goneawayworld | Some Kind of Jubilee Rains Down a Remedy That I Soak Up [Closed]

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Some Kind of Jubilee Rains Down a Remedy That I Soak Up [Closed]

Who: Dan and Sam and maybe Ric?
What: The boys talk about the perils of monster-hunting over some contraband.
Where: Triple dorm.
When: After the 50's plot and after the Rig's gotten gross and swampy.
Warnings/Notes: Alcohol, cursing and lots of manpain of the urban fantasy variety.

Dan's a great roommate, or at least that, that would be his official take on things. He's friendly and quiet, even when he's staying up until dawn as his internal rhythm demands. He isn't tidy, but he keeps his hoards of things to his own bedspace and locker. He isn't bothered by any noise, clutter or requests his roommates usher in. When he scores extra snacks or liquor or other sundries from his many hookups in the cafeteria, secretarial pool, shipping, the mailroom, IT, etcetera, etcetera, he always brings some back to share with his roomies. He does laundry for the whole group and makes sure there's always a light on and stocked cabinet of easy pharmaceuticals in the room. He does a good job of not being oppressive about it, but his natural caretaker streak pops up with regards to the comfort and wellbeing of the denizens of the triple room.

Dan's a great roommate usually, but he's been a bit of a pain in the ass lately on account of being vocally displeased with the change in climate. It's been too humid to sleep, and between early Planker hours, his night-loving internal clock, and his frequent nightmares, Dan's already been struggling to get enough rest. Sweating makes his nicotine and librium patches flake off, so he's irritable and spacey and miserable from bouts of withdrawal - and the rooftop smoke breaks he does manage have been interrupted by the new fauna attacking. He's been changing clothes multiple times a day to avoid rashes from damp attire, and during his frequent bouts of laundry-doing to keep up he's accidentally put several things through the wash that shouldn't go through the wash, including people's snacks, keys, and someone's communicator, although he can't tell if was his or not.

That's coming off the back of a mission that rattled Dan a little more than he foresaw - it keeps him up, wondering if that 1950's role Joshua created would have been a better captain of this vessel - and a such after a particularly punishing day of Jorgmund-scheduled shenanigans, Dan decides to say "fuck it" and throw himself a party while Sam and Ric are off doing something somewhere someway. He managed to talk Jenna in the gym stockroom into parting with a bottle of something strong and perfumey, and Poppy in engineering handed over some of her "stress relief" snack cakes in exchange for a stream of compliments and an IOU, and he grabbed a pack of cigarettes from where he stowed them in between the highlighters and reams of paper of an office supply closet, and even if he can't get himself to sleep tonight he's going to get himself relaxed or he'll be damned.

"Who do I got to vote for around here to nix global warming?" he sighs, setting up in his top bunk.

The vent in the ceiling doesn't give him the mercy of AC, so instead it just serves as a way for him to siphon rising cigarette smoke out out the room. He's exhaling into it when he hears Sam's footsteps - Dan's good at recognizing them, now, the way Sam carries that tall frame as if he's always ready to jump into action. A hunter's walk.

"Hey, Sam. Come on in. I got treats for us. You probably can use them much as I can." He sits up and gestures with his nose at the smoke detector. "Humidity kept setting off that son of a bitch, so I disabled it for now."

He puts out his cigarette anyway, since Sam doesn't smoke.

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Sam's been living in as little as possible, to be perfectly honest. With the weather the way it is, it's the only way he's been able to deal with everything.

"Man. I never thought I'd be glad for crap water heaters," he mumbles as he heads into the room, pausing a moment at the smell of cigarette smoke before looking up at seeing Dan. He huffs a laugh as he sits down on the edge of his bed to kick his shoes off. "And yeah, they do that. I think we had to disable a few of them in the hotels we stayed in over the years, too."

"Far as I'm concerned, I ain't moved into a place until I've disabled the smoke detector. But since I ain't never had my own place, it's all a moot theory." Dan sits up and tosses his half-smoked cigarette into a mason jar and seals it. He does his best to make his bad habits unobtrusive.

He rolls over in his top bunk and dangles the bottle of hard liquor over, then pushes one of the packages of snack cakes so it plops down onto Sam's bed. "If you don't got nowhere to be, you should help me with this. The kind of Planker bullshit we had to do today, it'd be justifiable but not advisable for me to drink the whole thing on my own."

