I write fics to make my brain less squishy

You see the way they care for each other. The way Sam plays into his role as little brother, rebels against Dean in a way that is so soft, so sweet, even though you can see he wants to push him further. The way Dean takes care of Sam, looks after him. Puts a jacket on him when the leaves start falling. Makes sure he always brings his books if Bobby takes you anywhere, but not to read them while he’s in the car, or he’ll get nauseous. Despite how young you are, it moves you deeply. This little boy taking care of another little boy. 

Their closeness makes your own loneliness feel almost violent. Some of the kids in school start being less understanding about your mother’s strict regime. You feel different, and it’s not nice, it’s painful. But looking at Sam and Dean, you’re pretty sure they’re different too. It’s just that, on them, it has something mesmerizing, beautiful. You wish you could be like them. Be one of them, a sister maybe, but not quite, because anytime you see their father, John, he scares you a little. He’s quiet, rarely raises his voice, but there is something about the way he narrows his eyes at the world that lets you know there is something bubbling under the surface. When he snaps, he snaps suddenly. You feel it at the bottom of your spine. Like a slap, or the sound of a gun going off.

Dean tells you about the cases his father goes on, but it doesn’t take long for you to realize he doesn’t really know what his dad is doing. Still, you don’t call him out on it - he is still closer to the hunting world than you can ever hope to be, so you hang on his every word. How he saw his dad pack a shotgun, and salt. At night, you repeat everything you remember to yourself while you lie in bed. You have salt in the kitchen and although you don’t have a shotgun, you’re sure you could hunt ghosts anyway. You will, one day, but in the meantime, you know you have to learn. Once you wonder what it would be like to hunt with Sam and Dean when they’re grown-up too. Maybe you’d be a good team. And you wouldn’t have to walk into old houses and dark basements on your own.

The first postcard arrives when you’re eight years old. It’s from Salt Lake City. You take it up to your room, sit on your bed, and read it.

There are a lot of churches here. Dad works all the time. There is a snack machine at the motel. Dean ate a whole thing of sour candy and got a stoumech stomach ache. I’m reading Huckleberry Finn and I like it, I like that he tries to be a good person.

Sam W.

And then scribbled below that:

We watched monster trucks on TV and Dad has been hunting. I nearly fired a shotgun, but then didn’t have to. He says he’s gonna drop us off at Bobby’s while he finishes the hunt.

You keep looking at the card, hold it between your fingertips. Turn it around, look at the front, then turn it back again, read it once more. 

The thought that someone, somewhere, is thinking of you makes you feel funny. It makes you feel like you’re real. So far, you haven’t been sure, always, if you actually are.

Later, in bed, you hold the card over your heart and stare at the ceiling. You close your eyes, imagine a motel, which you've only seen in movies. 

The cards keep arriving. Your mother tends to bring in the mail, throws it on the small table in the hallway. Sometimes there are letters in red envelopes there, which you know means something bad. When you go to church and to your grandfather’s house afterwards, and a lot of the red letters have been showing up, your mother is always extra nice to him. Smiles and nods, the corners of her mouth tensed and twitching. As you get older, you notice there’s always less of the red letters that show up for a while.

You make it a habit to bring in the mail when you come home from school. You’re not sure if your mother would mind the boys sending you postcards, but you’re not going to risk it. The anticipation of going through the stack of mail makes your heart beat fast, your mouth dry. Most of the time, there’s nothing. Sometimes there’s so little mail that you immediately know there won’t be a card, but you still carefully go through it. Drop it on the table in the hallway and stare at it for a second, as if it might materialize at the last second. You’re already thinking of the next day.

One card has the Niagara Falls on it, even though that’s not where Sam and Dean went. They tell you they drove by it, stopped at a gas station. You imagine them going through their pockets, looking for change to buy it. Another card, just before Christmas. More and more. You keep them all locked away in a jewelry box wedged into the space between your mattress and the wall of your room.

The card you’ll always remember, the one you never get to read, shows up in the summer. You’re nine. The Olympics are on TV. You like the pole vaulting. The way they seem to defy gravity for a few seconds. 

