WARNINGS: Rated M for graphic sex in later chapters. Angst. Dark fic. Angry season1/season2 Sam! Age difference. Cross-generational relationship.

Rape/Non-Con in later chapters.

For the past four years, Sam had been expecting the call.

He had just been expecting the call before TMZ, People magazine, and all of his Twitter followers told him first.

"Gabriel." Sam said as he answered the phone. He still was not sure if he was more furious that Gabriel would have the nerve to call him or that Dean didn't.

"So, I guess you've heard then."

"Yeah. I heard." Sam bit the inside of his cheek. He wasn't going to cry in front of Gabriel, not even over the phone. "From the internet. Where is Dean?" Sam's resolve cracked, just for a minute, "How is Dean?"

"He's... he's not great, but his friends are here." Sam could hear it, over the line, even if Gabriel didn't say it.

His friends are here. Because you aren't.

Gabriel didn't need to actually say anything to be a complete dick.

"Well, he'll call me, right?" Sam asked.

"You do know that phones work both ways, don't you?" Gabriel retorted.

"Right, well, thanks for the condolences and all, but-"

"I'm not calling about that." Gabriel cut him off, "There are some forms you need to sign, I was telling you that I'm overnighting them. Figured I should call first. Dean wouldn't bring it up."

"Oh." Sam said shortly. Business, of course. "Ok, sure."

"Have a lawyer read them over, first. Otherwise they're pretty standard."

"I am a lawyer."

"Oh, that's right."

"Goodbye, Gabriel."

"I am. Sorry. Sam. I would have led with that, but I figured you'd have just hung up on me."

"I would have." Sam said, right as he hung up the phone.

For as long as he could remember, his Dad had been on the road. Sam's first steps had been at a rest stop, when the tour bus ran out of gas. Sam had learned to read from a private tutor who made a classroom out of the cramped dining table that doubled as a bed in the trailer when they stopped for the night. The first friends that Sam ever had were Dean and the roadies.

Sam's first hand job had been by a groupie who's opening line was just how much he looked like his Dad. John Winchester. Small time rockstar, general drunkenness and world weary eyes to complete the whole picture. Professionally trimmed scruff to really sell it, but even Sam had to admit that John Winchester was great at what he did.

He sang heartbreak, wore it right on his sleeve but never once seemed weak with it. He had a strong voice, but not loud, just sure. Sam had many complaints about his father, but the effect of John's voice was undeniable. It didn't warble, or tremble. It was sure of all the sorrow in the world and it was sure of all the pain. And it went on forever, ran in his ears and pumped through his blood like music, long after the song ended. Even to this day, now that Sam was grown and all, utterly over being the prodigal son of the man, he found himself getting his father's songs stuck in his head, late at night or right before a big test.

A reviewer once called John's voice the voice of the man who narrates the world. Sam knew that John bedded her after, hell, maybe even during, the interview. But, that didn't mean she was off the mark.

There was a time of his life, young, formative years when adults seemed infallible. When there was a crucial little part of his brain that was convinced that wisdom and being right was directly proportional to being able to see over things. He would watch his father from the side of the stage, surrounded by crew and usually holding the sleeve of Dean's hoodie, and Sam would marvel at how brave his Dad was. On the stage, he looked so impossibly vulnerable, while blinded by the lights on him. Everyone was looking, holding their breath. He looked like a man facing down the enemy, one single person against the eyes of many. And he sang; sure and unwavering. His Dad was the bravest man in the world.

Sam didn't like their Dad after the show, though. He was twitchy and short tempered, always shaking his sons off and disappearing into the night. He never wanted to look at them when he was all keyed up and trembling, almost like he didn't really believe he'd have survived it. Like maybe he really had gone to battle in the crowd and in the music, and now he wasn't sure of what to do with himself in the real world.

So Dean would take him and sheppard him off towards their trailer, try and convince Sam to go to bed. Sometimes they'd stay up and Dean would tell Sam stories about their dad and their mother and girls and towns from when Sam was too young to remember. It wasn't until Sam was older, that he figured Dean was making most of them up.

Every Christmas, they got guitars and the vast majority of the time that Sam could remember his father looking at him, just him and Dean without roadies and managers at his elbows, he was teaching them chords. Dean was better at it, but Dean practiced more. Dean skipped his school lessons and plucked his guitar instead of learning his math. He never read Steinbeck or Dickens, but he did learn how to do a major string change.

When Dean turned fifteen, his Dad let him preform one of his songs before he came on stage, and it was just the shittiest week of Sam's life.

