Chapter Text
It’s late into the second day of his drive when Sam’s unease over the idea of showing up unannounced after eleven years of radio silence finally overrides his nerves. Attention still half on the mostly-empty Interstate 80, with nothing but rocks, short prairie grass, and the occasional semi truck passing by on either side, he dials the number and puts the phone to his ear, adrenaline rushing through his veins.
Miraculously, someone picks up.
“Singer’s Towing and Auto Repair.”
The sound of a voice he hasn’t heard since high school hits him with an unexpected wave of relief and nostalgia all mixed up with refreshed grief. He may have lost everyone else in his life, but Jess couldn’t take every friend in the divorce.
Assuming he still has the right to call Bobby a friend.
“Hi, Bobby, it’s Sam. Winchester.” He grimaces as he gives his long-abandoned surname, but he can’t be sure Bobby will recognize him otherwise. “How, uh, how have you been?”
“Sam.” There’s a long pause, and Sam drums his fingers nervously against the steering wheel. The silence might just be surprise, but there’s probably a better chance it’s irritation. Scrub brush passes by, followed by barren rock outcroppings as he waits for a response. Wyoming’s truly desolate.
Finally, Bobby lets out a sigh into the receiver.
“Can’t say I expected to hear from you after so long. You, uh, get caught up in funky town?”
It’s weirdly shocking to hear the old hunting code. He hasn’t thought about it since he was a teenager.
“No, no emergency, just—” His voice cracks, vision blurring as he forces back unexpected tears. He’s been like this for days, falling to pieces at the drop of a hat. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but the fact that Bobby cares enough to ask—he clears his throat, pushing down his emotion and trying to sound natural. “Just been a while. Wondering if… uh, well, I just haven’t… I kinda thought I’d like to drop by, if that’s ok. For old times’ sake.”
“That’s fine. You know I told you boys when you were kids that you could always come by when you needed it, and I meant that.” Sam’s hit with a rush of gratitude and wipes his eyes with the back of his sleeve. Bobby has always been a master of reading between the lines without any open dissection of feelings.
He breathes out in a rush of air. “Great, that’s—that’s great. I’m halfway through Wyoming right now, should hit South Dakota in a couple of hours.”
“You’re where ? Oh hell, don’t tell me you’re on the way to Sioux Falls.”
Sam’s heart drops. “Is that a problem?”
“Well, only if you wanna actually find me, versus the old place,” Bobby says dryly. “I moved. Sold the scrap yard coming up on four years ago.”
“Oh.” He feels a pang of regret. He knows it’s stupid to have expected no changes after eleven years. He’s certainly gone through plenty of changes of his own. It’s just that when he made the decision not to keep in touch, he’d somehow still pictured Bobby’s place continuing on without him indefinitely.
“So, uh, where are you now?”
“Grand Lake, Colorado. Tiny little town, coupla’ hours northwest of Denver, up by Rocky Mountain National Park.”
“Oh, wow. Colorado. Uh, ok.”
“And listen. Your brother’s here too. I’m guessing you didn’t know that, if you didn’t know I’d moved.”
His brother is alive. It’s something he should’ve thought about before now, probably, but with the job and the Jess situation and everything else that’s been going on, he hasn’t allowed himself to really question it. All the same, it eases a weight off his shoulders to hear it.
“Yeah, no, it’s been a while since I—it’s been a while.”
He hasn’t looked up either of them since he left, not Bobby or Dean, and not Dad either. He’d thought about it these last few years; enough time had passed that he was no longer angry. He could be generous and forgive his family for the faults of their past. But that was when he’d thought he had plenty of time to decide if he wanted to reach out. Now that Jess has left him, he can’t help but grimace at the idea.
Dean will take one look at Sam’s heartbroken face, and none of his achievements since leaving will mean a thing. He’ll see nothing but vindication for Dad’s crazy bullshit and trivialize the pain of Jess’ betrayal by framing it as “proof” that his attempt at living a civilian life was doomed from the start. It’s the worst possible time for a reconciliation.
“Yeah, I bet,” Bobby grumbles, grumpy and disapproving. “You make sure to call him before you come. He’s got stuff he needs to tell you about, and it ain’t my place to do it for him. But he deserves a heads up, you follow me?”