School is out for the summer, and you’ve started running outside as soon as you know the postman has delivered the mail. Your mother doesn’t work, hasn’t for as long as you remember, due to what you’ve heard an aunt call a “nervous condition”. So you never know when she’ll be home. 

The reason you’re so careless is because when you grab the pile of letters out of the mail box, you can immediately see the corner of the postcard. Your heart beats faster, but rather than simply grab it and pull it out, you slowly go through the pile. That’s the rule. The anticipation, the ritual, is important. If you rush, look at it immediately, it will transform from a card from Sam and Dean into something else, something not meant for you. 

You’re walking up the small path to the house as you go through the pile with shaking fingers. Shoulder open the front door you left open, push it closed with your foot, which you know you’re not supposed to do. Only one brightly colored flyer separates you from your window into the world out there. The window into what could be.

Your mother shows up out of nowhere. You didn’t hear her, too absorbed with your process. Your entire body goes rigid, and you can’t bring yourself to look up at her.

“Give me that,” she says, not more or less mean than she usually does. Her nice, manicured fingers come into your field of vision. She needs to tug on the letters for you to let go.

Maybe she won’t see it. Maybe she won’t care. But you know she will. You know.

She looks at the flyer, does a small scoffing sound at whatever is on it, then moves it to the back of the pile. The card is next. She stares at it, then turns it around. You feel numb. Nauseous.

“What…” she says, but doesn’t finish the sentence. She keeps reading, then slowly turns to you.

“Look at me,” she says, and you force yourself to look at her face. There’s dark rings under her eyes. Lately, you often hear her walking around the house at night. Once, when you went down to the kitchen for a glass of milk, she was sitting at the small table there. Smoking and muttering to herself.

“What is this?” she asks, holding up the card, but it feels like you’re looking at it through a tiny hole. You move your lips, but no sound comes out for a second.

“It’s a… it’s a postcard,” you say. She waves the card in front of your face.

“I know what it is,” she replies, tone nasty, and you want to tell her that if she knows then she didn’t need to ask. But you don’t. “I’m asking why you always have to ignore everything I say!”

And no, she didn’t ask that, but you know not to point that out. You’re also not sure what she means by ignoring what she said, but when you open your mouth, she’s quicker.

“I told you explicitly I don’t want you to be friends with these boys,” she says, and now her voice is raised, and you feel the hot heat of anger flow through you. She never told you that. She does that, though. Insists she told you something she never did, then gets mad you forgot, or didn’t read her mind. “I told you– hey, come here!”

You haven’t moved, but still she grabs your arm. Her hand wraps around your biceps, the fingertips digging into your flesh. You look up at her, wonder if she’ll slap you. But she’s not angry enough at you yet. She always needs a little bit of time to become comfortable in her anger.

But you don’t. It’s been growing in you recently. The older you get, the more you feel like some significant part of your life is made up of lacking - lacking a father, lacking a mother who is nice to you, lacking a family that doesn’t make your skin crawl. Of consistency, of honesty. You have stomach aches all the time. So you pull your arm back, out of her grip.

“You didn’t tell me anything,” you say, your voice already thick with tears at the unfairness of it all. “They’re my friends!”

“Oh, your friends?” your mother asks, her tone mocking, and it’s so mean, so disgusting. 

“Yes, they are!” you say back, your voice cracking and shrill. You’re terrified she’s going to question your friendship to Sam and Dean. There’s enough holes there. How little you see them. How much of your time is spent apart. But for that, to point these holes out, she would need to pay more attention to your life. And you know she doesn’t. So she takes a different route.

“Well, they’re not anymore,” she shoots back. “I forbid you to see them! They’re nasty little boys.” Your eyes widen.

“You don’t know them!” you bite back, your voice taking on a tinge of hysteria. 

“I know where they come from,” your mother says, meeting your voice with a raise of her own. “I know what they are. Them and Bobby. They’re all filthy.”