Dean was jittery the whole time, too eager when his father was looking but ghost faced when he wasn't. He was deliberately ignoring Sam, calling him a kid and rolling his eyes at Sam's childish neediness. He went to bed after Sam did and snuck out when Sam wasn't looking and it wasn't fair because Sam didn't have any friends. How could he? He never set foot inside of a school, never talked to anyone his own age besides the occasional kid of a motel owner, running around.

Dean was the one who played Go-Fish with him and Dean was the one who helped him play pranks on the road crew. It wasn't fair that Sam had to be the one alone in the trailer. Dean probably didn't even think about Sam while he was out in bars, drinking and talking to girls. But Sam just sat at home and waited for him to come back. All Sam had was Dean, but now Dean was following Dad onto the battlefield of stage lights and even the crew members couldn't do anything besides talk about how well Dean was coming along and how handsome he looked in his father's coat. It was the one that John wore on the cover of his only album that went platinum.

John was on the cover of it, standing next to Mary Campbell. It was titled "Only Her and the Road." and even Sam was old enough to recognize that Dean was being groomed. Dressed up to remind people of her without him having to say it.

Sam didn't watch Dean's performance because Dean had called him a baby and made him cry that day. It seemed to really matter a lot at the time.

But Sam knew that he sang that song that John wrote for their mother, even before she was in the ground. And Sam didn't know her at all, but he was mad at John for giving that song away, for giving that love away to a bunch of strangers. That was probably when it started to change; that little part of him that used to think his Dad was a hero began to think of him as a coward. He wasn't facing down the enemy, not bravely declaring his love for her to the ears of strangers.

He was looking for her, replaying that memory over and over again turning it into a ghost to haunt him and Dean with. That song that got stuck in his head when he tried to fall asleep. Dean shaking under stage lights, trying to find some phantom image of Mary in the crowd, like John had implicitly promised he would. It never came to anything, besides picking over the scab until it was a scar the size of a canyon between them all.

It had started that night that Dean didn't come home after his show. It festered on all the lonely, inconsistent nights after. He got his own trailer and his own room once he started opening for John on tour and Sam sat in the quiet dark and hated their father more than anything in the world.

Suddenly Dean needed "space" to do grown up things and kid brothers weren't allowed. He needed his own rooms for the girls after the show. He needed his own space for drinks with the road crew. He needed a special bag that Sam wasn't allowed to touch. He'd peeked once, because telling a twelve year old to not touch something was practically asking for it. It was a pipe and rolling papers and sweet, musty smelling weed.

Dean had never left Sam out before, and now he couldn't seem to get a word in edgewise. John took his brother from him, put him in the line of fire and now Sam was all alone with their songs stuck in his head.

Then Sam turned eighteen and all that hatred building inside him for six years had been pressed into something salvageable.

Sam wrote one hell of a personal statement. He dropped his father's name without shame and got into every school he applied to. He sold all the guitars that his father had given him and went to Stanford. And he met a girl who insisted that she hadn't heard a single note of his father's songs and he told himself that he loved her.

And then, ten years later, TMZ called. And People magazine and his Twitter feed blew up with messages of sympathy.

John Winchester was found dead in his motel room in Dallas.

He got calls from complete strangers, reporters, therapists and groupies. Hell, he even got a fucking call from Gabriel.

But Dean never called him. And more than the loss of their mother had even registered with him, even more than the loss of their father, Sam felt the loss of his brother like a knife in his heart.

Jess stood beside Sam as he pulled on his suit. He hadn't worn a suit in a long time, not a real one, anyway. He'd always had one, he hadn't grown or shrunk significantly since Armani sent it to him at nineteen, hoping he'd make it to the Country Music Awards and would wear it.

Sam didn't go. But he kept the suit.

"You look really nice." Jess told him, smoothing the shoulders. "It's a little small. I don't think anyone would notice."

"Thanks, Jess."

Jess stood on her tiptoes and rested her chin over his shoulder, hugging him tightly from behind.

"I love you, Sam. I wish you'd let me go with you."

Sam sighed. Jess had called him the instant that he had hung up with Gabriel, telling him she was coming over, she was going with him to that funeral, she was never going to leave his side. Sam wasn't even sure if he wanted to go to the funeral, Dean's silence was like a slap in the face. There was a terrifying thought that Dean didn't want to see him, that turning up would somehow make this, probably the worst thing in Dean's life, a little harder.

Or, perhaps the worst idea of all, that Dean was waiting for Sam to make the first move, and Sam's silence was the one slapping Dean in the face. So, either Dean didn't want Sam there and staying away was the only kind thing Sam could do. Or, Dean was withering without his brother's support, his brother's fucking acknowledgement and staying away and staying silent was the cruelest thing Sam could do.

He couldn't decide, so Jess did it for him. He was going and she intended to go with him. But that was when Sam remembered who he was, a full grown man, a recently graduated lawyer and not the kid in the trailer that followed his Dad's tour.

