SPN fic: Two (Sam/Dean, Adult)
Title: Two
Author: itsuki9
Rating: Adult
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Word Count: Around 17300. Split into two posts for length, but this story is complete.
Spoilers: Assume spoilers for everything up to 2x20
Summary: A few years down the road, a second chance at making things right.
On the morning he was set to leave, Sam awoke to the sight of Dean perched at the foot of his bed, cleaning his guns with a soft cloth. He'd have the sense memory imprinted in his mind, of waking half-hard to the smell of gun oil and the confusing aroma of coffee flowing underneath. There was a mug waiting by his bed, the drink scalding his tongue with the first sip. Milky and right on the edge of bittersweet. Dean had gotten up early for this, a last meal with an extra shot of kindness.
In his sleep-addled state, it took him a minute to realize that Dean was fiddling with the wrong gun, the ol' Glock which was the red-headed stepchild in Dean's weapon collection. (Sam maintained that it was a good sidearm, being lighter and having reduced recoil, an assessment Dean agreed with: "Yeah. For a granny.")
Even with half his brain cells functioning, he understood Dean's intention.
"No way. I'm not taking that," he said in a voice like a chainsaw, and grimaced. He wet his throat with a swallow of coffee before continuing. "Can you picture me chasing after spirits with a gun, in between lectures?"
The boxes of bullets, upon closer examination, were of the regular flavor. Those wouldn't work.
"It's for your self-defense, Sam. Everybody hates lawyers," Dean deadpanned.
Sam said no again, his laugh sounding more like a cough. Dean hassled him the whole morning, not caring that it bordered on nagging when he was hell-bent on Sam being armed at all times. When Sam gave in with a nod, he was promptly left alone.
There were no disagreements, after that. He stared at Dean's back, the hunch of his shoulders like the shadowed crags they'd passed in the desert, silhouettes stark black against the glow of twilight.
With too much time to brood in the months that followed, bitterness welled up from the depths of hurt, putrefied and toxic. All wounds took a turn for the worse before they started to heal, but Sam saw no reprieve in sight. Even after he weaned himself from the few pain meds he actually took, his thoughts refused to obey any order. Every breath he took that first week stung with pain and betrayal.
You asked me to come with you.
In his head the arguments were cogent and lucid, but as soon as he opened his mouth, faced with Dean's silence on the other end of the line, clutching the phone with a white-knuckled grip, his logic deserted him--leaving only weakness behind.
Dean's words at the beginning of their journey came back to him every so often, words that had broken through the unnatural stench of the fire clinging to them as he'd been pulled into a one-armed hug. I can't do this without you, Sam.
So Sam had uprooted himself and followed. Concrete blurred away, burst into the openness of dark gold fields; tragedy struck in every town but life continued in the background. As time salved the sting of loss, silence gradually gave way to conversation, the sound of their voices melding with the hum of the road and wind--talking about anything to keep Dean awake, until Sam fell asleep himself.
Dean had changed him.
He'd decided long before he said anything. He remembered Dean's sulking face as he gave Sam the finger and wiped iced lemonade from his lap, one crisp afternoon not too long before life derailed, the sun beating down on their heads and burning the tips of their ears. Sam had laughed like his heart might take flight with the lightness of it.
He'd almost said it then: I've changed--You've changed me. I'm here to stay. But that would've made Dean more insufferable, so he waited.
Didn't his actions speak clearly enough?
But Dean, who was like a singularity, the gravity so strong it altered Sam's path--Dean who'd always been unmoved by Sam's doubts, the exasperating constant through Sam's years of rebellion and beyond-- one chance bullet had swayed him where Sam could not.
It'd been a trigger-happy rookie and his partner who remembered Dean's face from an old photo. Their luck had to run out some time. (Dean should've listened to him.)
He remembered Dean yelling and shots fired. His shirt soaked through, his vision went grey.
Sam didn't learn until much later, coming around on a ratty couch in excruciating pain to find some hippie smiling down at him with crooked teeth, that he'd stumbled into the line of fire and taken the bullet that might've killed Dean. Crazy Harold (really a doctor) had clinched the extracted pellet in his red-stained surgical gloves and offered it for Sam to keep as valuable memorabilia. Gross, he'd tried to mouth.
Dean had stood there beyond the couch, hanging on to a desk that was the only thing keeping him on his feet, his face taut and pale. There was a smidge of blood on his ear that he'd failed to wipe off.
Crazy Harold had mentioned permanent nerve damage like it was good news, Sam being a few millimeters short of a collapsed lung and still having a pulse at the end of the day. A close call, judging from Dean's face.
The raised scars where Harold had cut into him turned all shades of autumn before settling on white as time passed. With distance to dull the shock, Sam wondered irreverently--if he'd been a second too late, would the bullet have skidded right off Dean's skin? Dean was that fucking impenetrable sometimes.
But Sam had made it out alive. They both had. Why was he being punished?
Palm met table, cracking the tip of the pen he'd been practicing writing with. Satisfaction was brief before he regretted his impetuous stupidity as the impact rang all the way up from wrist to shoulder. It hurt like hell.
The ink splattered the blank margins on his set of notes. He stared at his pathetic attempt at handwriting: The guilty mind, in illegible scribble. Law school, what had once been his goal and escape, now seemed trivial when Dean was out there fighting alone, with local police agencies notified to shoot him on sight and nobody around to watch his back.
You still need me, Sam thought as he pinched at the flare of pain between his eyebrows. I can't be wrong about this.
He never thought that one day, he'd be the one to slow Dean down.
Sam had the sneaking suspicion that Dean, despite his claims of being too cool to worry, always knew the critical stats of Sam's life. Who's the girl Sam's been real sweet on (nobody), which fools have been trying to corrupt him (a surprising number, misguided they may be), and any changes in his location, even if Sam had declined and subsequently been abducted for the Fishing Trip of Desperation a week before exams. Nobody packed a fishing rod, but there were plenty of beers and chips for a weekend stay at a house with an ocean-view. Just a bunch of 2Ls trying to salvage their threadbare sanity before they mauled someone.
Dean answered on the second ring, but paused a fraction of a second too long when Sam asked where he was and which trail he was chasing now.
"Meth-Town," he replied, then dropped his voice to conspiratorial. "Chasing a chick with a pair of oomph--" He whistled and made the type of noise he normally made around a mouthful of steak. "I can't begin to tell you, Sam."