“They’re not!” you scream now. If she forbids you to see Sam and Dean, if she forbids you to go to Bobby’s… you don’t know what you’ll do. The thought is too terrible. “They’re not! They’re not!”

“Stop yelling!” she yells back, and if you were a little more removed from the scene, you might see the irony in that. But you’re not, and you can’t. Because what your mother is saying is that you are filthy. Whether by association or not, it doesn’t matter. But it’s even worse actually. Because if they are filthy, then you want to be filthy too. And that’s a sin if you’ve ever heard one.

It sets something free in you that makes it feel like you’ll catch fire. Your mother keeps looking at you for a moment longer, studying you with disdain. Then she grabs your arm again.

You assume she’s gonna take you up to your room. You still tear against her hold, but your muscles feel weak and atrophic. You whine, and she only pulls harder, making your shoulder hurt. She drags you after her.

But it’s not to your room. 

It’s only a few feet to the door to the basement.

She rips it open before you can say anything, react in any way. She pulls you down the stairs, and for a few seconds, you have to concentrate on not tripping and falling. Your hand goes out to steady you against the wall as the rickety stairs below you groan. She lets go of you when you’ve reached the bottom.

The low dangling light bulb illuminating the space throws strange shadows over your mother’s face. It makes her look demonic, evil, like something out of a nightmare.

“You’re gonna stay down here,” she says, panting hard, “and think about what you did. You need to listen to your mother, and I won’t—” She briefly loses her place in what she is saying, unsure how to continue.

“You do not disobey your parents,”she starts over. “That is a sin. And I don’t want you coming upstairs until you’ve understood that.”

Before you can say another word, she turns, starts stalking up the stairs. At the top, she flicks off the light and then closes the door behind her with a slam. You are too alight to say anything, shout something after her. Because deep fear has gripped you.

You don’t like the basement. You don’t like the dark. It scares you, the way it encroaches on you. The way it’s so easy to see people and faces in the shadows. The way they come close, crowd in.

It’s suddenly deadly quiet around you. You can still hear your mother moving upstairs, her footsteps heavy and fast, but it feels distant, the dull quality of it making it feel worse than if they were in the room with you.

You look away from the stairs, carefully take in the rest of the room. There is a small, dust-covered window at the far end, but the light that comes through it is miserable and weak. The dark is already feeling closer. 

The first sound leaves you and you barely believe it’s you making that noise. Terror sits low in your spine, but it’s quickly spreading outwards, into your stomach, into your fingers that become numb. Reaches your lungs, making them flutter and tighten. 

You look the other way, away from the window, immediately realizing it’s a big mistake. The other end of the room is pitch black, or not quite, but close enough that you can still see shapes in it. One shape in particular.

It must be a shelf. It must be. An old winter coat hanging from it. But it looks like a person. Standing there, watching you. He will step towards you at any second. And you know what happens then. You can’t turn and look away and move towards the window. If you turn your back on him, everything will be much, much worse.

You begged your mother to buy you a night light after you moved out of your grandfather’s house. All bedrooms were pitch black there. It wasn’t a place for children. Your mother told you you were too old for one, which you don’t think is right, but had no way to prove it. You know none of the kids at your grandfather’s house had nightlights. Even though you were the only child living there, cousins would come over, spend a week there with their parents. None of them had nightlights. You loved having them sleep in your room, which you always had to beg for, because while that didn’t light up the night, it meant he wouldn’t come.

You whimper, fat tears spilling from your eyes now, as you’re sure the thing moves closer. It’s like that one dream you have, that recurring nightmare, where your arms don’t work and your hands don’t work and you can’t move, like something thick and heavy is sitting on your chest. Except you’re not sure it’s a nightmare.

If you were a hunter, you wouldn’t be scared. Or maybe you would be. Maybe you’d just be more brave than you are scared. You’d raise your gun, which you’d have, of course, point it at the thing. Tell it to stop, because in the movies you’ve watched with Sam and Dean, the good guy always tells the bad guy to stop, giving him one last chance. But the bad guy never takes it. He always moves, despite the warning.

