Pink Houses - aetataureate - Supernatural (TV 2005) [Archive of Our Own] (2024)

Chapter Text

Around the time Sammy left for school, Diane had these recurring dreams. She and Sam would be searching for something in the Empire State Building, which looked like if the elementary school they’d shared for one year in Jackson was strange and fantastic. Sam and Diane would open door after door, and Diane would get a feeling that she knew what would happen next. Before she could remember what it was, Sam would open the wrong door and their mom would be there with an ax, already in mid-swing. They would fight; Sam would lose, but the wounds never appeared on her. She would shout and push at Joan with her long arms while each blow put a hole in Diane’s gut, and Diane would try to tell them, but her voice was too quiet, like she was underwater, and in the end Diane would be lying on the floor with her center a bloody mess, and her family wouldn’t notice at all.

Diane wrote the dream down for Sam once, back when she thought she might send her a letter. It had woken her with a start, their mom sleeping lightly in the next bed and the motel stationary gone or nonexistent, so she tore a page out of the back of the Gideon as quietly as she could and scribbled it down in the dark. The morning light had revealed its compromised legibility, but she’d carried it around in her pocket for months before she realized the dreams had stopped, at which point she let a guy she’d met that night cut it up and use it for rolling paper. Poof, no more dreams. Just an idea: that when Sam hurt, Diane bled.

This was why Diane snatched the phone and leaned halfway out the window so Sam couldn’t get it back.

“Mom, it’s me,” she said, straining to hear over the whip of the wind past her head. Sam punched her hard on the hip, but Diane ignored her. A faint sound, like a sigh, could be distinguished over the line, and then Diane heard her mother’s voice.

“Diane,” she said. “Listen carefully. Write this down.”

“Yes ma’am,” Diane said, scrambling to locate a pen in her own pockets before giving up and yanking Sam’s jacket off the seatback and retrieving a marker from there.

“Hey!” said Sam, but she left both hands on the wheel and her glare pointing through the windshield. Didn’t care enough to fight this one out, then, the way Diane would have if Mom had called her phone.

“Prepared to copy,” Diane said, uncapping the marker and flipping the newspaper to a page without any pictures.

“Zoreah, Utah. Twenty-three hours. Omaha Protocol. Do I need to repeat myself?”

“I got it, Mom,” Diane said, scribbling it down and annotating the current time. Utah wasn’t far from eastern Oregon—Diane was glad they hadn’t taken the other job they’d been looking at, down in Georgia. With Sam to help drive, she might not have blown the timeline, but it would have been tight.

“Read it back.”

“Zoreah, Utah. Twenty-three hours. Omaha Protocol.” I miss you, she almost added, and by the time she managed to swallow it down Joan had hung up.

They made Zoreah as the late evening crept into the night. The Utah section of their atlas revealed a state park with a campground in the immediate vicinity, and a slow cruise by revealed that there was no ranger collecting entrance fees at the booth after seven p.m. Accommodations sorted, they slunk away and drove, itchy and aimless, until they hit a roadside bar with motorcycle parking and a ramshackle saloon-style exterior, which implicitly promised to keep the lights on late. Diane turned the key and the van shuddered into silence.

“Hold on,” said Sam, “five more minutes.” Diane was forced to languish in the stale interior for fifteen while Sam carefully copied case notes into her journal.

Diane had tried to keep case notes while she was alone. The main problem was that, unlike Sam and Mom, she never found the right journal, which would have been one she remembered to use. If she’d ever come up with a system, it had rotted away during one of the long droughts between hunts she managed to find on her own, and her recollections ended up scattered across motel stationary and Urgent Care waiting room pamphlets, magazine margins and diner kid’s menus, tacky brochures for tourist caverns and flyers for corn mazes that had turned out haunted. For one whole month she kept a previously-owned Lisa Frank diary, in which a victim had left a surprisingly lucid summary of the events leading to her untimely demise, and which Diane had continued for her. When Sam finally came back Diane took one look at the mess crumpled in the bottom of her messenger bag, saw it added up to nothing, and dumped it. Sam took better notes anyway, with her stringent rules against jostled handwriting, beer spills, and waiting a few days to write things down. Every letter was sharp, clear, and orderly, like the inside of Sam’s brain. Nonetheless, when Diane took an occasional peek inside her journal she found it indecipherable, cross-referenced and shorthanded into a code she couldn’t break.