"Yeah, I get it. The sharpest fangs you've ever seen?" Sam put down his beer and went out on the porch to talk, waving at the disoriented 1L who'd tagged along on this trip to lie back down on the couch before his hangover killed him. "You know, I'm in Eastham right now with some friends."
"Eastham?" The way Dean said it, with just the right amount of disbelief and teasing, confirmed Sam's suspicions.
"Whatever retarded name you've come up with, I don't want to know. It's less than 2 hours from Methuen, if you break the usual speed laws."
"Huh." And Sam heard the laptop start up, noted the background chatter of a 24-hour diner or a coffee shop. He could almost see Dean tilting his head back, exposing the lean line of his throat as he grinned at the ceiling before sinking down into his seat. There was something smug about Dean's voice when he continued. "My, how you've changed, Sammy. You never complained about my driving before."
"Probably because I was still in the car. I wouldn't put it past you to shove me out on Route 66."
"Whatever, Sam."
A brief silence.
"I'm going to see you later, right?"
"Keep your panties on, I'm still working on my pick-up line and Ice Chick is playing hard to get."
"Dean."
"Yeah," Dean finally relented. "Yeah, I'll drive by when it's done."
He didn't, of course.
Sam's right hand still shook when he handled the Glock. If he held the gun straight in front of him for more than a minute, which he would have to if he was to be of any use, his shoulder and pectoral started feeling like they were on fire. These were problems physical therapy couldn't fix, but he had a brilliant (crazy) idea; he was going to learn to shoot with his left.
Being a lefty came easily to him, the grip of the handle fit right into his smooth palm, his thumb flicking the safety off and on. He then tried tucking the gun in its usual place under his waistband, and nearly shot his ass off.
(He would have, if he'd remembered to load the gun.)
Even so, he believed he was born a lefty, a black sheep of the family in this just as in everything else. He must have switched in his childhood from following Dean around (much to Dean's annoyance) and copying his moves--smartass attitude, dexterity with a range of weapons, the complete Winchester package.
Steak knives and a dart board provided him his training range. His aim initially sucked, but brute force made up for its lack. The blades sank the whole way through the board, straight into the wooden door behind it.
Dean did stop by to see Sam after all, but that was two days and several of Sam's pissed off, increasingly anxious messages later. Smack in the middle of exam week, Dean walked into his apartment and whistled approvingly at the TV and the sound system, as if he hadn't picked them and wired them himself. He sat down on Sam's bed and stretched out his legs, sore from gas pedal abuse, like he'd never left Sam's side.
Sam set his books aside and went with Dean to get takeout for dinner. On their way back with the food and a six-pack of beer, they noticed the neighbors' open door--a heady film of smoke lingered in the hallway. Dean peered into their apartment to ask "How's it hangin'?" and ended up bonding with the dudes over shared tastes in slasher flicks.
It usually took many beers and dirty jokes before Dean played well with strangers who possessed the useless Y chromosome, but today he and Sam's neighbors were totally chumming around.
Dean was that smooth of a liar, when he needed to be; Greg-the-neighbor, who was built like a Grizzly, did keg stands and crushed peanuts with his chin, could not act to save his life. The nervous tic below his bloodshot eyes was the damning evidence.
But Sam let it slide.
Alone again in his apartment, they ate and talked and ragged on each other for disgusting choices in food. Sam couldn't believe how much he'd missed this warmth--on impulse, he cracked his cookie in half and read his fortune: You will mend fences with an old friend. Close, but not quite. He folded the slip in half and tucked it into his wallet.
Dean rolled his eyes, but said nothing about this quirk of Sam's. It had to do with faith and hope, and Dean never trampled on those grounds.
Dean read his out loud: "People think you're charming 13 27 30 33 41 45." Sam called bullshit and grabbed the slip of paper, only to confirm that was what it said. They dumped their glasses in the sink and shoved the leftovers in the fridge. The night flowed molten then cooled, air stretching brittle around them. A moment condensed with clarity--Dean patted him on the arm and got up to leave.
"I'm coming with you," he said, pulling on his jacket.
"C'mon, Sam--" Dean didn't miss a beat, voice regretful but backed with steel because he had Sam's best interests at heart. A well-planned, smooth rejection even as scuffed boots took Dean to the door in four unhurried strides. "You were right before. A life on the road's not what you want."
"That's bullshit." The door rattled and Sam had Dean pressed up against the painted wood, hands clenched on the front of his leather jacket. Their knees collided. It felt like déjà vu, except the emotions were skewed. Dean shoved back immediately, one hand moving without thought to touch the corner of his mouth. His eyes were aflame, yet he'd never looked more lost.
The distance between them may be unbridgeable.
Sam tried to hide his grimace but could not help the near-shout, all the words circling in his head over the past week coming out in a deluge of anger. "You don't know a thing about what I want."
"Oh yeah?" And with that, Dean shrugged off the layer of civility like a boxer's robe, snapping into the familiarity of them trading blows. "Changed your mind again, didn't you. You scratched law school off your New Year's resolution and added 'Kick some demon ass' to the list? Or was it 'Add more holes to chest for better ventilation,' because one wasn't fucking enough?"
The tender spot below the clavicle and above the sternum was his Achilles' heel, where a light jab could white-out his vision and double him over in pain. The shove, those words seemed to hit him right at the center of it.
"God, Dean--" He took deep breaths to conquer the nausea, just like they'd taught him. Dean could be that brutally effective at making his point.
"--did you have any idea I was worried out of my mind?"
"Listen..."
"You don't say to someone, 'See you in a few,' then take off in the opposite direction to chase a lead two towns away. You didn't answer the phone--"
"Hey."
"--I thought you were dead, Dean!"
"Hey," Dean said again, voice subdued and no longer argumentative. "People needed help. You would've done the same thing."
"No. I wouldn't." Forget the breathing exercises, they both knew that sound was Sam gasping in pain. After all, he was just a guy who saved as many people as he could within his physical limits--limits which had now been indisputably drawn for him. But Sam was not a coward, and he never used the victims to avoid his brother.
A waft of air, then the door closed with a click. This time, Sam didn't stop him from walking away.
He stood at the crossroads and watched the thunderclouds obscure the sun, the rain washing out his paths in every direction. A few figures stood bleakly in the distance. Sam couldn't see their faces or catch their mouths moving, but he knew the reedy sound wasn't the wind. He found himself walking toward them.