“Yes, sir. Sure thing, Bobby.”
“Now hang up and pay attention to the road already. I’ll text you the address.”
Bobby ends the call with his customary bluntness, and Sam blinks at the phone before lowering it to his lap.
He doesn’t want to call Dean. It’s a little frustrating that visiting Bobby means he’s going to be forced into the position of defending his decisions yet again.
He tries to remind himself that he doesn’t need to justify anything.
He’d tried hundreds of times to explain why they needed to get out of the life, but Dean never understood. If Sam hadn’t committed all the way to leaving, Dean would’ve been riding him and stalking him incessantly. He didn’t even have the choice to stay available for emergencies—neither of the elder Winchesters had ever been above using guilt-trips as a manipulation tactic. Hell, if Dad gave the order, Dean might have even actively sabotaged Sam’s efforts to get an education and to put down roots with Jess. He wouldn’t put it past them. It was a hard choice to make, but cutting them out completely was the better way. Sam still believes that. There’s not a doubt in his mind.
He fidgets, twirling the phone in his hand with his thumb.
He really doesn’t want to deal with the inevitable long-simmering shit-fit about having run off to Stanford, cutting all contact, ditching his old phone, changing his name—as if the Winchester legacy of petty crime and grave desecration is something he ought to be proud of.
Knowing Dean, he’ll latch on to Sam like a remora all over again, try to bully him into coming back or into apologizing to John. Sam has enough misery on his plate as it is. He doesn’t need more pressure on him when he’s already hurting and vulnerable. Hasn’t he lost enough? Isn’t it enough to lose his marriage without also being expected to toss away his job, his home, his reputation, and possibly his life for every asshole who doesn’t know how to salt their own freakin’ door? Hasn’t he given enough already, sacrificed his entire childhood to the hunt already, without also giving up his entire adulthood, too?
There’s only so long he can prolong the inevitable, though. It’s too bad he couldn’t ever rely on Dean to just be supportive and leave it at that. Dean, and behind him, Dad, have never understood when to stop demanding more and more and more.
Setting his jaw and already bracing himself for what he knows will end in angry shouting, Sam reaches for the phone and, after only a second’s hesitation, dials the number he’s been avoiding all these years.
“Hey-oo, Josh speaking!”
He falters for a second, foot lifting off the gas only momentarily. A single car passes him on the left and disappears slowly into the distance, leaving him alone on the road again.
“Is—Is Dean there?”
“Who?”
“Dean.” Winchester, he wants to add, but longstanding grudge or not, he doesn’t want to screw things up for his brother. Whoever this Josh is, he might know him by an alias instead.
“No Deans here, dude.”
“Whose phone is this?”
“Mine, and I don’t know any Dean, man. I think you got the wrong number.”
“Are you… oh.” It used to be the right number, he knows that, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he might not be the only one who changed his number after their separation.
Somehow, the thought stings.
“Sorry, man.”
“No, it’s fine. Thanks.”
He hangs up and stares at the road ahead of him for another mile, phone held absently in one hand against his chin.
He should call Bobby back for Dean’s new number. Bobby had said Dean was staying with him, hadn’t he? So they must keep in at least semi-regular contact. There’s no reason he couldn’t just call Bobby again and ask for it right now.
But Bobby had sounded unimpressed with him already. Sam doesn’t even want to think about how he’ll sound if Sam admits to not even having a contact method for Dean anymore. It’s a little embarrassing, after all that. It’s going to be hard enough to face the impending argument over his permanent departure from the hunting world without handing over any more ammunition.
No, Sam will just surprise Dean when he gets there, if Bobby hasn’t mentioned it to him by then anyway. After all, what does Dean really need a heads-up for anyway? He’s had eleven years to get over Sam’s taking a stand—what good is another 12 hours going to do him? They’ll have it out when he gets there, Dean’ll shout and sulk and be pissed for a while, and then they’ll be over it. And before that, Sam will have one more night to get it together and plan out exactly how he wants to deal with it.
~
Grand Lake, Colorado, population 500, turns out to be a touristy little hick town in the Rockies, low-budget but rustically pretty. The climate’s subalpine, a refreshingly cool 71 degrees even now in mid-July. Short deciduous trees speckle the slopes within town limits, freshly green with summer foliage, a welcome break from the endless conifers on the hours-long drive up. Snow-capped mountains cut sharp into the blue sky in all directions, providing scenic backdrops to the wide empty straight-aways.
