run devil run, for zara_zee

[summergen-mod.livejournal.com]

Title: run devil run
Recipient: zara_zee
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Word Count: ~1,200
Author's Notes: I tried to incorporate a little of each of my prompts!
Summary: Dean runs. Sam follows.

I.


Sam remembers running. He remembers waking up in the darkness with Dean’s hands clamped tight on his shoulder and over his mouth, remembers Dean packing them up in the middle of the night, sneaking through hotel hallways and out the exits. He remembers being pulled by the collar of his coat out into the dark streets, the sound of his tennis shoes hitting the pavement with every stride.


He’d begged Dean for these shoes, once: Sneakers with glow-in-the-dark laces, with blue and red lights that flashed with every step. Sam had pictured his feet, picked out in those bright neon lights, illuminating the ground before him. Like the red and blue candles on his birthday cakes, like miniature fireworks. Like Christmas lights. He’d begged for months, he’d hoped all the way up until his birthday that Dean would find a way: Dean always had before.


Those shoes aren’t safe, Dean had told him finally, and when Sam had looked back on that tucked-away memory years later, he’d been amazed at how natural it seemed, how easily he’d accepted that glow-in-the dark shoes could be lethal, could be dangerous. Could get him killed, chest split open, guts falling out.


Two a.m. in his dorm room bunk, with his legs hanging restlessly off the edges off the twin-sized mattress, he laid awake and wondering, How could a pair of kids’ shoes be unsafe? How could a pair of shoes made out of rubber and nylon be dangerous? And how it had it seemed so normal at the time?


“Monsters’ll see you,” Dean had said. “All lit up. Like a beacon,” and Sam had stayed awake all night, he had imagined hiding in a dumpster, waiting for Dean, seeing fangs and phantoms lurking around the corner.


“I’ll be back,” Dean would say, and Sam would believe him. “I’ll circle around and lose him.”


He had pictured those shoes, red and blue streaks of light shining through the dark, he had been thinking of getting caught, of monsters gulping down his arms and legs and chomping down on his bones and only leaving behind those shoes, those empty shoes with the broken laces, the only pieces left of Sam for Dean to find..


II.


From the moment he looks and sees smoke and brimstone in his brother’s eyes, he starts working. He makes charms. He makes hex bags, one after another, fills them with dried rosemary and cat bones, with tansy and rue and sea salt. He clips locks of his brother’s hair while he sleeps, he takes the rags once used to wiped away blood from his brother’s face and slips them inside small metal boxes along with teeth and claws and angelica, St. John’s wort and rosaries.


He’ll hide a hexbag under the front seat of his brother’s car, he’ll slip one under each motel mattress after Dean has fallen asleep with the tv still playing reruns of Bonanza and Hawaii 5-O. He slips a saint medallion inside the heel of Dean’s boots, he sneaks rue and ashes in the pockets of Dean’s coat.


He writes spells in his spare time, spells to keep his brother from running, or maybe spells to help himself catch up: he won’t know which until he uses them. He buys a calligraphy pen, writes out words in Latin, Enochian, Sanskrit, draws the sigils he's seen in his heavy parchment and vellum books inside the covers of Dean's copies of Slaughterhouse-5 and Cat's Cradle.


He takes precautions.


He prays. He’s still my brother, he says to the empty spaces above his head. Keep him safe.


III.


He remembers the breaks in between running. There are silent, still moments that crumble under his fingers like dust when he holds them up to the air. He remembers tearing around the edges of motel pools at a mad gallop, remembers jumping in and hiding underneath the water as long as he could hold his breath, waiting for Dean’s voice to float overhead, calling his name.


“Take your shoes off first, you goof,” Dean would say. He’d peel off Sam’s shoes, velcro strip by velcro strip, toss them away from the edge of the pool so that water wouldn’t slosh around under his socks when Sam had to lace them back up again; Dean would tug Sam’s t-shirt over his head.


He remembers running, tearing down the street, a backpack strapped to his shoulders, running with everything he owned hanging off his back, pencils and paper and textbooks, the graphing calculator Dean had spent all his lunch money on. Sometimes even now he’ll be jogging down a busy street and have to stop and bend over, winded, because it still feels like there’s a weight on his shoulders. How did we run so fast with such a load? he wonders sometimes. How did we run so much and never get anywhere?


Sometimes he’d run home from school and head straight to Dean, let Dean deal with the stony-eyed kids that hung around outside in the parking lot long after Sam had slammed their motel door shut. But other times he’d take off, jump off the bleachers and head out back to the wood of thin scrubby pines behind the stadium, he’d let those kids chase him for miles and never run out of breath.


Sometimes he’d plow through the thick of the woods and into the empty ravine, the place that Dean didn’t know that Sam already knew was where he went to smoke pot on the days he skipped school. He’d drop his bag and wait and when the boys came tumbling through the trees he’d be ready.


IV.


He remembers waking up hearing soft cries from Dean’s bed, but when he opened his eyes Dean would still be asleep, the lamp still on, the television screen still flashing. He remembers that year as the year Dean had cried when he thought Sam was sleeping, the year Sam had spent praying for a way to keep him out of hell.


Can we keep doing this? Can we keep running like this forever?, he wondered, and he looked ahead to the next year, the next twenty. We’re running, he thought as the miles passed underneath their feet, we’re running, we’re fast, we’ll outrun them yet, but at night he heard the voices of the hounds echoing in his ears all over again and he knew it was only a matter of time before they'd catch up.


V.


Dean runs.
Sam follows.


He tracks Dean across Nevada, across New Mexico, and when a pair of hunters put Dean in their sights, Sam tracks them too.


He stares down at the bodies, breathing hard. Dean watches him with a glint of light in the dark of his eyes.


“Why’d you do it?” Dean asks harshly. The words fall out of him like broken bits of glass. It strikes Sam then, that Dean is easier to break than he’d ever imagined. Sam has always seen him in a certain light: through the glow of a night light, lit up by the dim green light from the dashboard.


“I’m the kind of thing that I always would have protected you from,” Dean says.


They stare at each other. Sam looks close, but Dean’s eyes are all black now. Doesn’t matter.


”You’re still my brother,” he says anyway. “I’ve got your back,” Sam says. “That’s what I do.”


When he looks again, Dean is gone.


Sam laces his shoes.