spn_springfling | Letters from a Half-Finished Boy by homo

springflingmod.livejournal.com posting in

Title: Letters from a Half-Finished Boy
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Any warnings: mentions of underage, AU-ish

His little brother was a surly, mutinous, whip-crack smart teenager with a big genius brain and cold steel eyes and he loathed everything about the life they once lived.

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Thirty-nine days gone on their own and it’s the longest it’s ever been yet.

Every now and then, an insistently itchy feeling will creep up on Dean when he looks over at Sam and he thinks, shockingly, that it’s still not long enough. Some needling, covetous part of him is waiting for someone to come along – CPS, the cops, a cute stranger – and snatch Sam up, take him away, and his weaponed hand equally itches to maim. There’s nobody around but them.

Dean starts to like it.

“Hope he stays gone forever,” Sam says, like he’s done uncountably in the years before, though tonight, in the fog and haze of togetherness, he sounds less bile-bitter and more heart-hopeful, and Dean thinks that maybe Sam has started to like it, too.

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It’s Dean’s first laundry shift by himself since becoming, for all ill intents and nefarious purposes, orphans.

Everything is done at night. Pickpocketing, sniffing out edible food, midnight domesticity at the 24-hour Value Laundromat where nobody blinks if you’ve got a black eye or a fat lip or bloodstains on your holey jeans.

Usually, Sammy gets stuck on bitch duty and Dean’ll go charm the pants off someone with a pristine purse or weighty wallet, someone who doesn’t mind shelling out some shiny coin for a few well-earned minutes with a pretty face. And he’ll come back to the train with food for a week and a travel-sized bottle of mouthwash already half gone.

Sam, though, has become overly aware as of late, grousy and snappish, and he never has a good reason for it. But it’s time to switch, he said, I’m fourteen, I’m old enough, Dean, and that was that.

Dean doesn’t tell Sam how or where to find food. Sammy’s shrewd and quick. He won’t have to do what Dean does. He better not do what Dean does. He’s stuffing quarters into the shoot when the thought roils uncomfortably through his belly. For a moment, he goes queasy. Nearly loses his balance. Grapples for the first thing he can reach to catch himself.

Sam’s duffel goes falling. And with it, a notebook Dean’s never paid attention to before.

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He isn’t going to actually look. He’s a shit, but not that big a shit, and he’s still righting himself against a deserted folding station when he zeroes in on a couple of drawings littering the margins. Horned creatures, the anatomy of a switchblade, something that’s probably a lechuza. Things boys Sam’s age know from video games, not life.

Dean’s just found himself thinking, hey, these are pretty good, when he catches his fluttering fingers flipping the page.

06/02/95 it reads at the top, scribble scrawl he knows well, and Dean takes pause, feels a puncture of leeching sorrow. Sammy was just twelve then. Still just a kid. Still fucking is.

He actually thinks he’s got his grubby hands on some sort of composition book from one of Sam’s science courses, or a snooty-tooty honors class, back when they still did societal things like school and daytime and other people. But then he sees something about and from the day I met you, you were the embodiment of everything I thought I wanted to be and he suffocates a creeping snicker, thinking, what the fuck is this – little Sammy’s diary?

Then he keeps on with it and realizes, shit shit shit, but no, you were the embodiment of everything I wanted to have, last word underlined hard, it really is.

And for some head-fucked reason, thinking of Sammy thinking of someone in this way, it unnerves him bad. And he has to keep reading.

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The rest of 1995, however sporadically jotted down, continues in the same concealed cobweb of obscurity and protectiveness, and Sam’s insidious inscriptions never reveal too much. Not nearly enough.

Sick and sweaty and stricken with his own actions, Dean tells his panicked insides that he’s gonna stop. At the bottom of every page, he swears it. He has no right. This is pure, and personal, and downright poetic, and he’s such a betraying fucker because he can’t stop flicking and scouring, gorging on the inner bits of Sammy’s heart all right there on college-ruled lines.

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Dissected a silkworm moth today. Or, I almost did. A bug. Just a bug. Not a person-shaped thing. Worse feeling, somehow.