Everything on Main Street is either a lodge or lodge-styled, emphasis on the exposed wood. Western-style facades make the buildings look taller than they really are. A covered wooden boardwalk shades a few scattered window shoppers eyeing hand-carved wooden bear sculptures and over-priced hummingbirds made of glass. Big decorative rocks mark out the boundaries of gravel parking lots, and hand-painted signs advertise cabins, snowmobiles, and canoes for rent. He passes a Lakeview General Store, the Grand Lake Historical Society, and a tiny florist shop called The Stalk Market, before finding himself immediately outside town again on the side opposite from where he came in.
“Damn small town,” he mutters to himself, trying to peer through the forest that comes right up to the road, looking for side streets. By the time he finds one, he realizes he’s gone too far and has to double back into the ‘town’ proper again, slowly trying each one-lane road of unpainted asphalt until he finds a dubious dirt lane with the proper signage.
The address in Bobby’s text leads him to a cheery little house, all clean bare logs behind a gravel driveway and a bed of red geraniums. It’s so disconnected from what he remembers of Bobby that he wonders for a second whether he’s got the wrong address after all, but then he sees the tow truck parked out to the side beneath some poplars and that settles it.
The sound of the house’s front door slamming greets him as he gets out of the car, and a familiar figure approaches in a trucker hat.
“Hey, Bobby.” Sam smiles nervously.
“Sam.” Bobby’s gruff, muted nod is the same as ever, though the gray in his beard betrays the decade Sam’s missed. They hug, an awkward one-armed pat on the back. Somehow it isn’t quite the homecoming Sam had hoped.
“So this is an unexpected reunion. What spurred this little drop in?” Bobby asks after pulling back to a predictable manful distance.
“I, uh, I’ve been thinking about the past. Changes, you know. Life stuff.” He itches to tell Bobby about Jess. He wants to spill everything in big painful heap, lay out all of his hopes and efforts, all the work he put into their lives together and the heartbreak he got in return, but he can’t do it out here on the front lawn, in full view of the neighbors and street. It’s still too raw.
“Changes, huh?”
“Yeah. But what about you, in Colorado now? I never thought you’d leave that old place!” He forces a smile. He wishes Bobby had told him before selling it, but it’s not like he’d left any contact info, so he can’t exactly say as much.
“Well, your brother settled here first. I just followed him, seeing as I don’t got much family left outside of you two. Speakin’ of which,” Bobby looks at him askance, “you wanna explain the decade of radio silence? Dean and I both tried calling you after you left only to find out your number’d been changed.”
“I’m sorry, Bobby. I just… there was Dad, y’know? And Dean was just repeating his crap like it was gospel. I needed some time.”
“Eleven years is a hell of a long time, Sam.” Bobby’s disappointment is palpable. Sam shifts restlessly under the weight of it, abruptly annoyed at the implication. He came here for support in his moment of greatest vulnerability, not to be dragged over the coals yet again for never being good enough.
“Well, not all of us can be so blasé about living off stolen credit cards and con jobs,” he says testily. “Some of us actually need to work for an honest living. It’s not like I had a lot of free time.”
He realizes a moment too late that Bobby looks pissed.
“Oh, well, sorry to get in the way of your big important life, Sam! Maybe you’d better get on back to it, if it’s so damn busy you can’t even pick up a phone in eleven years!”
His heart sinks into his stomach. He has nowhere else to go, and no one left to turn to, totally alone in the world if Bobby throws him out now, before he’s even stepped foot in the house.
“Bobby, no, I’m sorry. God. I’m so sorry. I just—” He clenches his jaw, eyes burning for a second, and deflates. He has to say it. “I’m a little sensitive right now, that’s all. I just—I just signed divorce papers last week. My wife left me. Said I wasn’t ‘emotionally available,’ and now…”
It’s a simplification of a whole lot of lengthy complaints she made in the months leading up to her actually leaving him, but he can’t go into it. He still doesn’t even understand it. Or maybe he’s afraid to understand it. There’s always that.