Sam was going to get torn apart when he showed his face. Dean might be missing him, but between Bobby and Ellen and definitely Gabriel, he'd be walking into a lion's den. He could handle, he'd spent his life growing a second skin to drunken insults muttered under people's breaths and the snappish tempers of people too long on the road with only each other's company. There might be cameras. There would surely be at least one pushy reporter trying to find a new angle. The patriarch is dead, and his sons, the one who stayed and the one who left standing beside each other. It was a story that would sell, even Sam could admit that.

But he didn't want anyone to sell Jess and somehow, just being in proximity to people who made a living off of someone else's life turned everyone inside out and against each other. It would be hard enough for Sam to be reintroduced to the culture where everything you said could be sold. He didn't think he could walk on eggshells and still look over his shoulder to be sure that Jess was doing the same.

She certainly wasn't happy about his decision. She did, however, offer to lend him one of her suitcases. She did not remember why she previously hadn't let him into her half of their shared closet.

Sam threw the box onto the dining room table where she was studying. She looked at him in shock for a moment before she registered what it was she was looking at, then all the color drained from her pretty pale features as she remembered what had been in the box she had spent so much time ignoring and just how nasty Sam could look when he wanted to.

"You said you didn't know." He said softly as he threw the tee shirt onto the bed.

It was faded from being washed a few million times and a size or two too small to fit Jess now. Creases were pressed into the fabric, from years and years of hiding in that closet, under the suitcases and boxes of knick knacks she had forgotten since they moved in together.

Despite the shirt's age, on the fabric, as legible as it was the day it was pressed said the letters, "Only Her and the Road." And there, in his damn leather jacket, sat John Winchester with one arm around his wife and a guitar in the other.

"Sam," Jess warned, standing up nonetheless. Jess was tall and Jess was tough but Sam was a force to be reckoned with when he wanted to be. "Sam, don't overreact."

"You lied" the whispered accusation was met without resistance.

"It's a shirt, Sam. And... c'mon, it's unreasonabe for you to expect that someone would have never heard him! They still play it on the radio! It wasn't why I'm with you. It had nothing to do with it! It has nothing to do with you!"

"You lied." Sam growled, "If it meant nothing why bother? Why spend five years-"

"Sam, I've never brought him up. I never did anything like that!"

"Why did you lie?" Sam asked again.

"Because." Jess took a long breath, crossing her arms over her chest, "I wouldn't be here with you, five years later if I'd said that, yes, I did know who you were. And yes, I knew who he was and once, in nineteen fucking nintey seven my Mom went to his concert and bought me a shirt. You push people away too fast, Sam. Assume that they want you for the worst reason. It wasn't like that. I wasn't like that. There's a reason you don't have any friends, Sam. And it isn't him. I'm sorry that he's famous and I'm sorry everyone knows, but... Sam. You're the one who is letting it define you."

"You know how it is?"

"I didn't mean it like that."

"You know how I feel?"

"Sam-"

"You have no idea what I've seen and done. You never will either. Sorry, Jess. I hope your lie was freaking worth it."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Jess retorted, following him as Sam turned and left the room. He was calmer, now. He always had been when he knew what he needed to do. "Sam, stop right there and tell me what you meant. I love you and I deserve to know what-"

But Sam had already found his keys and was prying his copy of their front door key from his keyring.

"No. No. Sam are you fucking kidding me? I deserve more than this. I deserve better than this. I've loved you for five years and you need to sit here and talk about this with me like a goddamn adult."

But Sam was already opening the door.

Loving someone had never stopped Sam from leaving before.

Sam didn't need to call his brother to know that Dean would still be in Dallas. His brother still wore John's leather coat. He still had the necklace Sam won for him out of a crane machine. He was sentimental. He didn't just up and vanish, run when things got real or painful.

Sam wondered if he got that from their mother.

He sent his text to Gabriel, who had sent a car to the airport, not bothering to come along to meet Sam himself with the driver. Gabriel had always been intuitive like that.

Gabriel hadn't always been his father's –and now, apparently, Dean's- manager, but it certainly felt like it. Whenever John needed to be herded from one plane to the other, Gabriel was there. Whenever John needed to be picked up from a bar, Gabriel was there. Every Christmas that John was preforming, every birthday that John had forgotten, Gabriel was in the background, ushering John from Sam and Dean, leading him toward the stage.

Gabriel's job was making sure that John was where he would make the most money, and Gabriel was very good at his job.

And now Gabriel was still around, so presumably his new job was keeping Dean in the lime light, vulgarly bright now that everyone was talking about the tragic death of John. The only time anyone really talked about the Winchesters was when one of them died.

