Sam slipped into his old stained campus mattress wearing his boxers. His hair was still damp from his shower. From the desk across from him he saw his phone screen light up.
He furrowed his brow.
It buzzed.
Sam dragged himself out of bed with a groan and padded across the floor. He picked it up and looked and looked at the text. It said: Bitch?
Sam huffed out a reluctant snort of amusement and pulled out his desk chair. He sat down heavily on it and stared at the phone screen. He chewed on his nail for a moment, totally absorbed in his own thoughts. Should he call him? Send a text back? Two years without a word from Dean and now this? Was something wrong?
Jerk? He sent back. He waited. And waited. Set the phone down put his elbow on the desk and leaned his head on the back of his hand, blinking groggily. Should he call him?
He looked at the time on the phone. 12:30 am. A bit late for Sam nowadays but prime time for Dean.
Sam picked up the phone and flipped it open, his mind now a bit worried about what was going on.
What's up? He sent.
The phone rang and it startled Sam so much that he almost dropped it.
His heart leapt and he took a second to calm down before he answered.
"Dean?"
"Sam."
Sam wrinkled his nose. "Yeah. What's wrong?"
"What's the name of the girl smurf?"
Sam blinked. "What?"
"The girl smurf."
Sam pulled the phone away from himself to stare at it with his brow furrowed before he put it back to his ear. "Smurfette?"
"Well yeah I know it's Smurfette but like was that her actual name?"
Sam snorted. "Are you drunk?"
"Dude. That's not relevant to this conversation."
"You don't talk to me for two years and then you call me at almost 1 am to ask me about fucking smurfs?"
"No the smurfs aren't fucking Sammy, obviously, cause there's like only one chick. She Must be a slut. There's gotta be more than one chick, right? I mean otherwise all the girls would be named Smurfette. So she's gotta have like a real name besides that."
"Are you smoking pot?"
There was pause. "So you don't know if she had another name?"
Sam wasn't sure whether to be amused or annoyed. "No. No, Dean, I don't know."
He felt the weighted pause on the other line. "Is this what you called me for? Are you okay? Is...Dad okay?" Sam opened the desk drawer and got out the little 5x7 picture he kept of his mother and father. He barely recognized Dad... clean shaven and happy. He traced his thumb around the edge while he waited for Dean to respond.
"We're fine. Course if you cared about that you coulda called or somethin."
Sam felt his dander rise immediately. "You know Dean that goes both ways," he snapped a little heatedly.
"I'm callin now, ain't I?"
Sam tried to rein in the wave of anger he felt toward his brother. He logically knew that Dean didn't deserve it. He might even be trying to reach out in his own weird way. "What's up, man?" Sam asked.
Dean hesitated again.
Sam could sense his discomfort. He felt almost uncomfortable himself, completely at a loss as to what to say. Words of Dean's around the night they parted echoed through his head. How well am I going to fit into this new chapter, Sam? They seemed to have come to pass despite Sam's determination that they wouldn't.
Dean... Dean didn't belong here in the orderly quietude of Stanford. In the California sun. Dean was from another life. One Sam didn't want. Almost didn't want to be reminded of, even. How could it be that the thing Sam loved the most reminded him of so much bad?
"Wanted to see what's up with you." Dean said.
"I'm good. I take it you've been watching smurf reruns?" Sam asked, deliberately deflecting the question back onto Dean.
"Caught the tail end of one and just realized that there's only one girl and she has a name like Smurfette."
Sam knew damned well his brother couldn't have simply called him after all this time...God...years even, over a smurf question. He was calling and breaking the ice with something innocuous and then feeling his way around to see how Sam would receive him.
"Where are you guys now?" Sam asked.
"Wisconsin."
"Jeez. That feels like a state we haven't been to much."
"Yeah. Coven of freaking witches. Hate them."
"Yeah I remember." There was another stilted pause. Sam felt his heart tug. He and Dean had always had comfortable silences. Companionable lapses of communication...this was awkward. They were both dancing around the elephant in the room. Trying not to step on the landmines that surrounded them. Trying to get a feel for one another without diving headlong into a fight or spooking the other one off. That bond...that airtight bond between them felt stretched and brittle.
Sam blinked back tears as a sudden swell of emotion hit him. He wasn't prepared for it and it took him sideways. He fell silent while he struggled to keep the emotion out of his voice. But his throat was tightening with words he wanted to say but couldn't. When he'd walked away, he'd meant to walk away from their lives, but he hadn't really meant to walk away from Dean.
His big brother was just collateral damage in the explosion between father and son.
"Hey," Dean's voice broke his reverie. "You still there?"
