rionaleonhart | I'm Not Very Good At This, Am I?

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I'm Not Very Good At This, Am I?

THIS ENTRY IS NOT GOING TO BE ABOUT INCEST. There has been too much incest in this journal lately.

'TALL TALES': AMAZING. I love it when the writers and actors have clearly had far too much fun with a particular episode. Trickster episodes are the best episodes. (The back-of-DVD blurb was rather amusing, too: Dean and Sam mysteriously start bickering like an old married couple. How sinister! THAT'S - THAT'S NOT INCEST; IT'S JUST A SIMILE.) It sort of makes me want to write an entire fic with Dean in the role of the highly unreliable narrator, but I imagine that would be terribly difficult to keep up for more than three seconds. Also, of course, it would never be able to equal that episode's sheer levels of amazingness.

SPEAKING OF THE AMAZINGNESS OF 'TALL TALES': the two sides of the bar scene on YouTube. SO MUCH JOY. And there are no spoilers! And it's only three minutes long! Meaning that you have very little excuse not to watch it. You like 'two characters tell the same story in different ways' scenes, don't you? Well, you should.

This episode may have made me into a bit of a Sam/Laptop 'shipper. (AND THE LAPTOP IS NOT RELATED TO SAM. I AM STRONG.) Because, you know, their love is true.

HERE IS A QUESTION FOR YOU: if they're both in the Impala, and Dean is driving, and Sam is using his laptop in the passenger seat, is it a foursome? OBVIOUSLY IT IS NOT AN ABSOLUTE FOURSOME, AS NO SAM/DEAN IS INVOLVED. THIS ENTRY IS NOT ABOUT INCEST IN ANY WAY.

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-

In camp, Sam was going through their packs--two packs, like the two bags, the two rooms. It was easy to tell which was his and which was Dean's--and Adam was smaller than either of them, and there was nothing sized to fit him.

"I guess now is the time to start explaining," Adam said.

Sam spun. Adam was approaching from the hill, looking like he knew too much. "You shouldn't exist," Sam said--it wasn't quite right. But something was wrong.

"It was the blood, wasn't it?" Adam asked. "Cleaning each other up. You've probably been doing that since your dad started taking you out with him."

"Dad?" Sam asked. "What dad?"

"It can happen," Adam said. "One specific image, or smell, or sound, with ties far enough back. Reasserts the old memories. You start seeing all the contradictions. And you start to wonder." He circled around the firepit, keeping eye contact like he was approaching a low demon. "Dangerous thing, wondering."

"What are you?" Sam asked, backing away. Adam was routing him toward the forest, but close enough that he couldn't risk a glance behind him.

"I just want to live, Sam." Adam spread his hands. "Don't you? Is that so wrong? Don't I have as much a right as you?"

"You screwed up our memories," Sam said. "Made us believe--"

"We were good, weren't we?" Adam's tone rose. He ducked his head, using tactics Sam could recognize from his own persuasive arsenal. "The three of us? Us friends?"

"Except we weren't ever friends, were we?" Sam asked. The texture of the ground changed under his feet; small twigs snapped where he stepped. He stretched out his hands, lowered his center of gravity. "You made us believe that."

"It's a living," Adam said.

Sam dropped another few inches, letting his fingers skip across the ground until they hit a branch.

Gotcha.

Adam must have seen him grab it because he lunged, reaching out and snarling. Sam swung, snapped the branch across Adam's ribs and then Adam was on him, hands on his face, force-feeding images into his mind except that they weren't just memories any more. These ones hurt.

These ones were about fire and watching his friends burning, watching his hands burning, watching liquid flame crawl up his arms and blacken the skin. There were about Dean tied up and tortured and his father--their father--being ripped apart by unseeable demons, about feeling hate well up inside so hot and so hard that he pointed a gun at his brother and pulled the trigger, about Dean pushing him down and pushing his shirt up and pushing himself over him--

He fell and Adam followed, pulling him in and cradling him. "We could have been friends," Adam said, running his fingers back behind Sam's ears. "But I think the time for that's passed, now."