Sam glances up, then takes the bottle and looks at the snack cakes. "One of these days, that guy's going to get what's coming to him." And as much as Sam would like to be the one to do it...

He opens the snack cakes first, taking a bite of the first one. Alcohol is a terrible idea on an empty stomach, even if you want to get drunk. "Yeah, I'm not due to be anywhere." A pause, then, "So. Does this mean we're talking?"

"Early retirement," Dan says with a laugh, because he makes it a point not to wish ill even on the evil. He has plans to try and ingratiate himself to Planker, maybe coax the old brute into being about two percent less sadistic towards the Hires, but Dan hasn't seen the opportunity to set Operation Seduce Planker into motion and thus hasn't make forward progress.

"What else are we going to do when it's this humid? I certainly ain't up to moving." Dan makes a whimpering noise and taps the vent, which is doing nothing but shuffling around soggy, stale air.

"To a farm in upstate."

Sam's not usually the bloodthirsty one. Dan reminds him of Dean in a lot of ways, but in some ways? He's really not. This is one of them.

He cracks open the bottle after having the first snack cake, taking a draw from the bottle. And coughing because it's been a WHILE since he's had the hard stuff. "Fuck, where'd you get this from?"

"Where he's got lots of other happy Plankers to run around with and piss off."

Dan cracks up laughing when Sam takes a drink. His own tastebuds and tolerance are thoroughly desensitized by years of aggressive alcohol abuse, and even he can feel the sock in the mouth that this liqueur packs.

"You don't think all my socializing is just because I'm bored, do you?" Dan's starting to develop his low-key reputation as someone who knows who to talk to to get little things, bits of contraband, or to get gossip on the Jorg staffers. It's a niche he's surprised more people haven't tried to nose their ways into, but he supposes it's hard for folks to want to bond with the complicit henchmen of their own enslavement.

"I figured it's long past time we had a good drink and done us some monster hunter traditioning. I've been living with you eight months, God knows we both got a lifetime of reason each to drink ourselves stupid, and I ain't never even seen you tipsy. It's a crime. We're doing our gun-toting curse-breaking ancestors dirty."

"Something like that." Sam leans back against the wall, snorting softly before looking at Dan. "I did know that. And it's useful, admittedly, as long as you're happy with doing it."

Consent is the big thing with Sam. As long as Dan knows he doesn't HAVE to do it for other people.

Sam snorts, taking another drink of the alcohol. "You missed me arriving. I was actually hungover. Dean and I'd just taken care of a shōjō just before I was brought here. It's a type of spirit you can only see while absolutely shitfaced."

"Happy as a clam." Dan has a looser relationship with his body than is common or probably advisable, which primes him for both self-destruction and a very active casual romantic life on the Rig, which, thankfully, suits him just fine.

"See, every once in a long, long while, you tell me something about your world that's fun and not just terrible. Bet I could talk a monster like that into partying with me instead of haunting and devouring innocents."

He reaches over the edge of his bunk and grabs the alcohol from Sam, dividing half of it into an empty water bottle so they don't want to keep passing. He gives the glass bottle back to Sam.

"But don't get me wrong. The big majority of what you tell me about your world is terrible."

That's probably easier than passing it back and forth, yeah. Especially with Dan on the top bunk.

"I promise you, vengeful spirits that can only be seen when you're drunk off your ass aren't that fun." Non-vengeful spirits, maybe. "And you're not wrong. About it mostly being terrible."

"Your mouth is moving and all I'm hearing is that there's a world where I could get paid to hunt drunk." Of course, in Sam's world hunters don't get paid, which renders Dan's envy moot. Dan gets less financially from hunting than he puts in - guns, ammo, chanted objects and bail bonds all cost money, and since he's not unionized and he's a Mundane the stipend per gig he gets usually still falls a few hundred short of even - but at least some of his costs and administration are covered.

It's one of the many differences between their worlds. That and the fact that Sam's world seems to have a moth-like impulse to destroy itself and need saving. A whole world crying wolf all the time.

"Alright. Tell me what's good about it, then. Bonus points if you can do it without mentioning folks you might could miss." The truth is, Dan loves to hear people talk about things that make them happy, that fill them with splendor, and every world has something. Everything.

