hates him even more because the look on Cherry's face means he is going to be dead meat tomorrow at school. Sometimes he really, really doesn't understand his brother.
"Dad got a lead," Dean says. "We're leaving tonight."
He reaches out and turns the music back up and Sam sinks deeper into the back seat and wishes he were anywhere but here, because at least dead meat at school is only figurative.
"So, hey, give me a call, you know – if you're not too busy with your poetry readings and sculpture classes and shit."
Sam hits delete as soon as the message stops playing. He doesn't know how Dean found his new number, but he doesn't want Jess hearing it. Dean doesn't really contact him any more, but sometimes, just occasionally, there'll be a message. When he does call these days he sounds drunk, or maybe just high from the hunt. Every single word of that stupid message underlines how far apart they really are. Even tonight, when it's mostly about 'happy birthday, Sam', he can't resist the dumb crack at college life – or what he believes college life to be about.
Dean. For all he's done Psych 101, Sam doesn't really understand how his brother can have this effect on him. When he thinks back to their life on the road, Dean was a pain-in-the-butt, cocky son of a bitch who always, but always came through for Sam, when he wasn't teasing the shit out of him. But now… Now Sam's grown up and Dean hasn't, and it's kind of embarrassing. He doesn't want Jess to meet Dean. He knows Dean would take one look at her and hit on her in the most unbelievably crass way. And then, when that was over and done with, Dean wouldn't have anything to say to her. Maybe he'd ask her where she's from, about her family, but he'd meet it all with a 'huh', because her life has been normal and Dean doesn't rate normal.
He kept the first postcards Dean sent him, even though he couldn't reply because there was no return address. At first he clung onto them, because though he didn't want part of it any more, that life, and Dad, it was still Dean. Even when all he wrote was that they'd had a good hunt, no trophies but an awesome salted barbecue, and by the way, the girls here were smoking, Sam knew Dean was saying he missed him. But after a while the postcards stopped being amusing and became asinine. And the occasional spelling mistakes were kind of embarrassing, too. The cards stopped, sometime after the first year.
Sam never meant not to return Dean's calls. Those first few weeks, he did call him back. God, he was so lost and alone, and it really helped knowing that Dean had found time to ring him without Dad knowing, that Dean never once said 'I told you so', but just told him about the hunt, and the local bars and the local girls, and the Impala's last oil change and how much better she was running now. But then he got busy with classes, and studying, and he met Becky and Zach and their friends, and learned how normal people live, learned to make conversation, to use the right cutlery, not just the nearest piece, and to stop feeling guilty for wanting this.
He doesn't know when he went from seeing Dean as the big brother who all the cool kids wanted to be, who all their sisters wanted to date, and who he wanted to be more than anything else on the earth, to this. To the realisation that Dean is… well, Dean is limited. Dean doesn't discuss things in the way Sam and his friends do. He doesn't understand the issues that are important in life, the beauty and thrill of abstract argument, of intellectual point-scoring. And he's not exactly somebody he could introduce to Jess's parents.
He'd swagger in wearing old jeans and a scruffy leather jacket, with half a day's growth on his face. Not that that look doesn't have its place, but meeting Sam's almost in-laws isn't the place. If he stopped flirting in an embarrassingly crude way with Jess's mom long enough, he'd be scarfing down his food, elbows out, head down, and talking with his mouth full. He'd make inappropriate jokes every time anybody tried to discuss anything rationally or intellectually. And his vocabulary's embarrassing. He comes across like a guy who pumps gas all day.
So Sam deletes Dean's occasional messages. He hasn't removed Dean's number from his cell phone because even if he hasn't called it in over two years, he can't bring himself to do that. It's just that they're in different worlds now. He wishes Dean would recognise that and leave him alone.
Maybe Mom was right about birthday wishes because Dean doesn't call him again after that. He just wishes he didn't feel so goddamned lousy about it.
It's his own personal purgatory, only maybe it's actually hell, because he can't see any way out. He's stuck here for the rest of his life, on a never-ending road trip with his big brother who never grew up past eighteen, who hits on every girl in a forty mile radius, and who won't stop listening to goddamn brainless mullet rock.
These days, Stanford seems like a dream. He thinks he had one shot at a normal life, and that was it. Because after Jess, he can't ever try again. He can't risk it. Normal isn't meant for people like him, but it doesn't stop him wanting it. He wants a home, a career. He wants Jess. He doesn't want any part of this life that Dean has this big stupid romanticised picture of. Dean wouldn't know normal if it bit him in the ass. It's yet another reason why they're so far apart these days, only Dean won't see it. Won't see that Sam's grown beyond what they were as kids. Sam has the sinking feeling that he's going to have to spend the rest of his life playing a reluctant Robin to Dean's swaggering Batman. Which makes Dad, what? The Joker? Sounds about right.
He can't sleep, because he dreams. He doesn't want to stay awake, because of Dean. Which leaves Sam exhausted, and wishing that he was anywhere but here.
"Get off me, Sam, I said I'm fine. Just let go of me, dude."
"You're not fine, Dean, you're – ok, fine. You want to wind up on your face in the dirt, go right ahead. Yeah, just like that. So what's the view like down there, Dean?"
"Shut up."
It takes Sam nearly an hour to get Dean out of the clutches of the grateful Williams family and back to the motel room, where he finally gets Dean to take off his shirt so he can see the damage the poltergeist left behind. Damage that should have been Sam's to take, from the rock collection – and what kind of lame-ass freak is Roger Williams that in this day and age he has a rock collection? – that got thrown across the study at them. Only Dean, being Dean, pushed Sam out of the way. Because Dean has this whole hero complex and God forbid that anything should happen to Sam on his watch. Because little Sammy is always going to need protecting.
And Sam would tear Dean a new one – probably still will, just as soon as he's stopped groaning every time he moves – for being such an over-protective smothering bastard, except he knows it's not just Sam that Dean feels this responsibility for. He'd have done the same if it had been anyone else in the way. He makes Roger Williams look like a genius, really.
Roger Williams who couldn't do enough for them, and Petra Williams who clucked and fussed over Dean and meant every word, and little Tanya Williams who attached herself to Dean's leg the instant they let the family back inside the house and seemed like she wasn't going to stop crying when she found out he was hurt. Maybe the family wasn't so dumb-ass stupid after all.
So Dean's irritating. He sneers at normal, which still gets Sam pissed, but maybe now he understands a bit more why he does it. He knows normal will reject him, so he rejects it first. And for the first time, Sam wonders if maybe normal is all it's cracked up to be. Lucas's mom didn't care about Dean being normal when he saved her little boy. That Hailey girl didn't care. That guy Jerry didn't give it another thought - and he was as normal as they come, with his 9-5 job and his family.
Dean might not be normal, but Sam sometimes thinks he's more human than Sam will ever be. Dean might come across like an insensitive jerk, but when it really matters, people turn to him. They open up to him and trust him.
To people like the Williams, he's a hero. And Sam realises that maybe he had it right, all those years ago. Dean's not without his faults – God, no – but when it comes down to it, maybe he is a crass, smartarse, honest to God fucking hero.
But that's not going to stop Sam ripping the shit out of him about Tanya Williams' pale pink hair-ribbon that's still where she left it, tied in a loving bow round Dean's left wrist.