He couldn't even scream. Didn't have the presence of mind to try--Adam ceased to exist, replaced by a knife in his hands as he cut his girlfriend across the stomach, a swelling bruise as his father hit him across the eyes, Dean's hands closing on his throat and twisting his arm up above his head.

"Remember this?" he asked. "And I was always there for you, and I held you just like this, and I made it better, Sam, me--"

"Not in my version," Dean said, and Adam looked up into his fist.

He let go of Sam, hitting the ground as Dean drew a pistol.

"See, I should've thought of that," Dean said. "I should've thought of that first. I'm a good driver. Got a memory like an elephant. None of what you were telling me made sense, and that's one of the marks of your kind of demon."

"Dean--" Adam began.

Dean pulled something out of one pocket, keeping the pistol leveled at Adam's face. "Newspaper clipping," he said, letting it drift down toward him. "That town, about five miles back. Spate of couples, murdering each other. Remembering fights that never happened. And some just drive off into the woods for no reason and get torn up in the night. So what's your story?" He curled his second hand around the gun again. "Hate couples? Got a grudge against this town? Or is this just for shits and giggles?"

Adam wiped a hand across his mouth. It came away bloody. "You people," he said. "You don't get it."

"Yeah, we don't really need to. Bye, Adam."

"You can't!" Adam yelled, an instant before he fired. "I mean you can't."

"And why the hell not?" Dean snapped.

"Please," Adam said.

"Not a good reason," Dean said.

Adam pushed himself up, expression changing. "You're going to remember me," he said, bloody grin aching across his face. "You won't have a choice. And as long as you remember me I'll exist in some way--"

"Yeah, and what happens if I shoot you in the face?" Dean cocked the gun. "The way I see it--"

He didn't finish the sentence. His eyes darkened, his jaw tightened, and he pulled the trigger instead.

Adam's head snapped back and his entire body flickered, like a convulsion, like a ghost. Dean shot again and Adam screamed--a sort of full-body decompression shriek as whatever composed him dissolved.

"I'll remember you dead," he said, flipping the safety back on and sliding the pistol into the waist of his jeans. "Sammy, you all right?"

Sam answered by rolling over and vomiting into the brush.

"What did he make you see?" he asked, and didn't give him time to answer. "Well, whatever it was, it wasn't real, okay? Come on." He reached out, clapped Sam on the shoulder.

Sam recoiled. It wasn't a reasoned response, it was conditioned--whatever Adam had left in his brain acted up, made him hit Dean's hand away. "Don't touch me."

Dean's jaw tightened. "I'm going to tear down camp," he said. "Start the car. You okay to make it back there on your own?"

Sam swallowed. Acid and bile still coated his mouth, and his heart was still skipping beats. He nodded.

"Right." Dean wasn't convinced, but he wasn't making any special effort to stick around. "Holler if you need anything."

He walked away at a doublestep. Sam rolled onto his back, blinking, staring up through the branches toward the sky.

-

He lay there until the noise from camp faded away, and pulled himself up when he heard the Impala's engine. He picked his way up the hill slowly, on legs that felt steadier than they should have been. Any moment, he was sure, he was going to collapse into a shuddering heap.

They drove to the cheapest, nearest motel they could find, where Sam only managed to convince Dean not to get two rooms by reminding him how unwise it was to split up. On the way, Dean turned the radio up so loud that it was impossible to hear the lyrics, let alone say anything. He kept his eyes glued to the road.

In the room, he picked a bed and dumped his pack out onto it, picking the first thing he could sharpen and going to work on it. Sam listened to the even scrape, scrape, scrape of the knife against the whetstone until he couldn't take it any more. "Dean!"

"What?" Dean asked, not looking up.

"Do you think--" Sam shook his head. "Think maybe we should talk about what happened?"

"What's there to talk about?" The rhythm of the scraping sped up. "Our job, we run these risks. Demons screw with you. Play mind games. It happens."

