|=| Transient |=|

Transient

They are transient.

He read that word once in one of the few books he’s ever had the patience to finish. It was a book of poetry, and he never tells Dad or Sam that he read it. Dad’s all about survival books, The Anarchist’s Cookbook and Foxfire and all that; Sam’s never read a book that didn’t have a some whacky equation in it. Actually, Dean only picked up the book because he figured if he was gonna steal from the local library of Wicham, Minnesota, then he might want to steal a book that wouldn’t be noticed.

That was when he learned that there was a name for people like him—a name other than the names that people throw at him in the schoolyard. Homeless and fag and white trash never described Dean, never told him who he was. That one word, printed in faded ink on a musty old sheet of paper, told him more than the bullies ever had.

The next library they came to, Dean looked it up. Transient, n. 1. lasting for only a short time and quickly coming to an end, disappearing, or changing. 2. staying in a place for only a short period of time.

It was the entire Winchester family in a tiny column of text on page 453 of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary.

Now, looking at Sam, Dean understands much more about that little word than he did as a confused 16-year-old. He understands all that it entails, the underlying implications that his younger mind missed. Every town they come to there’s always someone who says Winchester like the rifle, but Dean knows that’s not true.

Guns are forever. Dad taught him that before he was old enough to learn what forever meant. He grew up cleaning them, shining them. Cocking and shooting them. When Dean holds a gun it keeps him grounded, because guns are the Winchesters’ tools of trade. A Winchester holds a gun like he’s made for it, because in all the ways that counts he is.

But they’re not like the guns. He and Dad and Sam, they’re like fog or a faded recollection that barely has the power to make you crack a smile—there one minute and gone the next, leaving no trace of their existence and fading quickly from memory. They have no home, no names aside from those they give each other. The government thinks he’s dead, and he has no intention of ever correcting the assumption.

It was Sam who protested their nonexistence, who dug in his heels and refused to move. Dean laughed when he did it those four years ago, just like he laughed when he saw Sam again. For all that he’d been away, he was still a Winchester, and he’d kept their habits. Clothes all folded up, none hanging, because they were easier to toss into a suitcase that way. Keeping all his stuff close together—no sense spreading out when you’re due to leave any second. Layering clothes, because the more you had on, the less you had to carry. And there was always the chance that the stuff you didn’t have on your back would be obliterated by God only knows what kind of demon, so it made sense to keep as much as possible with you.

Yeah, Sammy hadn’t changed a bit.

He still hasn’t—and in fact, he’s rapidly adjusting to their lifestyle again. It worries Dean sometimes, how easily Sam’s fallen back into things. The two of them work in tandem now, but there’s no smile in Sam’s eyes the way there used to be. He hardly ever laughs any more; before, he’d laugh more than talk. All Dean can see any more is worry and fear and fuck, but it hurts.

He should have warned Sam about that, about digging in roots so deep that when they’re yanked out you know it’s the beginning of a long, slow death. He should have told Sam don’t get attached, we’re not real, next town and we’ll be forgotten. But instead he smirked and told himself it was just a phase, reveled in the knowledge granted to him by that one word he’d discovered.

Sam doesn’t have transient; he doesn’t have a clear-cut definition of who they are and what he’s supposed to be. Sam is noble and stubborn and all those things that Dean isn’t, and much though Dean wants to help him, he can’t.

So he lets Sam layer his clothes and bitch about the scams, and when Sam cries at night he holds him and soothed his fears with gentle touches and stolen kisses.

The kisses bother Sam too, and when he asks Dean about them Dean just shrugs. It’s the same as everything else is with him. When their lips touch and their hands caress shuddering skin, Sam is the only thing that exists. When they’re apart again, Sam’s his brother and that other love, the one that whispers wrong in the nightmares Dean can’t seem to shake, doesn’t exist. Simple as that.

They are Winchesters, transient as the smoke that had choked Dean that night 22 years ago. Someday Sam’s pain will fade, just like everything else.

Transient

Send me feedback!