"Wait. We're supposed to get paid for this shit?" Okay, they actually kinda did for that particular job. It's still a rare, rare thing. "I swear, the last time I actually got any sort of pay, it was an FBI agent we saved destroying our records." Pause. "Before he still ended up dead, poor bastard."

Another thing to hate Lilith for. And he'd had plenty at the time.

Sam sucks down another drink, giving it a lot of thought. "I'm not sure I can do it without mentioning people I'd miss. Mostly because...I'd miss the people. Don't get me wrong, folks are assholes in general and the world would probably be better off without at least some of them. But...I don't know. If I didn't like people in general, I probably wouldn't work as hard as I do to help them." He lets his head fall back against the wall of the room. "And the stars, I think. I'd miss just parking up on the edge of some highway with Dean and sitting on the hood to watch the stars. We've killed a lot of beers that way over the years."

"Labor is labor. You're the only hunter I ever met that manages to earn less than I do." Before he still ended up dead. That checks out. The amount of people hunters can talk about in the present tense tends to be pretty low. "In my world, it's paid work, but it's such a pittance that most nobody goes into the field unless they were raised on it, are looking for revenge, are independently wealthy and real bored, or are using it as a pipeline to magical artifacts and the like that they can resell."

Except Dan, who's none of those things.

The stars up above. Dan misses sleeping under the stars so much that it feels cruel to be laying on his back in the top bunk looking at a blank ceiling. He frowns, then rummages along the inside lip of his bedframe to find where he stashes his pens and markers, and he pulls one out to start drawing on the blank space above him.

"Christ, I miss road life." The Rig is a cruel approximation of it, slouching along the pipeline. "That's the way I feel about my back home too. I love people, even when it ain't always specific people. I was surprised when I got out of the bunker when I was a teenager and started meeting folks outside my family and realized that not everyone has that feeling towards others."

"The lot of hunters in my world. Some of them stay mostly in one place, just taking care of what comes up around them. We're not all like Dean and me." Their world needs hunters like them, of course. Other hunters can't be everywhere, after all. So the ones that can move around are useful. "Most people in my world end up as hunters because they lost somebody close to them to the supernatural. Which I guess falls under revenge. There are a couple of old hunting families, but they're mostly dying out."

Which leads Sam to taking another long pull on the bottle as he and Dean are the last members of one of those families.

He leans his head back, watching what Dan's doing. "Road life was all I really knew, honestly. Demon burned our house down when I was about six months old."

And apparently the alcohol had started doing its job. Because he didn't talk about these things.

"The ones in it for revenge always worry me. It ain't never enough for them to kill that one werewolf that ate their mom. It's such an Us versus Them mentality, when ninety-nine percent of Them ain't never done anything to Us personally." As if it's every monster's fault that a few go rogue, as if that makes each of them as completely culpable. Dan starts to sketch out a cartoon version of Sam, all boardwalk caricature style, with the Mad Magazine-esque big cheeks and an exaggerated forehead and luscious Fabio locks. "The demon that burned down your home...same one that made that deal with your dad?"

Because that's the thing; in Dan's experience, victims of the supernatural are either completely wrong-place-wrong-time, or they're targets that monsters and witches and, he supposes, demons have been grooming for decades if not generations. He's discovered that his family was coaxed and molded for years before the witch struck. And he knows demons don't just up and burn down houses for no good reason; they're smart, and that's why he's so grateful to have never gone up against one directly.

He takes a moment to admire his sketch of Sam, then starts to draw over it in silver to give himself a new canvas. He takes a long drink.

"Would you raise a kid that way? Road life?" Dan hasn't breathed a word to Sam about those five years he raised a child on the road, or, well, as much as one can raise a being that can never actually age or mature. The point is that he had a kid he considered a daughter and raised her on fast food and sleeping bags under the stars, and after she pushed enough, he raised her on hunting, too. The other point is that he's too sober to bring it up directly, to ask Sam whether the damage of that upbringing is forgivable.

Sam makes a sound of agreement at the back of his throat. "Yeah, I know how it is. I'm more on the side of grey in our world, that not all the 'monsters' are dangerous. That's why I always say when introducing myself that we go after the ones that actually are dangerous to local populations."

