Fic Rec: Another Brick In The Wall By Road_rhythm

fic rec: Another Brick in the Wall by road_rhythm

fandom: Supernatural

pairing: Sam Winchester/Dean Winchester

word count: 171k

Is it explicit: no

Bottom line: the best casefic i have ever read in all my born days

Alright lads let’s start by calibrating our expectations: road_rhythm is not for everyone. I do not think I would have put myself through the emotional wringer of this fic if I didn’t already at least have Gnaw and The Operative Word under my belt. This fic is not the fic I would reach for were I at 20% brain capacity. But I trust roadie. I trust them to give me, not a happy ending—you’re barking up the wrong tree for that—but a satisfying answer to the questions raised by the story, and it is in this sense that roadie always, always delivers. The question this fic asks is: How does Sam reconcile his need for independence with his need for Dean?

That’s not the only question—it’s a really dense story—but it’s the one I’m most interested in. Sam is abducted and wakes up in a sewer. That’s how it opens. He waits and waits for Dean to rescue him. Spoiler alert: He rescues himself. Which is not to say he doesn’t still need Dean—the reason he had the physical and psychological resources to escape was due to a sacrificial ritual Dean performed on his behalf. It was not an easy ritual; Dean went on a whole hero’s quest and in the end Sam saved himself. But what Dean did for Sam still matters. That’s the crux of it. In an author’s note that made me tear up, roadie returns from a two-year hiatus to confess she had doubts that the fic was too long, too plotty, too boring …and then kept writing anyway. Thank you for caring about this dumb show about dumb brothers doing dumb shit, roadie. Thank you for reassuring us that they matter, and that our investment in them matters.

In the hands of a lesser author, a casefic might be merely an opportunity to refract some aspect of the Winchesters’ relationship back at them. Another Brick in the Wall does this too, but the scope of its vision is staggering. There are themes that you see in roadie’s earlier work that come to fruition here: Sam and bodily autonomy, Sam and faith, Dean and food-as-caretaking, the-city-as-character (the number of maps of Providence, Rhode Island she must’ve pored over to write the car chase scene alone).

roadie’s take on brotherfucking is: It is a thing that has fucked them both up but it is also nowhere close to being the most fucked-up thing about them. Half the time you’re reading a roadie fic you don’t even realize it’s established relationship until they have sex and then you’re like whoah whoah roll back the tape, what?! This fic is no exception. There’s no pining, no dancing around the line, no guilt—I mean there’s plenty of guilt but very little of it on account of gay incest. Again: The point of the sex is it’s not the most fucked-up thing about them. In a lot of mutual pining stories the stakes are “does he want me back” but in THIS fic the stakes are “does he need me (in every sense of the word need, including but not limited to sexually) as much as I need him” and the answer is, obviously, both of you idiots need to find a dictionary and look up the word ‘codependent.’

I think it’s so telling that while the boys are reunited by the end of the fic, it doesn’t solve any of their underlying issues, and the only time they actually know peace is in their fantasies. Not sexual fantasies, either—the fantasy is about being together being enough for both of them. I legit wept. No one has ever accused roadie of over-romanticizing samdean lol but the thing that gets me about her writing is that it’s so layered, there’s always 5-8 bowling pins in the air at once, one of which is invariably the impulse to reach for an ideal love. An unobtainable ideal given who and what the Winchesters are, but they keep reaching for it. It’s a theme that crops up throughout roadie’s work: the gulf between what they want and what they are allowed to have (see especially Finding Harmony and This is All Very Meta ).

Finally before we get started I just want to register my admiration for roadie’s command of canon. I have never seen its equal. The fic is not constructed so that you can’t understand it without the canon background—I confess the first time I read it I had not seen Season 6—but I am floored by the amount of care and thought that went into situating it chronologically within canon so that events could unfold to their inevitable conclusion. It’s set in Season 6 which means Castiel is too busy waging a heavenly civil war to heed Dean’s prayers. It’s set after 06x16 “And Then There Were None” which means that Bobby’s too busy mourning Rufus to answer Dean’s calls. It’s set in Season 6 which means Ellen, Jo and Ash are gone but we don’t have access to Jody, Garth, Charlie, and a host of other allies that might have been available in later seasons. All in all roadie has done an airtight job of isolating our boys; of ushering every potential outside resource offstage. It’s just Sam and Dean, and the two of them aren’t reunited until the 80% mark. Which lets you see just how dysfunctional they both are without the other. The real payoff of the “isolate the crap out of samdean” strategy, though, comes later, in the Lisa scene: Crucially, this fic is set before 06x21 “Let It Bleed,” the episode where Crowley kidnaps Ben and Lisa. roadie apparently looked at the way Dean lost Lisa in canon and went “Nope, not painful enough, how about I twist the knife in harder.” In canon, Lisa and Ben were vulnerable to Crowley because Dean wasn’t with them, because Dean had chosen to hunt with Sam rather than settle down with Lisa. And that choice had passively endangered Lisa and Ben. In this fic, however, Dean is faced with a much starker choice: In order to save Sam he has to actively endanger Lisa by recruiting her as his confederate in a scheme that has a nonzero chance of resulting in a felony conviction. But Dean’s got no one else. There is literally no one else he can turn to whom he can trust, and as much as it pains him he does not hesitate to burn this final bridge because when it comes to Sam he will cross every line and burn every bridge.

Ok guys let’s do a close reading!

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