apocalypsos | Fic: Rings of Smoke Through the Trees

I was supposed to be writing Wincest, I wrote this. Go figure.

Title: Rings Of Smoke Through The Trees
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13 (for language)
Pairing: None
Spoilers for: Up to "Nightmare"
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, wheeee!
Summary: During their separation, it's the little things that remind Dean and Sam of one another.

*****

Rings of Smoke Through The Trees

*****

How you lose your firm and steady grip on the now is, you're walking down the sidewalk thinking about Jess and homework and a million other important things when you shift to avoid someone coming in the opposite direction and bang the corner of your bookbag off the driver's side mirror of a vintage '67 black Impala.

Go on, you can stop. No one will hold it against you.

No, go ahead. No one in this town even knows who Dean is, right? Other than Jessica, who couldn't pick him out of a lineup, and when you take that figure of speech literally (easy enough to do), that's probably a good thing.

But sure, stop. It's not Dean's car, after all.

And you don't even need to look really hard at it to know it's not the Impala, not Dean's baby. There's two major kinds of love in the world, the kind where you touch something and use it and won't let go of it even as it crumbles to dust in your hands and the kind where the thing you love looks at you from behind layers of glass and plastic, preserved for all eternity if possible. This is that second kind, the kind that makes a wave of pity wash over you every time you see it.

You picture someone wiping this sweetheart down with a diaper and waxing it within an inch of its life and want to throw up. You wonder if that feeling's genetic, some automotive recessive gene or something.

Hell, it's okay. Go on and touch it. You'll know you're in trouble if someone comes running out of the nearby cafe with fists flying and words that bludgeon with their indignation, but they don't. You can't help almost gleefully leaving fingerprints all over the hood, touching the spots where Dean's car has been pockmarked by bullets or dented by bodies slamming into it.

Someone needs to mar the hell out of this thing, you know? Just take it out to a war, give it some scars or a few brutal nightmares or something.

You could do it.

No, really, you could totally do it. You have the rest of the day -- the rest of the weekend, really. Jess has her part-time job tonight, you don't have any tests to study for, nobody's really looking at you. A pick of the lock, a twist of some wires, and you could be halfway to the next county by the time anybody realizes either one of you are gone.

You could go all out, too, if you're so gung-ho to play Dean For a Day or whatever the hell passes for it. Pick up some weapons and a fake ID or two. A bag of salt, a box of matches and a shovel. The greatest hits of AC/DC and the obituaries and a red pen. Drive until you find something big and nasty to kill. Flirt with anything that moves.

Couldn't you just picture it? And see, what would really be the capper on the whole thing is that with your luck, Dean and Dad would suddenly appear out of nowhere and wonder what the hell happened to you. You're standing there with someone else's battered Impala with a simpering damsel in distress on one arm and the severed head of something ugly and scaly dangling from your other hand. It's almost poetic, wouldn't you say? Of course, "I was having a Dean moment" doesn't quite cover that level of embarrassment, does it?

Your fingers practically dig into the paint job before you pull away, admiring the streaks left behind with a smile. You picture it in your mind the way you see Dean's car in your memory, shot to hell or stained with Winchester blood, scarred and beautiful like a vengeful warrior woman. Dean's car has been gored and set on fire and haunted for a entire week on one memorable occasion. When you left, it had just under six hundred thousand miles on it and showed no sign of flinching because of it.

This poor bastard looks like a princess pony in comparison.

But you're still thinking about it, aren't you? Taking it out, getting the damn thing some fucking personality. Driving it to some no-name town with a long list of mysterious deaths and driving it right into the thick of the darkness.

God's honest truth?

You'll still think about it occasionally in a few months, when you're lying on the back seat of Dean's Impala sore from fighting with Jess's burning body on the ceiling above you, phantom image or not. You'll think, This is how it's supposed to be, your hands drifting over neatly repaired tears in the upholstery remembering some of their war stories and making up some of the others. You'll take a deep breath and smell leather and blood and gun oil and that weird lived-in scent the Impala's had for as long as you can remember, and you'll realize with a jolt, Jesus, that's what Dean smells like.

And that's when you'll figure out that you never could have done it. Nope, sorry, not even in your twisted imagination. You would have gotten in that car, you realize, and a mile down the road you would have pulled over and sighed and understood. You could boost a leather jacket from the mall and slice your palm over the dashboard like a cheap and easy sacrifice and douse the entire goddamn thing in Hoppes and it still wouldn't be right.

But hell, you've always been a genius about some things and pretty fucking dense about others, which is why you're touching it again. Didn't notice yourself doing that, did you? Look, you've got your hand on the door. You can't even rip your hand away, can --

Oh, sure, now you can.

You'll be thinking about it later, though. Try and deny it, but you'll be relaxing, going through your history text even though you don't have homework in it, and it won't get out of your head. You'll keep telling yourself you're not thinking about it, too, the same way you'd probably tell yourself you're not going skydiving as you're jumping out of the plane.

Trust me, you'll understand in a while.