They have little claws. And an anal horn. We were told they often engage in male-male coupling and after that, I got a hall pass. I couldn’t cut that guy open. Just a stupid fucking bug.

It stops there, then swaps over into pencil, real light lettering. Just the ghost of words.

Insect. Insect. Insect.

And very, very faintly, something rubbed out. But not enough for Dean’s squinty eyes to not see, or think they see, Why is switching the s and the c so terrible? He 80% convinces himself he's going batshit crazy or batsight blind.

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Not every page is nearly as eloquent in nature; the little miscreant.

Some are just fleeting thoughts, stupid questions, a couple of dirty blonde-jokes he probably heard outside of a trucker’s bar somewhere when they were stuck in the car for a few hours with nothing but brother-bickering and rolled down windows.

The illustrations though, take a significantly lewder turn the farther Dean delves. Back curves and outlined body parts, sketched in shadows and hollows and ridiculously private places Dean knows he never thought about when he was goddamn twelve. He was all boobs and butts, not buttholes, Jesus.

His boy's been drawing secret porn for the better chunk of the past couple of years, shrouded in the backseat of the car, under scratchy motel sheets maybe, and Dean's been so utterly unaware.

And with mounting, gnawing dread, he begins to wonder just what the hell else he doesn't know about the one living thing in the world that he thought he'd patchworked together himself.

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what’s Latin for I want to fuck your mouth with my fingers?

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The buzzer zings on an echo when the one washer full of their worldy wardrobes finishes its spin, and Dean doesn’t hardly notice a damn thing until a gnarled old woman snaps a poorly misshapen brown-spotted hand over his head.

“Mildew smell’ll set in quick,” she smiles at him. Dean, dumb and delirious from this new lifeform he’s discovered living at his side day by day, just nods. Doesn’t smile back. He’s seen enough sweet old ladies bend into black magic ways to know better than to get too close, even faintly.

He wrestles tees and pullovers and Sam's jizz-crusted boxers or whatever into a dryer and goes right back to his sordid fuckin' saga, one eye on the old coot, both hands on his unholy treasure.

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When paper-Sam's crossed over to thirteen, Dean figures he must be having chest palpitations. He has to be. His brittle body is doing this constricting thing up top, throb-throb-clench, and then a searing, sinking pain. Crushing breath. Because somewhere along the way when Dean was too busy making sawed-offs and gutting ghouls, his beautiful little brother went and fell in love.

And that's more than Dean, whose whole world orbits around the beat of this kid's heart, is equipped, or ready, to handle. Oddly, devastatingly, it feels like his own is splintering right down the middle. Fragments of hair-ruffling and potato chip fingers and long weekends spent stuffed in shitty rooms blurring his vision. He hadn't, fuck. He hadn't even known Sam was connecting with anyone on that level yet.

Whoever they were, they're long gone now, and Dean, with no small amount of petty selfishness, is partly thankful they've never stuck around anywhere long enough to form real ties.

He finds a folded-over flap, a little pocket of secrecy, and inside it reads, “I don’t want anybody else to touch you. I’m silly. I get furious if they touch you.” – Ernest Hemingway, and Dean almost has to go sick up in a nondescript bathroom in a funky laundromat with a maybe-witch listening in.

With bone-sucking clarity, seeing some scope of his own dream-dark perversities written out, he understands right off that he, too, has felt the same way about someone. For years. Forever?

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By fourteen, Sam’s idlings have grown pronouns, and Dean definitely – definitely – comes close to spitting up his heart.

Wants to leave ligature marks on a bodiless stranger he'll never meet whose dick Sammy is apparently so hot for.

He is beautiful, and frightening, and all of my body wants all of his. Another specific something grated out, a tiny tear marring the page in the insistence of erasure, I wonder how the clench of his jaw would feel against the small of my back. Smaller, off to the side, I hate me for wanting this with him.

