![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apocalypsosTitle: Keep Me Here, Keep Me There
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Word Count: 1,180 words
Written For:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
psych_30, prompt #24 -- Skinner Box
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Spoilers for: "Hell House"
Warnings: Incest, bad language
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, I just like playing with them.
Summary: Walls keep in as many things as they keep out.
*****
Keep Me Here, Keep Me There
*****
When Sam is a kid, he's got four cardboard boxes, the words BOOKS and CLOTHES and TOYS and OTHER TOYS written on the sides of them in big block letters with black marker.
The BOOKS box is always stuffed from top to bottom, a large hard square that Dad lugs to the back of the pickup with every move with the same bogus complaints about it weighing too much and taking up too much space. Dad always threatens to leave it behind and Dean offers to sneak it out of the back at every truck stop between their old home and their new one. Both of them wait until Sam whines to rumple his hair and lay off the teasing, one or both of them always making some sarcastic crack about, "Well, hell, at least it's not video games."
When his collection of paperbacks outgrows the BOOKS box, he leaves the ones he's read the most or loved the most behind at bus stations and roadside diners like he's letting butterflies free.
The CLOTHES box is always the same stuff for far too long, T-shirts marked with neatly mended holes and jeans that started reaching only to his ankles months ago. The growing out of stuff isn't Dad being a bad parent, isn't Dad off somewhere else doing God knows what like the neighbors think. It's just Sam shooting up like a weed injected full of fertilizer, gaining inches like he's gaining kills.
The TOYS box is always half-empty, and it's all board games anyway. Dean stopped playing Trivial Pursuit with him when he was ten and won for the first time, but the chess board comes out with a frightening regularity, considering. Dean takes to chess better than you'd think for a teenager with three guns, a small knife collection, and more scars than an entire battalion of soldiers.
The two of them stare each other down across the chess board all the time, because Sam's the brains but Dean's a natural warrior, and at the end of every game it feels like there really is a war going on.
The OTHER TOYS box is the only one Sam tapes shut when they move from place to place, like it's full of dirty secrets that'll fall off the back of the truck between the old place in San Antonio and the new one in Phoenix. Whenever they get to a new place, he drops it in the corner of his new bedroom like there's nothing important in it, and every time he thinks that maybe the next time he opens it the box will be filled with old homework or stuffed animals or holiday decorations.
It never does, of course, but weirder shit's happened.
Sam sometimes stares at them between moves, stares hard at them and then at Dad and him and Dean, and wonders what the hell Dad would label the box he puts them in.
*****
You trust me and you trust Dean. That's it.
Dad isn't going for mean or paranoid but he's leaning towards it just the same, and when he shouts it at Sam, it comes right after Sam asks why Dad won't let his friends come over like he did in the last town and right before Sam slams the door of his bedroom shut so hard one of the windowpanes cracks.
We live in a fucking box, Sam thinks bitterly, and when he punches the wall, he's pissed as hell when none of his knuckles bust open.
They pack up and leave town within days after the fight, and when Dad carries out the BOOKS box that time, Sam misses the sarcastic cracks and jokes about the weight of it.
Once after Stanford, he and Dean are in this rundown bar in the middle of nowhere, Sam drunk enough to be hazy and Dean drunk enough to be a fucking fog bank, and Dean says something about why Dad had started up that time. About the creature who'd been stalking the shadows back then, something with a taste for young virgins, and how all clues were pointing towards Sam's friend Tommy's parents conjuring the damn thing.
No wonder we left in such a hurry, Sam thinks.
He downs shots like they're filled with water after that, and when Dean lugs him back to the motel, he latches onto Dean's shirt and won't let him walk away.
*****
Dad wants to turn his sons into warriors, and he does a damn fine job of it, doesn't he?
Maybe Sam's overly bitter about the whole thing, but you don't get a chance to buy out of the childhood they had. You can't replace the fact that you can walk into a room and figure out how to take down everyone in it. Can't change the sense memory of a gun in your hand or a knife slicing through the air inches from your face, can't forget what pits of blood splashed on walls or burnt flesh smell like.