You’ve seen the way both boys flinch at the inevitable gunshots. Sam’s eyebrows draw together, and he looks more worried than scared, like he’s upset at the whole entire state of the world. Dean flinches too, but he corrects himself almost immediately. Puts down the hands that went up as if he’s defending himself against something, forces down his shoulders. Reaches for the bowl of popcorn, like he doesn’t have a care in the world.

If they were here now, and if all of you were hunters, you would not tell the bad guy to stop. You would shoot right away. Bang! You would see him crumble, fall down on the floor. You’d turn to Sam and Dean. All of you are older, but it’s difficult to imagine what you would look like. Still, you think you manage. 

“Good job,” one of them says, you’re not sure which one of them. And they say it in a nice way, in a way where they mean it. Not like your mother does when you accidentally push over a glass and spill the water inside it. Not the way your teacher says it when you haven’t been paying attention, have been looking out the window dreaming of a different life, and can’t answer their question. Good job. You want someone to say it to you and mean it.

Sam and Dean would mean it. They would pat your shoulder, those strange, adult versions of them, the ones that have their childhood faces. They pat your shoulder, and then all of you go upstairs and watch a movie, and none of you flinch when the bad guy is shot. Because you know that it’s right and it needs to happen.

You don’t know when you sit down on the floor. You don’t know when you realize that your mother has forgotten you down there. Her footsteps become slower and less performatively angry. At some point, you can hear her hum, something she only does when she thinks you’re not around. The ground below you is dusty and cold, and soon your butt is cold too. 

A thin rivulet of snot makes its way from your nostril to your lips. It tastes salty.

The light from the window grows dimmer. You hear your mother walk up the stairs, maybe to sit on her bed and turn on the small TV she has in her room. You sit there a little longer. When the light is almost fully gone and you can’t see the thing standing in the corner anymore, you get up. 

Your entire body hurts as you unfold it. But that is part of the life of being a hunter. Bangs and bruises and cuts. You know this because the good guys always need to hurt a little. But they make it in the end. The bruises are there to remind them of the battles they fought, and the hardships they faced. 

The lights are off downstairs, the last of the day’s sunlight filtering in through the large windows. You go to the kitchen, turn on the faucet, wait until the water is icy cold. Then you form a cup with both of your hands and wash it over your face. Next you drink some of it. You’re hungry, but nauseous at the same time. You walk upstairs to your room, pass your mother’s on the way.

You peer into her bedroom, carefully. She's lying there, eyes closed, chest slowly rising and falling, still dressed in her day clothes. The light of the TV plays over her features, the volume turned down low. She looks peaceful.

How can she sleep? How can she sleep after doing that to you? 

A weird, eerie calm settles over you as you stand there and watch her. For a moment you contemplate simply dropping into your own bed, letting tiredness overtake you. But you can’t. You need someone to know that you’re alive, that you made it out of that basement, even if they didn’t know you were in there in the first place.

You walk downstairs again. Quietly open the front door. Take your bike from where it’s lying behind the large hydrangea bush in the front yard. Walk it out the garden gate before you get on it and start pedaling. 

You’re definitely not allowed to be out this late, and you sort of understand why. The cars with their headlights seem more imposing, bigger than they do during the day. You drive fast, and there’s goosebumps on your arms from the evening chill. You should have brought a jacket.

The road to Bobby’s house is dark and quiet, as opposed to the streets in town. You can hear cicadas so loud that you think they must be sitting on your shoulder. A possum crosses the road in front of you and you need to swerve to avoid it.

The porchlight is on. The house seems quiet, and you wonder if he’s already gone to bed. You don’t know why you came here. For comfort. To be somewhere you don’t feel so unwanted, even if you only sit on the porch stairs for a bit, leaving Bobby to sleep in peace inside. You quietly get off your bike and put it down on the ground before you keep walking towards the house.

“What are you doing here?” you hear a voice from your left and you whip your head in that direction. 