Two gunshots rang out, sending crows scattering from skeletal trees.
There was no reason to panic.
Like sound distorted underwater, these were fragments of dreams he'd learned not to chase. "Premonitions are sublime," a dying man once said to him, though he couldn't remember if this, too, happened in a dream. They originate from somewhere the living don't belong; downfall lies waiting in the completion of the puzzle.
When Sam opened his eyes, his head barely hurt, and the sky outside his window was an endless blue.
He was going to find Dean--they needed to stay together to survive.
The one time he went back to the Roadhouse, Sam spent half the cash (left for him in a box with his textbooks) on a plane ticket and a rental car. Ash greeted him with a friendly punch on his bad arm and a "Hey man, where've you been?"
Rumor apparently had it that Sam was living the high life of a drug lord ("Scarf Ace") in Acapulco. Other versions claimed that he'd sampled too much of the goods, or screwed around with too many insatiable girlfriends, and shuffled off the mortal coil a happy, horny sonuvabitch. Sam clung to his mortified smile and prodded Ash for news, cursing Dean in the back of his mind.
Ash's slurred "You sure, you weren't in Mexico?" and the accompanying drug jibes from a few eavesdropping old drunks didn't bother him, but he'd no idea how to deflect the simple question that followed: "So where's Dean?"
"Um." He flicked his gaze significantly over the other patrons staring at him, then nodded toward the office in the back. "That's part of the reason I'm here," he confided in a lowered voice.
Ash reasoned out loud as he started moving along. "So he didn't really shoot a cop either, did--" He suddenly stopped, turned to Sam with an unexpectedly sober expression, and blurted, "Did he?"
Sam grabbed the nearest stool with unsteady hands and sat himself down before he fell. "I don't know."
"Seriously, you guys have a falling out or something?"
The man was just anxiously picking at a piece of the puzzle that didn't fit. Sam understood this, but he'd never been more tempted to punch a genius in the head. That huge brain of Ash's could process five years' worth of data on temperature variance and EM anomalies in the break between his third and fourth beers, yet still manage to miss the most obvious facial cues. It was as if all that spare IQ had fried his humanese interpreter.
Maybe it was the expression on Sam's face, or maybe it was the cash, but Ash let him walk away with a bare bones version of the tracking and analysis program on his laptop. Though nowhere near as sophisticated as the full version that only its creator or a madman could understand, it'd been good enough.
The printouts and notes were spread out on his floor, pages moved around and out of chronological order, the way he left them before crashing in exhaustion last night. There was a string of suicides that started in Cheshire thirty-five years ago. He was sure this was it.
The first was a woman who swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Her husband found her body in the kitchen the next morning. The second was a young boy, not even twelve years old. He rode his bicycle to the edge of the neighbor's pond, left his bike and a half-melted popsicle by the tree and jumped in. Sam doubted children were capable of fully comprehending suicide.
A few more cases scattered over the years had sunk quietly into obscurity, but the most recent was the star of the local high school's basketball team. The night he fouled out and ended the season with a home game loss, his footprints could be tracked for five miles through the dirt. He got past the locks and chains and plummeted from the top of the clock tower. The medical examiner's office ruled out foul play, leaving accident or suicide, while the media ran rampant with statistics on rising alcohol and drug abuse in teenagers, overwhelming the less sensational reports that the senior had already been scouted by two universities--both offering scholarships.
It didn't make sense.
Because it's not supposed to, Dean would say. If Sam called him now, he'd get the Insensitivity 101 lecture along with the denial. You can't expect to understand everyone. This ain't our gig. Why the hell are you losing sleep over this? But Sam knew, with a certainty that didn't rely on fancy programs, that Dean would be following this trail.
As he stood by the gas station with arm outstretched and thumb sticking up, he wondered whether it was depressing or awesome that all his essential belongings, twenty-seven years of existence distilled and distilled again, still fit in the laptop case and duffle bags sitting by his feet.
A beat-up truck sped by. It braked noisily, rattled for a second then started to back up. It was his neighbor who rolled down the window.
"Sam? What are you doing?"
Good question. All he knew was that when he caught up with Dean, he was going to reclaim his rightful spot in the Impala as the resident smartass. No leaving without him this time. He couldn't explain this, especially not to a well-meaning snitch, so he just shrugged mournfully and said, "Radiator's busted."
Greg-the-neighbor looked appalled and offered to give him a ride at least halfway to wherever he needed to go. Sam accepted.
And with some luck, he'd narrowed down where he might locate Dean. The thing was, Dean had been really good at keeping himself out of the spotlight, but the car hadn't been so cautious; she'd made a guest appearance on the front page of the local student newspaper, where a picture of flowers and candles burned down to the wick left outside the high school gym showed her distinctive rear poking out from behind the buildings. Special Agent Suave-Car had probably been off interviewing students at the time.
At two in the morning, Sam found him in the dinkiest bar in the older part of town, slumping precariously against the counter with a bottle of beer grasped loosely in his hand. There were more empty bottles and a line of shot glasses by his elbow. The okay-looking blonde in the racer jacket and low-cut top must've whispered something intriguing, because Dean was nodding and smiling languidly at her, his face falling closer and closer to her cleavage.
You can't un-teach an old dog old tricks, Sam thought, staying out of sight.
What looked to be the boyfriend picked the moment they started sucking face to return from the men's room. He was buckling up the belt over his leather chaps as he stalked over, angry boom of a voice reaching them before he pulled the woman away by her shoulders. She let out a string of curses as she stumbled.
Dean stood abruptly, knocking over his bar stool. There was that cocksure look on his face Sam recognized, the one that made everyone want to sock him--but his eyes were flat. The other guy stepped right up into Dean's space, taunting.
The bikers gathered stood up from their tables in twos and threes, crowding closer. In the sudden hush, the barkeep yelled at them to take it outside, but his words went unheeded.
Sam debated whether to step in and save Dean's sorry ass or let that muscled monstrosity knock some sense into his brother. The decision was taken out of his hands when the insulted boyfriend smashed his beer bottle and sent glass shards scattering. The woman went hysterical, screaming right behind Sam's ear as he jumped into action. The barkeep--fucking coward--was nowhere in sight.
"I'm awfully sorry--" Sam towered over him but apologized profusely, grabbing the tattooed wrist wielding the broken bottle. "My buddy's Puerto Rican, he thinks he's supposed to kiss everyone hello." Good one, Sam. You moron.