He's worked with actual demons because they were actually the lesser evil. A few of them, at least. Though which side Crowley was on could change from day to day.

"Dad, though. Dad was definitely on the side of 'us vs. them'. Met a few other hunters like that as well." Gordon Walker comes to mind. He's quiet for a few moments before nodding. "Yeah. Yeah, it was. Same one that made a deal with my mother for Dad's life ten years before she died." He snorts slightly, looking back up at the ceiling and Dan's artwork.

"That's a good likeness," he says before Dan starts drawing over it, just to give himself another second to consider the question. Because it deserves to be properly weighed up. "I...no, I personally wouldn't. It's not that I don't think it can be done properly. There are people who do it all the time, after all. But in my world? I'd prefer having a solid base of operations before even considering bringing a kid into things."

Another drink, though more a thoughtful sip this time. "Here's the thing at the end of the day, though. I? Hated it. I never liked moving around, never getting a chance to make friends because I never knew how long I'd be at the school, never really taking a chance with folks because I didn't know if we'd be leaving in the middle of the night, on to the next hunt. The number of library books I accidentally stole over the years is...very high." And a grin because, after all this time, he can at least be amused by it. "It was all I ever knew, though. And I was jealous of the kids who didn't have to leave, you know? Didn't help that Dad tended to treat me and Dean more like we were Marines than his kids. I promise you, there was a lot more issues going on than just road life."

"I made fifteen bucks a head on the Santa Cruz boardwalk, twenty in Miami. Usually could get a few hours in before the cops would come hassle me for not having a permit." Dan rolls his eyes, like the idea of needing a permit to sell drawings by the beach is absolute horseshit and like he wasn't frequently flouting open container laws while getting his gas money. "Likeness is all in the eyebrows, funny enough..."

Because thinking of that is more pleasant than thinking of children growing up in a constant state of destabilization, thinking of a young Sam never knowing what bed he'd be sleeping in that night, knowing exactly what that does to kids because Dan's younger siblings were all children too when he and his sister tried to raise them while outrunning a curse. Dan takes a drink heavy enough to make even a seasoned alcoholic like him cough and wince.

"I kind of figured that your dad was probably military. My folks were sovereign citizens - that's why I'm undocumented- they didn't believe in no government, no armies. Reckon if your dad and my dad are in Heaven somewhere, either they've murdered each other out of political discord or they're bonding over teaching kids to catch grenades." Funny, how Sam's life and Dan's were so different in their youths, and yet they both ended up here with alarmingly similar jobs. "I didn't know nothing but stability growing up. Never left the farm ever, saw folks who weren't my family maybe...three, four times a year at most, when we'd go trade with the nearby town."

He takes another drink, this one a bit slower. All he wanted growing up was to stay on that farm, to love the land that cradled him his whole life, to take care of his parents in their old age and have kids of his own and nieces and nephews, and now? Road life has ruined him. He can think of nothing more intolerable than the boredom of staying in one place his whole life.

But he still misses home so much. Home's just a time, not a place. You can travel to places.

"Your dad sounds...I'll be charitable here when I say 'driven'."

Sam barks out a laugh at that, shaking his head. "My dad was an asshole. You can say it, it's fine." He tilts his head back, thinking about things. "I wouldn't be surprised if there were a certain number of sovereign citizens in hunter circles. I'm...not exactly too certain about the greater hunter circles in my world, actually. Dad avoided most of them when we were growing up. Probably expected most everybody to have the same reaction to him raising us the way he was that Bobby did."

It takes a moment for that to filter through his brain. Or, rather, that Dan won't know who Bobby is. "Bobby was a hunter my dad hooked up with for a while when I was younger. For work, not anything else." Because he realizes how it sounded. "Dad left us with Bobby for a month once when we were kids, but went off without any contact. Didn't know if he was alive or dead and..." He goes quiet for a few moments. "Honestly, it was probably one of the best months of my life." It's not easy to admit, even mostly drunk. "When Dad came back, he and Bobby had one hell of a fight. Leading to Bobby loading rock salt into a shot gun and threatening to shoot Dad if he ever came back. Which was the last we saw of Bobby until a lot of years later, after I'd started hunting again."