Dean looks taller than when you last saw him. He’s sitting on the hood of a beat-up beige car. You step closer to him, which is when you see the bruise under his eye, dark and angry. 

The silence is loud between the two of you. You feel a little light-headed, and maybe that’s why the moment feels so significant. 

“I just needed to get away,” you say, your voice sounding foreign to you. You’re not sure if what you’re saying is making any sense, but Dean nods slowly. He scoots to the side and indicates the space on the hood next to him.

You walk over, hoist yourself up. The metal is dusty and it’s getting on your clothes, but you don’t care. You feel too tired to care.

You look over at Dean, then follow his gaze up to the night sky. It seems massive, with thousands and thousands of stars. It makes you feel tiny. It makes you feel huge.

“I’m gonna grow up,” you say, breathing slowly, “and I’m gonna become a hunter, and I’m never, ever coming back here.” You don’t say it to Dean, not really. You say it to the stars. Make this promise to them. Witness, you think they call it when someone says something did or didn’t happen in court. You hope they hold you to it.

You’re surprised when you hear Dean speak. For a long time and many years later, you’ll wonder what moved him to say the things he says. You never get a chance to ask him.

“I’m gonna become a hunter too,” he says, his voice breaking then squeaking, something that you already noticed happening the last time you saw him. He stops, presses his lips together, then starts over. “I’m gonna become a hunter, and I’m gonna be the best one there is, and I’m… I’ll just be really good, and I’ll watch after Sam, and we’ll be safe cause I’m so good at it. And my dad can stop hunting then.”

You’re not sure why Dean thinks his father would want to stop hunting. He must like it too, you think, your idea of what hunters are already colored by John Winchester. But again, you’re too tired to question it. You watch his face, watch the way the low porch light reflects in his eyes.

“I could come with you,” you say, and it takes every bit of bravery you have. “To hunt. We could both look after Sam.” You feel sudden heat rise to your cheeks, as you realize how that sounds, like you’d be mother and father, but you don’t know how to correct yourself. Dean shifts without looking at you.

“You can,” he says, and you take a slow, endlessly grateful breath. “But there’s something we need to do.” You nod. Anything. You would do anything.

“What do we need to do?” you ask. You see Dean’s fist clench and unclench.

“We need to kill a demon,” he says. You nod again.

“Okay,” you say. “Which… which demon?” Truth be told, the thought of any demon scares you. You’ve read a little bit about them in Bobby’s books, but they seem terrifying. Able to go into people’s bodies, control them. But if this is the price, you’re fine with that.

“The one that killed my mom,” Dean says. You purposefully quiet your breathing, the moment feeling too monumental to interrupt. 

Sam and Dean’s mother is a taboo subject. Sam has mentioned her a few times, but the longer you’ve known the two, the more you notice that he does it when Dean’s not around, notice the dip in his voice. You know her name is Mary, like the Virgin Mary. You know that she died when both boys were very, very young. 

“If the demon’s dead,” Dean says, and his words sound weirdly recycled, “then everything’s gonna get better.” You don’t reply anything, just keep looking at Dean. Barely thirteen years old, a splattering of freckles over his nose, a big, ugly bruise under his eye. Staring up at the night sky, swearing blood vengeance. You’re not sure if your picture of him ever changes much after that night.

“I’ll help you,” you say, quietly. Dean turns to you, frowning. He could make fun of you. What do you have to offer to possibly help him? But maybe he’s as afraid of being alone in that basement as you are. “I’ll help you kill it.”

He could laugh at you now, just because. But he chooses kindness over ridicule. Buys your eternal loyalty, in that second.

“Promise?” he says, and it makes your heart bloom that he wants to make sure.

“Promise,” you say. “I swear. We should…” You look around. Dean blinks, looks around too, though he doesn’t know for what. 

“We should make a blood oath,” you say, one leg dangling off the front of the car, flair for the dramatic taking over. “To swear it.” Dean keeps looking at you for a second, and maybe there is just a hint of doubt on his face. But then he reaches into the pocket of his jeans, drags out a pocket knife. Of course Dean has a pocket knife. You should have known.