"Dean," Sam said hesitantly. "Why are you calling?"
He heard the affront in his brother's voice. "Oh I'm sorry, Sam. Didn't realize it was such a freaking inconvenience for you."
"That's not what I meant and you know it."
"Yeah it's never what you meant, is it Sammy?"
Sam's sorrow turned to annoyance in a fraction of a second, an automatic ingrained response to his brother's tone.
He gave an exasperated sigh. "Something is wrong or you wouldn't have called me. What is it?"
"You think I only call when I need somethin?"
"Yeah, Dean." Sam shot back a little heatedly. "Yeah, you kind of do."
"You know what. This was a bad idea."
Sam knew where this was headed. He tried to scramble to keep it from imploding. "Don't hang up...I just..." he took a breath, unsure where to go with this. What did he even have to talk about Dean with? What common ground was left to stand on? "Hey, I got my ass kicked in a fight a few weeks ago."
He sensed Dean's interest.
"Yeah? Butting heads over algebra?"
Sam snorted. "Couple of frat boys trying to rape a girl."
"Those assholes!" Dean paused. "You git your ass kicked? Did you lose the fight?"
"No...kinda. My friend jumped in to help. We got her out. I just got a little banged up in the process."
"That's my boy." There was a touch of pride in his voice. "Don't be getting soft out there now. You should have been able to take two frat boys."
"Yeah." Sam said. "I really should have."
"Don't forget your training."
"Okay. I'll go find more frat boys and practice on them next week so I don't lose my edge."
He heard the smile in Dean's voice. "Atta boy. Knew I could set you straight...You got a bunch of college babes?"
Sam rolled his eyes to the ceiling. "No."
"Why are you wasting that opportunity, man? Was the chick you saved grateful. Huh?"
"What happened with the coven?" Sam asked softly.
He could feel Dean's sudden emotional shift on the other side of the phone. Sam thought it odd that could sense that nonverbal shift. He'd almost forgotten their ability to feel what the other one was thinking. He knew by the silence that he'd struck a nerve.
"Nothin." His brother replied.
"You tracked down an entire Coven for nothing?"
"Of course not. They were doing their usual witchy bullshit."
Well that narrowed down absolutely nothing. Sam took a stab in the dark. "You always do your best, Dean."
There was a sharp inhalation. "Do I?"
"Yeah. Yeah you do."
"Doesn't feel like it's good enough sometimes."
"Tell me about it." Sam commiserated.
"What do you mean? You do well when you aren't even trying."
"My best was never good enough for Dad."
It was the wrong thing to say.
Dean's voice took on a sharp edge. "Oh here we go. Throw Dad under the bus."
"Stop trying to defend him all the time." Sam replied, feeling betrayed again.
"Then quit talking crap about him."
"You know what? Fine." Sam snapped a bit petulantly.
Dean always reduced him to this. Always reduced him to reacting like like a ten year old. He hated it. Hated it.
"You hurt him." Dean said quietly. His tone somber.
"I hurt him? What about me?"
"What about it?"
"He threw me out, Dean. For going to college. For Stanford! You think I'd have chosen to stay away this long if he hadn't given me an ultimatum?"
"Hey, you chose that over family."
"I shouldn't have to have chosen between either! Why is this even an issue? Why can't we be a normal family that's proud of their son for going to a prestigious university? This is ivy league, Dean. And I made it." Sam's voice caught. "I really made it here on my own."
"Ivy league, huh. Yeah rub that in, little brother."
Sam's lip twitched. "I didn't... I'm not rubbing it in."
"Then why are we talking about it?"
"I..." Sam tried to wrestle down his emotions. Tried to swallow his urge to fight. To make Dean see why he deserved to be here.
"I don't know." Sam replied. He felt a wet warmth trickle down his upper lip. He wiped his runny nose with his arm and fought down another wave of frustration as he realized that he was never going to be able to make Dean see why he deserved to be here. Was never going to make him or Dad proud of the accomplishment. Was probably never going to be able to have them in his life in any meaningful way at all. He pushed the emotion down, felt his heart give a few hard thumps before it calmed once more.
"Hey," he said, keeping the agitation out of his voice. "Why don't you come visit sometime? I can show you around."
Dean snorted derisively. "Yeah I'm sure they'd love a guy like me showin' up."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Sam pinched the bridge of his nose and winced at a sudden headache building behind his eyes.
"What do you think it means."
"You know, Dean. A lot of the people here are good people. You're judging them and you know nothing about them."
"I know how people like them look at guys like us." Dean replied evenly.
"They look at me just fine." Sam stood up and walked the few paces over to his bed and sat on the edge. It creaked under his weight. He had to shift to keep from falling into the sinkhole created by his ass. "You know dorm mattresses are actually shittier than the ones at most of the motels we stay at."
