Living La Vida Loca Chapter 9, a supernatural fanfic

Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: see Chapter 1

LIVING LA VIDA LOCA

Chapter 9

Sam looked wearily at the dim display of the bedside clock, the LED clearly on its last legs: 5:42am. For a moment he was tempted to close his eyes and go back to sleep, but instead he sat up, because he knew; sometimes you didn't need a nightmare or a vision to clue you in, just the ability to watch what was going on right in front of your face.

Dean awoke instantly as Sam sat up and pulled on his shoes; sleeping on top of the bed fully clothed wasn't a brilliant method of getting a restful night's sleep but no way were they going to make more bodily contact with the bedding than they had to.

"What're you doing?"

"Dylan's intending to split," Sam said quietly. "I'm going to talk to him."

For a moment their eyes locked before Dean deliberately broke the contact by closing his eyes. "Try to keep your noise down to a dull roar, Sammy," was his only comment.

Sam slipped quietly from the room and down to the parking lot of the Bates Motel II, where as he had known, he saw Dylan struggling to shove his gear into the Toyota one-handed, the other hand – no more than badly sprained with fingers bruised not dislocated – having been strapped up for him by Sam. Who now drew in a deep breath hoping it would give him some inner resilience. The past two days had been the most unpleasant of Sam's life bar none – including being trapped in the woods with a wendigou, including when Dean was stricken in a hospital bed, including his last furious fight with his dad before he 'escaped' to college for two years of normalcy.

"You're definitely dad's kid," Sam commented as he watched Dylan toss a backpack into the foot-well of the front passenger seat, "The cut-and-run is classic John Winchester."

"Go to hell."

"Very probably," Sam conceded, looking at his half-brother and feeling his heart twinge at the dark circles under Dylan's eyes and his pallid, drawn face. "So, you headed anywhere in particular?"

"Anywhere away from you," Dylan retorted and turned to him. "What, no earnest plea for a change of heart?"

"Your heart isn't the problem; it wants to stay here," Sam told his half-brother quietly, "but your head's in charge. Besides, I know why you're running away – because it's easier than facing the truth."

"Truth? This from a guy whose father is king of the credit-card scam?" Dylan snarled.

"When I was a kid I saw a preacher, one of those evangelicals," Sam commented, ignoring the jibe. "This woman drove him away yelling words I'd never heard of, so I walked after him and asked him why he did it when people were mean to him. He said he had no choice."

Dylan was looking at him like he was crazy, obviously thrown by the non sequitur.

"I didn't get it and he said that the reason most people don't want to hear the truth is because accepting the truth about something immediately puts you under a moral obligation to act on it. He said he was like the only guy on a street with a TV. When a hurricane warning came on he could grab his family and hide in the basement and be safe, but he'd be as responsible for his neighbours' deaths as if he'd gone around their houses with a 12-gauge; the guy had a moral responsibility to warn them of the impending danger. He quoted Scripture, somewhere in Ezekiel, I think, about God telling the prophet, 'If I say unto the wicked one he will die for his sin, and you do not actually warn him, the wicked one for his sin will die, but his blood I shall ask back from your hand. But if you warn the wicked one, and he shall not repent, for his sin he will die, but you will have delivered your own soul.'"

"Wow, pretty parable," Dylan snapped. "Did you hit your head this morning?"

"I didn't get it either," Sam acknowledged, "and the preacher told me that he didn't particularly enjoy doing what he did but that accepting the truth placed him under a moral obligation to warn others that they were reaping the whirlwind. "'Son, when the last trumpet sounds and the Lord demands, 'What did you do in the Great War?', none of the bad guys is going to be able to point the finger at me and say, 'But he never said!'" Then the preacher looked at me said that was why the lady had driven him away, because she hadn't wanted to accept the moral duty to act in acknowledging he was telling the truth. He told me that there is no such thing as an atheist, just someone trying to shirk their responsibilities – to God and man."

"Do you have, like, a point anytime soon?"

"That is my point," Sam shrugged. "All your life you've been able to nurse your righteous anger, secure in the moral high ground of having the two-for-one-deal: deadbeat dad and whacko. But now you can't; because now you know that what our father hunts and fights and kills is real and evil and out there. John Winchester is a bona fide American hero, and it's easier to run away from that truth than accept that your mom carries her fair share of responsibility for the fact that your life sucked."