You scoot closer to him. Watch as he opens the knife, then brings it to the heel of his hand. He hesitates, then presses the knife against it. He smells like grass and sweat. Like laundry detergent, but that must just be his clothes.

He makes a hissing noise, and only when he pulls the knife back do you see that he’s actually parted skin. It shocks you a little, how easily he does it. He hands the knife to you, then looks at your face. Maybe he expects you to back out.

You take the knife from him, press it against your skin too. It hurts, and then it hurts more, and then you move the blade in a slight cutting motion, and all of a sudden the nature of the pain changes. It becomes clear and sharp. You pull the knife back. Watch beads of blood bloom on your palm.

“What are you doing?”

Both of you look up, even though you know the only other voice it could be is Bobby’s, but it’s way too small for that.

Sam stands in an oversized t-shirt, dark hair messy and too long again. His arms are hanging at his sides. He’s skinny as all hell, which is an expression you’ve heard from Bobby. The heck has your daddy been feeding you? You’re skinny as all hell. Look, arms like twigs.

“Sammy, go inside,” Dean says, voice slightly raised to seem like the authoritative brother, but not loud enough for it to carry across the rest of the lot up to the house. Sam just shrugs, apparently unimpressed.

“Bobby’s asleep with the TV on,” he says and Dean sighs. “What are you doing? Can I do it too?”

“No,” Dean immediately says, and Sam throws him a dark look. You look between the two, then at Dean.

“Just let him,” you say. Dean gives you a sharp look.

“No,” he says again. Sam takes a step forward.

“Please, Dean?” he says. Dean looks at his brother, then at you, both of you imploring. You two are the biggest pains in my ass, he’d say if you were fifteen years older. Sam would laugh, and you would press up on your toes to kiss Dean’s cheek. But all of that is still a long way off.

Dean sighs, shakes his head.

“Fine,” he says. “But if anyone asks, you fell, okay? Scratched your hand.” Sam nods eagerly, steps closer. 

You drop off the hood of the car and cross the two steps towards him. He’s still shorter than you, but won’t be for long. When he sees the knife in your hands, his eyes widen, and it’s only then that you realize that he begged to join you and Dean even while the darkness was still hiding what you were actually doing.

“I can do it for you,” you say, and he looks up at you. You give him your most reassuring look back. You see him tense, but then he nods.

Carefully, you take his hand in yours, press your thumb into his palm so he doesn’t move away. It’s way stranger, and worse, in a way, to do it on someone else, but Sam’s brave. You hear him make a little noise when his skin finally parts, but you keep it to yourself. Dean doesn’t have to know. 

You step back and pass the knife to Dean. He takes it, and then the three of you stand there, clueless. You stretch out your hand.

“To what we wished for tonight,” you say, feeling like you better choose your words carefully, since they seem important. “And that we help each other… do it.”

You’re unhappy with your choice of words, but then Sam and Dean extend their hands too. You’re pretty sure for it to be a proper blood oath, the blood of all three of you needs to mix, but you don’t feel like pushing it, so all three of you just awkwardly bleed on the ground for a few seconds. Then you pull your hand back, press it against the side of your leg, against the jeans fabric. Let your mother yell at you for ruining it. Let her dare to.

“Yellow Eyes,” Dean says, and you look up at him. He’s looking down at the dark ground where the three of you have washed the earth with your blood.

“What?” you ask.

Dean looks up, looks at your face. Something stoic and sure there.

“The demon,” he says. “His name is Yellow Eyes.”

Next time on SUN BLEACHED FLIES:

You burst into puberty like you burst into a cold body of water.

Everything is different. Everything is uncomfortable. It’s like you’re morphed into a different person. Some sort of freak monster rather than the soft femininity you were hoping for. You thought things would get easier once you started looking more like a woman. They don’t. They become infinitely worse.

You’re twelve when you start your period, cramps so violent you think your insides will burst out of you. Such deep discomfort you’ve never known. 

You’re fourteen when you kiss Dean Winchester for the first time.