Mint and apricots

38. On your doorstep

Let's go back to the main issue - and start digging into my favourite part of this story.

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Sam had no idea why Dean and Cas weren't talking to each other. All he knew was that on Thursday night he had come home after his shift at the library and had found his brother-in-law cooking with a long face and his brother entrenched in their bedroom with a locked door.

Sam and Castiel had dined without the third member of the family, accompanying their turkey burgers and stir-fried peas with a silence that Sam hadn't been able to crack. Tired as he was, he had barely managed to cast questioning glances in Castiel's direction, but his brother-in-law just shook his head in exasperation and made Sam's attention fall back onto his plate. For a moment the boy had felt like a scolded child at the dinner table, but then he had surrendered. He had to give Dean and Cas time to solve whatever altercation they needed to untangle.

Also because Sam was too exhausted to investigate any further. He had been unable to get more than three hours of sleep each night since Sunday and, despite having hit worse records during college exam sessions, he could no longer pretend not to notice the results: both his body and his mind were giving in. The outrageous amounts of caffeine he had been gulping down since Monday morning had helped his appearance, but his head was aching constantly and that afternoon he had nearly fallen asleep while searching for some titles for two biotech undergraduates on his computer.

He knew that the effects of lack of sleep on the human body are comparable to those of alcohol abuse and he began to worry to the point of having inconsistent thoughts: could he alternate the coffee he needed to maintain alert at work with sleeping pills? Would they have handed him something at the pharmacy without a shred of prescription? Surely not.

But these thoughts were only useful to avoid the real problem. Every so often he had to be distracted from the fact that Luc had begun to ignore him from the moment he had run away from Gabriel's apartment the previous Sunday. And by "ignoring" he meant no contact, not even the smallest. No replies to his phone calls, constant messages, not even to the emails with which Sam had begun to harass him starting from Monday.

It hadn't taken Sam long to realize that the anger his boyfriend had thrown at him when he had confessed to knowing about his parents had only increased as days went by.

Not that it was the first time that Luc had expressed his resentment by imposing himself with some good old silent treatment. For the first few days, Sam kept telling himself that he should have gotten used to it, but as the middle of the week approached, it became particularly difficult to dispel the feeling that Luc was about to leave him. But even more difficult to deal with, if possible, was the suffocating feeling of having no one to talk to.

The afternoons he had spent with Gabriel had set a high bar for him, in this sense. With him, Sam had rediscovered the pleasure of sharing memories, even painful ones, with someone who was ready to grant rather than demand. It was something that Sam had hoped he could replicate with Luc and that he felt he could no longer count on Dean and Castiel for. Let alone Charlie, with whom he had never really managed to open up even on minimal issues – not for nothing, exhausted, disheartened and completely in crisis, he had missed their last Thursday morning appointment.

At half past six in the morning on Friday, January 22, when Sam surrendered to that constant state of half-sleep and opened his eyelids on the darkness reigning in his nephew's future room, his fears and needs had only amplified, as if the night had served them as a speaker.

The boy let out a discomforted sigh and ran a hand over his face before getting up from the mattress and going to look out onto the corridor: no sound, no movement. Usually, by this time, Dean and Cas were awake and the apartment itself was starting to come alive again with the soft sound of water running off the shower walls or the sizzle of fried eggs and bacon, while the warm scent of toasted bread pervaded the house.