Another quick drink. "Dean said Dad just had that effect on people, but from what I know of Bobby now? He tore a strip off Dad's hide about dragging us around like he was. And Dad never took well to being questioned."

"I don't have to say it, you already did." Dan laughs. "I ain't never met any other sov-cits in hunter circles, but I don't meet many other mundane humans in the line of work either. Magicians might as well be their own sovereigns, anyway. It all shakes out. I work better solo anyway."

Well, he worked best as a unit with his siblings, but there's no point in reminiscing about that. He mostly just wants to listen to Sam, which he does, because he knows Sam being open about this sort of thing is rare and precious - not just to him, but to Sam as well. How often do hunters get to talk about this without fawning sympathy or without people trying to helpfully dig up more?

He can't help but notice that Bobby also gets the past-tense treatment.

"I get it. I think if my parents had had someone criticizing how we were brought up they might could have chased that someone off the land with rifles." Would have been nice if they taught him how to goddamn read. "I think..."

Nah, he's not that drunk yet. Instead he smiles and starts unwrapping another snack cake.

"What did you do, that best month of your life?"

He's not sure where Dan was going with that, but it's okay. Sam stretches out his legs, letting out a sigh. "Uh...not much. I made my way through most of Bobby's library, really. Bobby did a lot of research for other hunters and had books on just about anything you could think. It was during summer, though, so I didn't end up in school there. Might have been better, end of the day. Just a summer month to do whatever we wanted."

Another sip. "Dean got pissed at him for assuming Dad wasn't coming back and lit out on his own to find Dad. I wonder, sometimes, if Dean ever regretted doing that."

"That sounds like paradise for you. No wonder you remember it-" and Bobby, apparently- "so fond."

He's only got that little bit of information Sam's given him to put together a story - not just the words, but the way Sam talks about his father and his brother and Bobby, which words Sam hesitates before saying, which ones he says with a smile - but he can guess that Dean did, in fact, regret that.

"And it probably made you a better hunter than a month of shooting things and tracking would have done you." The ability to research, to know what your enemy is and how to fight it, the power of knowledge, goes so painfully underrated in the hunter community across both worlds, it seems. And then, because apparently Dan is that drunk, he adds through a mouthful of cake: "I had my kid doing research like that for me for a while there. Probably saved a thousand lives or more just from having someone who could hit the books and come up with answers."

Edited 2021-05-15 23:21 (UTC)

"Honestly, it's what I'd love to be able to do with my life if I get to the point where I can't hunt any more." If. Because they both know that there are not many old Hunters out there. "Find a place like Bobby's, maybe, where I can provide information for the others out there. I've been toying with the idea of starting a website or something, you know? Get the info out there in ways that people can easily access."

Another sip, not as much as the earlier ones. Enough to keep the low, warm buzz going. "Helped a lot for college, too, honestly. There's not much information you can keep out of my hands." There's another sip, then a pause as Sam looks up at Dan. "I didn't know you had a kid."

That's...that's new information. Not information he was expecting, either. Not in the least.

"That sounds like the ideal job for you. Maybe you could do a hunter hotline or something, for folks like me who don't internet too good. Mind if I ask why you want to wait until you can't hunt no more? Just enjoy the field?" Dan likes to be the person out there doing the work, but he distrusts how others will handle dangerous situations. The way he sees it, his patience and willingness to de-escalate are unique to his style, and he just doesn't think anyone else is going to do it right, so as the saying goes: if you want something done well, do it yourself.

But he also loves the danger, feels alive when he's filled with adrenalin and sweaty and catching his breath after a scuffle, and he accepts and even embraces the idea of dying before he's forty. He doesn't get same impression off of Sam. Sam always comes across as someone who wants to live.

He pauses a bit as he thinks about how to deflect away from something he didn't really want to get into and didn't realize how much he didn't want to get into until it was already out there. Then he laughs.

"I know, I look mighty young to have a kid, don't I? "

Sam pauses, considering that for a long few moments. Because, why can't he do it while he's still hunting?

The answer comes soon enough, which makes him sigh. "Because it would really require settling down somewhere. If we're still able to hunt, it would mean curtailing the area we take jobs in. Don't want to leave the hotlines without being covered for very long, you know?"

