Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.” -Jack Kerouac, On The Road. 





There was a girl in Walla Walla, Washington when Sam was fifteen named Sandra LaCoe. For reasons Sam didn't understand until much, much later, everyone, even the teachers, called her Candy. As far as Sam could ever tell Sandra never asked anyone to call her Candy; she never asked anyone to stop calling her Candy either, he supposed. He just never liked the way she winced when people shouted 'Hey, Candy!' in the hall or 'Candy, can you help me with this?', 'Did you hear about Josh Falco, Candy?' like it was her real name.

The only time that she ever outright glared at someone for calling her 'Candy' was when someone slipped and called her 'Candy Sandy'. Her upper lip would curl, painted bright red with lipstick, and her bright green eyes would narrow, framed by thick smudges of eyeshadow, and she would spit out a well-timed and beautifully delivered, "Fuck you," before sweeping away in a swirl of dark, baggy clothes and curly hair such a deep dark red in some lights it looked nearly purple and in others her skull looked like it was aflame.

Candy Sandy.

Sam didn't understand. This was a tight community. The high school held two thousand students who had known each other since they were in diapers and Sam was just an intruder. An outsider, some foreign object inserted into the student body like a parasite that the masses attempted to accept, but he was just too alien to ever be able to understand why it was customary to write your name upside down on the brick wall outside of school if you were a senior or order a chocolate milkshake as a 'brown cow' at the local diner.

He never did get to find those things out. It ate at him that he'd never be a part of a community in that way. He did get to find out why they called Sandra 'Candy', though.

Afterwards he wished he hadn't, and maybe that's ironic.

Maybe he should have just ignored the sound of retching from the back stall. Maybe he shouldn't have called out a tentative, "Hello?" while stalking back into the dirty boys’ bathroom on the second floor, abandoned in the middle of fourth period. Maybe he shouldn't have done a lot of things that he did do, but there wasn't any taking it back now.

Black sneakers and black jeans were visible kneeling on the small square tiles of the grubby floor, knees splayed open to wedge the toilet as deep into the 'v' of thighs as it would go. Another loud, coughing gag echoed out from the stall and Sam watched the toes of those black sneaker dig into the grout and Sam could imagine a spine arching and shoulders heaving under the force of those vicious dry sobs.

"Are you okay?" Sam asked into the open air outside of the bland blue bathroom door. "Should I go get anyone?"

The retching tapered off into coughing and Sam shifted on his feet awkwardly, not sure whether he was obligated to see it through or if he should walk away, leave the kid to his own devices.

A harsh sniff and a few more flighty hacks came before the sneakers straightened out, knees popping and back cracking as Bathroom Hacker straightened out, took a few moments before flushing the toilet and scratching at the lock on the stall door before fumbling it open.

The door swung outwards quickly and Sam had to duck a shoulder to avoid it before he looked up right into the big glossy green eyes and pale, sweaty face of Sandra LaCoe.

"Hey, Sam," Sandra smiled and wiped her mouth.

"I-," Sam's eyebrows scrunched together, mouth pulling down at the corners. He had a lot of questions, like if she was okay or why she was throwing up or if she needed help with anything but the first stupid thing that came out of his mouth was, "This is the boy's bathroom."

"I know," she smiled, a little stiff around the edges where her lipstick was pale and smudged, as she breezed past him and towards the sinks. She rolled up the sleeves of her thick woolen sweater up once, twice, three times before her hands were fully exposed and Sam realized for the first time that Sandra was small. Scary small. Hands-like-little-pale-spiders-they're-so-thin small. "There was somebody in the girls’ bathroom," she excused, and Sam watched the bones in her hand work and glide mechanically under thin, pale skin as she turned a faucet, prompting a rattle and rasp of cold, slightly murky water to burst forth too strong and then, after a few moments of initial blast, too weak.

"Okay," Sam said, because he didn't know how else to respond. Sandra watched him in the mirror over her shoulder as she cupped water in her hands and rinsed out her mouth. "Can I get you anything?" He swallowed reflexively, uncomfortable being tracked in the mirror. "The nurse?"

"No," she answered simply, then tossed her fiery red hair over her shoulder and started to dig into the pocket of her jeans, which hung loose around her hips.

"Okay," Sam mumbled again, leaning back into the wall on his shoulders.

"You gonna watch me put on my make-up?" she asked, a smirk playing at the corners of her mouth as she turned out a silver tube of lipstick from her pocket.

Sam flushed slightly.

"Hm," she hummed, making a face in the mirror with her lips pulled tight over her teeth as she uncapped the tube, rolled out the lipstick and smeared it on thick. The bright red was a neon sign, distracting from the sharp lines of her cheekbones and the defined hinge of her jaw. She popped her lips in the mirror, eyes skipping back to Sam. "You can just ask, you know."

