shatterverse | (no subject)

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You know how if you repeat a word often enough in your head, it loses all meaning and starts sounding like nonsense? You know the word has a definition and it should mean something to you but at that moment, there's nothing to it. It's blank and empty and just there.

Sokka is standing in front of a small pyre a mile or two down the road from the farm. He wanted to be away from the main house, for attention and to spare anyone else the smoke and smell. It's been burning most of the night and is in the process of dying down, but even that should take a few more hours. At least until after the sun's come up.

The body resting on the wood base is small and slender and wrapped up in a bed sheet.

He has a feeling he should be feeling something.

But if you get your heart broken enough, it stops making the effort to heal and you stop feeling the effects of it.

He's watching the flames more than the body.

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Dean digs in his pocket for a battered packet of cigarettes and pulls one out. After a moment, he pulls the packet out and offers it to Sokka.

He's back to blinking again but these, at least, he recognizes. It's been a few years since he smoked and that was for Hana and Loo's birth, and before that sneaking into the mens' hut at home.

He takes one anyway, if only for something to do with his hands.

"I don't really..." Sokka looks down at the cigarette, fiddles with it, twisting it between his fingers. "What would I do?"

Dean lights his own and holds out his Zippo, flame hot and bright and flaring blue, nothing like the pyre at all.

"Mmm." Frowny. "Got a car still?"

Sokka lights it with some difficulty. Once the tip glows red, he leans back and takes a breath, but he mostly plays with the cigarette instead of smoking it.

"Yeah."

Of course.

He frowns and glances at Dean, remembering when he'd come for help with his brother and then left him behind in Lawrence to go on adventures of his own.

"...my family's here."

Dean looks at the pyre again. "I dunno, Sokka. I only know what'd make me feel better. I don't know anythin' about how it is with you."

He rubs his nose hard, as if he's trying to push it back into his forehead, searching for the right words. They don't come, and he shrugs helplessly and takes another drag on his cigarette.

"Drivin' works f'me. Takes me back to myself, y'know? Back to who I am."

Who he is. Back to himself. To his roots.

Home.

Sokka looks back at the fire while the flames die down, the linens black and fading on the wind, nothing left on the pile of sparking wood.

He mimics Dean and takes a hit of his cigarette.

"Yeah... yeah, maybe... maybe that's a good idea."

Dean flicks his cigarette, still barely touched, away into the grass and shrugs.

"Easier for me," he says, frowning. "All I need t'go home is m'car and the backroads of America. Don't much matter which world."

His car and the road, and his brother - but that's an addition the kid doesn't need to hear.

Sokka frowns, watches the flames die down, feels the weak paper of the cigarette between his fingers. Something shines in the pyre and he digs in his pocket for a moment.

A little piece of cloth is produced, almost a handkerchief, and he steps toward the pyre to dig out a small circle carved blue stone, shining almost like glass.

He stares at it for a little while.

"...maybe it won't matter for me either."

"Your family?" Dean asks, frowning. If the kid's going to take off and just drive, he'd probably better make sure Mel and the babies are OK.

... he wouldn't much mind that kind of comforting, either.

"They be OK without you?"

"I won't stay gone forever."

Mel won't be happy. Hana and Loo will tell him they hate him until he promises to bring something back. Steph...

Steph won't be happy either.

Sokka lifts the cigarette and takes another drag of it, coughing a little while running his thumb over the cooling pendant. "I'll talk to them first. Mel will take care of everything."

"I'll keep an eye on 'em," Dean offers.

And then grins.

"Two on Mel."

Sokka barely reacts to that. Rather than the coughing and startling and blushing of last time, he just glances at Dean with a smirk - and it's still more reaction than he's had in over a day.

"Please don't bone my sister until after I've left," he requests, giving Dean a dry look and taking another drag on the cigarette.

"And try not to knock her up if you're not planning on marrying her."

Mel would roll her eyes and lecture him. Sokka's enjoying getting his teases in where he can on a man he likes, respects...

Someone who's trying to help.

A reaction is good. Dean smirks back, hands in his jacket pockets again.

"Marrying? Do I look like the marrying kind of guy?"

Sokka makes another face at him and shrugs. "How should I know? But if I come back here to any more nieces or nephews, I'm hunting you down."

It's light teasing, continued because Dean seems to be agreeable to it.

But there's a blue stone in his palm and he flicks the cigarette to the ground and steps on it, the smile leaving his face.

"...I need to talk to Mel."

"Yeah." Dean looks over at the pyre again, amusement leaving his face too.

Family.

"Want me to go get her?"

Sokka shakes his head. "I'll find her. Don't worry about it."

"A'ight. There anything else you need? You got enough salt in that pyre?"

Aaaaaand we're back to blinking.

"What?"

"You salted and burned her?" Dean frowns, and remembers who he's talking to. "Oh, right. Uh, you said she came back, killed folk? You gotta include salt in the pyre, or it - uh, she - might come back again. Just burnin' won't do."

Sokka frowns and looks at the pyre again, the only emotion he's showing now is businesslike. "I thought that was just to keep her out of stuff. But she... I mean, when she was a ghost, she was..."

Fine.

Perfectly fine.

"Salt mixed with fire'll destroy any traces," Dean says, professional in answer to Sokka's tone. "Unless ... you want her back."

Sokka stares at him.

Then he kicks the pyre so it collapses in a cloud of cinders and smoke.

"Fuck you," he informs the other man, matter-of-fact and shaking the pendant out of the handkerchief, "or better yet, go fuck my sister until you figure out how to talk again. I've got plenty to think about without adding sibling resurrection to the list."

Dean lifts one eyebrow.

"So ... I'll get the salt, then."

Sokka shakes his head - not to disagree but out of frustration again. That Dean's expecting him to think seriously about anything right this second.

"Look, you've got to focus." Dean reaches out to put a hand on the other guy's shoulder, intent. "You can fall apart later. You caught the monster, a'ight, now you gotta finish the job or you might as well not've done anything."

John gave him this speech once, he's pretty sure.