Title: Everywhere and inbetween.
Disclaimer: I wish.
Summary: Dean really can't stand the quiet.

you are the noise in here i cannot sleep without

Dean couldn't really stand the quiet - it's the reason he blasted the stereo so high on long drives, windows down, angry music following carefully behind. When he was a kid, sometimes, he'd hum to himself. Before he discovered the wonders of death metal and a walkman. Hitch the curtains open in his room, let the chaotic lull of the city calm him down - until the day his dad stormed in, slamming his fists against the sil and yelling how he could have let 'anything' in.

To most kids, that would have meant burglars or bugs or the cold on your little brother's sore chest.

To Dean, it literally meant anything.

There were no stories of the sandman, to him, they were all true. Blinding kids, blinding them until they couldn't stay awake long enough to remember to breathe.

When it was quiet, when it was silent, he could hear them all in his head. The heavy breathing, the static of manic grins.

Drowning it out, he could pretend some of it didn't exist and feel pretty okay about it.
He had nightmares about vampires when he was eleven. Instead of telling him it was just stupid, an overactive imagination, his dad had drawn him clan charts and made him sleep with the lamp on.

When he was eleven, he had learnt that the silence was to be feared just as much as the dark. His dad had told him, shown him what was out there.

For years it had been Metallica (his dad always disapproved), Black Sabbath and the occasional old grunge remix. When he couldn't sleep.
For years it worked.
Until Sam.

Punctuated sentences, arguments, haphazard snoring and feet pressing against the floor in the middle of the night.
Idle conversation. Everything.

Gradually, the music faded delicately into their daily clutter.
And Sam became the noise instead.

Like it was always meant to be.