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He dabs at the gash above her temple with a piece of gauze while she drags a makeup wipe across her eyes. Mascara has left watery black trails on her face, curving at the sharp protrusion of her cheekbones and fading down to her jaw.
She can’t stop crying. She doesn’t know if she’s ever cried like this before.
“I’ll kill them, Sammy, I swear to God, I’ll rip them apart.”
“Stop,” she whispers, and she hates how her voice sounds, hates how it feels so disjointed from the rest of her. “Please, I can’t talk about it, I can’t think about them.” Not when the bruises are still fresh and the bleeding hasn’t stopped.
Her brother retreats back into a stern sort of silence, brow furrowed in anger and worry as he tapes a bandage to the cut and moves on to the split in her lip. They both choose to ignore the mammoth in the room: the scatter of splotchy, black-and-blue bruising around her neck.
She takes off her rings, stained with blood that wasn’t hers. The crown of her head pulsates dully, aching from how hard her hair had been yanked. She could deal with the pain; she’d grown up cultivating a high threshold for it. It’s the reasons behind the violence that have her so rattled and inconsolable.
“This isn’t your fault, Sam.”
Her nose scrunches as she fights back tears. “I’ve heard about this happening, I’ve seen the statistics, I just—I didn’t ever think—“
“Nobody ever expects it. You can’t tell how much hate is in a person just by looking at them.” He tucks a couple strands of hair behind her ear. “People fucking suck. There are human beings out there worse than scum, worse than monsters we kill, and—God, Sam, I wish I could make them all go away.”
She can’t find it in herself to do anything more than nod.
He finishes cleaning her up and wipes away the remaining wetness under her lashes. “How about we take it easy the next few days, huh? I think we both got a little spooked tonight.”
He’s doing his best to downplay just how terrifying it was, which she appreciates. She doesn’t want to face the true brutality of it, the fact that she’d found the darkest, most wicked corners of the world within three strangers’ faces. She can’t.
She tries to take a shower, but her legs are like jelly and she ends up sitting underneath the spray, patching her cracks together before she can break completely. She scrubs at her skin until it’s pink, trying to cleanse herself of a dirty feeling that won’t go away, that seems to come from within her. She hadn’t been hurt like that, and for that she was so goddamn thankful, but she still felt violated and exposed. Unclean.
Story of her life.
She comes out of the bathroom in a pair of her brother’s sweats and a sweater that falls off her shoulders. Her hair is damp, drips a little down her back. Her brother is sitting on the couch, flipping through TV channels because he must have known she wouldn’t want to see him making angry phone calls right now, must have known to wait until morning to call the police, or even Cas. She wouldn’t put it past him to send the God Squad after the people she’d fought with in the alley earlier, but it isn’t like they had gotten away unscathed. She’d made sure they got theirs; her busted knuckles and bloodied teeth are proof.
She can still taste that one man’s skin in her mouth, when he’d had her pinned to the concrete ground and she’d gone for his wrist, biting down until she’d reached copper and crimson. They cut her open and she tore them apart. She’d been a fucking animal.
“Hey.”
She comes back to the present, where her brother had looked up from the television, expression softened.
“Hey.”
“Shower felt nice, I bet.” He's tiptoeing around her, treating her like a fragile china doll, and she hates that, but she doesn't know what else she could possibly ask for. Tiptoeing might be what she needs from him.
“Yeah.” She’s got her arms folded over her chest, horribly self-conscious and still shaken. She stays in the doorway, trembling and distraught, nothing like the wrath-filled freak she’d been two hours ago.
Freak.
She can’t believe she used to think she’d ever escape that, like she’d ever be anything more than a mess of gangly limbs and a head filled with demons. Ugly and obscene and unsteady. Her knees buckle and she wants to puke.
“You still feeling bad?” It’s not really a question.
She’s not transparent, she’s sure of it. They both lie as a profession. So the only reason he can see through the charade is because they’d been brothers for nearly twenty-seven years, and now they’re approaching two years on being brother and sister. He knows her too well to be convinced by her smoke and mirrors, all the tricks that fool everyone else.
“C’mon.” He scoots over and hits the empty space next to him with the palm of his hand. “I can’t watch Jeopardy without somebody who knows all the answers.”
