More than a Feeling
Sam Winchester x Eileen Leahy
A/n: This was for @wordstothewisereaders 300 Followers Challenge! I had a lot of fun with this, and while Eileen is still dead in this fic, I like to pretend she’s actually not. Little angst, little fluff, and the mental image of Sam shaving. Mmm.
Sam woke up just after 8:30 on a Saturday. Picking up his phone, he realized that somehow he had slept through his alarm. Giving a deep sigh and chocking the anomaly up to the stress of recent events, he got out of bed and walked over to the sink in his room.
He stood for minute, just looking in the mirror, immediately noticing red eyes and a scruffy face. He ran his fingers through his wild hair, taming it down, before leaning over the sink and looking in the mirror again. He spent awhile like that, just standing. But eventually he noticed the eerie quiet of the bunker, and how, for some reason, it was driving him damn crazy.
Sam usually preferred a quiet morning. He was used to getting up before Dean and knocking out several items on his morning to-do list before the sun was even fully risen up past the horizon. But this morning, he guessed he just wasn’t feeling it.
He picked up his phone off the bed and opened Pandora, finally settling on a soft rock station. Placing his phone on the dresser near the sink, he picked up his tooth brush and started getting ready for the day.
Halfway through shaving his face, More than a Feeling by Boston came on. Boston was good, but it was never a go-to for him, or even for Dean. Foreplay/Long Time actually kind of ticked him off after awhile. “I know it’s a classic but why do we have to listen to the full thing every damn time it comes on the radio?” He’d asked Dean countless times over the years. This song he didn’t mind, but he didn’t start really paying attention until the second verse.
So many people have come and gone
Their faces fade as the years go by
Yet still I recall as I wander on...
Immediately, of course, Sam thought of Kevin, and Charlie, and Ellen and Jo, and Bobby; then Andy and Madison and Ava, all the people he couldn’t save, and the friends from college that he left behind. But as soon as the chorus came back in, he stopped cold. Because the next face that popped into his mind, somehow more radiant and prominent than the others, was Eileen’s.
Taking a deep, shuddering breath, he set the razor down on the edge of the sink. He looked over at his phone as if to say “Why are you doing this to me?” But the phone only answered back with the refrain.
When I’m tired and thinkin’ cold
I hide in my music forget the day
And dream of a girl I used to know
Sam’s heart skipped a beat so hard it almost hurt.
I close my eyes and she slipped away
Then, as if on cue, Sam closed his eyes, biting his lip and leaning against the sink again, just letting himself feel it for a minute. One major thing Sam’s learned about always keeping your emotions in check, is that sometimes you just have to let it wash over you for a bit. Take your finger out of the dyke, so to speak. And it helps; it really does.
So when Sam stands back up and looks in the mirror, wiping away the small smattering of tears that he let fall, he’s able to take a deep breath and look himself in the eye, and tell himself that he’ll be fine.
And as the song plays out, he cracks a small smile as he picks up the razor again, almost singing along. Almost. He and Eileen both knew what they had, and it was good. There wasn’t any sense in wondering about any could-have-been’s, because he already knew.
And it was so much more than a feeling.