I CAN'T STOP

Dean can’t either. The dryer beeped an hour ago. He’s alone in the joint now. He brings his dirt-caked boots up and digs heels into the edge of his seat, balances the book on his knees, wipes his ocean-salty eyes, and reads.

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Mrs. Matsuda gave us a list of books to choose from for our end of the year essay. If I'm even here for it, Sam wrote, some time in January looks like, and Dean remembers that teacher of his. Great rack. I'm reading The Cement Garden. Nobody else picked it from the stack on the cart. I was the only one who would even touch it.

A question mark underneath.

And then, below, in a different color, like a review,

Relatable, but not feasible. Accurate sense of longing. In parentheses, (Would recommend reading, would not recommend experiencing) followed by a strongly worded chunk of text. Which only makes Dean hanker for a library, stat. He has no idea what makes this 'woebegone, violently destructive love story' warrant such a lit-up reaction from an otherwise outwardly quiet boy.

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Two months ago, it says:

He sits in a whore sprawl all the time, like he knows, like he’s goading. I don’t always look, but sometimes I think I’ll die if I don’t. Keeled over at fourteen – death by cock-gazing, right. Torch me up, leave nothing behind. I think even the ash of me would want to float in his breath. Just to get in him.

And in a swirling circle of dizzy free-flow neat cursive that Dean has to keep turning in his hands like a lunatic to read, What if I asked him in a whisper, when he's like that in his rat-bitten sorry underwear, what if I said, 'Yank the leg of it up, pull it to one side'? What if I said to him, 'Let me see it. Just let me have one look. Will you let me?'

I wonder at the idea of bending him in half. Toss his crap-ass sprinkled donut out the 3rd floor window and pound him just like that, all surprised and stupid and muttering Sammy like he doesn’t know he does in his sleep.

I could probably reach now. I’m getting taller.

And Dean stops fidgeting, goes scarily stiff, ragged wheeze, and thinks, wait.

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Pay-per-view channel. Nightfall. One snoring fucker. Every now and then I like to whisper that not-bug word in the quiet. To see if he flinches in his sleep. Incest. Kinda like Christo, but not for demons. For depravity.

He hasn't yet.

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Riffling through the remaining pages quick as a papercut, Dean scans the newest doodle 'n dance, couldn't have been more than a week ago, and he sees words like swine and broken-bodied and no over and over. Sees clusters that say slut for everyone but me and comes home smelling like dirty snatch and spunk and most damning of all, and I would still fuck him filthy.

I love him more than dirt loves death.

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Dean’s old enough, more than, and wise enough, to get a job. Good paying, legitimate work with 8-4 shifts and weekends off. No cards or darts or games of pool, no alleys or stalls or genitals in his mouth. He could. He should. Only reason he hasn’t is ‘cause of Sammy. It’s always because of Sammy.

They live in an abandoned train in the backwater bayou world they were dumped in, they take baths at the homeless shelter on Tuesdays and Fridays. They live on the outskirts of civilization and their manners aren’t what they once were. But they’re alone and they’re all they’ve got and Sam seems part-animal on the few times Dean’s brought it up.

Maybe, Dean would start, and Sam would snarl, flip the hood up over his head, tug the drawstring in tight. So he's stopped.

But tonight, he might try again.

He gets to their boxcar, decorated with rust and graffiti and festering nature, and he hops up and in, sees a bag of probably tepid gas station taquitos and a six-pack of store brand ginger ale next to it. Sam's sitting on his ass, blinking in the Louisiana thicket, nightmarish and ghostlike and the only boy Dean would burn a thousand houses down for.

Dean shoulders off the duffel, drags the book out from under his Zep shirt. Sam's eyes go fly-like, wide and scared, and before he can sprout to a running crouch and flee, Dean says, "Say it. Out loud."

Sam's face glows vivid red even in the dark, and Dean sits down beside him and swears on all nine of his lives, "I won't flinch."

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His little brother is a smutty, murderous, gun-savvy stunner with a big beautiful dick and warm hugging arms and in bed at night, he likes to tell Dean bloodcurdling stories in his ear, and no, Dad is never coming back again.