mellaithwen

Title: Hold My Own And Drive
Chapters: One-shot
Word Count: 2, 433
Warnings: Gen, no spoilers.
Summary: Dean's first Christmas without Sam; he takes a road trip.

Written for the spn_christmas prompt; Dean's first Christmas while Sam's at Stanford.

Un-beta'd, mistakes are my own.

*-*-*

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For a little while, at least.

*-*-*

He can hear the radio from under the water spray still. It wouldn’t shut up even when Dean threw it against the motel wall, and it’s still singing more and more carols. Christmas number 1’s and 2’s from has-beens in the 80’s. Some of them are catchier than he’d dare admit and some of them make him gag.

Others give him chills because they carry memories of childhood he thought he’d left behind at sixteen when he realised forgetting was just easier.

Under the shower, the warm water chases away the goose bumps that have spread...well...everywhere. It’s cranked up to full, as hot as can be, pounding his frozen skin and thawing out his icy limbs. The blood rushes around beneath the surface and his fingers tingle when the feeling returns.

There’s a beep in the background that signals the end of this heavenly venture. The hot water has run out, his time’s up.

He ignores it...

And yelps when the water is bursting with the same cold as the frost outside. He jumps out of there and leaves a damp trail all across the motel room’s scratchy carpet. He starts fiddling with the heat dial by the door—but it would seem even that was frozen.

His feet pad over the wet footprints as he goes back into the steamy room and dries himself off.

It’s fucking cold, it’s fucking cold, it’s fucking cold.

He picks the warmest clothes he can from out of his duffel while his teeth chatter; smacking against each other, gnashing like some creature he killed in the fall.

It’s better than last year, he supposes.

Last year he’d been left to die in Montana backwoods with broken ribs and a wheezing breath that fogged around him like the fog that had lead him there in the first place.

He shudders at the reminder.

Sam hadn’t been with him then either, but for a whole different host of reasons.

Now, Dean’s alone because Sam is...well, he doesn’t know what Sam’s doing. He sure as hell doesn’t get the annual newsletter. Sam wants normalcy and replying to some seriously strange letters from his brother isn’t normal. Hey Dean, got the letter, a Chimera you say? Well gee that sounds...

Exactly.

Sam is at college, learning, being someone, and opposing their life for the chance of something better. Being someone better. If anyone deserves it, it’s Sam. Maybe that’s why Dean can’t be bothered to feel hatred on this, of all holidays. Maybe that’s why the noises of the yuletide night all around him just bounce away.

Dressed and clad in at least four layers, he dumps his stuff in the impala and parks it out of sight. The neighbourhood isn’t the worst he’s stayed in but desperate times can change the best. He makes his way to the nearest bar. The cold hits his face the most as he walks down the lamp-lit streets. He stops outside the broken neon sign. The crowds sound rowdy but he can’t see any broken chairs from where he’s standing. He isn’t stupid enough to walk into a brawl without reason.

Can’t brood if you don’t have drink, and without drink, that hatred might come rolling on back now so he finds himself a stool and a crack in the wall to stare at all night while the barkeep refills his glass without a second thought.

*-*-*

His phone rings and wakes him up from his moderate hangover. Unknown number; always is. He ignores it—gets up and gets out. His beloved car is waiting for him but the left window is smashed. Perfect, he mutters finding a stray stone on the driver’s seat.

Hell, it wasn’t even a break in, just a bored kid with a bitching snowball.

Dean embraces the cold through the open—well sorta—window as he puts his baby in gear. The wind makes his hair—gotta get it cut, kiddo—sway. He turns up the dial, and the volume increases until the Stones’ riffs are leaving cracks in the scenery of down south Wyoming.

Every time they drove through the state his little brother would caw all about Yellowstone—but they never went. Yogi bear isn’t there and neither is any business for the Winchesters.

Sam still wanted to go though, and truth be told, Dean did too.