When your fingers grip the upholstery as you wince under the onslaught of another vision, when the familiar scent of the Impala is tainted with smoke or sulfur or blood, when you're squirming with nervous energy in the comfortable dip in the passenger's seat as you beg Dean to drive faster, get there faster.

That's when you'll understand. Just you wait and see.

*****

How you lose your firm and steady grip on the now is, you're sitting in this library in Pennsylvania waiting for Dad to find some more information on the ghost you're hunting and you pick up this book from a table to give yourself something to do and the smell of it punches you in the chest like someone nailing you in the sternum with a two-by-four.

Oh, come on. No one is going to think you're insane if you take a hit off the book again. Old book smell is like new car smell, right? Everybody loves it. You're not some sort of freak for doing it, you know.

To be honest, you're more of a freak because you're carrying four knives and a .45 on your body and salt and matches in your knapsack to a fucking library, but that's beside the point.

Really, go ahead. You know you want to.

It's okay if that reminds you of Sam, that strong musty scent that rises from the pages like an ancient perfume. Books are Sam and Sam is books, you think in this childish litany, and you can't argue that statement, as if the kid were built entirely out of binding and spine, paper and ink. You remember some stupid quote you heard once, about a sculptor saying the way he worked was by going up to the stone and knocking off the parts that didn't belong there, and you think, Someone did that once with Sammy. Stacked up a pile of old hardcovers and just started hacking away until they got this tall, gangly geekboy.

Makes more sense than it should, doesn't it? Because that smells reminds you of Sam so damn much you have to resist the urge to turn around to see if he's standing right behind you.

It's all right for you to check, if you want. We both know he won't be there, but it'll bother the hell out of you until you do.

There. Feel better now?

Yeah, didn't think so. If you did, you'd have put down the book, wouldn't be flipping through what was starting to look frighteningly like a botany textbook from the 1950s just to stir the air with that scent.

It's not like Sammy smelled totally like musty books, okay? You get that. But he smelled partly like old books, which reminds you of the way your stomach clenches every time the waitress brings you onion rings or that crappy alternative rock Sam liked somehow makes its way onto the car's radio. Sam is made of parts, dozens of them, tastes and smells and sounds piled up high and hooked together through sheer will. Ain't nobody on the planet you've ever known better than Sammy, and the little bastard still manages to surprise you.

You're still smelling the book, aren't you?

No, no one's stopping you. It's a pretty big book and you're getting this weird nostalgic smile on your face, because you know what you're thinking of right now? You're thinking of a five-year-old sitting in the back seat of the family car, and you peering over the back of the passenger's seat, and all you could see was this huge old spellbook Dad had picked up from a rare book dealer. Above is a mop of unruly dark hair and below are a pair of small grubby sneakers, and the book's being held up by chubby fingers that drum on the cover. If there's a little boy behind it, you can't even tell, because the only sign there might be is the happy humming of something that sounds vaguely like a mangled Beatles song.

The nine-year-old self in your head keeps thinking that the kid's pretty content for someone who doesn't know most if not all of the words in that damn book. The toes of the sneakers move from side to side off the beat as the fingers slip up to turn another page. Someone is laughing in the memory, either you or Dad, or maybe it's at the memory, in which case it's definitely you.

You so want to go find Dad, don't you? Somewhere else in the library, he's up to his ears in researching this goddamn ghost and one too many arguments about what the hell to do about it mean you stomped off to cool down somewhere else.

But now you're seriously thinking about coming up with some bogus excuse, like, "I think the ghost is afraid of flowers, and we can figure out which one using this." And then you can go find Dad and shove the book under his nose and maybe he would get the same jolt of recognition you did.

He wouldn't, though. You'd take bets on that one.

But sure, go ahead and walk towards the part of the library you left him in. Why the hell not? He migrates through libraries and gun stores like he migrates through the goddamn country, but maybe he'll still be there this time.

Gripping that book tight enough there?

You notice you're doing it now, standing in the middle of the computer reference section holding onto the damn book like a shield. If you dropped dead right here, they'd have to pry your fingers apart with a crowbar, you think, and resist the urge to shake it off.

You could take another book, you know, something that's not the Encyclopedia of Singing Houseplants or whatever the hell this thing is. Oh, don't say you're not thinking about it. It's a book, for fuck's sake, and nobody will miss it if you tuck it into your jacket as you and Dad leave. Nobody's going to frantically search for Encyclopedia of Singing Houseplants as if their life depends on it, trailing after the scent like a pack of excited bloodhounds.

You don't honestly think Dad's going to give you shit over something like this, do you?

Jesus.

You find Dad exactly where you left him, a small surprise, hunched over a local history book and making notes on a legal pad with quick strokes of his pen. The scene shifts in brief stark clarity, and like a flicker in the film stock, the man at the table before you grows taller and leaner, a faceless stranger with a mop of dark hair and a pair of sneakers that dance as he hums.

Confused? Oh, you'll get it in a few months.

When Sam's dropping books onto tables and settling in with a familiar ease, when you're fighting over who gets to go through the newspaper's back issues, when he's crossing thresholds in dozens of libraries and tension bleeds away from somewhere inside him like a lanced wound.

That's when you'll understand. Just you wait and see.