There's also the fact that Dean...well, Dean just wouldn't be able to settle down, he doesn't think. Hell, he'd all but jumped at the chance to get hunting again when he thought Sam was back.

He takes a longer drink at that memory. Faded as it may be.

Sam rolls his head, looking over at Dan. "I mean, you're old enough to have a kid. Just wasn't expecting one old enough to be doing hunting research."

"Ain't nothing as nerve-wracking as a phone call where the other person ain't picking up."

Dan's started to get the suspicion, correct or not, over the last year rooming with Sam, that it's less that Sam occasionally wants a particular life other than being a hunter so much as he just gets exhausted with the unique stresses of this lifestyle and fantasizes about alternatives. A slight distinction, maybe, between I want something else and I want something that isn't this.

Who wouldn't get exhausted with this? Especially since it seems Sam's gone through in thirty years what most hunters go through in a lifetime.

Dan purposefully looks at the ceiling instead of making eye contact with Sam. They've lived together a while, and Dan hasn't mentioned wanting to get back to a kid, hasn't worried out loud about how she's doing without him - Sam can probably fill in the blanks. Whatever happened to the kid, she's not back home waiting on Dan to show back up.

"You were researching young, though, you said. I bet you were cracking the books when you were still in diapers." Dan takes another drink. "How old are you, anyway?"

Dan's unaware that that's a particularly loaded question.

"Believe me, been on the waiting end of those a little too often. It's partly why I ended up back in hunting, actually." Sam pitches his voice a bit lower, a bit more of a midwestern twang to it. "Dad's gone on a hunting trip and he hasn't been home in a few days." Sam snorts and shakes his head. "That's what Dean told me when he came to see me. Six months from graduating from college and, angry as I was, I couldn't tell him no." He pauses a moment. "I wonder, sometimes, how things might have gone differently if I'd told him no."

And yeah. Sam's figured that much out about Dan. Whatever he has waiting at home, it's not a kid. And, having BEEN a kid in a hunting family, he can guess all too well what happened to her. Instead, he simply raises his bottle in acknowledgement.

The question, though, makes Sam shudder, closing his eyes as he works through the automatic reaction.

Instead, he deflects. "Physically, psychologically or spiritually?"

"Your brother don't really sound like that," Dan snorts, except he's seen some of Sam's memories before, and Sam's impression is both loving and uncanny. "I didn't realize you didn't graduate. Here I was thinking you were licensed and passed that, what's it, lawyer certificate exam thing."

Dan knows it's called a bar exam, but he's teasing, and playing dumb is one of his tried-and-true methods of getting a smile out of someone else.

He notes the pause before Sam answers, and sits up in his bunk and chucks a snack cake down at Sam, a friendly distraction from whatever ant hive he just accidentally kicked up.

"Here, that one's grape-flavored, I can't stand grape flavor. And, um, whichever one feels most real to you."

Edited 2021-06-30 22:30 (UTC)

It's probably a bit raspier than it was at the time. Dean's voice has changed over the years, become more gravelly. But, then, whose hasn't?

He snorts at that, grinning. "Never finished my bachelors, nevermind law school. Took the LSAT and had a pretty good score, but..." He sighs and shakes his head. "Shit hit the fan after that weekend. Ended with a fire at my apartment and my girlfriend being the victim of the same demon that killed my mom."

There's a BIT more to it than that. Like how there'd been a demon hiding out in his best friend for at least a year who had killed Jess, but...details. Not that Sam had meant to let that much out as it was, but alcohol was making it easier to talk about some things.

Not all of them, though, as he catches the snack cake and opens the wrapper with some thought. "Physically, I just turned thirty, I think. Was about a month before my birthday when I arrived here and it's been a bit over a year. Psychologically? Probably closer to eighty." Because God knew that hunting took a lot out of a person, making them feel older than they were. "Spiritually..." A pause as Sam chews a bite of cake. "Two hundred and twenty. Give or a few years."

"Hey, at least you went to a school." Dan laughs. He's only ever been in schools back in that 1950's psychoscape, or working odd hauntings. You can't even pick up an unskilled temp job at a school, what with all the background checks, and Dan's RAP sheet has plenty of red flags for both the very illegal business of hunting monsters and the very illegal lifestyle of being an itinerant drug-abuser. "You still got to teach me how to do a signature sometime. Don't forget, I'm looking real forward to signing my stick figures."