Bobby, still rankled but expression softening a bit, assesses the misery in Sam’s eyes for a good minute and a half before finally settling into a sigh, hands in his pockets.
“Condolences.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
They stand outside in the mild summer sun, cool breeze coming down off the surrounding snowy caps, quiet and separated from the civilized world beyond the mountain ranges.
Bobby finally breaks the silence.
“Well, let’s get you inside. You can stow your stuff in my spare room. Get some coffee in you.”
Sam feels like he can breathe again. He looks up with a weak smile. “Booze?”
“Got that, too. C’mon.”
~
Normal families fall out of contact all the time. Look at Sam’s coworkers; most of them see their parents maybe once every three years, and god knows if they ever even think about their siblings. It’s normal. It’s fine. The expectations the Winchester family grew up with, Dean’s obsessive need to always be checking on Sam’s safety every day—those were weird and fucked up. Keeping space and distance between family members is normal, and while Sam’s choice to go no-contact might have been hard on all of them, it was a necessary part of setting normal, healthy boundaries.
He just wishes Bobby would cool off enough to see it that way.
“So. Divorced,” Bobby says too nonchalantly over beers at the kitchen table. “S’posed to be you get married before that’s a thing.”
He’s not looking at Sam, instead feigning interest in the bent tab on his open can, but Sam isn’t fooled. He surrenders with a bow of his head.
“Yeah. Six years back.”
“You didn’t call Dean, at the least?”
“It was an elopement.” Sam picks at a scratch on the table and tries to huff a laugh, avoiding eye contact. “Not like there was anything for him to do. Stand next to me, or whatever.”
Bobby takes a long drink. “He tried calling you when he got hitched. Spent days trying to figure out whether you’d changed your name. Looking for forwarding addresses, phone numbers, email, workplace or anything. Wouldn’t shut up about it for over a week.”
Sam leaps at the chance for a topic change.
“Dean’s married?”
Bobby’s eyes narrow, fixed on him directly now. “You better not be telling me you didn’t talk to him when you—”
The sound of the front door slamming open interrupts them. A voice breaks through from the living room, clear as day, and ground-shaking in its familiarity.
“Bobby! You shoulda been there today, Garth was changing the oil on this old Chevy when this squirrel comes flying out—”
Dean turns the corner into the kitchen, posture confident and relaxed, only to freeze up when he sees Sam and stops in shock.
He looks different, but really good—filled out, for sure, all healthy muscle and genuine comfort in his own skin instead of the bluffing swagger that used to characterize him in his early twenties. His expression is both guarded and alarmed, eyes wide, but Sam didn’t miss the smile on his face for the split second before he’d registered Bobby’s visitor.
Bobby sighs. Sam had almost forgotten he was there.
“You didn’t call him.”
“Sam.” Dean almost looks afraid.
Sam slowly gets up from the chair, wiping his palms on his jeans. “Hey, Dean.” He reaches out to invite a hug. Dean doesn’t react, which hurts, and Sam’s about to lower his arms, shame-faced, until Bobby breaks in with his usual bluntness.
“Sam got divorced and is here to lick his wounds.”
Like magic, Dean’s expression melts into sympathy and he steps forward into Sam’s shaking open arms.
“Aw, hell. Sorry to hear that, dude.”
It’s a cursory hug, not the back-pounding, clinging thing Sam had somehow expected, but it’s a relief all the same. He feels his eyes prick.
This is all he’s been waiting for.
~
They sit on the steps in Bobby’s backyard, watching the chipmunks dig through scattered piles of pine cones in the cool late afternoon sun. It’s got to be around 5:00pm or so, and Bobby’s gone inside to take a shower and clear out the spare room for Sam.
Sam rolls his bottle of El Sol between his palms, wiping the condensation around his fingers in the cool air of the mountains. It’s not a drink he particularly enjoys, but they ran out of cans of Bud an hour ago.
“Six years of marriage,” he says, glad that Dean keeps his eyes on the vermin and not him. It’s hard enough to talk about this as it is. “I come home to find her closet cleared out, books gone, movies, her grandma’s antique dishes—nothing left but a note on the table saying she’s at her parents’ place and ‘don’t call me, I’ll call you.’ And even then, it wasn’t her calling; it was her lawyer.”
“Harsh.”