“Be sure to include the creepy perfect ducklings and the creepy color-coded trees,” she said, jiggling her leg against the driver’s side door.

“I’m not including the ducklings,” Sam snipped, and continued to write for another pointed ninety seconds before zipping her journal up into its zip-up case and tucking it into the pouch she’d stapled below the passenger seat.

“Alcohol,” Diane chirped, and threw herself out into the night air.

Her self-imposed good mood lasted as far as the front door. There was a guy on a stool near the entrance as they strode in: scraggly beard, rough smell. “Oh, pretty girl, sad girl. Come here, sad girl,” he said immediately, and kept blabbering as Sam set her jaw and made her way to the bar.

Diane’s baby sister was gorgeous: legs for miles and hair out of a shampoo commercial. But Diane was the looker of the family: as in, she was the one who made men look. Guys saw Diane and knew that she had what they wanted. It was a fact of life that had led to a number of interactions with regrettable characters over the years, but one that came with perks.

Sam, on the other hand, attracted bona fide freaks. Not just the long-haired crystal healing guys and the bar-top magicians: a certain kind of guy, with a loose hold on reality and none on morality, looked right through Sam’s blank stare and pile of flannel and thought, her.

This guy, Sam had already noticed, so Diane had to stick it out: couldn’t complain that something on the jukebox or the nonexistent drink menu had offended her and drag them both to an identical joint down the road. Instead they had to sit there within earshot and prove to a lunatic that he was nothing to them.

Sam nursed the only German beer on draft. Diane had three pickleback shots and ordered a tub of nachos to work through while she decided who was going to pick up their tab. It was a Tuesday, or thereabouts, and pickings were slim—a group of their-age guys in the corner were playing darts with the sober concentration and endless discussion and miming of proper form distinct to men who have decided to become good at bar sports, which, unlike already being good at bar sports, was an enormous turn-off.

Sam pulled what looked like a phonebook out of her bag and began to read, looking for all the world as placid as a still lake. The guy by the door was loudly listing ways he was going to make her happy, which were all the more off-putting for how they weren’t explicitly sexual. Diane ate slices of jalapeño and pictured killing him until he switched his tune abruptly to “f*ck you, bitch,” and left.

Even afterwards, the bar wasn’t the release Diane looked for after a case. Sam had spent more of the drive than usual staring silently through the windshield. Now, she looked up from her book and chatted back when Diane pointed out things happening around them. One of the TVs was tuned to the infomercial channel. The rough-looking barback was wearing a G-string—Diane could see it when he crouched down to change a keg. Still, Sam was quiet. Diane felt like a wind-up key was tightening between her shoulder blades a single click at a time.

Sam leaned back and crossed an ankle over her knee, two-thirds of her beer sweating a puddle towards where her phone rested on the table. She was totally absorbed in her book, which, Diane leaned sideways to see, had Abraham Lincoln on the cover.

A slightly-better-than-average-looking guy at the bar glanced over at them. Diane turned it into eye contact, leaning forward and taking an easy sip of her beer, at which point Sam’s phone rang for the second time that day.

Mom, Diane thought, slapping a hand down on the phone before Sam could move and dragging it towards herself.

Jess <3, the front screen read.

Sam extricated the phone from Diane’s slackened gip, checked the caller ID, and smiled softly. “Hey,” she said, rearranging her legs, book, and chair as if to stand up.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Diane said, spreading her arms wide. “A witch almost killed me with gasses today. I earned a drink with my sister. Tell her you’re busy.”

“She’s my best friend, Diane,” Sam said, and it was cold, not anything like how she’d answered the phone for Jessica. Something familiar, hard and angry leapt into Diane’s throat, but Sam was already getting up and walking towards the front door, leaving Diane with nachos for two and most of a drink she’d never order for herself.