She sits down beside him, forcing her muscles to relax as he pulls her close and holds her.
“Need anything? Water, coffee—we still got that weird vegetable juice you made me buy the one time we went to Whole Foods—“
“I’m okay.”
He smoothes down her hair, running his fingers through it to get rid of any tangles. Her mind flickers back to a few weeks ago, when he’d taught himself how to French braid because she’d mentioned to him how she couldn’t do it herself.
Jesus, she loves him.
“Thank you,” she murmurs.
“You know I don’t take care of you for thanks,” he says. “’S never how it’s been. You never need to thank me for any of this, baby girl.”
He kisses her forehead and lets her stretch out her ridiculously long legs over his lap. He pushes her sweatpants up to her knees and marvels at how smooth her calves are, which makes laughter swell in her chest. Then he’s tickling the backs of her knees with no mercy and she’s crying again, this time for all the right reasons.
+
Sam’s got a thick skin. It’s not like her brother’s is or her father’s was, but she’s got it. She can brush off the tension she sees in people when she’s around, the badly concealed whispers, the constant eyes on her. It doesn’t bother her, not really. She knows how confused they are, and to a certain degree she understands. She used to be confused about herself, too.
And she has moments that make it worthwhile, moments of euphoria and comfort and confidence in herself. There are moments where she’s proud.
There’s one day in particular, when they’ve stopped at a diner just outside Los Lunas, and she spots a little girl with her mother a few tables down. She can’t be older than six, and she’s staring at Sam with these wide brown eyes. She was never this fascinating before, Sam thinks, not before she started shooting up estrogen and painting her eyes with smoke.
“She watching you?” Dean asks.
“I think so.”
“Probably jealous of your hair.”
Sam snorts. “Sure.”
She’s halfway through a credit card scam on her laptop and Dean is halfway through his burger when she feels a small tug at the hem of her shirt. She looks over and finds those wide brown eyes again, framed by a tumble of black curls.
She asks Sam, all sincerity and innocence, if she’s a real princess.
Dean chokes a little on his beer and Sam doesn’t know how to respond. Suddenly all the jokes Dean used to make when they were younger seem prophetic instead of crude.
“I, uh—“
She prattles on, smiling with missing baby teeth and wandering hands finding the silver that circles Sam’s wrist. She’s too young to know it’s only to prove Sam’s not a shifter, too young to realize that girls and boys like Sam and Dean can’t afford things like this without five-finger discounts.
Dean runs his fingers up and down through the condensation on his beer bottle. “Where’s your mom, kiddo?”
“Outside, calling Dad.” She climbs into the booth next to Sam and takes her hand. “You fight stuff,” she mumbles, still inspecting Sam’s callouses and scars.
“Yeah.”
“Like monsters.”
“Yeah.” It's funny, how honest they can be with children.
She sizes Sam up again, and Sam sees her focus on the sharpness of her jaw, the broadness in her shoulders, and she knows what comes next. She doesn’t think she can handle it, not from a kid, not from someone who doesn’t even know they’re hurting her.
“You’re strong,” she says, and Sam’s stomach drops into the bowl of her hips with relief. “Strong princesses are the best kind.”
She’s tying her hamsa loose around the girl’s neck when Dean mutters, “mom’s back,” and she pulls back instantly.
The girl’s mother rushes over, and Sam expects to have a mouthful of slurs thrown in her face, but instead she’s hearing things like I’m sorry, so sorry and told her to stay put and didn’t mean to bother you, ma’am.
Sam can barely breathe, but she insists it’s alright, that it was no bother at all.
The little girl is pulled away by her mother’s hand, but she’s still looking at Sam, a tiny fist holding onto the hamsa around her neck.
“How ‘bout that?” Dean marvels. “She called you ma’am. I mean, we’re in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, just west of redneck country, and some soccer mom calls it like it is.”
Sam can’t stop smiling.
+
Some days aren’t like that.
Dean starts locking the doors when they pass through neighborhoods real slow. He keeps the windows up, turns the radio low, like if they’re quiet enough, nobody will make trouble.
