Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or anything from it in any way, shape, or form
Author's Note: So often we think of Dean's pain when Sam left for Stanford. This, however, begged for the question to be asked- how did Sam feel as he left his family? One shot.
Warnings: No spoilers, no violence, just a spot of light language
Other things may change us, but we start and end with family - Anthony Brandt
The bus door closed with a squeak and a groan, but Sam couldn't tear his gaze away from his brother – well, what he could make out of his brother, anyway. His view was partially obstructed by the door, but there were two skinny horizontal windows on either side of the door, and in the left one he could just make out his brother, standing there, with a look on his face like…well, Sam didn't even know what, he couldn't put his finger on it. He'd only seen a look like that on his older brother's face once before in his life. He had been five years old, carefree, smiling and happy. If he concentrated hard enough he could still remember the smell of the classroom where he spent the latter part of his first grade year – fingers paints and dried clay.
He and Dean always met each other at the fence and walked home together. He didn't know why he said it – it certainly wasn't around Mother's Day because it was a cold February afternoon, and Dean had just given him a lecture about keeping his jacket zipped up because he was getting over an ear infection. Dean was zipping up Sam's jacket because somehow six-year-old fingers aren't functional when it comes to zipping up jackets yet when he asked, "Dean, what was Mom like?"
Dean looked up, and that same expression was on his face – the hurt, lost, lonely look. Sam had taken a deep breath when he saw that look on his brother's face, because it was so obvious that it just didn't belong there, and it was so wrong for Dean. He almost looked scared, and Dean was never scared – he was too brave to be scared. Dean swallowed really hard a few times before he said, "I don't want to talk about it right now, Sammy."
Sam didn't ask that again for a long time, because he didn't want to see that look on his brother's face again. But now it was there, and maybe even a little bit worse. He was biting his lip and looking so unbelievably sad and lost and scared that Sam almost wanted to hop off that bus and hug him.
Their gazes broke and Dean began to study the ground like it was the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen, shoving his rough, callused hands into the pockets of his worn jacket.
"'Scuse me, sir?" the bus driver said. Sam turned, breaking his gaze on Dean. "If you gonna ride this bus, you need to take a seat."
Sam bit his upper lip. "Yeah, sorry," he whispered. He didn't look back at his brother, because he knew if he looked back he would never be able to go. He climbed up the two small steps and flopped down into the first available seat. He dropped his head into his hands and let out a long, shuddery sigh.
Tears started to prick in his eyes and he squeezed his eyes shut tightly, trying to force those sharp, salty tears back into his head. He imagined that his eyeballs are super absorbent cotton, and tried to make himself seep up the tears. God, his forehead was searing…
"Headache?"
He looked up to see who the bearer of the voice is. A small, elderly woman sat in the seat directly across from him. Her skin was the color of burnt toast, her head wrapped in a florescent green scarf. Her eyes, milky white with age and vision loss but still with a distinct beauty to them, seemed to be all knowing, as if she could read every word stamped onto your soul with one single gaze into your eyes.
"What?"
"Do you have a headache, child?" Her voice was kind, yet stiff and rigid at the same time. "I got an aspirin in my pocketbook if you want."
His father's voice rang in his head. "Don't accept anything from anyone, Sammy, you never know what might be a trap." He pushed the old man's voice aside. "That'd be great," he said, rubbing his forehead again. She handed him the pills and he swallowed them dry. "Thanks."
She examined him. "It's more than a headache, isn't it?"
"What is?"
She smiled. "Now, now – I'm elderly, not juvenile. You can't fool me. Tell me – what's on your mind, son?"
He sighed, cracking his knuckles and enjoying the little bit of soreness that came with the cracking sound. "I…I don't think I could really talk about it." He bit the inside of his cheek.
"It ain't healthy to keep feelings bottled up inside of you."
He laughed. "If that's true, then my family must be pretty diseased by now."
"You folks don't talk much?"
"No, not much."
"I can tell. Your socialization skills are worse than my sister's ex-husband."
His eyebrows crept toward his hairline. "Well then…" He felt something bubbling inside of his stomach, like vomit except…a vomit of words. It crept up his throat and into his mouth, leaving a disgusting, metallic taste until he began to speak. "I guess it all kind of started when I was a kid."
"Couldn't have been that long ago, you are a kid."
"My mom died when I was just a little baby, and from then on it was just me, my Dad, and my brother." He concentrated on the ground, on the woman's shoes that slightly resemble bedroom slippers. They're worn, and her toes are poking through – toes that are covered by florescent pink tights. "I don't remember my Dad before my mom died, but my brother always told me that he was a lot different when my mother was still around."
"Grief can bring out the worst in people. It's the worst, most unbearable pain in the world, losing the things that you love."
Sam nodded. "Yeah, I guess it had to be hard for him, but after she died my Dad desperately wanted to find the thing that caused my mom's death."
"Revenge – we're born with a thirst for it, to hurt those who hurt us. Go on, child," she said, pushing him a little bit like a mother bird pushing her babies out of the nest, trying to get them to fly.