Sam tentatively relaxed his grip and pointed the jagged glass toward the floor, adding sotto voce: "And you see, he don't speak English so good."
The guy turned to give him a disbelieving look that plainly said You're out of your fucking mind.
Dean burped and collapsed back onto another seat. A few in the background were egging them on with screams of "fight, fight, fight." Sam smiled weakly. Total confusion, about to revert to violence.
"Yeah, pull the other one," McTestosterone snarled, spitting, and shrugged his arm free of Sam's grasp. His fist was clenched to punch ... but the momentum had been broken.
"Here, drinks are on me," Sam said, pulling a few bills out of the back pocket of his jeans and laying them politely on the bar. He didn't stand around to see if it would work. Turn his back on the man, dismiss the threat. Resolving the bar fight was the easy part; the real trouble sat there less than an arm's length away, stinking of booze and staring at him.
"You've really perfected your ability to piss people off," Sam whispered as he dropped down on the empty stool beside Dean's.
Dean turned back to the bar, rubbing at his mouth tiredly, and uttered a muffled "I hate you" into his palm. With a look, he signaled the bartender who'd finally reappeared for another beer. There was a brittleness about the way Dean was hunched over, his collars turned up to keep out the cold.
"Hey. You okay?"
"Go away."
He didn't budge when Sam stepped closer, wouldn't meet his eyes.
"I'm not going anywhere, Dean."
The bartender was openly staring in their direction, but Sam slapped a twenty on the counter for the drinks he wasn't ordering, and they were left alone. One step forward, two steps back--Sam placed a hand on Dean's elbow, Dean stiffened. He slid the beer more or less inconspicuously out of Dean's reach; the face reflected in the spill was shadowed and aloof.
He kept his voice low when he asked, calmer than he felt, "How've you been?" If he let his anger show, he'd lose Dean for good. "I've missed you." He was ignored, but that was fine. He could see when he got up and slung his bags over his good shoulder that he'd fared all right.
No victory dances. He was prepared for Dean to try and shake him off at the first opportunity--in his experience, a sense of nostalgia upon waking from a feverish sleep or remembrance of a gentle touch meant only one thing: that Dean would be gone before he woke up.
The smell of alcohol was strong on Dean's breath as he shoved at Sam, stubbornly refusing to hand over the keys to the Impala. Sam had to physically manhandle him into the passenger seat, swipe the keys from his pocket and buckle him in. Dean fought him all the way before giving in with a tired grunt.
"Where're you staying?" Sam asked. Dean kept his mouth shut. Without directions, Sam drove them to the nearest motel he could find. In the thirty seconds that Sam was away, getting a bottle of water for Dean from the vending machine down the corner, Dean almost throttled the little punk behind the front desk. They narrowly avoided getting kicked out, after all the trouble Sam had gone through to secure them the last available room.
The signs weren't subtle--he should've noticed sooner--but they had been lost in the midst of Dean's usual eccentricities and the tension between them.
As soon as he flicked on the lights and locked the door, Sam asked, "Honestly, what's the matter with you?"
Dean had stopped in the center of the room, head tilted slightly, listening for something. He turned around to look at Sam, oddly acquiescent. Sam was just thinking that Dean's skin seemed too pale when Dean opened his mouth and asked, voice almost too faint to hear:
"S'really you, Sammy?"
Sam's shoulder ached. He dumped all his belongings onto the closer of the horribly Impressionistic bed covers. The car keys landed and stayed on the table. Sam took a deep breath and turned back to Dean.
"You're kidding me, right?"
Dean said nothing. His focus was on Sam's shoulder, the crummy one.
"What?" He almost shouted, dread a kick in the guts. "You're worrying me, Dean. You gotta tell me what happened to you."
Crumpling to sit down at the edge of the bed, Dean stayed bent forward. He rested his head in his hands.
Several questions and uninformative grunts for response later, Sam pieced together what he knew of Dean's evening: 1) Dean was seeing things. 2) Dean had seen Sam earlier that day. He was willing to bet it hadn't gone well.
Dean also seemed to think the time was just past 2300, and that if he hit the road now--if only Sam would leave him alone--he could drive out of this stinking town before midnight, as planned. Dean tried to stand up a few times--got somewhere to be, gotta get there soon, why are you here, Sam?--it was like a flawed feedback loop. Sam drew back his sleeve and held his wrist in front of Dean's eyes; the numbers on his watch didn't register.
"Never mind," he sighed, sitting Dean back down. "You didn't know the meaning of time management anyway."
Sam upended his bags and spread the contents over the bed, rummaging through notebooks and printouts until he found the information he was looking for.
He took one look at Dean's hunched form, grabbed the Impala's keys and headed out, almost knocking over a kid and his sister in his rush down the stairway. He stumbled, apologized dizzily, then jogged the rest of the way to the car. Dean's bags and the shovel Sam might need were still in the trunk.
Sam broke several traffic laws in his haste to get to the city cemetery.
The problem with successfully keeping himself shielded for so long was that when he came back in the business, he re-experienced how much of a headcase he must've become, near the end. On top of that, getting shot at seemed to have kicked his abilities into overdrive. Dean had good reasons to send him away. Images and smells assaulted Sam as he wandered between rows of headstones.
They were nothing like the closure of seeing Jessica in her white sundress a day after her death. Instead, he smelled blood where there were no stains and saw rotting flowers in the sodden darkness.
At the little boy's grave he distantly felt the confusion, the murky questions and a persistent, low wail. The headstone after that, a shotgun was fired, a body with its head missing. He arrived at a plot where he felt nothing--not because of a peaceful death. It was empty.
The name on the headstone read Felicia Donoghue, the first incident in his notes.
The freshly turned earth meant that Dean could've been on to something before the good workout failed to give him any answers.
Scribbled on the back of one sheet of printout was an address over three decades old. Sam didn't have much expectations for finding it, but he drove down one narrow trail after another and ended up nearly running over the For Sale sign in front of the old Colonial-style house. It appeared to have been on the market for years.
The house hasn't been lived in and all the broken locks have yet to be replaced. Armed with only a flashlight and the rock salt gun, Sam stumbled his way down to the basement. He was immediately aware of a tickling at the back of his mind. There was something lying low in one corner: blackened fragments and melted debris, covered by dirt and crumbles of the wall. Human remains.
