coyotesuspect

Title: Flightless Bird
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG 13
Summary: No one ever has to write an essay on Paradise Regained. Three Sam ficlets connected by theme. Pre-series through early S1. Sam/Jess, Sam/Dean.
Word Count: ~1300
Spoilers/Warnings: No specific spoilers. Wincest.
Disclaimer:

Death itself is a music.
-Mary Oliver

He wakes up, sheets sticky, dream still rattling in his head, a girl with soft hands and hair like sunshine, and the alarm clock glows red and mean at him: 3:32. Morning, but just, and he’s awake, cognizant that his sheets are sticky, and he can’t go back to sleep like that. So he drags himself out of bed, and his sheets after him, Dad and Dean still off somewhere, killing something and him with a test tomorrow that he couldn’t miss, that he had to study for. Holy hell of a fight because of it. Tight jawed Dean and their dark eyed father and the whole of Sam incandescent like a firework, like a paper set to flame, trembling in his rage.

Sheets are in the washer and there’s nothing in the house to eat. Sam’s hungry. Teenage boy hungry, his stomach hollowing itself out, and he opens cupboard after cupboard after cupboard until he finds two boxes of Girl Scout cookies, Thin Mints, and he thinks, ‘Huh, Dean wasn’t kidding,’ when his brother left during the argument and came back two hours later, shouted through Sam’s door, “I bought you Girl Scout cookies because you’re such a girl.”

He pulls out a sleeve of Thin Mints, cool dark circles of chocolate and mint, and eats them at the kitchen table. The light’s yellow overhead and moths flutter at the window, attracted to the light, and his book is open in front of him. Paradise Lost, and why did he take AP Lit in the first place? The teacher’s crazy and he’s finished the damn book but there’s that damn in class essay tomorrow, and he flips through Milton looking for quotes to press into his brain and wondering vaguely about the sequel. The way everyone talks about Paradise Lost; no one ever realizes there’s a Paradise Regained, and the moths still beating at the window to get in, trying to beat their way into the light.

*&*&*

He’s hanging awkwardly around the edges of a kegger, a year into this and still too damn unsure, red, plastic cup of Heineken gone lukewarm in his grip, doesn’t like the bitter piss taste of it anyway, and he’s pretty sure he’s gonna give up to his roommate’s disdain and go conjugate German verbs until he falls asleep with er fiel du fielst ich fiel wir fielen booming through his brain. Except then she’s there, long fall of yellow hair and her chest pushed out like the prow of a ship, tight beneath her faux-old Led Zeppelin shirt. She’s not the kind of girl Sam usually stares after- he likes brunettes, slender girls with dark eyes and small breasts- but she grabs his lukewarm Heineken and downs it, then smiles up at him (but not very far because she’s tall for a girl) and purrs, “Howdy stranger, I’m Jess.” He thinks dizzily that if he kissed her then she’d taste like Heineken and it wouldn’t be so bad.

Milk and honey, he keeps thinking as they talk, and they’ve hit it off immediately and maybe it’s the drink (he hasn’t drank much) and maybe it’s the music (he’s mostly tuned it out), but he’s pretty sure he’s leaving with her tonight. Er fiel du fielst ich fiel wir fielen. Milk and honey. The Israelites spent 40 years in the desert and then it was the land of milk and honey.

He knows her type: California retro-hip with flat top converses and 70’s throwback T-shirts, ironic nostalgia. Back in her dorm, her Led Zeppelin shirt’s crumpled black on the ground, and there’s a neat stack of books on her desk. She reads Wolfe and Hunter S. and Vonnegut, same kind of books his brother used to throw at his head with a Here geekboy, got you a present, and he tells her that with her lipstick smeared on his face, their pants unzipped and their bodies arching like parentheses. It’s a sudden, brutal point of realization, of real nostalgia, except all nostalgia’s fake and she laughs at him with her small, white animal teeth, too cynical to be naïve, too idealistic not to want to be.