As if to follow up on that thought, Dan starts to sketch on the ceiling again as he listens to Sam. It gives him a chance to decide on how he wants to approach any of the numerous threads Sam's left laying out, when Dan would hate to yank one that leads to too sensitive a place.

"I'm sorry about your girlfriend." Dan says it with deep understanding. He knows how these things run in families. He knows how hard it is to escape, how difficult it is even to escape the feeling that by being so cursed you're the one introducing the threat to everyone you love. He gets that. "Anyway, you're still younger than me physically so I reckon that means I'm still stuck on laundry duty. That's a real precise number for spiritually."

Give or take a few years.

"I'm not teaching you now. I'm not sure I could sign my own name right now." He probably could? But better not to test it.

He takes another drink, considering replies to Dan. What he finally goes with is a simple, "Yep." Another drink. Because there's not enough alcohol on the Rig for him to go into why that number is so specific.

"Ain't no rush. I've been getting by thirty-five years on having other folks forge a signature for me. It won't do no harm waiting until you're sobered up."

Dan's actually not particularly keen to learn any sort of writing, not for any fault of Sam's but just because the more he thinks about how much easier his life would be if his parents had taught him to read, the more upset he is at people who aren't alive to defend themselves. And all that frustration at his parents has nowhere to go, so it just sits, dark and ugly and rotting, inside Dan, and that's why he hasn't even gone so far as learning to do his initials.

"Well," Dan says, trying to tread carefully, "however many years it took us to get here, we're here now. On the Rig. Separate from all that, for better or worse."

"Most signatures can be faked pretty well, anyway. Just a D and an S and a squiggle behind." Which mostly means there's only two letters for Dan to really learn.

He has learned over their acquaintance that Sam is far more likely to lose his temper over things than Dan is. Which isn't so bad, really. Just...there probably are times that Dan should let his temper get the better of him. It can't be healthy to hold it all in.

Then again, who ever called Hunters healthy?

He huffs a small laugh, raising his bottle. "Here here."

"Is that a D and an S for Dan Sagittarius or Daniel Sartoris?" They sound similar, but Dan truly doesn't even know his initials solidly - and unlike most of the people on the Rig, Sam's seen enough of Dan's memories to know Dan's real name. "You know that's my stripper name, right? Got it working the pole in Texas."

He won't pry into Sam's unorthodox answer to the age question. If Sam's willing to talk, Sam will in his own time. Dan invited Sam to share a drink, not to be interrogated.

He does ask, though: "you raring to go back? To your world?" Sam's brother, and all the troubles of a world that seems to need hunters and yet chew through them even quicker than Dan's does.

"Does it matter?" Sam looks up at him. "The initials are the same. Squiggle with a line over top for the T in the middle. That's enough for anybody. Though, no, I didn't know it was your stripper name. Makes as much sense as any alias, though. Dean likes to use the last names of rockers."

The last couple of questions get a thoughtful look as Sam considers them. "I'm not..." A pause. "My brother'd likely tear the world apart if he knew where I'd disappeared to."

"Just didn't realize they're the same letters." Dan shrugs. "I don't never use real people's names when I need an alias, I get too worried about anything I mess up blowing back on them. Names from songs or books, sure. Probably most of the West Coast knows me as Leroy Brown or Seymour Levov."

Dan can't read, but he does love listening to books on tape. No one's ever asked, so he hasn't had the excuse to prove that he can recite The Hobbit and The Odyssey from memory, from the first to the last word.

"That answers how your brother feels, not how you feel," Dan points out.

"I like to use names from movies." It's just that the main movie he sometimes draws names from is Star Wars. Which led to Dean being able to track him down as Wedge Antilles once.

He hums a snippet of "Leroy Brown" before Dan calls him out. Which earns a bitch face, but it's a fairly mild one. "We're trying to stop an ancient evil from taking over the world. So I SHOULD be wanting to get back to stop that. I should want to go back just so that I don't have to worry about them trying to taze me through my damned spine."

It should be agitated. But there's no heat. Just exhaustion. "But I'm tired, Dan. I've been tired for a long time. So I'm kinda enjoying the break."