She applied herself to the man at the bar. He misread her completely, thought she was some kind of hippie who was interested in seeing Utah’s most exciting rocks. He was going to take over his uncle’s roofing business soon, or so he said—he was helping to run one of the crews while he took an accounting class at the community college. Diane played out a line about credits and debits, and he covered their tab, his hand on her inner thigh. See, Sammy, Diane thought. I can hang with college boys.

Still, Sam didn’t come back in. Diane decided abruptly that she didn’t want to see her for the rest of the night anyway, and when he tried it she let the guy lead her out of the bar, his arm slung over her shoulders. Sam was outside, leaning against one of the peeling wood pillars supporting the eaves and looking up at the moon while she talked softly into the phone. The guy manhandling Diane had a roommate, and in a fit of guy-on-guy chivalry, he said, “Your friend can come chill with us, if she wants.”

“We aren’t friends,” Diane said, and dropped the van keys into the dirt as she passed. Sam lowered her gaze to watch her, still on the phone. “I miss you, too,” Diane heard as she turned away, and slammed the passenger door of the guy’s car behind herself.

In the low dawn light that filtered through the window of the guy’s bathroom, Diane carefully removed all traces of her lipstick and as much eyeliner as would budge. She grabbed a handful of change off a side table and slipped silently out the front door, leaving it cracked behind her so as not to risk waking the house. On the advice of a landscaper who looked alarmingly prepared to start up his weed whacker, she walked almost three miles out to a bus stop, listening the whole way to the sound of her boots on the sidewalk.

The bus schedule wasn’t posted, and Diane sat on the curb, antsy and trying to decide whether she should give up and walk back or flag someone down. Soon enough it was properly morning, cars whizzing by too close to the gutter. The plan, to the extent there was one, had been for the guy to drive her back to the park so she and Sam could go to Mom together, but by the time he fell asleep she’d had no interest in spending a single second more in his company. Time was ticking down: Mom could be there already, or close, perhaps in the next car coming around the distant bend and heading back in the direction of town. Maybe she had already passed by, invisible in one of any number of sedans Diane wouldn’t recognize, and saw her daughter on the side of the road, waiting on a bus going the wrong way.

Diane resolved to hitch a ride from the next passerby she could hail and stood up. Her face felt tight, a layer of grit from the road clinging to her skin. Lo, the bus, trundling around the corner. Her handful of change covered some of the fare and the bus driver closed his eyes to the difference. It was still forty-five minutes out to the park.

The van wasn’t waiting at the entrance booth. Diane skirted it on foot and headed for the campsites, almost at a jog, her mood rising inside her. She reached the van, which was empty and parked beside a tent that Sam had bothered to put up but somehow not yet bothered to take down. Diane looked for a long moment at the place where STANFORD REC & WELLNESS was stamped across the side.

Sam was in the hardstand bathroom in her flip-flops. Incredibly, she was blow-drying her hair.

“We have to go,” Diane said, trying to make it something like a plea instead of an order. They had to go. They were going to be late to the meet. Diane was like a pressure cooker inside.

“I’m almost done,” Sam said amiably. Diane could tell this wasn’t true. Sam had far too much hair.

“Mom could leave,” Diane said, and Sam rolled her eyes.

Back at the campsite, Diane wrestled with the tent single-handedly. She wasn’t good at it. They’d never had one before, and even now she wouldn’t bother with it if she could help it. It got pulled out when Sam went on an insane kick about airing out the van. There was a hand-mended machete slash along one side that Sam painstakingly re-sutured every time it came apart, a part of her deluded insistence that she was one day going to return it.

Sam returned from the bathroom and began to sort the laundry in her duffel, by which point Diane had had it.

“Move it, now,” she said, grabbing Sam’s pile of dirty clothes and tossing it over the back seat.

“Dude!” said Sam, reaching her long arms over to try and start fresh, but Diane took her by the jacket and steered her around to the passenger seat.

“We have until,” Diane grabbed the Sharpie-annotated newspaper from the day prior and brandished it, “11:24 by the van clock. Do you see what time it is now?”

“Don’t be a dick,” Sam said, grabbing the newspaper and tossing it in the back with her clothes. “For all Mom knows, we could be coming from Georgia. She can be all ‘you have twenty-four hours’ all she wants, but no way in hell we would have made it from there. Which is how you know none of these deadlines are real in the first place.”