"Ask what?" Sam scuffed the bottom of his ratty old Chucks against the floor; ground his toe into the dirty grout.

"What you're dying to ask." Sandra ran the pad of her ring finger around her lips, scraping up the wayward red. "Did I make myself hack?"  She turned on him, eyes in full force.

Sam gnawed on his lower lip. He didn't know anything about this. It had come up in a few Health classes across the nation, sure, but Sam had never known anyone that it would actually apply to. Eating disorders were a vague concept to Sam, something that happened to Other People and he wasn't equipped in any way to deal with it outside of some stupid base need to help buried deep within him. He wanted to chase the monsters away, he wanted to understand. So he asked, "Did you?"

Sandra's smile was slick and smooth as it coiled across her painted lips, something smug in her demeanor as she leaned back against the sink on her palms and kicked one foot up to cross her legs at the ankle.  "Yep."

"Oh." Sam rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. "...Why?"

She inhaled a short, sharp breath. Instead of answering she just said, "You never call me Candy."

Sam blinked. "It's not your name."

"No." Her spindly fingers played at the hem of her sweater. "No it's not." For a moment, a flash second in time, there was a lightning strike of vulnerability in her eyes.  "I was a chubby kid, Sam. I had these cheeks," she leaned up off her hands to pantomime a fat face, blowing out her cheeks to help Sam visualize, "It was awful. But, y'know, I just loved candy. I had a bag of it everywhere I went, because that's what fat kids do. I was maybe seven when people stopped calling me Candy as a joke and it just sorta became my name. Which was okay, I didn't mind. It was funny, it was cute. Candy. How… me." She snorted, a self-disgusted sound that Sam felt in his bones. "It wasn't until I was ten that they started to get mean. Candy Sandy, Candy Sandy. God, I was just... disgusting. There wasn't a single good thing about me, okay? Nothing was ever good until I started losing weight. I'm still Candy, I'm always Candy, because it doesn't go away, but..." she groped for something, lips twitching as she hunted for a word. "I'm better, but I'm not good. I'm not perfect. God, I'm so close to being Sandy -I'm so close!” She jerked up her sweater suddenly over her stomach and Sam had to close his eyes.

Sandra pleaded with her body, taking a step forward towards him, sweater still held up to expose the pale lines of her stomach, the knobby protrusions of her hips, the grooves of her ribs and Sam stepped back into the wall in retreat, eyes going wide. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand at all. “You see Sandy, right, Sam?"

He couldn't fathom how anyone could do that to their own body.

He'd told Sandra that it wasn't healthy, that she should see someone, that she was beautiful.

That was two towns, six months, seven nights Dean told him not to wait up as he slipped out to a bar, and four screaming matches with his father ago and Sam can't stop thinking about it.

Standing shirtless in front of the full length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, Sam can't stop thinking about how tiny and pale and knobby Sandra had been. It's possessing him, he thinks as he twists and turns in the mirror, watches the play of muscle under his skin and the layer of fat in between. She was so small and Sam can't stop imagining the canyon between her ribs.

"Sam!" Dean shouts and the mirror rattles when he pounds against the door.

Sam jumps and scrambles to cover himself, despite the fact that the door is locked and bolted. "Yeah?" he asks airily as he jerks his hand-me-down AC/DC t-shirt over his head. "What?"

"Do you want to hurry the hell up?" Dean snaps. "I've gotta piss like a racehorse! What are you even doing?"

Sam catches his own eye in the mirror. “Nothing. I'll be right out."

"Yeah, okay, whatever." Sam can almost hear him roll his eyes. "Dad's bringing home dinner."

Sam frowns. "I'm not hungry."

"Yeah, okay, whatever!" Dean repeats, a note of urgency infringing on his tone. "Get out of the damn bathroom, Sam! You can jerk it later!"

Sam scrambles out of the bathroom, vehemently denying doing anything of the sort as Dean shouts "Yeah, yeah, yeah," and slams the bathroom door shut behind him.

He stands alone in the hall of the two room apartment his father had scrounged up for them in Norfolk, Virginia Sam feels like the entire world has taken one huge step to the left and forgot to tell him to step with it. It smells damp, like there had been a leak at some point that had been fixed but never truly mended, moisture still seated deep in the wood under the grey paint of the walls, rotting slowly from the inside out.

Sam thinks that he should go clear the table for dinner or unpack his and Dean's things or clean a gun or sharpen a knife or something, but he realizes something. He doesn't want to.

He doesn't want to go down the hall and clean up, he doesn't want to go lie down, he doesn't want to keep standing there in the middle of the hallway, he doesn't want to eat.