"All the money you pay and they can't give you a decent freaking bed?"
Sam wiped his nose again and looked at his arm. It was smeared with blood.
His eyes widened in surprise and he glanced around for tissues.
"Sam? You still there?"
"Uh...Yeah." Sam responded. "I actually don't pay any money..." he went for the tissue box on his roommate's dresser. It was empty. He swore.
"Sam are you having a seizure. What is going on?"
Sam tilted his head back a little. He grabbed one of his used shirts from the bedroom floor and pressed it to his nose to stanch the bleeding. The sour smell of old laundry convinced him that was a bad plan and he dropped it and held the back of his hand to his nose.
"I'm sorry, man." He folded a leg under him and sat back on the mattress and sniffed. The metallic taste of blood trickled down the back of his throat and he coughed. "My nose started bleeding."
"You know, you used to get nosebleeds all the time as as kid."
Sam blinked. "I did?"
"Yeah. You bled all over the backseat of Baby once."
Sam felt slightly thrown off balance by his brother's memory of something he didn't quite recall. Usually Sam's steel trap mind forgot nothing and Dean's memories were vague and foggy.
A drip of red hit the white sheets.
"I hardly remember that."
"I do. It was kinda gnarly to have your nose start running like a faucet."
Another spatter hit. Sam picked up the corner of the sheet and held it pressed to his nose. He waited patiently for it to clot. "I remember that time you elbowed me in the face before school and chipped my tooth."
"That was an accident. We were wrestling."
"You were trying to dump my book bag." A red spot was blooming across the white cotton in his hand. "There's blood all over my bed sheets. Its gonna look like a murder scene."
"Or like you popped someone's cherry on prom night."
Sam winced involuntarily. "Oh God, Dean. Can you be more disgusting?"
"Yes."
"That was an observation, not a challenge." Sam blinked, the room shifting weirdly with an image of warped floorboards. He blinked and it was gone. "Dean I gotta call you as soon as I get this so stop okay?"
"Sure."
Sam hung up the phone and jogged down the hallway to the bathroom.
His bleed had finally begun to clot by the time he grabbed some toilet paper off the roll and held it to his nostrils. He tipped his head back and took a few deep breaths through his mouth.
A few minutes later when he was reasonably certain that it wouldn't start up again he threw the tissue away and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink.
His upper lip was smeared with red and so was the back of his arm where he'd been wiping his nose.
Sam sighed and turned on the water. It smelled sulfuric. He blinked and shut it off again.
He'd never smelled sulfur water in the tap before. He wondered if something had disturbed the water table nearby. He'd had plenty of run in with the rotten egg smell of old wells in abandoned buildings as a kid.
He turned the water on again. The tap sputtered a moment before the water sprayed out. The smell was slightly less intense. He soaped up his arm and rinsed it off. Then splashed water onto his face.
Someone rushed in a bit sloppily and burst into a bathroom stall to vomit. Sam winced at the sound and wiped his face dry with his shirt and left.
He headed down the mostly empty hall, suddenly missing living off campus. Next semester he figured he'd get a room mate and jump ship to an withdrawn nature never seemed to make dorm life easy on him. He simply didn't want to move back in with Brady with the way he'd been acting. And Zach and Rebecca felt like he was crashing their party as a third wheel.
He wandered back to his room. The laundry pile was sprawled on the floor in a riot of blues and greys. He had no one to blame but himself for leaving his clothes for so long. He hated laundry. He'd picked up the habit from life on the road of letting it pile up until it could not be ignored anymore and then taking huge loads into the laundromat.
He thought of himself and Dean waiting around watching the spinning glass front washers swirl soapy suds in fascination as children. Then later on with resentment and boredom at their chore. Dean livened things up by switching people's wet laundry into adjoining washers if they'd left them there unattended. He smirked to himself when he watched the inevitable bafflement or explosion from the owners when they returned.
God, he was as ass sometimes.
Dean. Sam realized he should call him back. He flipped the phone open and stared at Dean's number. He had no idea why it'd become so hard to call his brother. But it still was.
He pushed the call button, his heart racing weirdly. It rang. And rang... then went to voice mail.
"Hey it's me. Heading to bed I guess. Catch ya later."
Sam hung up the phone, feeling oddly melancholy.
It was quite a while before Sam realized that Dean never really did say what went wrong with the coven.
Thank you to my reviewers as always! Michele, ShadowhuntingDD, SallyanneRenee, ncsupnatfan, Fanpire101, Dom Dark Wolf, Warner 02. All appreciated!
