Adaptation
i.
The first week, Dean told himself
that he was glad.
No Sam meant no coming back to the
hotel room after an evening spent staking out a graveyard, or an
abandoned mill, or maybe having a few drinks at a local bar, only to
find Sam and his dad fighting again.
No Sam meant no more Sam and Dad
being at each other's throats all the time. No more yelling, no more
words that couldn't be taken back being said. No more Dean wondering
when the end, the final straw would come.
No Sam meant that he didn't have to
wonder anymore.
Besides, if Sam wanted to tell the
two of them, Dean and their dad, to go fuck themselves—which, as Dean
saw it, was pretty much what he'd done—it meant Dean could think things
like, Fuck you, Sammy. Fuck you too.
ii.
The second week, he made a list of
reasons that Sam being gone was a good thing:
1) He didn't have to listen to Sammy
bitch about his music choices any longer. If Dean wanted to listen
to—what had Sam taken to calling it in the weeks before he'd left?—the
greatest hits of mullet rock on repeat, then Dean would damn well
listen to them on repeat.
2) He could go farther than 100
miles (or two hours, whichever came first) without Sam starting in on
their dad. (See also: the gladness of last week.) He sure as hell
didn't miss that.
3) He could spend as much time out
on the open road as he wanted to, and didn't have to listen to any more
conversations where Sam asked them to settle down, no matter how many
times Dean and their dad told him that this life just wasn't about
settling. That he needed to accept that *now*, what with it being the
family business and all.
4) He didn't have to feel guilty any
longer, watching Sammy watch yet another town disappear in the rearview
mirror, his face set in hard, unhappy lines.
5) When they were out hunting, he
didn't have to keep track of Sam anymore. He didn't have to spend that
extra second making sure Sam was safe, or out of the way. He could just
go in there and do his job. Even if most of the time, he still found
himself taking that extra second to look, to just make sure. Then
another second to remember why it was okay that he couldn't see Sam
anywhere. That, he was sure, would fade.
iii.
The third week, he woke up from a
dream involving Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson and a jar of cherries,
rolled over on his bed, and got as far as saying, "Hey, Sammy. You'll
never guess the dream I just had—" before he realized the person in the
other bed was his dad, not Sam.
iv.
The fourth week, Dean made another
list: things he hadn't been expecting after Sam left.
1) That he'd start making lists of
things to tell Sam the next time they talked. Stupid shit, like the
comb-over that hotel clerk two towns back had been sporting, or the
legs on one of the Walmart checkout girls, and how she'd written her
number on his receipt when he'd swiped Burt Carter's card.
2) That earlier that week, no matter
how many times he'd told himself he wouldn't—that Sam would have to be
the one to crack first—he'd gotten nine digits into dialing Sam's dorm
room at Stanford before he'd hung up the phone.
3) That Dad would still have that
haunted, impatient look in his eye. The look that said he needed to be
on the road right the fuck now, despite the fact that Dean was with
him, and Dean was always ready to go.
v.
The fifth week, Dean dreamed of one
of Dad and Sam's fights, and realized that those were more
words—shouted, growled, imagined—than he'd heard his dad speak in one
go since Sam had hopped the bus out to California.
vi.
It was habit now, reading as many
local papers as they could get their hands on, and during the sixth
week, Dean saw something in the Oak
Hill Clarion that was probably worth checking out. Kid drowned
in a lake, the survivors claiming to see a light hovering over the
water.
When he mentioned it to his dad,
though, his dad just rubbed his fingers over his beard, looked out the
window of the diner, seeing things, thinking things, knowing things
that Dean couldn't.
He was almost braced for it when Dad
said, "You know, Dean, you know what you're doing. You could head on
out that way yourself. Check it out. We could meet up again in a few
weeks, because I have—" He said more, Dean knew he did, but he didn't
hear it. He heard, 'yourself', and 'few weeks', and he thought he
should be feeling proud, that Dad trusted him like that.
Instead he just swallowed, said,
"Yeah. Okay. Yeah."
vii.
The seventh (or maybe first) week,
Dean told himself he was glad. Just him and his car out on the road. No
one to bitch about the music, no one he needed to look out for.
Yeah, he was glad.
-back-
-email-