If you're Dad and you want fighters, Sam realizes later, you shut your boys off from a normal life and you fill their heads full of stories of knights and soldiers. What knights did in battle is think of God and country and charge into the fray, he tells them once, and the thought of it makes the air choke off in Sam's throat.
This one time not long before Sam leaves for college, he and Dean are home alone watching some cheesy horror movie when some dorky kid takes his girlfriend out into the woods and tells her, "In the old days, warriors had sex before they went into battle," before lowering her to the grass.
Dean laughs at that and makes some sarcastic comment about how Dad never bothered to tell them that one.
Doesn't stop him from using it as an excuse later on, though.
*****
There is a world outside their doors, outside the Impala's familiar interior or the motel room they're staying in, where what they do isn't real. Raised in a box, Sam thinks sometimes, because outside their doors demons and ghosts don't exist anymore than Dean's tongue trailing along the curve of his hipbone does. When Dean's fingers grip his cock it's a myth, and when Dean offers to let Sam fuck him, Sam groans and figures he'll wake up any second now.
But in the world they live in, Dean always says, "In the old days, warriors had sex before they went into battle," like it's a bad joke, and he's chuckling under his breath when he does and casually pretending the word together in that sentence right after "sex" is blissfully silent.
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Word Count: 1,180 words
Written For:
psych_30, prompt #24 -- Skinner Box Pairing: Sam/Dean
Spoilers for: "Hell House"
Warnings: Incest, bad language
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, I just like playing with them.
Summary: Walls keep in as many things as they keep out.
Keep Me Here, Keep Me There
*****
When Sam is a kid, he's got four cardboard boxes, the words BOOKS and CLOTHES and TOYS and OTHER TOYS written on the sides of them in big block letters with black marker.
The BOOKS box is always stuffed from top to bottom, a large hard square that Dad lugs to the back of the pickup with every move with the same bogus complaints about it weighing too much and taking up too much space. Dad always threatens to leave it behind and Dean offers to sneak it out of the back at every truck stop between their old home and their new one. Both of them wait until Sam whines to rumple his hair and lay off the teasing, one or both of them always making some sarcastic crack about, "Well, hell, at least it's not video games."
When his collection of paperbacks outgrows the BOOKS box, he leaves the ones he's read the most or loved the most behind at bus stations and roadside diners like he's letting butterflies free.
The CLOTHES box is always the same stuff for far too long, T-shirts marked with neatly mended holes and jeans that started reaching only to his ankles months ago. The growing out of stuff isn't Dad being a bad parent, isn't Dad off somewhere else doing God knows what like the neighbors think. It's just Sam shooting up like a weed injected full of fertilizer, gaining inches like he's gaining kills.
The TOYS box is always half-empty, and it's all board games anyway. Dean stopped playing Trivial Pursuit with him when he was ten and won for the first time, but the chess board comes out with a frightening regularity, considering. Dean takes to chess better than you'd think for a teenager with three guns, a small knife collection, and more scars than an entire battalion of soldiers.
The two of them stare each other down across the chess board all the time, because Sam's the brains but Dean's a natural warrior, and at the end of every game it feels like there really is a war going on.
The OTHER TOYS box is the only one Sam tapes shut when they move from place to place, like it's full of dirty secrets that'll fall off the back of the truck between the old place in San Antonio and the new one in Phoenix. Whenever they get to a new place, he drops it in the corner of his new bedroom like there's nothing important in it, and every time he thinks that maybe the next time he opens it the box will be filled with old homework or stuffed animals or holiday decorations.
It never does, of course, but weirder shit's happened.
Sam sometimes stares at them between moves, stares hard at them and then at Dad and him and Dean, and wonders what the hell Dad would label the box he puts them in.
You trust me and you trust Dean. That's it.