He scratches at his palms irritably, twitchy with images of pale skeletons dancing through his head.

He’s still there, shifting on his feet and thinking about the weight of his skin hanging on to his body when Dean shoulders his way out of the bathroom, toilet running and sink dripping behind him.

The thing about Dean is, he’s Dean. Sam’s been painfully aware of that since Dean hit sixteen and every half-attractive thing in a skirt along the way, leaving Sam behind at twelve years old with a face too round and fists too chubby to even compete with all those lithe, pretty girls for his brother’s attention.

“What’s up, kiddo?” Dean threads his fingers into Sam’s hair and scrambles it up on his way past.

Sam trails after him because he doesn’t know what else to do. “Hey, Dean?”

“Hm?” Dean hums as he shuffles the only three plates they have to the Winchester name, and that’s only because Dean dug through some boxes he found in the closet and thought it would be pretty neat if they could eat off of some real plates every once in a while.

“Do you ever feel...” Sam starts to ask before he realizes what a stupid question he’s about to blurt out.

Of course Dean’s never felt like... this. Whatever ‘this’ is.

Dean’s strong and smart and sure. Dean can take whatever life or school or their father dishes out. Dean can hit the wall and bounce back, elastic, ready to grab and growl. Dean looks at himself in the mirror, shoots himself a wink and walks out the door. He doesn’t linger. He doesn’t inspect or scrutinize.

Dean doesn’t wake up every morning feeling like he’s falling down a dark tunnel and there’s nothing to grab on to arrest the descent, nothing to scrabble to for purchase, nothing to support.

“Sam?” Dean asks, and Sam must have some stupid look on his face if Dean’s already pulling out the ‘concerned about Sammy’ eyebrows.

“Nothing, it’s nothing,” Sam mutters. “Never mind.”

Dean stares at him for a few moments longer, arm half out, extended to put down a plate at the far end of the table but never really getting to unclasping his fingers. Sam thinks for one crazy second he’s suspended Dean in the moment, but he shakes his head because that’s dumb. The only people who suspend Dean in anything are about half a foot shorter than Sam, fifty pounds lighter, and have breasts.

“I’m gonna go for a jog,” Sam mumbles finally.

Dean lets the plate go and it thuds to the wood table resolutely. “Okay...” he drawls. “Be back before dinner.”

Sam pretends he didn’t hear him as he slips down the hall and pulls on his running shoes.

His feet pound against the earth, eating up pavement with the rhythmic slapping of the rubbery soles of his sneakers against the wet road. The air is thick with humidity, but Sam keeps sucking it down and pushing himself deeper into the world. Sweat plasters his hair to the back of his neck, his shirt to his torso.

He runs until his eyes go bleary with exhaustion and he’s more pawing at the air for momentum to keep going forward than anything else.  His mind trips and fumbles around vague concepts and half-formed ideas and images of Dean and Dean with Layla Braun in Kentucky and Dean smiling and Dean-

Sam coughs up stomach acid on the side of the road, doubling over and gagging as it stings his throat, up in his sinuses. He tries to breathe through it, pull down adequate gulps of air in between coughing fits while swiping at the salty sweat stinging his eyes, but he ends up only redirecting the burn into his already straining lungs.

He goes to his knees, coughing and gagging into the dirt, skinning his shins on gravel.

It’s not the first time he’s run himself past exhaustion and into purging.

It is the first time that, after the fits settle and the tremors smooth, after he sits up and wipes the tears from his eyes and gasps for air like he’s just broke water that he doesn’t feel worse than when he started.

In fact, as he takes a deep breath down his raw, savaged throat, and he kneads at a cramp in his side, he feels pretty good about life. He bares his teeth around deep, ugly gasp of air that burns all the way down in a way that might constitute as a smile under the proper circumstances. He puffs out an airy little laugh that sounds like rusty metal because this is, for once, the proper circumstances.

He blinks through the sweat and looks around the muggy side-road with the tall grass sweeping waves in the wind, listens to some bird off in the distance that chickadee-dee-dees and the most amazing thing about this shitty road with the washed-out potholes in the middle of nowhere is that Sam put himself there.

He doesn’t know where he is but he brought himself here, under his own control. No car, no Dad, no monster looming in the fringes of shadows ready to tear everything Sam loves away from him.

He coughs again into the dirt, rocks rolling and cutting up his knees.

Places like this exist.

Sam licks at his lips and wonders how long, exactly, he could get away with staying here. How long until Dean comes looking for him?

He doesn’t risk more than enough time to catch his breath before he’s limping back to the apartment around the knot in his side. He slips through the parking lot, past the Impala that’s long past idled, and tries to sneak into the apartment unnoticed.