She gets some weird peripheral glances from police and paramedics whenever they visit a crime scene (she shines too bright, Dean tells her, like the angels do, that's why they can't face her head-on), but it’s nothing she can’t deal with. People rarely approach her, either because deep down they know how inappropriate they’re being or because they’re afraid of her. However, that means all the invasive questions, all the comments and opinions about her, everything that she’d have to take if she was just a little smaller, go straight to Dean.
And Dean, as clueless and confused as he is by all this, wastes no time in getting pissed.
She knows how it goes; somebody looks her up and down, leans over to her big brother and mutters something more or less obscene. Judging by how furious Dean becomes, she can guess how insensitive and awful their words were. She never butts in, never speaks up; when it comes to things like this, she stumbles over her words, stammers and stutters and forgets how to breathe, because she can’t fight with people she and Dean have spent their whole lives protecting.
She goes on pretending it’s not real, ignores the way Dean holds the steering wheel white-knuckled, tunes out the arguments even as they rise in volume. She pretends everything is fine. She pretends that the world doesn’t hate her and want her dead.
There are a few moments, however, when she just fucking snaps.
A little while after her brush with those three in the alley, but not long enough for her nerves and rage to settle, she’s perched on a barstool by herself while Dean hits the head. She’d go, too, but she’s not planning on risking her life to take a piss.
There are eyes on her and she keeps her hands clenched in her lap so they don’t shake. She doesn’t remember a point in her life where she wasn’t angry, where she didn’t have fury eating up her insides like a parasite, but she’s always been able to control it. Right now, one wrong word is going to have her exploding.
She’s keeping it together as best she can, except the stares are grating on her skull, dozens of nails raking down her spine, and it’s getting hard to fight the urge to scratch.
And then some poor asshole who’s got no idea what he’s getting into drops the word tranny, all hatred and disgust and bigotry, and the nuclear bomb sitting idle in Sam’s chest finally ignites.
She’s got a hand around one of her brother’s empty beer bottles and she’s smashing it over this stranger’s head before her brain can register what she’s doing. Glass shatters across the floor and she’s dodging a fist, grabbing that same arm and twisting it until she hears a cry of pain.
She seizes him by the collar of his shirt, using all her willpower not to wrap her hands around his throat and start squeezing, because she knows how that feels to be strangled and it’s high time for some payback, and she looks at him. Really looks at him. Like if she searches his eyes long enough, she could find what’s made him this way.
“Do you wanna say that to my face?” She snarls, and God help her, she’s longing for when she was powerful enough to stop this guy’s heart with the flick of her wrist. “If you’re gonna be a piece of shit, don’t be a coward about it.”
“Sam!”
A strong pair of arms wraps around her shoulders, pulling her back, and there’s the smell of gunmetal and whiskey and rock salt and Dean is holding her, a lifeboat struggling against a raging tide.
“I’ll fucking wipe the floor with you, you hear me?” She shouts, and it’s deep and masculine and it only makes her angrier. “You’ll be dead before you even hit the ground!”
“Sammy, stop.”
She wants to, she does, because the air is dead silent besides her screaming and the crunching of broken glass beneath their feet. Everyone’s staring at her, watching like this is some spectacle, and her vision is painted red.
“How about I hate myself enough for the both of us and we can call it a fucking day?” Her voice isn’t getting any quieter, and the man stands there mute, holding the back of his head where she’d struck him with the beer bottle, his other hand clutching his bleeding nose, and she’s scared now, because she doesn’t even remember doing that. When had she thrown a punch?
“Get that freak out of here, or I’m calling the police,” the bartender snaps, phone in hand, clearly not playing games, but she can’t focus over the roaring of blood in her ears.
Freak.
“Don’t talk about my sister like that,” Dean growls, and Sam doesn’t have to look to know that his green eyes have gone dangerous and dark. “And we’re leaving, alright? Don’t get your panties all twisted up.”
Dean drags her out of the bar and they drive home in silence, Dean looking ready to burst a vein in his temple and Sam still trembling with her residing temper and fear. She’s too big for this body and all her emotions are spilling out, leaking over the upholstery and staining her skin. She’s ruptured, she’s bleeding, she’s broken, and she’s out of duct-tape and safety pins.
Dean’s tailing her when they get back to the motel, almost tripping over her feet, and he slams the door behind them once they’re inside.