“He showed up at my office and personally served me with divorce papers. Like I would’ve refused to sign for receipt if she’d just mailed them.”
“Out of nowhere like that, huh?”
“No. No, it’s been—” Sam holds the damp bottle up between his eyes, trying to force his brow to relax. It’s already been days of tension headaches, and he’s just so tired. “—it’s been a mess for a while. She’s been unhappy. She’s always unhappy. I thought it was just hormones, PMS or something. I just—I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“That sucks, man.”
“I know.” He takes a swig, washes it over his teeth before swallowing. The El Sol reminds him of staying at Bobby’s in his teens and drinking with Dean in hotels. They’d been underage, of course, but it’s not like anyone was around to give a damn.
“Let’s talk about you instead. You got married, too? How’s that working out for you?”
“Oh, good, good…”
“Just good?” Sam asks dryly.
“Well,” Dean ducks his head and grins. It’s surreal, a shy kind of blushing smile Sam would swear he’s never seen on his brother before. “Okay. Awesome. I, uh, I got it pretty good here. House on the lake, decent mortgage, got our own pier for fishing off of. Steady job, and Cas—Cas is great. Really great. Saved my life, if you get right down to it.”
Sam huffs an incredulous laugh. “Man, that is a shock. I didn’t think you’d ever settle down.”
“I wasn’t planning to. I spent, what? Five, maybe six years on the move after you left. Dunno if I wouldn’t have kept going, if it weren’t for… Well, Cas kinda opened my eyes to some stuff. Other options. Better ones.”
“You sound happy.”
“I am.” A soft glow of genuine warmth and happiness suffuses his face. Sam watches it with own smile at first, but feels increasingly bitter and twisted inside, like maybe he’s going to be sick. He looks away.
“She must be really something. Can’t say I ever pictured you in a real relationship, what with the never-ending strings of one-night stands.” He drinks to shut himself up before his mouth can add anything he doesn’t really mean.
Dean looks down at his hands for a bit, fidgety. Sam starts to feel bad, like maybe his tone hadn’t been as light as he’d meant it to be, but he firmly reminds himself he hasn’t said anything that isn’t true.
“Um. Listen, Cas—Cas isn’t a she.”
Sam keeps looking at him, blank and uncomprehending at first. Dean glances at him out of the corner of his eye, shoulders tight, and abruptly he realizes Dean’s checking his reaction. The words finally register and he figures it out far later than he would’ve if he’d been talking to literally anyone but Dean.
“Dude. You married a guy?”
“Yeah.” Dean’s jaw is tense as he waits for a response. He’ll be waiting a while, Sam thinks in some bemusement, because Sam doesn’t really have any thoughts at all about that. It had literally never occurred to him as a possibility.
“You—oh, you’re…” Then it hits him. He narrows his eyes and starts to grin. “Oh. Wait, you’re pranking me, aren’t you? Is this to get back at me for the radio silence?”
“Dude. No.”
“So you’re really telling me—”
“Yeah. I’m into guys. Too. Or, or I have been. Since always.” He swallows. “I mean, it’s only Cas, now, so, I guess, ‘guy,’ singular—”
Sam stares at him longer, waiting for the ‘gotcha’ to come, but the longer he waits, the more uncomfortable Dean looks, so eventually he gives in.
“Ok. Well, I can’t say I saw it coming, but congratulations. I’m happy for you.” He tries to mean it. The words taste bitter on his tongue with his own marriage lying in shambles in front of him, but he’s careful not to let it color his tone. He’s a senior civil litigator at the biggest law firm in L.A. He’s used to perfectly disguised performative congratulations covering bitter jealousy. This isn’t difficult. This is just another Monday.
Dean, clearly having lost all ability to sense disingenuousness out here in the sticks, looks at him with hope in his shining eyes. “Yeah? You are?”
“’Course.” He knows he should be, anyway, which is close enough. “Tell me about him.”
And with that, Dean turns into a complete stranger before his eyes, all soft smiles and red ears. He starts to describe this weird-ass gay man who’s somehow not run screaming from the fucked-up mess that is a Winchester life. He’s a doctor with a local family practice, grouchy, loyal, full of conviction, and protective of Dean’s health. He has a strange little sense of humor that’s hard to recognize, and is prone to picking fights in defense of the weak. He’s a few years older than Dean, but not nearly so well-versed in what is ‘cool.’ He jogs regularly on the trails around here, which does fantastic things for his calves and ass, something that makes Dean leer and look a bit more like he used to, but which Sam didn’t really need to know.