Which just figures that Dean’s basically looming over the door, waiting for him.

“Hey, Sam.” He pounces and Sam jumps, though, really, he should have figured Dean would have been waiting for him.  “I kept you some pizza.”

“It’s okay,” Sam presses himself back against the wall and edges past Dean through the narrow hall, so close he can smell Dean’s aftershave and see a shiny smear of pizza grease down his chin. “I told you, I’m not hungry.” He curls his upper lip under his teeth like it’ll mask the smell on his breath.

Dean stares him up and down and all around, eyeing the sweaty hair plastered to his forehead and the damp t-shirt clinging to his neck, under his arms. Sam doesn’t know what Dean’s looking for or what Dean sees when he looks at him. Hell, Sam doesn’t even know what Sam sees when he looks at himself.

Dean opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, tongue poised and lips formed in the beginnings of a question, but he cuts himself off, clears his throat, jerks his chin in the direction of the bathroom in a silent order for Sam to take a shower, and then walks away with his heavy boots pounding the uneven hardwood flooring.

Sam lets out a breath.

The shower isn’t as relaxing as Sam wants it to be. His muscles are cramping and his stomach, newly emptied and currently settled, is demanding food.

Sam presses his hand against the cold tile until his knuckles cramp.

Shut up, he thinks at his stomach. Who asked you?

-

Their father had taken them to a river baptism once, when Sam was younger. He had been looking for someone standing in the line down the river bank and had thought that it wasn’t too dangerous or too long of a stop to justify not bringing them along.

Sam remembers sitting in the back seat, leaning out of the open window with Dean crushing down on him to see the preacher man standing in the shallow waters with his arms held out wide like absolution.

John leaned against the car door next to them, reached out to squeeze a broad, warm hand on the back of Sam’s neck before peeling away to prowl the crowds.

A woman in a white dress had waded into the water, long hair that reached down to her waist hitting the surface and swirling around her as she moved through the water with intent and grace into the preacher man’s arms.

He’d spoken, words only for her. She nodded, frantic, trusting. His hand curled around her shoulder and she leaned back into his arm.

He supported her backwards, submerged her completely and Sam leaned so far out of the window Dean had to grab his collar to keep him from falling out.

She looked like an angel, separated from reality by a thin, moving veil of clear, clean water.

She came up gasping and Sam understood with an acute clarity that this breath was her first.

The river washed her clean.

He always thinks about that when he drinks.

Water bottles are Sam’s new best friend. They fill up the empty spots inside of him with cool and clean and Sam refills the one heavy-duty aluminum bottle his father got him -no need to be buying plastic ones and if you refill the same one too many times it starts to grow bacteria and you’ll get sick, son- four or five times a day.

It’s a game. It’s all a big game, and it’s the greatest game Sam’s ever played. He’d drink the whole river if he could.

He can’t stomach juices or sodas anymore. They’re too thick, too sugary, make him feel like his insides are gummed up. Dean even tried to slip him a beer a couple weeks back and Sam thinks that if he were still twelve or thirteen or fourteen, he would have pounced on that beer and tried to match Dean drag for drag just to prove he could keep up with his big brother.

He’d taken a sip, but it was too bitter and too thin and it wasn’t water.

Dean had given him a strong side-eye for the next week. Sam had been sure to eat a whole three quarters of a sandwich in front of him, before his stomach started cramping and he felt nauseated, begging out on a run and jogging until his bones trembled and the sandwich made an encore appearance.

He controls what goes into his body. In his whole life of endless highways and people he never got to know, Sam has five bottles of water, a granola bar, and two apples a day. He knows that.

Food and water are the only things that he’s sure about.

He thought it’d be harder to hide on the road when they skip town from Norfolk to Little Rock, to a string of motels, down to Arizona, with his father and his brother right on top of him at all time, but it really isn’t. In restaurants Dad’s got his nose buried in his journal and Dean’s sitting next to Sam eating half of his food and chatting up their waitresses when he can.

Sam works out a system. A strategy.

He feels giddy with it every time he slips back into the car with three bites in him and no one’s noticed. Giddy and horrifically empty.

It’s a game. It’s all a big game.

-

There’s a girl. For Dean there’s always a girl, but this one’s name is Grace and she’s just that. She used to be one of the captains of the dance team in high school and can still do high kicks and drop into a split at a moment’s notice because she keeps herself in shape. She and Dean aren’t ‘dating’, per say, because Dean doesn’t date. If he did, they would be.

Sam gets it, he really does.

She’s got this long, elegant neck that Dean likes to mark up and when she moves she looks like she’s dancing. Her fingers are long and they look longer when she’s got them carding through Dean’s hair to tug him into a sweet goodbye kiss before she walks out the door, passing Sam with his backpack digging into his shoulders on her way out.