"Don't talk about my mother like that," Dylan snarled and swelled his frame menacingly, "Deanie isn't here to save your ass this time."

"Dean said the same thing to me once," Sam replied, "right before he slammed me into a bridge pylon, actually. Look, you're right about dad. He liked your mom, but he didn't love her…he wanted a woman who was compassionate but undemanding while he learned to live in the world again, or at least function in it. But he does love you Dylan, because he's incapable of not loving his children…"

"But he'll never love me as much as he does Mary Winchester's sons." Dylan accused, for the first time showing as much hurt as anger.

"No, he won't," Sam admitted, not denying the fact. "But Sarah Cameron is no saint here. She liked our dad, but she didn't love him either…She wanted to be a mother but not a mate, and she lucked out because she found a man who was decent and responsible, but who wouldn't cause her any problems when she wanted to ease him out of the picture a couple of years down the line. Your mother and our father were cut from the same cloth; they both had their own agendas and we came a distant second."

"She never cared that it was just the two of us," Dylan stared at his sneakers as if they held the answer to the meaning of life. "I never told her about the bullying and about wanting a dad like the other kids…but he left us, she didn't force him away."

"And you know damn well why," Sam countered. "Look, our dad's made mistakes – plenty – but he wasn't some run-out loser who abandoned you to spend the rest of his life with Jim, Jack and Johnny in some sleazy bar somewhere. He wanted you to be safe…to have a normal life."

"Isn't that what you wanted?" Dylan parried shrewdly, "I know you went to college for a couple of years and you cut off all contact."

"We both did, or so I thought." Sam corrected. "We had a massive fight about me going –"

Dylan's eyes widened, "Fight?" There was a faint hint of challenge, unwilling to relinquish his long-held grudge about John, Dean and Sam as a sort of Walton trio living in full male-bonding harmony where never was heard a discouraging word. "Your…our…dad – hit you?"

"Dad never raised his hand against us," Sam retorted instantly…and even if he had, Dean would have put himself between me and the blow…"Unfortunately me and dad have always been like oil and water – and nitro and glycerine. In half the ways that matter we're too much alike to get on and when it comes to the rest of the important stuff in life we're too different to relate. Once I vowed to apologise to dad when me and Dean found him again and my brother said he'd give it five minutes before we were at each other's throats…in the event I think we managed about a minute-and-a-half. Up until I finally went to college me and dad were either yelling at each other, throwing crockery and slamming doors or else competing for days on end in icy silences and acting as if each other were invisible, communicating only through the intermediary of Dean. I found out a little while ago that dad used to come by Stanford to check I was safe."

"You didn't know?" Dylan asked.

"Like Dean said to me – it's a two-way street; I could have picked up the phone. Although in retrospect, maybe I didn't want to know." Sam amended. "But then again we didn't have the normal father-son relationship angst. I was a baby when the demon murdered my mother. Dad was so scared that he was going to lose me that he…suffocated me. When Dean was eleven he hunted for the first time alone, but when I was fourteen my dad still wouldn't allow me to go solo, only with him or Dean…" and I couldn't ever see past my own resentment long enough to realise that the way dad treated me made Dean always feel as if he were the less important son, the expendable son, "…and as if that weren't enough – I could never forgive my father for taking me away from Clarksville and my chance of a normal life and he could never accept my less than whole-hearted dedication to avenging the murder of a woman I never knew. "

"So you jacked college because you think you owe our father?" Dylan challenged.

"No," Sam vetoed firmly, "Caring for any child you bring into the world is a parent's sacred and binding responsibility, not an optional extra tick-box on some metaphorical parenthood form. I don't owe our father anything…but Dean I owe everything."

Dylan snorted derisorily, "Dude, if Dean Winchester is your idea of perfect big brother material, our family is even more dysfunctional that even I want to think about."

"When he was thirteen, my brother killed a man for me."

Sam allowed himself to savour a moment of slightly malicious satisfaction as shock wiped the challenge and contempt from the kid's face.

Quietly Sam told him, "Someone who didn't like me very much once told me Dean was jealous of me - my friends, my life, going to college and holding down a normal job …what he didn't say what that Dean had every right to be. He gave me everything of himself and all he got from me was a shrug and a nice view of my back as I walked away."