“What the fuck was that about, Sammy?”
“I don’t—I—“ She’d been so aggressive at the bar, so bold and unforgiving. She doesn’t know where that part of her ran off to. “I don’t know, I just-- couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You gotta talk to me, man—lady—fuck, I fucked that up, never mind.” He sheds his jacket, throws it on the desk chair. “Walk me through this, alright? Explain how you were able to beat the shit out of a guy in the five minutes I left you alone out there.”
“I wasn’t facing him, I don’t know what he was doing before, but… one second everything’s fine, people are staring but I’m handling it, and then he’s right up behind me, and he—he called me—“ She can’t get the word out, and instead she plunks down on one of the beds and tries not to pass out.
“What did he say to you?”
He won’t understand. He’ll tell her to brush it off, because words were words and you couldn’t let yourself get hurt by them. Don’t be a wimp, Sam, don’t let that shit get to you.
Humiliation wells up in her and burns her eyes, and it’s not until tears are dripping off her nose that she realizes she’s crying.
“Hey—Samantha, look at me.” He kneels in front of her and takes her face in his hands, and his eyes aren’t dark anymore. “You can tell me. That’s what I’m here for.”
Her lower lip quivers and she’s blown away by how quickly she’s come apart. Not a lot fazes her, and she’s pretty sure she can count the things that do on one hand. Clowns, and her brother dying, and remembering Hell. Those are okay; she’s allowed to break when it comes to those things. She’s got a good head on her shoulders and she keeps herself pulled together.
Except when she doesn’t. And when she doesn’t, it goes from zero to sixty faster than she can snap her fingers.
“He call you something?” Dean guesses.
Sam nods and turns away, wiping her eyes with the heels of her palms.
“And you don’t wanna say what it was.”
She shakes her head. “I’m not supposed to get hurt by names,” she mutters after a shaky exhale.
“Sammy…” Dean tucks her hair behind her ears, smoothing it down, same as he'd done the night after that scare in the alley, and his hand comes to rest at the nape of her neck. “I know you. If whatever he did was able to make you this upset, it matters. It’s important.”
She shakes her head again. Even if she wanted to tell him, she doesn’t think she can say the word. She’s reliving it on repeat, like a glitching clip show: the looks, that word, the weight of the bottle in her hand, the shattered shards across the floor, the blood, the glass, that man's eyes, that word—
“We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want,” Dean tells her. “But I’m… I’m here, if you wanna.”
She wonders, albeit briefly, if Dean would be this tender if she was still his brother. She wonders how much of this is because she’s a woman.
She decides she’s better off not thinking about it.
“I need you right now, okay?” Her own voice sounds weak to her. “Is that okay?”
Dean’s brow furrows. “Yeah,” he says, moving to sit beside her on the bed. “Yeah, of course it’s okay.”
He wraps her up tight in his arms, like he could single-handedly protect her from the entire world, and lets her cry until she has no more tears left and then some.
“’S alright, baby girl,” he murmurs over and over, softer than anything. “You’re gonna be alright.”
+
A few weeks go by with nothing on the Winchester radar, nothing except a very large, very angry Samsquatch. Dean leaves her be because she deserves to feel pissed, and it wouldn’t help to tell her to cool it. She’s got a handle on things, anyways; she’s out running before the sun is up and doesn’t return until noon, sweat-soaked and her chest heaving, but with some steam blown off.
She’s wearing makeup a lot, more often than she used to and whether or not she's planning to go out, like she’s trying to prove something.
“If you don’t wanna wear that stuff, don’t wear it,” he calls out to her when he hears her swearing from the bathroom—stabbed her eye with one of those tiny brushes, probably—and earns himself a muffled fuck off in return.
The days carry on more or less in that same fashion.
When they get a call about a werewolf pack in the Redwood Forests, however, Sam brightens.
“Why are you pumped about having to haul ass all the way to Eureka?” Dean asks. “If you make me hike those trails while we’re there, I will ditch you.”
“No, no, it’s not that.” She’d been looking at a road map, planning out their drive, but she stops to look up at Dean, eager and sanguine. “I wanna stop somewhere on the way.”