There’s a hollow buzz that tells Dean he has another voicemail. No doubt the same person who left the other four that Dean has yet to—and most likely never will—check.

He looks down at his hands when he realises how numb they are; how little he can feel. How little he cares. They’re so pale that his veins shine like glorified green and blue tinsel through shivering skin—transparent and bleak. He clenches his fingers into fists, in a vain attempt to circulate blood within and have anything but hand-shaped-icicles fastened to the steering wheel of his car.

He can’t keep driving like this but he can’t exactly stop on the side of the road and take the time to look through all of his crap for a pair of worn and torn gloves. It’s too cold to even think about stopping.

*-*-*

The car park is only full because the restaurants are bustling with families. Stopping when there’s a warm destination in mind isn’t so bad. It’s Christmas Eve but it’s no different to Christmas day. The stench of cooked turkey and gravy fills the air and near other doorways there’s a stronger whiff of overcooked vegetables and brandy smoked on black pudding.

His stomach rumbles and he watches the people in the window as they tuck into their dinner without a care in the world. Dean refuses to see anything but what’s on the surface. They look happy now, eating with glee, so they must be happy. They must be perfect. He can understand nothing more.

Dean ignores the amount of alcohol buzzing in the adults’ glasses. Or the mild memories floating on the frigid air and making their way home. He doesn’t see it, so it isn’t there. He’s alone in his pain because he refuses to see anyone else’s.

He keeps walking when he sees that every shop surrounding every restaurant is closed. He looks down at his hands and thinks there’s just enough feeling there to get him to a motel.

*-*-*

“You have got to be kidding me.” Dean curses and the kid no doubt filling in for his parents for the time being shrugs. Dean rests his head forward against the mangy desk and inadvertently takes a great sniff of the wood beneath. He gags because it doesn’t smell like wood at all.

“It’s Christmas, man.” The kid tells him with a shrug and a smile. Not yet, Dean thinks, but damn it’s close.

“Exactly, who the hell spends Christmas holed up in a shitty motel?”

“You tell me.” The kid bristles and Dean glares. There's no room at the inn; time to take his business elsewhere. You know, where there’s a room to be had, beds to be slept in and all that jazz. Only, turns out, there isn’t one. And he tells himself he never should have left the one he had.

Not one motel is open for business with a room fit for humans. He isn’t being picky; one of the receptionists actually gave him that very excuse. Whispered of course. Can’t go advertising shitty living space, now can you?

No, so Dean feels colder than he should. Might have something to do with sleeping in his car with the heating on low to save the waning battery life of his baby.

Dawn is breaking. It’s so early that the sun has yet to rise across the spanning horizon ahead of him. There’s a blue tint to the cold air and everything seems so frigid. The road is clear but he’s wary of ice. There are no chains on the wheels; he has to be careful. He has to trust that his baby won’t leave him face down in a ditch somewhere off the lone highway knee deep in snow.

And blood...and oil.

He has the window--what's left of it--down just enough to make his breath puff out in a white cloud before falling back and spreading across the windshield with a burst of condensation.

It’s Christmas day and wow does it suck.

*-*-*

Dean isn’t the only one not enjoying himself wholeheartedly though. After driving the highway straight through morning and now creeping up to early afternoon, he stops for a break. From driving, from everything. He’s barely seconds away from the car when he sees some kid advancing with a crow bar. Where the fuck he came from, Dean doesn’t know, but the threat is clear. Even if it isn’t much of one.

Oh hell no, he thinks as he strides faster than he has in a while and stares the kid down.

Crowbar boy is less than intimidated and Dean has no choice. The kid lifts his weapon and Dean hits him square in the nose. There’s a definite crack and blood flows freely while the kid sits on the cement. Ass handed to him on a bloody platter. Dean casually drops a five dollar bill because really it’s the most he can spare. He resists the urge to tell the kid to sort his life out, because really, he’s one to talk. Damn, his attacker can’t be older than seventeen...