"What, that's it?" Sam choked. Images were welling up at the back of his mind again, things he didn't believe but couldn't stop seeing. "It's that easy for you? You don't need any sort of--anything? Reassurance? External validation?"

"I didn't say easy, I said it happened," Dean shot back, "and no, I don't, because I know what's happened and what--"

"How?" Sam asked. "He was in our memories, Dean, how--"

"Because I know me," Dean said, "and I know you, and I know--"

He stalled out. Sam raised both eyebrows. "Adam?"

Dean inhaled. Licked his lips. The knife stilled for a moment, before he resumed sharpening. "Look," he blurted, getting the words out as fast as he could, "if you need to talk I'll listen, but if you don't mind, Sam, I'd rather not look at you right now, seeing as how last night I--"

He looked up for a second, eyes white and wide, and went back to his knife.

Sam turned away. One good thing about this place: plumbing meant running water meant glasses of water, and his mouth was getting dryer by the minute.

"Adam manipulated our memories," he said, spitting vitriol through his words. "He made us believe things that weren't real." And if that were true, maybe it hadn't happened at all. Certainly not the way he remembered it. Couldn't have.

"Yeah, well, that doesn't make it any less creepy, okay? If anything--"

"What, it's worse that it wasn't us?" Sam exhaled once, hard. "You get used to demons and their sick senses of humor, and--"

"And I can't get it out of my mind!" Dean yelled back.

A line of ice went down Sam's spine. "You're not still--?"

Dean didn't give him a chance to finish. "No! God, no," he said, and the tempo of blade against stone upped another notch. Sam didn't believe him, and couldn't suppress the stab of fear that went straight to his gut when he realized it.

He could have killed Adam again, for that. He never wanted to feel that way about anyone, especially not Dean. Not his brother.

His fingers raked the bedsheet. "That knife is going to be useless if you oversharpen it."

Without warning, Dean whipped it across the room into the wall. Then he collapsed, hanging his head.

"Things got so screwed up," he said. "I shouldn't have let it go that far wrong."

Sam looked from him to the knife in the wall, trying to return his heart to normal beating patterns. "How were you going to stop it?"

"I don't know. I just should have."

For a moment, the only noise was their breathing.

...which was apparently too much. Dean grabbed the shotgun and the workcloth, disassembling the former. "What did he make you see?" he asked. His voice was oddly flat.

Sam shook his head. "Nothing," he lied, then, when he realized it was obvious as a lie, he said "Jessica."

"You all right?" Dean asked.

Sam gave the only possible answer. "Yeah. Fine."

Neither of them believed it.

Sam rolled over, burying his face in the pillow. Everything still ached.

"Sammy," Dean began.

"Don't." Sam wasn't sure what he was warning Dean off, but he said it anyway. "It's not our fault."

"Yeah," Dean said. "Yeah. I know."

The rhythm of the gun, coming apart and being cleaned out, lasted them on into the night.

-

Sam didn't sleep. After an hour or two of tossing and turning he just gave up, lying still on the bed and staring at the woodgrain pattern on the wall.

A few hours in, just when he was drifting, he heard Dean shift on the other bed and pick his phone from the table between them. It was easy to recognize the series of keys denoting their fathers' autodial, and easier to count the moments it took to ring and ring and cut to voicemail.

Their father's voice was soft and distant, filtering out of the phone speaker. Dean's, when he spoke, was rougher, shaking. "Hey, Dad, it's me. I--"

He stopped. Sam closed his eyes, wondering what he could possibly plan on saying.

Dean apparently didn't know, either. He ground his teeth, moving on the bed and dropping his voice. "Look, I screwed up. Pretty bad this time. Missed something pretty important, and--" He paused. Exhaled. "--Sam got hurt. He's still not telling me most of it. I just, if you get this--" Pause. Shift. "God, I don't even know where to begin. But, your journal. That memory-eater thing. We killed it, but it got us both." Pause. Shift. Exhale. Sam was sure he heard him steady his breath; when he spoke again, his voice was rougher. "Look, Dad, if you get this, call me. Okay? Please."