They’ve passed through the intersection of Market Street and Noe when Dean starts to notice.
“Sam, you’re my sister and I love you, but where the hell did you take us?”
She grins at him from shotgun and turns back to the window. “You know how you called Greenwich Village ‘gay mecca?’ The Castro makes that place look like the Bible Belt.”
“Oh my God.”
They’d left Reno at 6, and they haven’t even been on the road for four hours, but Dean crumbles under Sam’s puppy-eyes and they stop for coffee at Spike’s. The barista asks Sam what her pronouns are and shamelessly flirts with Dean, who goes bright red and mumbles something about finding them some seats before shuffling off.
“Your brother,” the barista begins while handing Sam her change, “he’s not queer?”
Sam represses a laugh. “That’s the question of the century, to be honest.”
Dean complains about how he’s a dark, tarry roast kind of man, not some rich hipster kid who puts ten different things in his coffee, but he drinks the whole cup all the same. She watches him, makes a mental note on how tense his shoulders are and how his eyes won’t quit moving.
They make their way down the main boulevard, Sam taking in the feeling of home and safety, while Dean pipes up every few minutes with questions: “The hell is a gender-neutral bathroom,” “I get the rainbow flag, like, that’s the main one, but what are all the rest of ‘em supposed to be,” and “Marlon Brando was bisexual?”
It’s a much-needed learning experience.
The thing Sam loves most about it is the fact that she’s normal for once. Nobody does a double take when they see her walking down the street, nobody catcalls or glares or pushes her. Only one person stops, and it’s to compliment her shoes, which are cheap jump boots from some Goodwill in Missouri they’d stopped in three years ago. Is ‘tattered and old’ a new trend? Is she trendy? Nothing is making sense, and it’s fantastic.
As they pass the theater, Dean stops in front of the doors. “Holy shit, they’re showing Strangers on a Train!”
“You wanna go in?”
Dean looks at her as if he’d never considered that. “Huh?”
“We’re supposed to be in Eureka by morning and we’re only an hour out,” she says. “We have plenty of time if you wanna see it.”
"Uh, I mean, I dunno..." Dean turns back to the theater and watches two men walk in together with their hands held, one of whom had ruffled dark hair and eyes that reflected the sky. When he looks back at her he’s turned pale, the way normal people might turn when they see ghosts. “Sam…” His hands are shaking and he stuffs them into his jacket’s pockets.
“Are you alright?”
He shakes his head, and sirens go off in her mind because Dean doesn’t do that, he doesn’t admit when something is wrong.
“Dean—“
“Gotta get me out of here.” He’s speaking low, but his words are hurried and frantic. “I—I can’t—“
“Okay, okay.” She takes him by the shoulders and guides him back down the street. “Just do me a favor and breathe.”
She takes the driver's seat when Dean hasn't calmed down by the time they get back to the car. She casts concerned glances at her brother all the while before pulling off to the shoulder on the US-101, a couple miles away from the Bridge.
“Talk to me,” she says, using her no-nonsense tone that Dean knows well and hates more.
“It’s fine, it was nothing.”
“Don't try and bullshit me.”
He won’t meet her gaze, just keeps fidgeting with his hands and staring at the dashboard. “I know I always say whatever you are doesn’t matter to me—and that’s true, it is, I swear. I want you to be happy, and however that’s gotta happen, I’m cool with it. If you’re—if you’re queer, or whatever, it’s fine.” His eyes are rimmed with red, and he chews on his lower lip. “But I can’t… I can’t…”
Sam’s heart thuds against her sternum, aching. She supposes she’s always known, in a passive sort of way, but she hadn’t seen how much Dean had been hurting. And there’s nothing she can say now to reassure him, to make this better.
“Dean,” she sighs, “I’m sorry.” She’s sure that if Dean had been planning to come out, which she doubts, breaking down in the middle of the Castro District from an internal sexuality crisis could not have been his ideal scenario.
“Don’t tell anybody,” he says. “Please.”
“It’s your business, Dean, your choice. I’m not gonna try and make it for you.”
“But you’re not mad? That I never said anything?”
Her brows knit together. “Course I’m not mad. I just wish you'd felt like you could tell me.”