Sam thinks she might smile at him when she passes him by, but he’s always staring at how her thighs work in parallel lines and don’t touch.

Her hips sway to some symphony Sam can’t hear when she slips out of the bedroom that he and Dean share, and her thighs just don’t even touch.

“Bye, Sammy,” she breezes past him out the door.

Sam is pretty sure that they’ve never exchanged more than three sentences and knows that Dean’s infected her with the name rather than her earning the right independently to call him Sammy.

If he could ever bring himself to look her in the face he thinks he’d tell her off for it.

“Heyya, Sam.” Dean ambles out after Grace, all loose limbs and easy angles.

Sam jerks his chin in a nod and doesn’t meet his brother’s eyes as he slides into the living room to start his homework on the coffee table. He honestly doesn’t expect Dean to trail after him, hounding his steps.

“What’s up?” Sam finally relents as he sloughs his backpack off and collapses back into the shot springs of the purple corduroy couch that was probably a lot cuter in the sixties.

Dean rubs at the back of his neck and leans one shoulder into the entrance to the living room, letting the wall take his weight. “So, I was gonna take Gracie to dinner tonight? Do you think you could handle food yourself?”

The laughter bubbles up Sam’s throat and he drowns it with a big gulp of water from the titanium bottle that he can feel cold all the way down his throat and into his empty stomach. “Yeah, no problem. You and Grace have fun.”

Dean watches him silently as he opens his backpack and wrestles his Algebra textbook out.

“I mean,” Dean starts again and Sam glances up to catch the tail end of Dean’s desperate expression. “Are you sure? I can always cancel and we can hang out here. Watch some movies and eat some popcorn with M&Ms and shit in it, like you like it? We haven’t done that in a while.”

For a moment Sam tries to imagine his fingers dripping with artificial butter, wrapped around a fistful of popped kernels smeared in melted chocolate and smudged reds and blues of candy coat, tries to imagine putting that on his tongue or in his body and his throat constricts rhythmically in stifled gags. “No way, man. Don’t worry about it. I’ll run down to the diner and grab a salad or something; I’m not even that hungry.”

Dean chews at the inside of his lip and looks like he wants to say something more, but he peels away from the wall and retreats back into the bedroom to open the windows and air out the smell.

Sam crouches over the coffee table and sets up his notebook and his text book in front of him; his water bottle sits on the corner of the table arranges the game. Every five equations he takes a drink and every time he turns a page he’s allowed three of the oats from the granola bar he crushed up inside of the wrapper. He chews contentedly as he works. He doesn’t really notice Dean watching him until there’s a knocking at the back door that startles both of them.

Dean lurches up from his seat in the kitchen on reflex, chair positioned so that he has a clear view of the couch and Sam, in some reaction to a person being at the door or Dean getting up, jerks standing upright.

Everything empties out of his head, leaving a hollow pumpkin skull. It feels like all of the blood in his body decided to stay sitting, world swirling, vision blurring. He can feel the bottom of his feet, his weight on them shifting as he sways, and he can feel his knees, throbbing and buckling, but everything else is a vague outline of himself.

Suddenly he’s a stick figure in the middle of the room, sweating and gasping for air with the exertion of standing upright.

“Sam?”

Firm hands find his shoulders and Sam’s shaking his head already, pushing him away because everything’s fine, he just stood up too quickly is all.

“Sorry,” Sam mutters, lips smearing into something and as his blood pressure and circulation adjusts he realizes he’s on the floor, on his knees, held up by Dean’s hands under his arm and at the small of his back, face pressed into his brother’s shoulder. “Head rush,” he slurs.

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” Dean chants with a tremor running through his chest, not letting go. They’re sitting closer than any two brothers should be.

Sam rolls his head on his brother’s shoulder, still lolling and loose from the close brush with blacking out and plowing face first into the coffee table and he sees Grace standing in the doorway, long fingers drawn up to her mouth as her lovely face contorts in concern.

She’s beautiful, Sam realizes as he pants wetly into his brother’s neck. She’s got these high cheekbones and this thin face and Sam stares at the gap between her thighs and thinks that Dean deserves someone like her.

-

It’s not a problem until it’s a problem.

The track is clay dirt that’s baked orange in the intense Arizona sun and Sam’s school gym uniform is clinging to his sweaty chest, the insides of his thighs.

His head hurts like he’s floating down into an underwater trench and all of that black and all of that pressure is pressing in on him, compacting. It throbs with a drum beat and Sam has to stumble to the side of the track on jerky legs, muscles that keep jumping and bunching when he’s not telling them to, to sit down in the grass.