He hesitated before he hung up, and even then it was another minute before he replaced the phone on the table.

Sam kept quiet. Kept still. It was easy enough to play dead, and Dean wouldn't want to know he was awake, anyway.

It was one of the rules of the job: sometimes, you didn't get rescued. Sometimes, rescues came too late. What their father--theirs, not Dean's, not someone nice and safe and removed--was going to do about any of this, Sam didn't know.

Maybe it was for external validation. Tell us what to believe.

Dean rolled over. Sam could nearly feel him staring at the back of his neck. He wanted to say that everything was fine, would be fine, had been fine, wanted to wrap it all up in that nice, safe denial. Nothing could change now, so why not just push it all away? His throat closed up.

"Sam?"

He closed his eyes tighter. Played dead. Nothing to say, no way to say it.

Dean exhaled. "Yeah," he muttered, rolling over again. "Me too."

Moments passed.

"I'm sorry."

Sam didn't make a sound. Dean grabbed the covers on his own bed, digging in. Trying to last the night.

- end -

"I wouldn't forget me. Honestly I'm a bit offended." Hee!

I absolutely love Dean being all 'Pfft, we may be amnesiac, but I don't see why we shouldn't have sex. THERE CANNOT BE ANYTHING WRONG WITH THIS PLAN.' Oh, Dean.

I find the 'oh, yeah, and Adam disappeared. MOVING ON' far too amusing.

Sam and Dean were tired and cranky enough to split up themselves

DO NOT SPLIT UP. SPLITTING UP IS ALWAYS A BAD IDEA.

I am actually wincing at the fight with the Tailypo. Ouch.

Dean stood up, and yelled "Hey, thanks for leaving us out there to die!" at the woods.

Have I mentioned that you write a very good Dean? And "You? Not being dead?" He flashed a grin in the direction of Sam's left hip. "Fuckin' turn-on, man." is brilliant.

I love "Will you stop touching me?" Dean snarled. ADAM'S WORST ENEMY: A MAN WHO DOES NOT LIKE BEING TOUCHED BY PEOPLE WHO ARE NEITHER FEMALE NOR FAMILY.

Also, Adam is so creepy.

I really, really like using tactics Sam could recognize from his own persuasive arsenal.

"Not in my version," Dean said, and Adam looked up into his fist.

ASKFJHGDGDJGDKH OH MAN I AM FLAILING SO MUCH THEY ARE THE WINCHESTERS AND THEY SAVE EACH OTHER AND I LOVE THEM

"Yeah, we don't really need to. Bye, Adam."
"You can't!" Adam yelled, an instant before he fired. "I mean you can't."
"And why the hell not?" Dean snapped.
"Please," Adam said.
"Not a good reason," Dean said.

Seriously, it's a shame you don't like Dean, because you are amazing at writing him.

Sam recoiled. It wasn't a reasoned response, it was conditioned--whatever Adam had left in his brain acted up, made him hit Dean's hand away. "Don't touch me."

Oh, and this distresses me so much. And, of course, it reminds Dean of what happened, and why do I have this simultaneous adoration and hatred of Winchester-angst?

"Look," he blurted, getting the words out as fast as he could, "if you need to talk I'll listen, but if you don't mind, Sam, I'd rather not look at you right now, seeing as how last night I--"

Oh, hearts. Dean and his guilt is a wonderful thing.

Augh, it is so horrible when there's awkwardness between them!

It was easy to recognize the series of keys denoting their fathers' autodial is a really lovely detail. And oh, oh, boys.

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I'm Not Very Good At This, Am I?

Re: This may be the roughest thing I've written in three months. ...actually, it felt good.

Re: This may be the roughest thing I've written in three months. ...actually, it felt good.

Re: This may be the roughest thing I've written in three months. ...actually, it felt good.

Re: This may be the roughest thing I've written in three months. ...actually, it felt good.

Re: This may be the roughest thing I've written in three months. ...actually, it felt good.