They sit on the shoulder for another several minutes, Dean reclaiming control of himself and Sam casually passing him tissues no matter how many times he tells her he’s not crying.
“You want someone else to take the job in Eureka?” She asks.
“No. God, no.” Dean scrubs a hand over his face and straightens a little in his seat. “After a chick-flick moment like that? I’m itching to shoot something.”
A smile tugs at the corners of her lips, and she pulls back out onto the road. “There he is, he’s back.”
Traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge is abysmal. Dean is busy switching out the Guns N’ Roses cassette in favor of Night Ranger, sucking on some diner mints he’d found going through Sam’s bag, and Sam is trying not to give into the urge of slamming her head against the steering wheel.
“Can I ask you one thing, real quick?”
Dean groans. “Sammy, no.”
“Do you have any idea how you… you know, identify?”
They inch along the bridge while Dean considers the question, and they’re halfway across when he answers, just above a whisper, “the Marlon Brando one.”
+
Nothing drastic changes between them. They still don’t talk about it, despite the whole Castro District debacle, but she thinks Dean is letting himself relax more. He retains his role as a casual supporter, an older brother who totally isn’t queer, absolutely not, but he won’t hesitate to kick anyone’s ass if they mess with his little sister. Though, there is a subtle newness about it all; like a weight’s been lifted from Dean’s back and he can stand a little straighter. Or gayer, as the case may be.
And like her, he has his moments.
Over breakfast one morning, he clears his throat and focuses on the table with enough intensity to burn a hole through the wood.
“There’s a, uh—“ Dean falters, and Sam knows it’s gonna be about a gay thing, because he only ever stumbles over words like that when it’s about a gay thing—“A pride event? In Kansas City? It’s next weekend, supposed to be cool, I guess, if you’re up for a four hour drive…” He lets the offer hang in the air, and then waves it off. “Never mind, it’s a dumb idea, we should stick around in case—“
She swats him upside the head with her half of the newspaper.
“Ow! Bitch!”
“We’re going, jerk,” she says, and that’s that.
It’s raining and humid in Kansas City, but there’s a huge turnout of people, and Dean seems intimidated by all the colors and noise.
“How ‘bout you go, and—“
She claps him on the shoulder and forces him to walk with her. “Come on, you can do it. And it’ll be fun.”
Dean mostly stays next to her as they weave through crowds, searching for her hand whenever they grow too far apart, and he only talks to the people that approach Sam. But when they brush by someone holding up a pink and purple and blue sign with a picture of a young Marlon fucking Brando on it, Dean perks up and grabs her arm.
“Sammy, that’s my guy!” He tells her, and he’s radiating excitement, and she’s never been happier.
The person holding the sign turns out to be a cis woman, which might be why Dean feels comfortable approaching her and chatting her up, even though he’s in the middle of a pride parade and his hair is covered in glitter, but Sam doesn’t pry into that. He’s about as comfortable as he can get in a place like this, and she’s not about to open a can of worms and ruin it. He’s worked so hard to make her feel safe and happy; it’s about time for him to feel that way, too.
The rain lets up, but their clothes never dry completely. By the time it’s over and they make it back to the Impala, they’re exhausted, and they've got war paint smeared across their skin; Sam with trans and pansexual flags on her cheeks, and Dean with the bisexual colors on one of his hands. It had taken a bit of convincing-- Sam promising it was washable paint, he could get rid of it right after, no one would see if he didn’t want them to—but once it was on, it had stayed.
“What is it with you and Marlon Brando?” She says as they cross the border back into Kansas.
He snorts and scoffs. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No. What’s so special about him?”
Dean is clearly appalled. “First of all, he is literally the Godfather. And second, have you seen him in The Wild One? Or any of his movies before 1960?”
“I thought you’d have realized I haven’t, through context.”
“He was hot, Samantha. Like, super hot. Like, when I was twelve and Dad let me watch A Streetcar Named Desire at Bobby’s, I had to take an ice-cold shower and think about Jesus.”
Sam is laughing, hard, the paint on her cheeks creasing with her laugh lines. Dean grins, swipes a thumb over the streaks of paint on his hand, absentminded with no intent of wiping it away, and looks back out at the open road.
They have their moments.
-
"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." - E.E. Cummings