He squints in the intense sunshine and can’t remember where he is, who the people running in circles in the hazy heat waves are.

“Hey?” Sam turns, sluggish and vision blurring with pain, towards a girl with a high ponytail and a concerned look on her face. “Are you alright?”

Sam opens his mouth to respond but the only thing that comes out is bile before he collapses back into the grass, unconscious.

-

The world comes back as noise first.

Muttered voices like, “No, our dad’s not in town right now. I called him but he isn’t going to be back soon enough for Sam. Can’t you just give him to me?”

“I’m afraid our policy is-”

“I don’t give a shit about your policy. Let me take him home so I can take care of him. Get some fluids in him, let him rest up.”

“Mr. Winchester, Sam’s situation is a bit more complicated than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dean, what’s your home life like?”

“Excuse me?”

“The situation at home. What’s it like?”

“Fine, thanks. Dad travels a lot on business, but Sam and I do fine.”

“Are you aware that Sam weighs a hundred and twelve pounds?”

Sam’s first thought is what an ugly number one hundred twelve is.

“T-The kid just went through a growth spurt. He passed out because he’s dehydrated and those assclowns had him running outside when it was ninety-eight outside!”

Ninety-eight is a nice number.

“I don’t give a damn what you have to say; as soon as my brother wakes up I’m taking him home. I’d like to see you try and stop me.”

-

Dean herds Sam into the rental with a firm hand on his shoulder, fingers digging in like he thinks that if he doesn’t sink in then Sam is going to drift away.

Sam’s not sure he wouldn’t.

His head still hurts, but he feels less like he’s going to split open down the center of his forehead. He feels fluffy on the inside, like he’s full of cotton candy and the thought makes him want to claw himself open and tear it all out.

He stumbles at the entrance to the bedroom, has to lean back into Dean just to keep upright and Dean wraps an arm around his waist, whispering, “You’re okay, you’re okay,” behind his ear until he can jamble the rest of the way to the bed.

Dean’s forearm makes it from hip to hip with room to spare and when Sam collapses onto the shoddy mattress he doesn’t let go.

Sam’s not one of those waitresses with hips that rock like the ocean when they walk, or one of the women who work in or loiter around those bars Dean frequents who know exactly what they’ve got and exactly how to use it.

Sam’s not the shape he should be to be allowed to be tucked into Dean’s chest for the night, but he’s just too tired to put distance between them right now.

With his head pillowed on Dean’s bicep and hair falling across his eyes Sam starts to drift off.

He feels phantom fingertips tracing his ribs as he slips away from consciousness, hears Dean’s voice choked and muffled, whispering, “Sammy, why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

-

The library is only a little bit out of the way from the apartment. Everything in Arizona is flat and packed close together, so even though it’s halfway across town it would have been a ten minute walk if Sam hadn’t had to keep stopping to cool down in the shade every time his head started to throb.

Dean had left for work bussing tables early after Sam had assured him several times over that a little more cash never hurt anyone, he was planning on sleeping all day anyway, and no, he didn’t need someone to come watch him while Dean was working.

Dean had shuffled out the door slowly, probably waiting for Sam to change his mind and demand Dean stay in bed with him all day like he used to back when he believed that if he was feeling something then Dean, as an extension of himself, must be feeling it too.

He’d waited ten whole minutes to get up and pull on some jeans after Dean shut the door behind a, “I’ll check up on you on my break,” in case Dean changed his mind and doubled back, punching a new hole in the leather of his belt to keep them up around his hips. The collar of his shirt hung low on his collarbones in a way he doesn’t remember it doing for Dean when it used to belong to him.

He slings his backpack over his shoulder and hauls out to the library.

Sam’s not stupid. He knows that there’s something not right about him or how he’s dropped enough weight in the past few months to make his blood pressure a joke.

He gets to the library, slips the plump elderly woman sitting behind the desk a smile before making a bee-line towards the row of clunky PCs lining the back wall.

He’s not actually sure what to search first, so just types in ‘dizziness blacking out vomiting’ and gets back articles about low blood pressure and arrhythmia.

Sam huffs a sigh and tries to narrow it down.

Dizziness, blacking out, vomiting, water.

Results include tips on not throwing up while exercising and Sam scoffs and rolls his eyes. Lower down on the page is an article about aneurisms that scares him petrified for three straight minutes until he figures that he’s not old enough, not alcoholic enough, and doesn’t smoke enough cigarettes for an aneurism to be at the top of his list.

Dizziness, blacking out, vomiting, excessive water, diet.

He hesitates over the word ‘diet’, not liking the shape of the word, but hits the blocky search button anyway.

He scrolls through pages unsatisfied for a quarter of an hour, mood growing darker with each page he sorts through until he stumbles across ‘water intoxication.’