Dean’s so damn happy, and it only makes Sam feel worse.
He’s been married almost the same amount of time Sam has, and yet everything in his life seems to be going perfectly. How the hell did domestic bliss just fall into Dean’s lap, of all people?
As young adults, Dean used to repeatedly tell him there was no point in pursuing a slow romance because it wasn’t going to last anyway. He’d insisted on teaching Sam how to pick out the easy lays, steered him away from forming deep friendships, and burned bridges with others at the drop of a hat.
When Dad called and demanded lamb’s blood in the middle of the school day, Dean had pulled Sam out of midterms for a ‘family emergency’ that had never gotten excused.
While Sam worked his ass off to get back into debate club after being jerked from one school to another, Dean dropped out of high school and focused on his skills in petty crime.
While Sam desperately styled his hair and clothing as normally as he could in the mirrors at secondhand stores, lonely as hell and hoping against all odds that someone at school would invite him to hang out, Dean would swagger around in Dad’s too-big leather jacket, openly wearing satanic-looking charms and insulting anybody who drove a mini-van. Dean never cared about the apple pie life. Dean never even tried.
It’s not fair.
It’s not fair that after Sam’s years and years of effort, Dean’s the one who gets life handed to him on a silver platter just by lucky accident.
Beside him, Dean sits looking out over the sunny yard, happy and oblivious to his own unearned good fortune.
“But what about you, man? I mean, I know, the divorce. But what else do you have going on? What have I missed? Last I checked, you’d graduated from Stanford.”
Insides tight but knowing he has no call to get angry, Sam tries on the modest smile he uses when talking to witnesses and Jess’ relatives. “Oh, well, I got my J.D., started work in a large firm doing civil litigation. Got promoted quickly. I’m a senior litigator now. Eligible for partnership starting next year. Bought a nice suburban two-story in Sierra Madre.” Dean’s earlier comment catches up to him and he frowns. “Wait a minute, you knew about my graduation? I changed my name.”
“Yeah, I figured that’s what you’d done.” Dean’s gaze drops and he huffs a quiet laugh. “Checked the online graduation program every year just in case, but no Winchesters. It was only luck that I saw your picture in one of the group photographs. Still couldn’t get a name to match though.”
“You could’ve come. If I’d seen you…” Maybe. Sam had still been pretty defensive of his independence at that point. But he likes to imagine he would’ve been magnanimous on such a milestone, despite deciding not to send any invites.
Dean’s smile fades. “I tried calling. You’d changed your number, changed your name. Thought that was a pretty clear sign.” He fidgets with his beer label for a while, avoiding eye contact. “I tried hard to find you when I got married, though. Went all through the public records, all through the university site, cold-called every law firm in Palo Alto, San Jose, San Francisco…”
“I work in L.A. now.”
“Yeah. Shoulda thought to check there.”
They sit in awkward silence for a minute. Sam almost feels guilty, which is ridiculous—it isn’t as if he forced Dean to spend all that time looking for him. And if Dean had wanted to stay in contact, maybe he should’ve stood up for Sam against John’s insane, obsessive edicts and Sam might’ve actually phoned him once in a while. Which reminds him.
“I tried calling you, too, but got some guy named Josh. So it looks like I’m not the only one who dropped off the map.” Sam pastes on a smile to cover the hardness he’s feeling underneath. The fact that he only tried this number less than 24 hours ago is irrelevant. Who knows how long it’s been changed.
Dean’s response is surprisingly sober. “Yeah. Had to change my phone a few years ago. Someone was trying to kill me, kept tracking me with it, so...”
“Like, a tech-savvy monster?”
“No, I—someone else. I don’t really hunt anymore, not since Cas.”
Sam blinks in surprise. The idea of Dean not hunting is almost unbelievable. Hell, if he’d known convincing him to quit was even possible, he would’ve been open to rekindling the relationship much earlier. But there’s nothing to be done about that now. It’s water under the bridge. He sits in silence for a moment, unexpectedly thinking over all the time they’ve missed.