The signs told him that Dean had been here tonight, but others had broken into this place long before that. Sam's flashlight revealed symbols spray-painted in red on the walls--he didn't recognize any of them. In the far corner, what might've been a room before the enclosure was knocked down, the floor smelled like old piss.
It stank in here.
He'd seen many final resting places that offered neither rest nor finality, but the saddest conditions still managed to get at him. He covered his nose with a sleeve and got to work.
Dean must've rigged explosives to the wall to blow an opening for digging out the remains, but the rest were done by the book: salted and burned outside, brought back in and reburied. That last part was a mess, for there simply wasn't a neat way to hide the remains back into the wall without a drywaller on hand. Otherwise, there was little amiss that Sam could detect.
To be safe, Sam walked between the four corners of the room and concentrated on purification and closure, words he still remembered coming fast but quietly under his breath. He repeated them outside in the dewy darkness, all along the perimeter of the house.
Then he waited.
It was perfectly quiet.
It wouldn't be the first time that Dean had thrown Sam off the scent.
The room might be empty by the time he made it back, but Sam gave the gas pedal his all.
In his distraction, he drove past the Sharp Curves sign twice before he caught on to what was happening. He had only the high beams to see by. The features of the road not directly in front of him were swallowed immediately by the night, but he knew it was the same road sign, the same series of curves he'd been wearing the tires out on.
As he made the next turn more carefully, he noticed in the mirror the dark, vaguely human shape in his back seat. He reached for the duffle to find the rock salt or flask of holy water, anything that might help, but his eyes kept being drawn to the mirror even though he knew better than to look--
Two hollows for eyes, in what should've been a face.
Sam was slipping.
No sound.
No heat.
Dean.
He snapped back to himself, cold and shivering, as the steep drop opened up before him. He swerved back onto the road, numb and helpless as the car accelerated along the stretch of familiar territory. His spine felt frozen, his body locked from neck to arms.
He bit his tongue and let the taste of blood fill the inside of his mouth. The brakes weren't working and he could only watch as his hands slipped off the steering wheel, his arms falling leaden to his sides.
The same road sign rushed past him again.
"Donoghue," he tried, but it was the wrong thing to say. The wheels screeched and Sam was being slammed into the door frame despite his seatbelt. The car hit an uneven bank and skidded on the loose gravel, rear end spinning out.
The first of the cases scribbled in his notes, Felicia Donoghue née Young had been married to William Donoghue for more than a decade. The couple had one child. After her suicide, William had, in his grief, sent the boy away to live with some relatives.
Sam's head felt like it was being split open. Another jolt slammed him back into the seat, and he felt the front of the car lift off the ground.
"Listen to me, Felicia..." There was only so much he knew about her, but he told her everything: She used to volunteer at the local hospice and orphanage. Her only son had moved to California when he turned eighteen, and is still living there with his wife and kids.
The road changed, scenery warping. He'd made it out of the dangerous stretch.
"I suspect your husband murdered you. You wouldn't have taken your own life."
There was a low, distorted bellow as the tires were ripped apart on the rocks, a noise so loud--but not coming from the outside. It was right behind his shoulder. He thought, this could be the way it ends. Christ. He didn't want to die.
The jagged cliff face loomed up in his view. He braced for impact--
--and found himself staring at the NO VACANCY neon sign, only the sounds of his panting echoing harshly in his ears. He slumped over the steering wheel.
He was back in the parking lot of the motel, and his tires were smoking.
Sam reached for the door, fumbling for a minute with his seatbelt. Sweat drenched his face and ran down his chin and neck, pooling at the base of his throat. Both the front and back of his shirt were soaked; his sweat was ice cold. He was going to puke, lie down or pass out-- later. The shivering was out of control, but he didn't have the leisure of waiting for it to run its course.
He took only a moment, then hauled himself up to his room on rubbery legs. What he found was Dean standing up from a crouch, releasing the safety on the Glock--Sam's gun, fully loaded--
"Dean!"
--and placing it in his mouth. Dean's index finger curled around the trigger, and there was a look of contentment in his eyes that Sam hadn't seen in a long time. It was completely wrong.
Sam placed one hand on the barrel, murmuring, "Hey, easy now." He wrapped the fingers of his other hand gently around Dean's wrist--feeling the pulse beating low and steady in that moment--before he flipped the gun around and knocked Dean out.
Dean's favorite leather jacket was tossed onto the back of a chair, followed by his long-sleeved shirt and a tee, until Sam could examine the expanse of skin above Dean's waist: healing cuts on his chest and a bruise near his ribcage. Those seemed to be older injuries, the bruise already fading to green at its edges.
A quick check of Dean's pupils and head showed no signs of head trauma--the kiss from the Glock, courtesy of Sam, was necessary for keeping that stupid head in one piece. He turned Dean around so he could examine his back, palm sweeping up the dip and curve of spine, the sharp shoulder blades. When he got to Dean's shoulders, he felt a chill.
Dean was slowly regaining consciousness. Sam resolutely ignored his groans.
There were shallow cuts high up on his neck, sluggishly oozing blood. They looked to be from some sort of sharp metal object--barbed wire or maybe shrapnel. Dean's hair had grown longer, covering the nape of his neck as though he were more vulnerable there, now that no one watched his back.
Should've never listened to him. Sam tugged on the stubborn lobe of Dean's ear, combing his fingers down through the hair as he pulled back.
They came away dirty. It looked like a black residue muddied by Dean's blood, and it sure wasn't gunpowder.
He got up to check the inside of Dean's jacket, and found traces of the same.
"How did you survive all this time?"
Another groan was his reply.
The jacket was a goner, so he wiped Dean's neck as best as he could with the sleeve lining, then tugged off the well-worn jeans despite the lack of cooperation. He half-carried, half-dragged Dean into the shower and ran the water, just hot enough to be tolerated. Dean didn't look like he was going to remain upright, so Sam pressed his knees to the back of Dean's thighs and folded him to sit under the steaming spray. The glass door slammed as he hurried out, his own clothes wet.
Sam bundled up Dean's jacket and shirts and even the ugly bed cover inside a trash bag. He confiscated both of Dean's handguns and remembered to take his own with him this time around--feeling like a walking arsenal. The freaking car was staying in the lot.
He jogged for less than a mile before he found a grassless, secluded area where he could dump the contents of the bag on the ground, add salt and start a bonfire going. If it didn't work, they were shit out of luck.