Sam rips through the article and then the article’s online sources so quickly his head spins, which makes sense because he’s reading about electrolyte imbalances due to too much water and too little everything else.

The words ‘potentially fatal’ stick out and Sam sits back and laughs because what if he’s been poisoning himself with water? The laugh turns bitter and the woman at the front desk shoots him a concerned look.

Of fucking course he would poison himself with water, why not? He over-hydrated. Who does that? What kind of fucking idiot drinks too much water? So much water that they fuck up their brain. He could have killed himself, without even knowing. He could have had a seizure, passed out and fallen, broken his neck. He could have done it in front of Dean.

He reaches for his water bottle for comfort but jerks himself away, careening closer to hysteria with every labored breath he pulls in, making himself dizzy. He needs… he needs something, he doesn’t know.

Sam stands up swiftly, only stumbling slightly, and staggers to the vending machine he passed on his way in. He sits back down with a package of Skittles that he doesn’t really want and the urge to reach for his water bottle that he heroically resists.

He tears open the package and Skittles go sprawling everywhere, clattering against the desk and bouncing against the ground and Sam picks them up and adds them back into the pile. Like he cares; he’s not going to eat them.

He sorts them out by color first and then by perfection of the printed ‘s’ in the center, by shape determined by denting caused by the machinery, where the dents are in relation to that ‘s’, and then lines them up in rainbow order down the desk. The idea that they’re there, under his hands and smearing dyes all over his fingers as he handles them is intoxicating. He could lick the flavor off, pop one in his mouth and crunch down on it to feel the tangy sweet explode across his tongue, but he doesn’t, and the fact that he resists makes him feel even better than eating one could have.

By the time he’s finished his hands have stopped shaking. He reminds himself that he’s not a doctor. He reminds himself that he’s overreacting.

Breathing for a moment, Sam turns back to the computer.

He gets to ‘eati’ before he deletes it all and has to start over, and then gets all the way to ‘eating dis’ before backspacing and re-arranging the Skittles in a line of alternating colors.

Eating disorders.

He closes his eyes and hits search.

The first site is too bright with too many advertisements crowding the sidebar and Sam backs up quickly, put off. The second is too bland, why would he want to read a bland article?

By the sixth website he deems unworthy he acknowledges that he’s procrastinating.

The seventh website has everything.

Sam reads through with a sense of detachment, leaning his full weight against the back of the chair and absorbing the definitions and conditions like he’s doing research for a hunt.

He’s not concerned with his body weight that much, he doesn’t restrict his eating. He’s just not hungry. He doesn’t revolve around his body image.

“Christ, this is stupid,” he mutters under his breath and clicks to the next page just to really assure himself that this isn’t his problem so that he can go home and crawl in bed with the lights off and wait for Dean to come home to see if he can coerce him into making him soup that’s mostly broth.

Only there’s a picture on the next page and Sam’s heart stops dead in his chest.

She’s thin.

Of course she’s thin; she’s being used as an example of a body affected by anorexia.

But she’s so thin.

Her stomach is concave, dipping up underneath her ribs. A flimsy white bra hangs loosely over her chest. Her collar bones stand out like they’re being pushed through her skin. The other side of the figure is her from the back and her backbone looks like someone could play the xylophone on it.

Sam’s eyes track all over her body so quickly he feels dizzy again, like there’s not enough air in his body because this picture’s taking up so much room inside of him.

He sees Sandra in that picture.

He sees himself.

He knocks over the chair, scattering Skittles all over the floor when he sprints out of the library.

-

The burger glistens with juices that seep down into the thin bun and make it soggy. The pickles are peeking over the side to say hi, ridges coated in smears and swirls of ketchup and mustard that’s smudged all over the inside of the wrapper. The onions flop over the edge or the meat, either too large or too slippery to stay smashed between the bread and the patty. The French fries smell like salt and hot oil still. The outside of the cup is sticky from where Sam’s trembling hands had fumbled the soda when he first ordered ‘to go’.

The entire meal is laid out in front of him like sacrifice on the kitchen table and the smell alone makes him want to go take a shower and wash himself clean.

Afternoon sunlight slants right through the venetian blinds and Sam peels the bun off the burger and nudges the onions back into place, puts the pickles in formation again and resets it. He dumps the fries out onto the wrapper and figures since they’re already out he could lay them flat so he could see them all, maybe arrange them in order of height. The condensation on the outside of the paper cup clings to his fingers when he sets the cup at the diagonal corner of the wrapper and smoothes out the outer edges of the wrapper so that it lays flat.

He puts his hands in his lap and stares.

The McDonalds had been on his way back from the library, golden arches rising high above the other buildings on the street like a gateway and he’d slunk in, determined.