The could-have-beens extend the silence between them. It’s too bad that they’ve lost the camaraderie they once shared, even interspersed as it was with anger, fights, and periods of true resentment. He lifts his beer in toast and, in an up-swell of nostalgia, makes an effort to recapture the banter of their youth.
“Well, I’ll toast to that. To you not hunting, to the marriage, and to the job. You were so incompetent at actual human relationships, I can’t say I ever saw it coming, but I guess we both grew up.” Sam laughs teasingly and takes a long drink, gratified to see Dean follow with his own drink a moment later. Dean gives him a thin smile of acknowledgement but doesn’t return the jibe, and they fall into another prolonged silence.
Drinking again just to have something to do with himself, Sam gropes awkwardly for a way out of this conversational dead end. He forces another huff of laughter out into the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon yard.
“Well, anyway, here you are, Dean Winchester, respectable small-town husband and—what’s the job, again?”
“Mechanic. I own the place with Bobby. But, uh, it’s not Winchester.”
Sam latches onto the factoid. “No? You changed it, too?”
“No, I, uh, I took Cas’ name. It’s Novak now.”
“Oh. Mine’s Warner. Seemed easiest to stick with the same initials.”
“Oh.”
They stare out into the yard longer.
Dean’s next question comes tentatively, out of character in his gentleness. “Did she, uh, did your wife—”
“Jess. No, she kept her name.”
“No kids…?”
A real laugh escapes Sam’s throat to his surprise. It hadn’t even occurred to him, but that would’ve been the only thing that could have made this clusterfuck worse. “No, no. Fortunately. We, uh, we didn’t have the time. I’m still building my career, and. Well. Y’know.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Jess had wanted them, at first, until he’d explained to her how he never wanted to be like his father, having kids just to dump them off alone or on somebody else while he was busy with work. She didn’t know the half of it, still blissfully unaware even now that John Winchester wasn’t actually a traveling salesman with a drinking problem, but rather a traveling revenge-obsessed occult-wielding monster hunter with a drinking problem.
Sam shakes it off, forces a smile back on his face and pops open another beer. “So. Should we stay in tonight, or go out?”
Dean scratches his ear, plainly uncomfortable. “Oh, I can’t tonight. Cas and me are… well, we’ve got plans.”
“I can tag along.”
“They’re, um, dinner plans. At a charitable donor’s house in Granby. It’s a sort of an invitee-only thing for the med people.” He laughs in embarrassment, half-turned away. “I swear, I didn’t think when I married a doctor I’d be getting into all this dinner party and white tablecloths kind of thing, but here we are. Gotta wear a suit and everything.”
Dean turns back to him, eyes glittering with happiness. They search Sam’s own, before dimming to something more like sympathy. Or maybe pity. Sam hates it.
“But, uh, y’know what, they’ll forgive me if I bail this once. Cas can handle the charity update on his own. I mean, it’s not every day my long-lost little brother finds his way back to the family, eh? You need me right now.”
“I don’t need you,” Sam says a little too sharply.
Dean doesn’t look convinced. “You came all the way out here, man. Pretty sure it wasn’t for the mountain air.”
“No, I mean, okay, yeah, I want to hang out, which is why I called Bobby,” he emphasizes as a reminder that Dean wasn’t the center of this visit to begin with. “But I’m 30 years old, and I’ve been handling my own shit nearly half my life. I can’t just show up out of nowhere after eleven years of silence, no warning, and just expect you to drop everything in your life at a moment’s notice. I can wait ‘til tomorrow.”
“You sure?” Dean starts to get up. No, Sam mutters inside his head, but gives a firm nod anyway.
“Yeah. Absolutely.”
Dean still hesitates. Abruptly, Sam feels annoyed.
“I’ve got Bobby, Dean. I’ve got another case of beer in the kitchen to drown my sorrows in, and a spare room to crash in. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay.” Dean purses his lips and claps Sam on the back, then after yet another one of those pauses that shouldn’t be there, leans in to give him a quick rough hug and then leaves.
Sam listens to the Impala start up and then rumble away. He waits, feeling inexplicably betrayed. Despite what he’d said, on some level he hadn’t really believed Dean would leave him.