"What the hell?" Dean asked, arms wrapped around himself even though the water was still warm. Sam tested the temperature just to be sure, sending a sudden spray right in Dean's face. The humidity flattened the attitude out of the spikes of hair above Dean's forehead, and the rapid blinking of waterlogged lashes made him look years younger. Vulnerable, Sam thought.
Dean scowled and spit out a mouthful of water that splattered the hems of Sam's jeans. Or more like something the cat dragged in. Yeah, the pain in the ass was mostly back, charming as ever. Sam saw the swollen cuts on Dean's neck, the wisps of red running down his skin, and stopped smiling.
Dean's eyes were more angry than alert. "What the hell, Sam."
"You're welcome, now stop yelling in my ear." Sam hesitated for only a second before stripping off his own clothes to join Dean in the already crammed shower. He soaped and scrubbed at Dean's neck and back with the pads of his fingers, ignoring Dean's manly curses of pain, until he was convinced there was no dirt hidden in the wounds, and the surrounding skin had flushed pink in protest.
Those muscles were so tightly strung, he seemed likely to snap any minute.
"Will you just relax?"
Dean turned, one eye blinking at him over the hunched shoulders. "Where're my clothes?"
"Toasted them, sorry. If it makes you feel better, I'm now naked because of you."
There was an unfunny sound. "Dude, I don't think I'm drunk enough for this."
Sam huffed and pressed Dean's head back under the spray, shampooing his hair twice for good measure. He silently mouthed the one protection spell he believed in, in simple English and basic truths: He's important to me. Shield him, keep him safe.
In return for this kindness, Dean jabbed him in the eye with his elbow and complained about the shampoo smelling girly.
At least Dean's teeth had stopped chattering. He was being more and more of a dick by the minute which, all things considered, was status normal, but the tension still clung to him like armor. Hackles raised. Untouchable. It made Sam's neck hurt in sympathy. Has Dean forgotten what it's like to be in human company?
Sam had known what it meant to sleep with someone. Not fucking, but sleeping together, sharing warmth and weight of limbs, skin brushing in the background reassurance of I'm here, I'm not going anywhere. It was obvious Dean didn't have the first clue about it: he drew close to the edge of the bed early on, determined to put up a tough guy act yet not stoic enough to turn away Sam's touch, the contact he clearly needed. He didn't even waste the energy to snipe at Sam ("You need help finding your bed? And I'm supposed to be the drunk one.") and that was the most telling sign.
Hunting alone is going to kill him.
The drowsing body jerked, almost toppled off the bed. Sam could see Dean's hair sticking up over the waves of the covers, a mess even in the darkness. Dean was breathing deeply, trying to relax without shifting, but it was impossible when he just didn't know how.
Sam sensed when Dean woke up for the third time, wary and almost quaking with tension. "Jesus." He couldn't stand it anymore, so he reached out and hooked an arm across Dean's chest, pulled the cold stretch of Dean's back in toward him, tight against his own chest.
It was some time before Dean eased back into a shallow, uneasy sleep--the rest of the weary.
He kept watch for as long as he could, counting the soft exhalations for company.
Sam woke much later than expected, feeling drained. He left Dean catching up on the sleep he needed. The Impala looked surprisingly intact in the light of day, even though Sam had to replace one of the tires. Dean was going to be pissed about the scratched paint no matter what.
He went back to the Donoghue house to gather details he missed last night: beer bottles smashed and crushed into small glass fragments in one corner of the basement, cigarette butts at the bottom step of the stairs. He hadn't recognized the symbols on the walls at first because they weren't ritualistic--graffiti was all they were. It was no longer necessary, but he replaced the broken locks on the door when he left.
It started to drizzle by the time he headed back, dark clouds looming overhead. His legs were fatigued and left deep shoeprints in the mud. He wondered if Dean was still wallowing in bed, wrapped up in his cave of pillows and sheets. It was a long trek back to the motel on the broken trail.
The hazy landscape was eerily familiar, blurring the line between reality and his dreams; if Sam wasn't careful, he could easily lose himself in this fog. There was no reason for them to stay more than a few days, and he made a mental note to ask about in-room Net access. Now that he had an idea how it began, it was time to wrap up the case.
More mud in his shoes and an hour later, Sam unlocked the door to their room to find Dean sitting on the edge of his bed, a damp towel draped around his neck. The bandages there had been torn off. His face was dripping wet and the skin of his arms exposed by the white t-shirt looked cold to the touch. Clutched in his hand was Sam's note saying that he shouldn't be gone long. A few words scrawled in pencil--chicken scratches, if he were honest. Nothing about it deserved that sort of rapt attention.
The bed on Sam's side of the room was in the same condition as when they checked in: undisturbed. No imprint of a body, not a trace of human warmth. The afternoon light fell pristine across the bed spread. In Dean's position, Sam might've wondered, too, if his mind was playing cruel tricks on him.
He cleared his throat.
Dean stiffened and, in that moment before he remembered to look bored, his emotions were laid bare: Relieved. Terrified.
Sam's chest felt constricted. The gulf between them had formed, eroded layer by layer--would they ever learn? He kicked off his muddy shoes at the door and trod in uncomfortably wet socks to the desk, where he sat and spread out his notes as if the hours he'd been gone were mere minutes.
He heard Dean moving after a while, the sounds of him pulling on another shirt and digging out the kit to sharpen his knives. Sam had missed this, the strange way Dean's body relaxed as he settled cross-legged on the bed, surrounded by his favorite hazards. The tip of his tongue showed as he frowned at the blades dulled by recent graveyard escapades.
Between drying out his socks and reordering the sheaf of papers, Sam heard himself say, "I'm not running anymore. I know you--you never make things easy, but I'm not leaving without you."
Dean scarcely looked up from his work, not wanting to slice a finger in his distraction, but there was a cynical little smile appearing on his lips. One that gave away his tack before he opened his mouth to ask, "No?"
"Unless," Sam rushed to add. "Unless you're more of a jackass than usual and start the pranking thing before we even hit the road."
Dean actually let out a laugh. He had to put the knife down on the abrasive before accidentally stabbing himself in his amusement.
"Hey, I thought you loved mushrooms--"
"Yeah, on my pizza!" And that still excluded the hallucinogenic family.
"--so why the hate, Chief Samohawk?"