"So you're staying because you think you owe Dean?" for the first time since they'd met, Dylan's tone was plaintive rather than hostile.

"I'm Dean's world," Sam sighed, "but he was never mine…at least not until he finally left me, drove off leaving me on a back road to Nowheresville."

"He just drove away?" Dylan asked sceptically.

"I'd finally pushed him too far," Sam confessed his guilt finally. "In the end it was inevitable that either dad or I was going to. In our civil war for Dean's love no quarter was asked or given - he was our mediator and our victory prize. Each of us constantly demanded ever more impossible demonstrations of his love and loyalty to 'me' unknowing and uncaring of the fact that we put him through emotional hell every time we forced him to choose between us. We knew dad was in California but he ordered us not to look for him and go to Indiana instead."

"What did you do?" Dylan demanded.

Sam shook his head, "Dean as always obeyed dad. I threw a strop in the car on the way and demanded we scratch Indiana and go to California after dad else I wasn't going any further. I didn't even expect to find dad if we went to California. That wasn't the point, I was just demanding that Dean choose me over dad, that he yet again prove his love for me by following my wishes. Even with dad a thousand miles away it was just another power play between us over control of Dean."

"And so he dumped you at the side of the road and went to Indiana?"

"More or less, after pointing out what a selfish bastard I was. I'd finally hurt him once too much, once too often…I was going to head for California but…the separation put things into perspective. It was like God or the universe decided to let me have a close up and personal view of what was slipping away from me, from the human race, bit by bit."

"I don't understand?"

Sam looked at his half-brother, feeling the phantom presence of a gun pressed against his head momentarily, "We hunt evil, Dylan, and we kill evil. But we don't kill human beings because there's a very important difference. A demon's only aim is to cause as much death and destruction as possible. It will never change and never repent. But when you kill a human, you rob them of any chance to atone. As long as they live there is always the chance, however slight, that they will manage to achieve redemption. Killing a human being is a terrible thing and it causes profound psychological damage. The more you do it, paradoxically the easier it becomes because each time the damage you do is exponentially greater."

Sam watched Dylan as the kid absorbed this statement; at this moment, for the first time, Dylan was being shown the reality of his half-brothers lives - that they were not and never had been the indulged, pampered heirs he'd always rationalised them to be in his juvenile fantasies of himself and his mother as the wronged innocents.

"It's not that Dean doesn't believe you're our brother. It's that it doesn't mean anything to him, which scares me far more than anything we have ever faced. If you'd found us before I went to college, he would have been seriously pissed off, but he would have accepted you. I was barely out of the picture a couple of years and…he can't even connect any more." Sam admitted.

"And you're single-handedly going to stop him from going over to the Dark Side?"

"You better believe it. I did not spend my life learning how to be a real deal Road Warrior for it to finish up that one day a monster I have to hunt used to be my brother. Dean's soul is mine, and I will keep it on the side of the righteous if I have to pin him here kicking and screaming."

"So you're going to stay with them." Dylan said with resignation, "Hunting with Dean, for his soul's sake."

Sam shrugged. "Like the preacher - I have no choice. I am Luke Skywalker – 'I have no memory of my mother, I never knew her'. But they did know her, and they loved her and her ghost lurks in their eyes always. One thing I do know for damn sure is that me being Joe Average is not worth it at the price of Dean going Darth Vader. The one thing you can't sacrifice for your heart's desire is your heart."

"And so what?" Dylan folded his arms in defensive sulkiness. "You expect me to join your quest to make sure Dean stays more Don Quixote than Don Corleone?"

"No, I want you to do the opposite. I want you go to college and be a doctor; to have a mortgage and a dog; to stand for two hours in the driving rain 'cause your kid's his Little League team's ace hitter; to spend three hours in a post office queue because you filled in tax form 131bz instead of 132za."

Dylan blinked rapidly, taken aback by this list of mundane trivia and the obvious yearning for it in his half-brother's voice.

Sam sucked in a deep breath and then released it in an equally deep sigh as he finally let go of his resentful longing for the life he knew he would never experience. "I want you to have the life I never will – and I want you to live it for the both of us."

Concluded in epilogue…