Where Is God? - Sabriel

viii

TW: homophobia

I knew there was going to be trouble the second Dean and I arrived home, and saw the Impala sitting outside. Shit.

"Son of a bitch," Dean muttered, his jaw tensed with anger.

"Dean-" I try to grab him, to hold him, calm him down before he marches in and says something he regrets. I'm too late. He's storming inside before I can finish saying his room. I hurry after him, dropping my bag on the floor.

"Boys!" A voice that should be more familiar than it is yells as we come in.

Dad looks surprisingly well rested, the usual sunken in eyes and permanent frown he carries around when he's spent too much time with us currently unseen. How flattering to his two sons, those he's supposed to love, that he never looks happier than when he's been away from us for a good couple of weeks. I can only imagine how overjoyed he is when he's not with us.

"How are my two kids, eh?" He asks with a too-wide, too-toothy grin. This charade won't last long, trust me; I've seen it acted over and over again my whole life. For the first couple of days, he's able to pretend to take an interest in us. He soon becomes increasingly irritated with our continued existence, and snaps more often, before buggering off again. Crazy, right? It's almost as if we asked to be born and it wasn't his fault he didn't use appropriate contraception.

"Where the bloody hell have you been?" Dean snaps, his voice cold, quiet, and unfeeling.

"Oh, don't be like that," dad tuts, throwing an arm around each of us and pulling us in for rough, awkward hugs. "Let's order dinner, yeah? We can have dinner and catch up."

"We wouldn't need to catch up if you didn't disappear all the time," Dean mutters under his breath.

Dad selectively ignores this comment, but I can't. Dean is absolutely seething beneath the surface, his facial muscles tensed and protruding from his forehead. If his blood pressure gets any higher, I'll be able to see the veins in his head.

"What should we have? An Indian? I feel like an Indian," dad muses aloud to us.

"Sam hates Indian dad," Dean tells him, dead pan. I wasn't going to say anything, and I'm sure Dean knew I wasn't going to say anything, but since dad left the last time, Dean has been ranting a lot more often about dad knows nothing about us and how insulting it was that we've been dragged across the country time after time for him, forced to uproot at the drop of a hat, for a man who barely acknowledges our existence.

"Ah," dad says, nodding slowly. "So what would Sammy prefer for dinner?"

The way he says Sammy makes me feel sick, my insides squirming like a tin full of fishing bait.

"It's just Sam, dad. He doesn't like being called Sammy," Dean tells dad sternly.

In spite of everything, the irony makes me smile. I glance down to hide the tugging at my lips. Dean and I can bicker the house down, but against an outside threat, we bind together as an unmovable united front.

"It's okay. Get an Indian. I don't care," I tell him.

He doesn't take much effort to convince him to ignore my preferences. He orders the Indian. There's a painful silence as we wait for it to arrive. There's a painful silence when it does arrive. There's a painful silence as we eat, and a painful sensation in my mouth that I try to drown with glass after glass of water. I can't deal with spice at all, and as I'm choking back coughs, I reflect that maybe it's not too bad to be consumed with the spice issue, because I'm not consumed with the father issue.