"Well, my Dad's search took us all over the country. By the time I was ten I'd been to forty eight out of the fifty states – the only two I hadn't been to were Alaska and Hawaii. Since we moved so much, I never got a chance to make very many friends, so my only friend was – is – my big brother. And…I'm leaving for college, so we aren't going to be seeing each other anymore. It's hard."
She sat in silence for a second, nodding her head in a solid rhythmic beat, as though she was listening to her favorite music. Finally she said, "But if your father is going all over the country searching for this killer, surely sooner or later your family will be in the area where you're going to school, right?"
He sighed. "Well, that would work, except that my Dad didn't really want me to leave for college – he can't understand why I would leave him and my brother."
"Because he wants your help searching for this killer?"
"Exactly. So something tells me there aren't many family reunions in our future."
She nodded again. "Your brother – he's the most important thing in your life, isn't he? I can imagine that when you spend your life searching for a killer, you see some pretty bad things, but your brother was always something good, wasn't he?"
"Yeah…how could you tell?"
The bus driver piped in. "Oh," he said, "that's just her. She can see everything in people, even the things you don't show her. She's just special like that."
She smiled like she'd just been paid the highest compliment of all by the greatest person on the face of the earth. "Now Arthur," she said, a blush creeping into her cheeks, "you know compliments make me ill. Please"
He nodded and stopped the bus at another stop, opening the doors. One or two people stepped on but brushed past, settling far in the back.
"Your brother cares about you too?"
He chuckled and nodded. "That's almost an understatement. Dean – my brother – he's so overprotective of me, sometimes he does really dumb things, just to keep me safe. Like once, when we were younger, there was this kid who kept picking on me at school. I came home in tears nearly every day for a week. One day, this kid decided to punch me. I was pretty quick so I was able to duck out of the way so that he didn't get me very hard, but it was still hard enough to leave a little bit of a bruise. Dean saw it and he flipped out, and when he asked me who did it I told him. The next day after school Dean showed up, and he punched the kid so hard they had to wire his jaw into place, and my Dad was absolutely livid." The three of them chuckled a little bit. "If I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, I have no doubt that Dean would find the bus and dismantle it piece by piece, giving each hunk of metal a good kick as he took it apart."
The woman laughed, wiping a tear from her eye. "You certainly do love your family, boy."
Sam considered. "I love my brother," he admitted. The argument with his father was still all too fresh in his mind, and the words his Dad threw at him cut into his heart like the sharpest of knives.
"You love your family. You may fight with your family sometimes, but you love your family."
"How could you know that? I haven't said a thing about my father."
"Don't question her, boy!" the driver said. "She knows things about you that you don't even know about yourself!" He reached over and turned up the radio, and a bluesy Rolling Stones tune filled the empty corners of the dirty bus as the three sat in quiet.
"Have you ever told your brother that?"
Thirty minutes of silence and Blues music had passed before the woman spoke again. Sam had been looking out the window where the rain was cascading down like a waterfall from the sky. "What?"
"Have you ever told your brother that? That you loved him?"
Sam's brow furrowed. "My brother and I, we aren't really touchy feely like that. Dean has a thing about not saying stuff like that, because he says it's for prepubescent girls."
The woman raised an unplucked eyebrow. "You are an absolute idiot if you're falling for that line of bullshit, and if you're heading off to college I deduce that you're a very smart young man, so that surprises me. Telling someone that you love them doesn't have to be mushy or gushy. Maybe that's why it was so hard for you to leave your brother – because you know you haven't told him any of the important things."
Sam shook his head. "That isn't true. My brother knows that he means the world to me."
She clucked her tongue a little bit, and nodded. "If you say so."
The bus slowed to a stop, and Sam realized where they were, quickly picking up his bag. "I have to go," he said, "thanks for the talk."
"You're welcome," the woman replied. "Take care of yourself…and your family. They're important, boy." She reached forward and clasped the hand on the driver, their fingers enlacing. "Family and those that you love, they're the most important things in the world."
Sam blinked. "The two of you, you're married?"
"Going on forty-three years," Arthur said.
"But it feels like it's been since the beginning of time," the woman beamed.
Sam took a deep breath, forced a smile, and waved goodbye. He ran under the cover of the small bus stop, shivering a little bit in the rain, and waited for the next bus.
Call him, the voice in his head begged. Tell him.
He glanced up the street to make sure that the bus wasn't going to be coming any second before he sprinted for the pay phone, closing himself in the booth. He dug around in his pocket for the change, and pushed it into the slot, picking up the phone.
No dial tone.
He hung up and tried again, but nothing. He tried three more times before he saw the bus coming toward him. He sighed and punched the button to return his change before he ran through the rain for the next bus. Before he stepped on, he screamed as loud as he could, "I love you, Dean!"
The thunder roared in approval.
Arthur slowly pulled his bus to a stop for the night, shutting it off and reaching to help his wife. "That young man," he started.
She smiled as he helped her down the stairs of the bus. "Don't worry, Arthur," she said, "that young man, he's very strong. He's going to be fine…him and his brother." She smiled and patted his arm.
"How do you know?"
She laughed as they walked. "It's very simple," she said, as if she was explaining 2 + 2. "They have each other."
-end-