electricalgwen | Fic: put it in your pocket (Sam & Dean, PG)

Written in a flurry for the schmoopfest that is

de_nugis's tag "better with you." Because nothing says schmoop like ~1000 words of stargazing. Spoilers through 6.12.

put it in your pocket

Dean finishes his beer and tosses the empty in the general direction of the cooler; there’s a soft thud as it lands in the grass.

“Think there’s still a couple left,” Sam says, making no move.

“Probably.” Dean can’t be bothered to move either. “I’m good.”

He hadn’t planned on stopping. Figured they’d keep on the road all night, make some time and save some room on his one remaining credit card – Sam had cut up the ones he used with the Campbells, just in case, and hasn’t made it back to the drop box he used to apply for new ones, so they’re running a bit thin – but they’re running a sleep debt too. Sam had handed over to Dean half an hour before, maybe even less, and when Dean jolted awake in the wrong lane for the second time he’d taken the next available turnoff. It was a small road, in some disrepair, looked like it led up to a farm on top of the next hill, but it wound through a stand of trees and fifty yards in there was a clearing.

They’re parked there now, shielded from the road and anyone who might look out from the farmhouse. It’s a gorgeous, mild night. The moon’s waning and the stars – the stars are all Dean can see. Night like this, he wasn’t going to waste it.

“Vega,” he says.

The heat of the Impala’s engine is soaking through his jeans, warming his legs, and he’s got one of Sam’s hoodies scrunched up to cushion his head against her windshield. Sam’s stretched out beside him, another reassuring presence and warmth.

“Mm,” Sam says. “Altair.”

Dean’s eyes drift shut. He imagines he can feel the earth moving, spinning and chasing itself so fast in its eternal circle, but when he opens his eyes again the stars are as they were. Any shift is infinitesimal, undetectable.

Signs and portents in the heavens. Apocalypse narrowly, so very narrowly, averted, and the stars remained the same.

“Did you do this?”

Sam’s voice is quiet. Dean almost misses it, between the wind and the crickets and the whoosh of his own pulse in his ears.

“Huh?”

It’s not his most eloquent rejoinder, but he’s damn near asleep. Sam should know better than to ask him questions at times like this.

“When I was… gone.” Sam’s voice is lower still, thready with exhaustion and something else that Dean’s too tired to identify. “Did you ever?”

“See the stars?”

“Watch the stars.” Sam hesitates. “Name them.”

There’s a bubble in Dean’s chest, pressing against his breastbone, threatening to lift him up to the sky or split his ribs for all to see his heart. He’s never been one for words, and this – Sam should know better than to ask him a question like this. Dean can’t say it, can’t explain that he’d left the Impala under a tarp for a year. That he’d given up double cheeseburgers not because Lisa would lecture him on their evils, but because Sam wasn’t there to do it. That even sitting on the back porch after dark with a beer wasn’t worth it, because the ever present ache of loss flared up into a pain so fierce it made it hard to breathe, let alone drink.

Lisa would occasionally suggest a stroll under the stars, on one of the rare nights when Ben was sleeping over at a friend’s house, but that was all about his arm around her and the romance of the idea. She didn’t know the names of the stars. It probably wouldn’t have occurred to her that Dean did. Or that it mattered.

Ben liked bugs and geology, but he wasn’t particularly interested in astronomy. Dean had made sure the kid knew the basics: how to identify the North Star, how to work out compass points if he got lost in the woods. But Ben wasn’t a scrawny ten year old with a book of Greek myths, whose grin lit up the night as he told Dean the story behind each constellation Dean would point to. Dean had known over half of them but pretended he didn’t; Sammy was so delighted to have something to teach his big brother.

He closes his eyes again, listens to the earth move and the constellations pinwheel through their cycle.

“Wasn’t the same,” he says. Sam will know what he means.

Sam sighs, familiar noise in the darkness.

“I didn’t,” he says. “I mean, I don’t think I did. Pretty sure I didn’t. It wouldn’t have been something he… I wouldn’t….”

His shoulder nudges Dean’s. “Yeah,” he says. “Wouldn’t have been the same.”

Dean knows what he means. He pushes back in acknowledgment and they fall silent.

He’s nearly asleep when Sam speaks again.

“When I was falling, it looked like stars.”

It takes a moment for Dean to parse that, and he sits bolt upright on the Impala’s hood, fear sluicing through him. “Sam! How many times I gotta say it?”

“’M not scratching,” Sam says. He’s looking straight up at the heavens, not at Dean. “It’s where my memory stops. The last thing I remember, we were falling into the void, bits of earth spinning around. No perspective. They looked like stars.”

Dean hears Sam swallow. “I remember that, and then it’s all black. I don’t remember… I don’t imagine they have stars. In Hell.”

It’s Dean’s turn to swallow hard, fight for control of his voice.

“No,” he confirms, finally. “No stars.”

Sam reaches up, tugs Dean’s sleeve until he lowers himself back down, lying shoulder to shoulder with Sam again.

“Pleiades.”

Sam gestures. Dean snorts, it’s not like he doesn’t know where the Pleiades are, but he looks where Sam points anyway and there’s a meteor, shooting star burning its way across the sky.

“Make a wish,” Sam whispers.

Dean’s got his brother and his baby, and the stars are all where they should be.

He makes a vague wish that his jeans won’t be soaked through with dew in the morning, and drifts off to sleep. Right where he should be.

Current Mood: rejuvenated
Current Location: ski hill

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