“Do you believe in God?” he asks her the next morning and the sheets are sticky and she answers, “No, but I want to,” as if faith had anything to do with desire, as if it were a why and not a because. But her hair!- you gotta understand- her hair was like sunshine. Sunshine. It was like, it was like… It was like milk and honey. The land of sunshine and honey, the land of honey and milk, the land of milk and sunshine.

*&*&*

It must be the collision that wakes him up, the actual jolt and judder of it, the bump and squeal and the hard-soft sound of the body hitting the car and Dean’s harsh, sudden cursing, swerving to the side of the road somewhere in the middle of Sam doesn’t know where, the moon that awkward, oddly deflated shape somewhere between half and full that poets never write about and Sam’s mouth dry as summer, dry as the grave as he asks, “What’s going on?”

“Go back to sleep,” orders Dean, and Sam doesn’t. He follows Dean out of the car.

There’s a fox. They hit a fox. Dean hit a fox.

“Ran into the middle of the road,” says Dean sharply, “couldn’t brake in time,” angry like it’s the fox’s fault (and it is and it isn’t, but it certainly isn’t Dean’s), but Sam knows really angry at himself. Dean loves animals, animals and children. Big wounded animal of a man himself, same look in his eyes, and a bundle of twitching neuroses and half-aborted impulses.

But the fox. The fox’s not dead. Not yet, at least. It’s in the middle of the road, slick-shimmer black of its blood gleaming in the dimlight and it’s keening. Harsh, high, wretched noises, onandonandonandonandon. Eeeeeeee and eeeeee and eeeeeeeee, and Dean reaches into the trunk for a shotgun, for a mercy killing, and he pulls the gun out with his jaw set tighter and tighter, tin-soldier tight.

Sam’s brother is going to kill the fox. Sam’s brother who he just wants to throw all his anger and fear and bewilderment at, his hatred of this life and the sick long burning pull in his gut that’s his need for revenge and his dreams of fire. Just take it all and shove it at Dean with This, this is why I can’t talk to you. Sam’s brother with his wide, strong hands horned with calluses that catch on Sam’s skin in the night, the slip and slick and rough and sigh of those nights, arching and the breath soft-soft, quick-quick, Dean leaning forward and biting his name off Sam’s mouth. The night has teeth, and that’s one more thing they never talk about.

Sam’s brother with his shotgun, about to kill the fox on the empty stretch of highway, bleak and merciful the way angels are supposed to be, the oblong moon lighting the whole tableau up in grayscale, and Sam says, “I’ll do it,” and he takes the gun.

The fox shuts up then like it knows, and Sam looks at it looking at him, its eyes yellowed and damning, and he thinks, 'I’m sorry, but that’s just how it fucking is.' The bitter gall and unfairness of it all, and you deal and you hope with every insignificant atom of your being that God- his god, the one he believes in- watches over His imperfect creations and gets it, that even though He’s not benevolent, He’s merciful. And the fox just looks back at him like it knows, not that it’s gonna die, but like it knows the all of it and the whole of it, thisclose to death and it’s blood leaking and leaking and Sam and Sam and Sam and Sam-

He shoots the fox in the head.

End.

AN: Wrote this at a Jamba Juice in LA while waiting for my friend to get off work. Paradise Regained is, of course, the sequel (more or less) to Paradise Lost and widely considered inferior. I’ve read Paradise Lost (which is ostensibly about Adam and Eve's banishment from the Garden of Eden, but is really about Satan being a complete badass). But I have not read Paradise Regained. According to the wikipedia article, Paradise Regained is about Jesus resisting the devil’s temptation while wandering through the wilderness for forty days. (Not to be confused with the Israelites wandering through the desert for forty years after escaping from their slavery to the Egyptians.) The German verb Sam is conjugating is “fell.” I used German because I took German in high school, but I still had to use an online translator. Considering I graduated in May, I’m not sure if that’s a sad commentary about me, my teacher, or public schools in general. Title of the story is from the Iron & Wine song “Flightless Bird, American Mouth.” Opening quote is from the poem “Straight Talk from Fox” by Mary Oliver, which ~~I will probably post on Tuesday~~ is posted here, and which is weirdly similar to this story considering I wrote this a couple hours before reading the poem.

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