"You--I can't believe--For Christ's sake--"
And Dean was cracking up at last. "I love you Sam," he managed in between wheezes, the smile crinkling his eyes and taking over the rest of his face irrepressible and real. "You're the fucking light of my life."
The restlessness behind Sam's ribcage expanded a little more. All this time, its susurration had been, Tell him. Fix it. They had a tradition of forcing themselves into a corner, fuck or fight; he craved change. He never wanted to fight Dean again.
"I know."
Nothing more needed to be said. Truth cut sharper than a blade, and Dean looked away. He stared dazed at his empty hands, then remembered to pick up the hunting knife.
There was an old lady in Sam's neighborhood whom he greeted every other morning, when he went for a jog. She never looked up from her backyard when he or the mailman passed by, so he'd guessed that she was perhaps hard of hearing. Two days before Sam packed his bags and hitchhiked his way to Dean, she'd taken one look at him and said, "You'll get your answer."
It sounded cryptic, but so did most of her crazy talk.
Late in the afternoon, they drove by the local news press, where Sam dashed through the downpour to slide an envelope of photocopies of documents (temporarily missing from a storage facility) through a slot in the door. His typed note pointed out the deviations from procedure in the 1972 case that had been hastily closed, files sealed, by then Corporal of the now defunct MDC police--Warren A. Roberts, classmate of a certain William Donoghue. The dates were telltale signs.
He hadn't been sure where to begin. An empty casket remains at the city cemetery while the murder victim was never laid to rest--
"So where's old Billy, the murdering bastard?"
"I think Mr. Donoghue has been dead for a long time, Dean."
Surprisingly, Dean hadn't grilled him on how he knew this. Sam had continued typing up the suspicious points that would hopefully lead to a reopened investigation while Dean hovered over his shoulder like a malevolent gargoyle, tossing out smart-ass remarks on how law school sucked the life out of his writing. Where's the punch line, huh? Dean had asked.
At some point, the words 'Magnum, P.I.' were added in black ink to resemble a byline. Sam had been preoccupied with how Dean might react upon seeing the damage to the car that by the time he noticed, it'd been too late.
"It's not really an editorial, you know," Sam said as he carefully pulled the door shut--remember, car trauma--and shook the water from his hair.
Dean gave him the What? shrug and stomped on the gas. Leaning over to search for bills in the glove compartment, Dean said, "I didn't edit squat and you know I could've done worse."
"Eyes on the road!"
"Get with the program, Sam, I'm starving. Find us some place to eat."
The night trod the safe side of some invisible boundary, potent as a circle of salt, until they were both full, warm, and tired of talking. Dean snoozed on his bed by the light of a single lamp, newspaper over his face, while Sam sat sprawled in the armchair. It was peaceful. He stared, dry-mouthed, at the ceiling for thirty minutes before he found the courage to move to Dean's side, maneuvering on hands and knees to press a wobbly kiss to the shirt-covered stomach.
There was only the thunder of blood rushing in his head, heart tripping in his chest. Dean probably could feign sleep until the apocalypse came knocking.
He popped the button on those worn jeans--tips of his fingers grazing below the dip of Dean's navel--unzipped and tugged to pull the rain-smelling denim open and down. Before he could talk himself out of it, he traced the outline of Dean's half-hard cock with his mouth, breathing hotly on the boxer briefs to get a taste of Dean's scent.
Dean yelled Jesus and then Sam! as he shot upright in bed, knocking Sam backwards more forcefully than necessary. He seemed shocked, almost apoplectic, but there was this knowledge in his eyes. If he'd truly been dozing with the crossword section leaving its inky grid of an unsolved puzzle over his eyes, he was definitely awake now.
"I would say sorry, but I'm really not."
Sam knew how he must look to Dean: respectfully defiant, but with mussed hair falling in his eyes, sweat above his lips and the tent in the front of his jeans, also fucking turned on. Dean could accuse him of fighting dirty, he didn't mind.
If he was waiting for Dean to recognize this thing between them, to reach out first and pull Sam back into the space he once occupied--or anything to suggest that he was still welcome company--he'd be waiting for a long time. His whole lifetime.
"Fuck," Dean was saying, collapsing back on the bed and throwing his arm over his eyes. "What the hell you think you're doing, Sam?"
"I know what I'm doing. Do you?" Sam thought he should stay back for now but couldn't help inching closer, longing to touch Dean again, to connect no matter how briefly.
Dean lay deceptively still, showing clenched teeth below the line of his sleeve, his hands in fists, when Sam knew he wanted nothing better than to bolt out the door and hurt someone. Break some knuckles, bleed all over the place.
That was the last thing Sam wanted.
"If punching me will make you feel better..."
"Don't think I won't," and Dean was up and lunging halfway across the bed, one hand on Sam's throat. He was going to deck him hard this time, punch that smart mouth and put an end to the bold words. Eyes scrunched shut for the blow, Sam couldn't help the instinctive flinch.
It came, not a fist but an open, searching palm on Sam's chin ... Dean was cradling his face with his hands. Just holding on and taking a good, hard look, as if this close they still failed to see each other. Whispering, "Why" and "Sam" and "Damn you." He didn't seem completely aware of what he was doing, a finger absent-mindedly skimming Sam's cheekbones. The world had blurred for him.
Sam released the breath he'd been holding, eyes opening fully to catch the emotions contorting Dean's face. There was no hurry now. He brought his hand up to his own face and slipped his fingers inside Dean's palm, holding him in this way.
Continued here...
Author: itsuki9
Rating: Adult
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Word Count: Around 17300. Split into two posts for length, but this story is complete.
Spoilers: Assume spoilers for everything up to 2x20
Summary: A few years down the road, a second chance at making things right.
On the morning he was set to leave, Sam awoke to the sight of Dean perched at the foot of his bed, cleaning his guns with a soft cloth. He'd have the sense memory imprinted in his mind, of waking half-hard to the smell of gun oil and the confusing aroma of coffee flowing underneath. There was a mug waiting by his bed, the drink scalding his tongue with the first sip. Milky and right on the edge of bittersweet. Dean had gotten up early for this, a last meal with an extra shot of kindness.
In his sleep-addled state, it took him a minute to realize that Dean was fiddling with the wrong gun, the ol' Glock which was the red-headed stepchild in Dean's weapon collection. (Sam maintained that it was a good sidearm, being lighter and having reduced recoil, an assessment Dean agreed with: "Yeah. For a granny.")
Even with half his brain cells functioning, he understood Dean's intention.