Dad isn't going for mean or paranoid but he's leaning towards it just the same, and when he shouts it at Sam, it comes right after Sam asks why Dad won't let his friends come over like he did in the last town and right before Sam slams the door of his bedroom shut so hard one of the windowpanes cracks.
We live in a fucking box, Sam thinks bitterly, and when he punches the wall, he's pissed as hell when none of his knuckles bust open.
They pack up and leave town within days after the fight, and when Dad carries out the BOOKS box that time, Sam misses the sarcastic cracks and jokes about the weight of it.
Once after Stanford, he and Dean are in this rundown bar in the middle of nowhere, Sam drunk enough to be hazy and Dean drunk enough to be a fucking fog bank, and Dean says something about why Dad had started up that time. About the creature who'd been stalking the shadows back then, something with a taste for young virgins, and how all clues were pointing towards Sam's friend Tommy's parents conjuring the damn thing.
No wonder we left in such a hurry, Sam thinks.
He downs shots like they're filled with water after that, and when Dean lugs him back to the motel, he latches onto Dean's shirt and won't let him walk away.
Dad wants to turn his sons into warriors, and he does a damn fine job of it, doesn't he?
Maybe Sam's overly bitter about the whole thing, but you don't get a chance to buy out of the childhood they had. You can't replace the fact that you can walk into a room and figure out how to take down everyone in it. Can't change the sense memory of a gun in your hand or a knife slicing through the air inches from your face, can't forget what pits of blood splashed on walls or burnt flesh smell like.
If you're Dad and you want fighters, Sam realizes later, you shut your boys off from a normal life and you fill their heads full of stories of knights and soldiers. What knights did in battle is think of God and country and charge into the fray, he tells them once, and the thought of it makes the air choke off in Sam's throat.
This one time not long before Sam leaves for college, he and Dean are home alone watching some cheesy horror movie when some dorky kid takes his girlfriend out into the woods and tells her, "In the old days, warriors had sex before they went into battle," before lowering her to the grass.
Dean laughs at that and makes some sarcastic comment about how Dad never bothered to tell them that one.
Doesn't stop him from using it as an excuse later on, though.
There is a world outside their doors, outside the Impala's familiar interior or the motel room they're staying in, where what they do isn't real. Raised in a box, Sam thinks sometimes, because outside their doors demons and ghosts don't exist anymore than Dean's tongue trailing along the curve of his hipbone does. When Dean's fingers grip his cock it's a myth, and when Dean offers to let Sam fuck him, Sam groans and figures he'll wake up any second now.
But in the world they live in, Dean always says, "In the old days, warriors had sex before they went into battle," like it's a bad joke, and he's chuckling under his breath when he does and casually pretending the word together in that sentence right after "sex" is blissfully silent.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 06:40 am (UTC)Sam drunk enough to be hazy and Dean drunk enough to be a fucking fog bank
Love it.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 07:39 am (UTC)The two of them stare each other down across the chess board all the time, because Sam's the brains but Dean's a natural warrior, and at the end of every game it feels like there really is a war going on.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 01:35 pm (UTC)Once after Stanford, he and Dean are in this rundown bar in the middle of nowhere, Sam drunk enough to be hazy and Dean drunk enough to be a fucking fog bank, and Dean says something about why Dad had started up that time. About the creature who'd been stalking the shadows back then, something with a taste for young virgins, and how all clues were pointing towards Sam's friend Tommy's parents conjuring the damn thing.
I love this. I think a lot, not all but a lot, of the issues between John and Sam were because of situations like that one.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 08:38 pm (UTC)This was amazing. *looks foward to the others*
no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 11:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 04:35 am (UTC)Great job, thanks! :D
no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 09:12 am (UTC)...because outside their doors demons and ghosts don't exist anymore than Dean's tongue trailing along the curve of his hipbone does...
Absolutely perfect! Thanks for sharing. xx
no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-06 12:50 am (UTC)It's just so deep and all subtle but brilliant. Damn, girl.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-24 02:38 am (UTC)Very nice.