Dean walks away and doesn’t need to turn around to know that the kid is gaping at him.

*-*-*

“Sam?” Dean asks the phone, staring at it, not touching it and certainly not answering it. “If that’s you...”

What?

Its cold like Christmas is. It’s boring like Christmas is, it’s dreary and hell the weather reminds him of the majority of his on-the-road yuletides; grey and spotting, but it can’t be.

It just isn’t Christmas. There’s nothing there that might signal any of it. He’s not in Church celebrating the birth of a certain saviour—not that he does normally—and he isn’t sitting under a Christmas tree trying to fix any blinking lights. He isn’t wrapping or unwrapping presents and he isn’t talking to his brother.

He isn’t mocking or teasing his brother. He isn’t debating with him...fighting. Nothing. Their father isn’t nearby telling them to grow up and later on treating them with a meal of their choice. There’s no eager neighbours trying to entice them to the local town get together, no fireworks, no Sam screaming at Dad because John won’t let his boys go to the town get together or to the full on fireworks show that okay, costs a couple of dollars, but still worth it.

Therefore it cannot be Christmas.

It makes him feel horribly uneasy to just be driving. Ever since his eighteenth he’s had the freedom of the impala while his dad switched to the truck—but now he feels it more than he’d like. There’s no one in the backseat and the only thing riding shotgun, is his shotgun. Normally a little careless to have it out in the open but the roads are bare and surrounded by too many shadows.

He’d take bullshitting to Police any day if it meant one less car crash and one less poltergeist strolling on home with a murderous smile on his face after his most recent kill.

Focus on the road, dude.

Dad is in a little village called Ashton, banishing the local Witch while the tiny, tiny, tiny population try to stuff their huge turkeys into their not so huge ovens.

“I could tag along?” Dean had offered half tempted to add that they shouldn’t be alone for Christmas.

“It’s a one-man job, Dean.” John reprimanded, pushing his oldest further and further away.

“Ah come on, Dad, we can celebrate afterwards, take the night off when it’s done—” In Dean’s head that had come out a lot clearer, in John’s it was Dean trying to be polite when asking for a break.

“Seeing as you need it so much, the weekend’s yours.” John had told Dean on his way to the truck. Lock and Load, time to hit the road. “I mean it, take some time, I’ll be back on Monday morning then we gotta head on over to Iowa.”

“Iowa?”

“Take the weekend, Dean.”

He pretends the door shutting closed is actually Merry Christmas in the Winchester language. He’s still ironing out the kinks of that linguistic bitch after all.

Now he’s in California and he’s thinking where the fuck did Arizona go?

Ain’t it funny how roads work...taking you places and all?

He’s in California, but his foot’s on the peddle and his gaze is forward, as though there’s blinkers on either side of his face. His eyes are bloodshot; he hasn’t slept in days and hasn’t eaten in even longer. Marshmallows, old and not so soft, don’t count.

Technically, it’s probably not even Christmas anymore but with so many flashing lights and smiling civilians he can’t see it as anything but. The decorations won’t come down until at least New Years and then those smiling faces will be happier...and drunk.

His phone finally stops ringing when he’s gotten back onto the road and has a moderate destination in mind. He relishes in the silence for a little while. He drives straight through the cities until he’s face to face with the shore, and now? Now he’s lost. He hasn’t got a clue. He’s sitting in his car watching the tides break on dry land until it isn’t so dry anymore. He’s watching the foam flow back into the waves and staring at tiny particles of sand being whisked across the Wintered beach.

It takes him the whole weekend to realise that he’s running away at twenty-two years of age. Real mature. He starts the drive back and vows to get where he needs to be before their father does. His first Christmas without his brother is spent completely alone and it goes so quickly that Dean’s sure there’s something supernatural at work.

He forgets about the voicemails and in turn, the voicemails forget about him.

-Fin.