Somehow, Dan keeps crossing paths with people who have a divine calling, and he shivers as he thinks of how absolutely exhausting that must be, sometimes. Bunny wears his purpose like a crown, with pride and ambition and a sense of purpose, but Dan can't imagine feeling chosen as anything like but the way Sam sounds now. Exhausted, burdened. Trapped.

Dan figures Sam was trapped long before he ever got a shock collar put into his body. Since his last sibling died, and since Ellie's gone, Dan's had so much freedom to just go wherever, leave when he pleases, to decide if death comes for him alright, I'm ready without having to worry about the fallout. His world probably was a little better for having him in it, but it surely isn't missing him so terribly that it's gone to ruin.

He leans over the edge of his bunk and, even though he's joking around with his words, he's got the look on his face of someone who wouldn't dream of judging Sam, all understanding.

"I don't know. You only sound spiritually in your sixties right now. You need to add some groaning and talking about saving the world uphill both ways before I'd say you're spiritually eighty."

Edited 2021-07-07 23:17 (UTC)

Maybe, if Sam and Dean had a support system like Bunny does, Sam wouldn't be so badly off. But once it had gotten around about the whole Apocalypse thing? That seemed to be off the table.

Sam looks up when Dan leans over, narrowing his eyes in a classic bitch face before managing the coordination to flip Dan off. But there's something grateful in his expression, even if he doesn't say it. "Keep that up and I won't show you how we make goofer dust or a hex bag."

Whether either would be of any use in Dan's world is an entirely different question, but one that they don't need to worry about, really.

"Two can play that game. You don't teach me about this goofer dust thing, I won't teach you all the best swear words in Common Tongue." Dan grins wider at Sam's screwed-up face and thrown finger, flopping back into his bunk and resuming doodling on the ceiling. "Ain't no point in learning how to make a hex bag, though. I'm one of the special one percent of the population back home that can't never channel or use magic, not even a talking board."

Dan's drunk enough that he sounds actually bitter about that, or at least, as bitter as Dan ever sounds. "I appreciate that you don't think less of me for that, though. I try not to get insecure about it, but you add up can't read, can't do magic, living in a car - folks in the business get off-color about it. Were they ever like that to you when you went off to Stanford?"

Not that Sam can't read, and not that magic is basic skill in Sam's industry the way it is in Dan's, where magicians make up the lion's share of the supernatural underworld, but there's enough in common between Dan and Sam and, particularly, Dan's lifestyle now and the one Sam was raised in, that he wonders if Sam ever got as uncomfortable surrounded by the suburban upper-middle class white picket fence crowd as Dan gets.

"Not all hex bags need magic," Sam replies, shifting so that he can lay down. Not too worried about drinking at the moment. Though it wouldn't be the first time he'd drunk while laying down, either. "But, we'll see. Goofer dust is mostly only useful for protection against hellhounds in my world. Though I remember you don't have the same issues in yours."

Sam closes his eyes, considering Dan's other question. "I...it's not easy to answer that one. I've spent my entire life working hard to blend in wherever I go. And clothing wasn't too weird because most college students wear whatever's comfortable, you know? I think I got more shit for my height than anything else, at least the first year."

“That so?” Dan makes a thoughtful expression at the ceiling, wondering how different hex bags are from the satchets of warding materials hunters carry in his world; Dan’s favored formula is a cloth baggie of dried roses and lupins, a stick of ginger, a sprig of camphor and a copper penny. “Salt’s good enough for hellhounds in my world, and you can noseblind them with cold plants like eucalyptus or camphor. And you can smell them coming, and they’re too heavy in the jaw, so so long as you can get up stairs or six feet above ground you can stay out of reach.”

Unlike the hellhounds in Sam’s world, they’re a minor nuisance at best in Dan’s, the pets of sorcerers who can’t afford an upgrade.

“That’s what you get for being nine feet tall, you titan.” Dan laughs. He remembers Sam mentioning once a girlfriend from college, and he remembers moments ago hearing about a girlfriend pinned to death to the ceiling by a demon, so he figures he’s in murky waters, conversationally. “It’s nice you at least did some schooling before going. Everything I know about school is from TV. As far as I can tell, it’s all proms and detention.”

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