All of it’s real, Diane thought, and we could have made it from Georgia if you’d been willing to drive the way we would have needed to drive, and twenty-three hours, that’s how many we had, and now we don’t even have that in minutes. “Just give me the damn keys,” she said.

“For once in her life, make her wait,” Sam said, and Diane ignored her, except that was exactly what they ended up doing anyway, because the phone book in Zoreah had mis-alphabetized its diners, and by the time they figured that out they’d already tried three incorrect locations and were forty-one minutes late.

Diane burst into the diner ahead of Sam, her feet carrying her where her head couldn’t if she paused and thought for even a moment. She did not need to stop and scan the room. Her mother was there, in a booth on the left side, facing away from the door. That was her cropped hair, the curve of her ear, the line of her arm and shoulder inside her jacket.

It had been months.

“Hi!” said a waitress. “Sit anywhere you like.”

“Actually, we’re—” began Sam, but Diane put her shoulders back and headed for the booth.

Joan Winchester was sitting in front of three mugs of black coffee: two across the table from her and no longer steaming, the third down to the last quarter inch. She drained the latter without looking up at Diane.

“How many times do I have to repeat myself?” she asked, continuing a conversation they’d never begun, and were always having.

“Yes ma’am,” said Diane, disappointment swelling up inside her like the tide. She wanted to have done everything differently: to have drunk less, to have stayed with Sammy at the bar. To have saved some of the money from the half-decent hostess job she’d worked last time she was left alone, changed the oil in the van more often, checked her face in the mirror one last time before coming inside. She was working up the nerve to express this, or express something, when, over her shoulder: “Mom?”

Joan and Diane both turned to look at Sam, who was looking down at her mother, wide-eyed. She had never seen the hair, Diane realized suddenly. Joan had cropped it at the first hint of menopause, and she just looked like Mom to Diane now, but the change had been shocking. Like all this time, a woman Diane had never met had lived inside of her mother. She had to stop herself from telling Sam, Don’t worry, it’s her.

“Samantha,” said Joan. Diane looked down. She knew, from the inside out, the way it hurt just looking at Sam, when she first came back.

“Hey,” said Sam. Her hands fluttered over her clean shirt, her neat hair—Diane hadn’t realized she was nervous.

Their mother’s mouth was pursed, holding in an emotion entirely opaque to Diane. It made her look older. “Sit down,” she said, nodding to the booth across from her. “I got you girls coffee.”

“Thank you,” said Diane. She put a hand on Sam’s hip, sliding in behind her and taking a cold sip of coffee. The waitress came by. Diane ordered eggs, toast, pancakes, and sausage. Sam, who, no matter how badly Diane wanted things to be otherwise, was never anyone but Sam, asked what kinds of tea they had. The answer was ‘kind,’ singular.

The waitress departed. Silence. Joan and Sam were looking at each other, something desperate and uncertain in each of their faces, reflecting back and back on itself across the table. Diane finished her coffee and started Sam’s. She couldn’t think of a single thing she was willing to say to both of them at the same time.

“Are you girls okay? Healthy?” Joan asked, her eyes tracing Sam like scissors around a paper doll. Sam’s face and body hadn’t changed much in the three years she spent away at school, but her posture had—she held herself like a grown woman. It made her seem stiller, more compact—harder to reach, harder to ruffle.

“Yeah,” said Sam. “Yeah, you?”

“Close enough,” Joan said, shifting in her seat. Diane wanted to see her walk, evaluate the bum hip and badly turned ankle that sometimes kept her up at night. “What about money? You have money?”

“Yeah, enough.” Sam had book money. She’d spend it on some things, gas, showers, a subsistence diet, though not on alcohol. When Diane asked what she was saving it for, Sam said books. Diane saw the account balance once, when Sam complained about it dwindling—by Diane’s accounting, her sister was saving up for the entire Library of Congress.

“Van running smooth?”

“As it ever does. Diane changed the fan belt.”

“I’ve missed you. My little girl.”

Diane put down Sam’s coffee.

“I—” Sam began.