Dallas. Sam watched the city pass by, rolling pillars of concrete freeways and off ramps. Sam had always liked Texas. It was flat and boring to drive through, so Dean always ended up playing car games with him. Ten hours of marathon 'I Spy' with roadie's tee shirts and food wrappers in the van. But it was quiet as the driver went down the interstate this day, professionally so.

They pulled up to a Hilton just a half hour away from the airport and then Sam saw him, by the entrance of the hotel lobby, with a phone to one ear and a finger plugged into the other as he tried to listen over the noise of cars pulling up to the curb.

"Yeah, yeah. Check your email. I need to go." Gabriel said as Sam came closer. He angled his head to look up at him, taking a deep breath. Sam hadn't gotten any taller, but he had gotten broader. Filled out a bit in the shoulders and people started treating him differently. He didn't know why he had expected Gabriel to look different; he was still only about Sam's mid chest height, with a hair cut that hadn't changed since 1997. He had bright eyes that were easy to miss as his brow was usually scrunched up in frustration or annoyance. He wasn't round, but his face was. He had always had softer features than the rest of them, almost feminine, until he started talking and the words that came out were as salty as a sailor's.

Yellow- brown eyes narrowed up at him as Gabriel pocketed the cell phone.

"You actually came." Gabriel said softly. It sounded weird from him, that note of doubt and... was it pity? Sam had been in the real world, where people loved each other and were nice to each other and gave hugs when someone died, so he had to fight the urge to pat Gabriel's shoulder. Winchesters didn't touch. Only Ellen, and she did it sparingly.

Ellen. Sam missed Ellen.

"Well, ok, then." Gabriel said as Sam looked over his head, as though the thought of Ellen would make her magically appear. "Let's get you inside and settled. No one has caught wind of us in this hotel yet, so no paparazzi as of right now... but it's all over the news. They'll swoop once they find us. Garth will get your bags."

Sam wordlessly followed Gabriel into the hotel lobby. Gabriel didn't seem at all put off by Sam's silence. He was used to being all but ignored.

"Should I take you to Dean's room or wait for you to text him first?" Gabriel asked as they stepped into the elevator.

"Hold off. A bit." Sam said and Gabriel gave a curt nod.

"How was... the flight?" Gabriel asked, that annoying and foreign pitying tone of his. It was his mask, his work mask and Sam didn't have the patience for it. He didn't have the patience for Gabriel's snarky sympathy, underneath every word of it was the accusation.

He wouldn't have had to be on a flight if he hadn't left. He wouldn't need to give Dean this kind of space if he hadn't left. John might have not drunk himself to death in a motel room in Dallas if Sam hadn't left.

Sam was regretting his decision to come here, to leave Jess and her facade of love. Because here there was little faking it. It was too much attention from employees who slowed their work and stared out of the corners of their eyes as he passed. Gabriel and his knowing tone, predicting his every move like they were familiar.

They stepped out of the elevator into the sterile, quiet floor. It had that generic smell of air freshener, that sort of cushioned feel of someplace too clean to be a real home. Gabriel guided him to the left, pointing with his chin to where the hall forked and turned right.

"Dean's room is 658. Be sure to knock. Don't sneak up on him." He handed over the card key.

Sam took it and opened the door.

Gabriel stood dumbly as Sam stepped inside and dropped his coat on the bed. Sam stared at him, willing him to just go away.

"Sam... ah... we all missed you." Gabriel started. This was new. Gabriel always knew what he was going to say, even if no one wanted to hear it. "We are... here... for you. You know. I'm sorry. About John. You'll text me if you need... anything."

We missed you when you abandoned him. We're here for you, even when you weren't there for him.

Fucking Gabriel.

"Bye, Gabriel." Sam said flatly, and shut the heavy door in his face.

Sam hated hotels. The silence was the symphony of his childhood.

And, not for the first time, but certainly the most gut wrenching, Sam wished he had a different life.

He wanted a house, full of his father's things, that smelled like him to wrap himself in.

Because he did love his father. He loved the way it felt when John had picked him up when he was smaller. Artful scruff rubbing against his face when John was in a playful mood. He liked the way John sounded when he first woke up in the morning, a slow, lazy growl, like a bear prodded out of hibernation.

Sam would never smell his Dad's aftershave or hear his father laugh. All that was left was a legend of a man with a guitar on a stage, singing about love that was dead and gone.

And one day Sam would forget how he fit in John's strong arms. He'd forget the stubble hidden dimple on his cheek. He'd forget his father, hell, he'd been trying to forget his father since he was eighteen. But now Sam wanted a home to remember him in, not a series of generic hotel rooms and concert posters.

John Winchester was dead and gone and Sam didn't have anything more of him than some fan with a CD.

It was all too clean.

Sam pulled a pillow over his face and cried for the first time since he left.