He does not have an eating disorder.

And he’s going to fucking prove it.

He fists the burger and warm ketchup and slick burger grease seeping between his fingers. Sam’s eyes burn so he forces them shut tight. He takes a deep breath but all he can smell is grease and salt, thick and viscous like he’s swimming through it.

It feels like he’s wrenching his jaw open but it doesn’t matter because he’s going to eat it because he doesn’t have a problem.

The first tears slip down his cheeks when he gets the burger on his tongue and can taste savory meat like he hasn’t in months and his stomach clenches. He clamps his teeth, traps the food behind his lips and he tries, he tries so hard, not to spit it out again.

Chewing is like tearing out his fingernails. He salivates too much and works his jaws too hard, breathing heavily through his nose in hitching breaths.

The flavor sours on his tongue as he lets it sit in his mouth.

Swallow, he thinks actively as tears drip down his chin. Just fucking swallow and everything can be over.

He shakes his head like he’s telling himself no even as he forces his throat to work. The food slides down his esophagus, mucking up his throat along the way, and hits his stomach like a lead brick and he already feels like his blood’s thick with everything he just put inside of himself, heavy sludge coursing through his veins and he wants water, he needs to scrub his insides clean. It’s in his skin like he’s sweating oil.

“Fuck!” he screams, swiping the entire assortment off the table. The cup bounces off the floor, lid popping and sticky sweet soda spilling a flood across the cracked yellow linoleum, the burger splats, the fries scatter, and Sam fists his hands in his hair and retches out sobs because he’s so fucking weak.

He’s still there, hysterical, when Dean unlocks the front door and steps in.

“Sam?” Dean calls and Sam tries to suck down enough air to calm himself but he’s too far gone to save any face by the time Dean rushes into the kitchen.

“Sorry,” Sam stammers preemptively, knowing he should be apologizing for something. “Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“What the hell did—you went to McDonalds?” Dean demands, staring around the mess of the kitchen and looking overwhelmed. “You told me you were staying in bed all day, Sam!”

“I know,” Sam hiccups. “I’m sorry, I was just so hungry.”

Calloused fingers tremble as they find his face, wiping at his tears as Dean whispers, “Just… calm down, okay? Deep breaths.”

-

Dean leads Sam into the bedroom and lays him out on top of the covers, puts a damp towel over his face and orders him to calm down before stealing away to clean up Sam’s messes.

Sam stares up into the fibers of the towel until the sunlight dies, until the cloth is dry and stiff, and then for a few hours more.

Dean doesn’t come back and Sam doesn’t take the towel off so he has no way to judge the time when the bedsprings creak and dip next to him and the whiskey, old leather, regret smell of his father swamps the air.

“Hey, kiddo,” John speaks in rumbles and baritones and the wide warmth of his palm settles on Sam’s skinny knee. “How’re you holding up?”

Sam tries to place him somewhere in the country if Dean called two days ago when Sam first passed out and he’s just arriving now.

“Sam?”

“Hm.” Sam hums, realizing that his father isn’t going to leave.

“I asked you how you were holding up.”

Holding up. Like he’s one of those old houses with the corpses that won’t leave Dad drags them to during the day so he can teach them what to look for in a haunting, with the support beams rotting out and the shingles sliding off the roof and into the mud. Like he’s in shambles, but still together. He’s holding up.

“’M fine,” Sam mumbles.

“Yeah?” John asks and resettles on the bed for the long haul, and Sam can’t even imagine what Dean must have said or done to get their father to take this so seriously. “Wanna tell me what’s going on?”

That sounds like the last thing Sam wants to do.

“I’m just tired,” he says, and it’s not even a lie. He’s tired in his bones, in his fingertips, in his throat, and in his stomach.

“Okay.” That broad, warm palm soothes down his hair like he’s five again and it makes him feel so much smaller than he is. “I’ll let you get some sleep. If you’re not feeling better in a couple of days we’ll see about getting you to a hospital, alright?”

Sam’s pretty sure that’s an empty promise, but his father’s surprised him before and he’s just too exhausted to call him on it now so he just rolls over instead and listens to heavy foot falls all the way out the door.

-

It takes three days for Sam to come to terms with himself and evaluate a few facts of life, lying in bed alone in the quiet because Dean won’t speak to him, can barely stand to look at him.

One, he can’t tell anyone. Because he’s a Winchester, because he’s a boy, because they don’t have the money for the types of therapy every website and book Sam’s poured himself all over tell him that he’s going to need to get over himself. Because he should be better than this.

Two, he wants to be normal. He wants to be able to eat and live and love outside of a big black car.

Three, if he doesn’t find some stability he’s going to die.