“Why didn’t you call sooner, Mom?” Diane asked. “We’ve been trying to catch up with you for months. We hear about you from Jim, from Travis, from Olivia, but everywhere we go, you’re gone. And we’ve been working tough cases. Stuff we’ve never seen before. Even if you aren’t going to be there to help—remember what you always said about hunting with a clear head? How are we supposed to do that if we’re worrying about you?”

“Watch your tone,” Joan said. Then: “Worrying about me is not your job. It’s my job to worry about you, and even if you don’t understand how right now, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.”

“Tell us how,” Sam said, almost breathless. Her hand on the booth by Diane’s thigh was clenched tight. “Mom, please. Things have changed, with me, and I’m back to see this through. It doesn’t matter how big it is—I’m here because it’s big. I’m not going to be scared off, and I’m not leaving.”

“Sammy. I know you aren’t.” Joan reached halfway out across the table, like she was going to grab her daughter’s hand, and then pulled back. “You’re not going anywhere. I’ve been hearing things about you. Good things.”

“Great, so tell us what’s going on,” Sam said.

“People have been talking about us?” Diane interjected. “Who?”

“People,” Joan said. “Hunters. Word gets around the community. You girls are doing right by our reputation.”

Their reputation. A traditional sore spot between Joan and Sam. As Joan had gotten harder, and Diane more grown-up, and the number of other women in the so-called community willing to give them the time of day had nose dived. When they were little girls, public opinion held that their mother was diligent, tragic, and awfully pretty to be out there on her own. Two grown daughters and a couple of bad hands later, and an older Joan was instead relentless, psychotic, and trouble for any man still desperate enough to hitch his wagon. Sam, pubescent, had read this dynamic and taken a line like there was something her family should have done differently. Diane still resented her for it.

“I didn’t spend three years at Stanford to come back here and start giving a damn what those people think of me,” Sam said.

The waitress appeared with food that Diane, whose day was being swamped by a low-grade queasiness, couldn’t imagine eating. “Here we are!” she said. “You ladies enjoy.”

Joan, who was not eating, wiped around the corners of her mouth with her napkin, staring at it contemplatively as she folded it and placed it on her lap. “If you’re still pissed at me for all the sh*t you were pissed at me about when you were seventeen, I accept that,” she said. “I can accept responsibility for your childish sh*t if that’s what you need to hear to move on from it.”

“To move on?”

“Yes, Sam, to grow up and move on.”

And, Jesus, had Diane not been here before. The same booth, the same seating arrangement, Sam’s hands shaking as she tried to peel the top off the little plastic container of strawberry jam. Diane would happily let her steal the toast off her plate every morning for the rest of her life if it meant Sam wouldn’t say what Diane knew—knew—she was about to say next.

“Well, Mom, why don’t you go ahead and show me what moving on looks like.”

Diane’s first instinct was to hit Sam. That was normal, when Mark Campbell was invoked—Sam might have been his daughter too, but Sam never cried when he dropped her off at preschool. She never took a Christmas card photo with him. He wasn’t her first word.

Her second instinct was shame. There’d been a moment, when they first sat down, where Diane had been worried for her sister. She was used to a Sam who was sulky, or angry, or dismissive, and she didn’t understand why the fight had gone out of her. But it hadn’t. It had flickered, then came roaring back to eat up something growing inside Diane—hope, perhaps, a childish fantasy about a family where everyone got along. Diane might never have been smart, exactly, but she should have been smarter than that.

“Is this how you let her talk when I’m not around?” Joan asked, inviting Diane back into the conversation now that she didn’t want to be a part of it.

Sam put her head in her hands, pressing down like she was trying to put her elbows through the table. “I should have never agreed to come here. Diane, move.”

“Sammy,” Diane tried. “Mom, please.”

“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Joan said. Sam made a sharp sound through her teeth, and Diane took a proper look at her. Her face was the gray of an old undershirt, sweat beading her forehead.

“Whoa, Sammy, hey. You okay?” she asked, reaching to take her face in her hands, trying to catch her eyes.

“Move!” said Sam, and Diane scrambled out of the booth. Sam took three lumbering steps away from the table and caught herself on the service counter, leaning against it a moment before sinking heavily to the floor and into unconsciousness.