lines from "chemical kids and mechanical brides" - pierce the veil
I’m a chemical kid, you’re a mechanical bride
Sam about Dean, whom John treats like his obligatory bride, like Mary, raising his son for him, cleaning up his messes.
“Chemical kid,” the perfect term for how Sam sees himself compared to Dean, the mechanical bride, the perfect soldier. Dean, who effortlessly falls in line with their father’s orders, tends to his wants and needs as part of the harmony of a nuclear marriage. All the while Sam stumbles along, never quite understanding the mission, the goal. Always a half-step out of place, always questioning things in a way he can’t help, left at a disadvantage without the coercive devotion of a father-husband to guide his hand.
Just a chemical kid left in the back seat, left in the dark; a rough acid mixture scrambled together from a vat of molecules, all collectively disjointed and not quite right. Sam, the chemical kid who has a brother and a drill sergeant posing as his mother and father together in the front seat.
I held a diamond to the sun, to count the moments on account of the way you smile for me.
Oh, we’re in slow motion when you smile, for me.
As a kid, Sam falls in puppy love with Dean, not yet disillusioned to big brother’s imperfections. As far as Sam is concerned, Dean is the perfect, all-American boy next door. Sam doesn’t see him smoking, doesn’t see big brother make pretty, too-young girls squirm from his attention, at their father’s behest. Can’t yet recognize the smell of spirits on his breath, doesn’t know what that means.
I still hold your breath so you won’t leave
Then comes the break, the beginning of the end. Sam starts to make the connection between the smell on Dean’s breath and the sloppy way he talks when that smell is around. Connecting it to the same smell that’s sometimes on John’s breath - usually better hidden, he learns - and to the always too-quickly diminishing supply of “disinfectant” in the med kit.
He makes those connections and he panics and starts to grip tighter to his brother-boyfriend, not realizing that his devotion, that his cloying behavior is what’s breaking Dean’s heart in the first place. Doesn’t realize it’s driving him to desperately try and snap Sam out of that puppy-love, entirely sickening in the way it makes Dean feel far too much like their father, like Dean’s husband.
Dean tries wretchedly to keep Sam from the fate of becoming a mechanical bride to his brother, one that Dean never asked for but one that he knows he would selfishly never be able to let go, once it happened, once the marriage vows solidified.
Pastel red and pornstar white,
Ghost on the altar.
We breathe, don’t leave.
The eternal chorus of their combined lives. Breathing to each other in the dark, unacknowledged, “Don’t leave.”
If there’s a God then I’m letting Him go, all for you, you alone.
Raise my hands at the thought of you leaving me alone,
What if I… What if I… What if I, I still care?
All too soon, Sam grows up and realizes that Dean knows, at least a little bit. Realizes that it’s killing him. So Sam tries, for Dean’s sake, to move on, to stop breaking his brother’s heart with the curse of his little brother’s horrific love and affection.
But it doesn’t work.
Sam knows it’s wrong, to love Dean, to love his mother, this way. To crave the taste of his breath in the morning. To yearn for the knowledge of what his name sounds like leaving his brother’s breathless lips in the dark. He knows he needs to let go. He tries praying, tries distancing himself in the exact opposite way to how Dean does it, so they don’t run into each other. He throws himself into a private, secret faith, into schoolwork, into bettering himself - trying to purify his body, trying to cleanse it.
But it doesn’t work, of course. It doesn’t work.
And his efforts make his heart break so violently he’s ill with it, entirely sure in the knowledge that it’s killing him. And he knows that, beyond anything, that would kill Dean, for good, so he knows he has to avoid it at all costs. He tells himself that he’s not biased in that decision.
He keeps up his new habits - because it seems to make Dean secretly happy to see his rebellious normality, and that’s the goal, after all. But privately, in the dark, away from the prying eyes of the divine fraternal, he admits that he’s giving up on stifling his devotion. He stops pretending he doesn’t feel that arm-raising panic every time Dean walks out the door to go to the bar, leaving him all alone, and he stops pretending he doesn’t still care.
And he stops pretending that it doesn’t feel like infidelity when Dean comes home with the drugstore lipstick stains of some two-bit whore all over him. Finally stops pretending that Dean coming home, drunkenly (and mistakenly, surely) falling asleep in Sam’s bed while smelling like whiskey, sweat, and sex doesn’t have Sam jacking off furiously at every opportunity for days afterward.
As you fall fast asleep, it reminds me of the slow symphonies behind me, all the nightmares you’ll see, tomorrow.
Through the trees, I’ll blow.
But then it’s noon, and that means Sam’s inconsolable. It’s noon at midnight, with a Greyhound bus hurtling towards the no-name town they currently reside in, 4 hours out. Sam already bought a ticket.
It’s noon at midnight, and Sam watches as Dean falls fast asleep, reminding Sam of the slow symphonies of love, far behind him now. He thinks of the nightmares he knows Dean will see tomorrow after he wakes up to find all of Sam and all of his stuff missing. He thinks of how Dean will frantically search for him, of how he’ll find the note Sam’s gonna leave on the bathroom mirror.
Thinks of how Dean’s gonna find out about the ultimatum John gave Sam in a fight they had all too recently, on one of the rare afternoons they were both in the motel and Dean wasn’t. Thinks of how John will tell him, once Dean cries hard enough; always a big, tough marine until he sees the teary-eyed likeness of his dead wife pasted onto the face of his eldest son. Crumpling fiercely, fervently in the face of Mary-Dean’s grief, betraying the vow of silence Sam had twisted out of him that afternoon in an instant.
But that’s okay, Sam thinks as Dean’s breaths gently even out. That’s okay because, by the time that coerced vow is broken, Sam will be long gone, less tangible than a wisp of wind blowing through the trees.
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