Till The End [Phan]

Highway To Hell

Sean smiled at me as he zipped up the dark green duffel and pulled his converse back on. I smiled back. He had a plan. How could he come up with a plan in such little time? It didn't matter how he'd done it, I wasn't complaining.

"What's the plan then?" I asked,
"Well, I know these guys," he said, "one of them owes me a favour for helping them move some time last year and the other guy owes me for helping him with a science project. But what I'm thinking is that they can watch out for Dan and Phil while we're gone. Luke's uncle is a police officer, so if anything happened while we were away, it would get dealt with fairly quietly, and it wouldn't look like you had anything to do with it. Alex won the boxing championship for his town when we were kids. Dan and Phil will be safe. I promise." He smiled at me as we walked up to the Impala and Sean took his phone out.
"I like it," I said, "the plan and the car." Sean laughed a little,
"Yeah," he patted the roof of it, "I'm pretty much Dean Winchester when it comes to this thing." He smiled at me as he sat in the drivers seat and rang his two friends, who were glad to help out. Sean pulled out of the driveway and we started to exit London.

"Sean?"
"No," he said,
"You don't even know-"
"I'm not letting you drive." He smiled at me when I didn't say anything. I'd wanted to drive a car since I was eleven; I wanted to just be able to get up and go whenever I wanted to,
"I'll teach you another time, okay? You never know how long we'll be gone for." I hadn't really thought about that at all. We could be gone for ages. It might be months until I saw Dan and Phil again. Something else occurred to me as well,
"Sean," I said, "what about your mum and dad? They'll get worried about you, and you'll be missing sixth form." Sean just smiled again, like he had nothing to worry about. But the smile faded fairly quickly,
"I pulled myself out of school this afternoon, I said mum and dad wanted me to go to college instead- but I'm seventeen so it doesn't really matter. They took me off the register. As for mum and dad, they're probably used to me just taking off like this, but I'll call them and say I'll be away for a while once they're back from work." He sighed. Sean didn't really talk about his family much. I know I'd only properly hung out with him twice, but it was clear that his family was a sensitive subject, I just couldn't figure out why.

"Sean, what did you mean when you said you'd love a family like mine?" I asked. He looked at me as if to tell me to drop it,
"Please tell me," I said, "you know everything about my family." He nodded slowly and sighed,
"I have a sister," he said. I was confused for a moment before he continued, "I had a sister, a long time ago." He paused and took a deep breath,
"Oh," I said, "I'm sorry."
"No, no. She didn't die, she's still alive," he looked at me to check I still understood; I was confused. If Sean had a sister that was still alive, how come I hadn't heard of her or seen her around school?
"Who is she?" I asked. Sean sighed again,
"Jessica." Sean didn't say anything after that, I assumed he didn't want to talk about it anymore.

Thinking about it, it made sense that Jess was his sister. It explained why Sean didn't try to ask me out after Jess and I started to go out. It expained why Jess had been upset when I said I was going to meet up with Sean and it explained why Sean was so accepting of the LGBT community. But what it didn't explain was why they didn't live together. It didn't explain the fact that Sean was living with his parents even though Jess said that they'd moved to America. The other thing was, why hadn't she told me? Sean and Jess being related made sense, but it was also confusing.

There was silence for a considerable amount of time before Sean spoke again, shattering the silence like a glass falling in slow motion,
"Jess and I used to get along really well. We were all we had, our parents were full of shit. I practically raised her myself. When I was six she was only three. I changed her nappies, cooked her food, bathed her, everything. It took a long time before anyone spoke up. People knew what was going on. Our aunt Marie knew from when Jess was born- she probably knew from when I was born. We were both mistakes. Our parents had a real on-off thing going. They stayed in contact but nothing was ever official with them and I only got to meet the guy a couple of times. He was a bastard though, really messed up in the head," he sighed,
"What happened?" I asked,
"Well, when I got to year six, we had all these assemblies about support and ChildLine came up. So I googled them and it turned out that I wasn't supposed to look after Jess in the way that I did. So, it took a really long time, but by year eight I rang them up and explained that I'd been looking after my sister since I was six and they told me that they could contact social services who would try their best to fix it all for me. They said they'd try and keep Jess and I together for as long as possible. So, we were taken into the care home and. Well. The usual procedure,"
"The care home that Jess is in now?"
"No. A different one, it was in Cambridgeshire. For a really long time I refused to go to a family that wouldn't take us both. Most families were kind of homophobic. You know, the type that never said they didn't like gay people, but still wouldn't make friends with them or speak about it. The 'bad-influence-on-my-kids' type of homophobes. But after being transferred to four different care homes in a year and a half, Jess and I kind of realised we needed to stop being so picky. Nobody would take us if we made a big deal about LGBT rights. By that time we were in the one Jess is in. They said it was our last care home before we were separated and Jess got put into a Girls' Home and I was sent to a Boys' Home." He sighed as he remembered everything.
"So how come nobody told me you're related?" I asked,
"That wasn't supposed to happen," he said sadly as we stopped for a red light, "I was fostered and Jess wasn't. Sarah said she was really sorry. Jess and I had six different meetings together with six couples, just in the care home that Sarah runs. The ones that weren't homophobic only had room for one child, the ones that were homophobic would only take me. For a while I refused to leave Jess. It was both or neither of us. When you have siblings and shit parents, it's kind of important to stick with each other no matter what. That was what I always said, anyway."
"What do you mean?" We'd pulled onto the Ring Road, about to join the M25 by now. I didn't actually know where we were going, but Sean seemed to. The sun was starting to go down now, it had taken us longer to get out of central London because of the rush hour traffic. Sean sighed and hesitated; I swore I'd seen a tear fall down his cheek,
"I didn't mean to, Jay. I didn't know," he sniffed, "Sarah got me a meeting with Sylivia one day and it went really well. She said she'd love to have me, and I really, really liked her. She didn't tell me that Jess couldn't come. She signed the paperwork to pick me up the next weekend and that was that. It wasn't until the next day when Sarah told me that Jess was going to stay. I didn't know what to do. There was nothing to do. It was already too late. I'd lost the only important person in my life. I had to tell Jess. I had to tell Jess that I was going to a really nice family but she was going to stay by herself in a care home full of bratty children. I had to do that; and I did. You want to know the worst part? I was happy to be leaving. I was excited. I'd been looking after my sister for ten years and finally, I didn't have to anymore... I think about that every day, and it kills me inside. Jess didn't talk to me after that. Even when she joined the Community College, she wouldn't speak to me." Sean looked at me and half smiled,
"Oh, Sean," I sighed in sympathy,
"No, it's alright. It's okay. I'm fine," he said,
"Is that why you're helping me?" I asked, "because you know what it's like to lose family?" He nodded at me,
"Yeah. And if Supernatural taught me anything, it's that family doesn't end in blood. I lost mine because I wasn't thinking. I'm not going to let you lose yours after you've thought about every possible way to save them. Not in a million years."
"Sean?" I said quietly, "thank you."