Absence.

[quigonejinn]

Sam was twelve, and Dean had made the mistake of impressing his freshman English teacher. The address on the emergency card turned out to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken's where they'd never heard of him, and she had to find out their true address from another teacher -- a double-wide trailer in the middle of nothing.

She drove out after school, with her purse on her shoulder, and a solidly built kid with a vague resemblance to Dean came to the door. He seemed disinclined to tell her anything or, in fact, talk at all. She refused to move.

"They've gone hunting," he said finally. "I don't know when they'll be back. Do you want to come in?"

...

It really was the middle of nowhere. No neighbors. No other buildings. Just rolling grassland, a three minute drive to their mailbox, and a pile of car parts in the front yard The television had rabbit ears; there was a septic tank cover, so they weren't on county lines, and the inside of the house was dark. All the curtains were thick and tightly drawn. She could make out three chairs set before the rabbit-eared televsion, though, and a Corps eagle-and-globe flag on one wall.

Their father, maybe, had been in the the Marines, and the kid -- Sam, he was Dean's younger brother -- took her into the kitchen, where it was much brighter.

"So you're by yourself?" she said, as politely as she could.

He pulled out a chair at the fold-out dining table for her. "I'm used to it," he said, with a angling of his left shoulder that reminded her a bit of Dean. "They make me go with 'em sometimes, but I don't like it."

"You don't like hunting?"

"Not really. Not like they do."

It was months too early for deer season, and the teacher couldn't think of a single other thing, the hunting of which would require pulling your son out of school for two and a half weeks. Maybe that was the explanation for the boxes and boxes of salt she saw on the kitchen walls. Hunting deer out of season and salting or smoking it. Why didn't they just get a freezer?

Sam opened the pantry, showing more boxes of kosher salt, to get plastic cups, and then he poured grape soda for them both. It was, he said, the only drink in the house.

...

"Look, I have to make a confession. I actually came to apologize to your brother. I -- I made a mistake and said some things that I shouldn't have."

"Yeah, he told me." It was difficult to pin down Sam down. The tone of his voice wasn't particularly friendly, but he had invited her to sit down. He wanted to know about her. He was curious about her. She would say something, and it was obvious that Sam was wanted to ask her about it, to know more, but when she stopped to let him ask, he stayed quiet.

"He finally did something for class," Sam added. "And you thought he'd copied it."

She was leaving school. Halfway to the parking lot, it began to pour rain, and after that, her car decided that it wouldn't start. Something was wrong with it; the engine was making strange noises, but there wasn't anyone around to jump the car. She was beginning to despair when Dean drove up -- did they let fourteen year olds drive? -- in a rattly wreck and asked her what was wrong.

Together, they stood around for half an hour in the rain, hooking up cables, and coaxing her battery back to life. It was a strange thing for a fourteen year old boy to be doing; it was particularly strange since it was the same afternoon that she told him to stay after class, then asked if he'd copied his essay. During the whole, strange episode, she had been working up her nerve for when she would have to thank him for his help, but maintain that she couldn't accept work that had been stolen.

"How did he convince you that he didn't copy?"

"The essay he wrote compared what we'd read to some other pieces. So he quoted to me another part of one."

"Let me guess. Beowulf?"

Even with how sorry she was feeling for herself, she was a little surprised that a twelve year old -- even Dean's twelve year old brother -- knew what Beowulf was.

"In the original?"

She nodded again. It had taken her a minute to work out what he had shouted to her over his shoulder: it had been a long time since she learned it in college, and it was a matter of luck that she'd gone above and beyond what the professor assigned. Sam seemed to sympathize because he grinned and reached over to pour her more grape soda because. He had apparently been taught that it was inappropriate to ever let your guest's plastic cup get more than half empty of ridiculously sugary and somewhat flat grape soda.

"My brother likes to show off, Miss Martin. You get used to it."

...

"If you live out here, why don't you go to a closer school district? That way, you could catch the bus, and you wouldn't have to rely on your father or your brother driving you."

They were sitting on the steps of the trailer together, watching the sun go down into the grass. She tried to catch his eye, make him look at her, but he refused. His shoulders were hunched over, and she could tell that, underneath the bulk, he was going to be enormous once his growth spurt hit. "You could go to school even when they weren't around," she added, as kindly as she could, because she had seen the textbooks and homework neatly stacked on the table before he cleared them away.

"Maybe," Sam said,finally. "It's just that -- " He stopped talking.

"Just that?"

"Those are the schools we would've gone to if our mother hadn't died. Our house burned down when me and Dean were little, and she couldn't get out in time."

She had a feeling that her mouth was hanging open.

"Dad didn't start hunting until after that. Dean likes it a lot because it lets him be close to Dad."

There was a long, long period of silence, and she thought about asking if he would like dinner in town. Her treat. The sun was almost gone, and it was starting to get cold on the steps.

Finally, Sam looked up. The sun was pretty much gone, and in the shadows, he actually resembled, a little, his brother. "You look like the pictures of Mom. Dean talks about you a lot. I'll tell him that you came to apologize."

...

Dean never came back from hunting, at least not to school. She even took the step of going to the middle school, asking if Sam Winchester had shown up, and no, neither of them had been in school for months. When she drove out to the trailer, she found that the door was locked and the place abanoned. She went around back, stepping over that strange line of salt that their dad made them to keep around the house at all times. The salt was gone, but the circle of bare ground remained. It was a Native American thing, Sam explained.

The kitchen was empty, too. There was no more Sam, no more soda. No more salt. No more copy of Beowulf on the toaster oven; their father read it to them when they were young, Sam told her, because he was learning it himself. It was their bedtime story, so they had never gotten frightened of it. They would act parts of it in the car, knew parts of it off by heart, even in the original language, and yes. She had to stand on her toes to make sure, but the singed photograph of a blonde woman, which Sam had kept in a place of honor, was quite certainly gone.

...

They bowed grey heads, spoke in their sage, experienced way about the good warrior and how they never again expected to see that prince returning: the wolf of the deep, they said, would have him forever.

In my head, the bit that Dean says in Old English back to the teacher is Beowulf's goodbye to the king when setting off to kill monsters -- it's the last day he's in class, and he's going off, that night, to hunt demons with Daddy. The chunk at the end is a hijacked version of Seamus Heaney's translation of where Beowulf goes off to fight Grendel's mama.

Comments

[randomalia.livejournal.com]

Sorry my reply is so late, I was non-internetable. Re: the fic, I think I've come across some good stuff on those topics, I'll have a look at my links. It's really fascinating I think because it takes a lot of guts for them both to make the choices they made, but in part those choices seems like they're about avoiding other stuff as well, you know? About fear. OR SOMETHING.