"No way. I'm not taking that," he said in a voice like a chainsaw, and grimaced. He wet his throat with a swallow of coffee before continuing. "Can you picture me chasing after spirits with a gun, in between lectures?"
The boxes of bullets, upon closer examination, were of the regular flavor. Those wouldn't work.
"It's for your self-defense, Sam. Everybody hates lawyers," Dean deadpanned.
Sam said no again, his laugh sounding more like a cough. Dean hassled him the whole morning, not caring that it bordered on nagging when he was hell-bent on Sam being armed at all times. When Sam gave in with a nod, he was promptly left alone.
There were no disagreements, after that. He stared at Dean's back, the hunch of his shoulders like the shadowed crags they'd passed in the desert, silhouettes stark black against the glow of twilight.
With too much time to brood in the months that followed, bitterness welled up from the depths of hurt, putrefied and toxic. All wounds took a turn for the worse before they started to heal, but Sam saw no reprieve in sight. Even after he weaned himself from the few pain meds he actually took, his thoughts refused to obey any order. Every breath he took that first week stung with pain and betrayal.
You asked me to come with you.
In his head the arguments were cogent and lucid, but as soon as he opened his mouth, faced with Dean's silence on the other end of the line, clutching the phone with a white-knuckled grip, his logic deserted him--leaving only weakness behind.
Dean's words at the beginning of their journey came back to him every so often, words that had broken through the unnatural stench of the fire clinging to them as he'd been pulled into a one-armed hug. I can't do this without you, Sam.
So Sam had uprooted himself and followed. Concrete blurred away, burst into the openness of dark gold fields; tragedy struck in every town but life continued in the background. As time salved the sting of loss, silence gradually gave way to conversation, the sound of their voices melding with the hum of the road and wind--talking about anything to keep Dean awake, until Sam fell asleep himself.
Dean had changed him.
He'd decided long before he said anything. He remembered Dean's sulking face as he gave Sam the finger and wiped iced lemonade from his lap, one crisp afternoon not too long before life derailed, the sun beating down on their heads and burning the tips of their ears. Sam had laughed like his heart might take flight with the lightness of it.
He'd almost said it then: I've changed--You've changed me. I'm here to stay. But that would've made Dean more insufferable, so he waited.
Didn't his actions speak clearly enough?
But Dean, who was like a singularity, the gravity so strong it altered Sam's path--Dean who'd always been unmoved by Sam's doubts, the exasperating constant through Sam's years of rebellion and beyond-- one chance bullet had swayed him where Sam could not.
It'd been a trigger-happy rookie and his partner who remembered Dean's face from an old photo. Their luck had to run out some time. (Dean should've listened to him.)
He remembered Dean yelling and shots fired. His shirt soaked through, his vision went grey.
Sam didn't learn until much later, coming around on a ratty couch in excruciating pain to find some hippie smiling down at him with crooked teeth, that he'd stumbled into the line of fire and taken the bullet that might've killed Dean. Crazy Harold (really a doctor) had clinched the extracted pellet in his red-stained surgical gloves and offered it for Sam to keep as valuable memorabilia. Gross, he'd tried to mouth.
Dean had stood there beyond the couch, hanging on to a desk that was the only thing keeping him on his feet, his face taut and pale. There was a smidge of blood on his ear that he'd failed to wipe off.
Crazy Harold had mentioned permanent nerve damage like it was good news, Sam being a few millimeters short of a collapsed lung and still having a pulse at the end of the day. A close call, judging from Dean's face.
The raised scars where Harold had cut into him turned all shades of autumn before settling on white as time passed. With distance to dull the shock, Sam wondered irreverently--if he'd been a second too late, would the bullet have skidded right off Dean's skin? Dean was that fucking impenetrable sometimes.
But Sam had made it out alive. They both had. Why was he being punished?
Palm met table, cracking the tip of the pen he'd been practicing writing with. Satisfaction was brief before he regretted his impetuous stupidity as the impact rang all the way up from wrist to shoulder. It hurt like hell.
The ink splattered the blank margins on his set of notes. He stared at his pathetic attempt at handwriting: The guilty mind, in illegible scribble. Law school, what had once been his goal and escape, now seemed trivial when Dean was out there fighting alone, with local police agencies notified to shoot him on sight and nobody around to watch his back.
You still need me, Sam thought as he pinched at the flare of pain between his eyebrows. I can't be wrong about this.
He never thought that one day, he'd be the one to slow Dean down.
Sam had the sneaking suspicion that Dean, despite his claims of being too cool to worry, always knew the critical stats of Sam's life. Who's the girl Sam's been real sweet on (nobody), which fools have been trying to corrupt him (a surprising number, misguided they may be), and any changes in his location, even if Sam had declined and subsequently been abducted for the Fishing Trip of Desperation a week before exams. Nobody packed a fishing rod, but there were plenty of beers and chips for a weekend stay at a house with an ocean-view. Just a bunch of 2Ls trying to salvage their threadbare sanity before they mauled someone.
Dean answered on the second ring, but paused a fraction of a second too long when Sam asked where he was and which trail he was chasing now.
"Meth-Town," he replied, then dropped his voice to conspiratorial. "Chasing a chick with a pair of oomph--" He whistled and made the type of noise he normally made around a mouthful of steak. "I can't begin to tell you, Sam."
"Yeah, I get it. The sharpest fangs you've ever seen?" Sam put down his beer and went out on the porch to talk, waving at the disoriented 1L who'd tagged along on this trip to lie back down on the couch before his hangover killed him. "You know, I'm in Eastham right now with some friends."
"Eastham?" The way Dean said it, with just the right amount of disbelief and teasing, confirmed Sam's suspicions.
"Whatever retarded name you've come up with, I don't want to know. It's less than 2 hours from Methuen, if you break the usual speed laws."
"Huh." And Sam heard the laptop start up, noted the background chatter of a 24-hour diner or a coffee shop. He could almost see Dean tilting his head back, exposing the lean line of his throat as he grinned at the ceiling before sinking down into his seat. There was something smug about Dean's voice when he continued. "My, how you've changed, Sammy. You never complained about my driving before."
"Probably because I was still in the car. I wouldn't put it past you to shove me out on Route 66."
"Whatever, Sam."
A brief silence.
"I'm going to see you later, right?"
"Keep your panties on, I'm still working on my pick-up line and Ice Chick is playing hard to get."
"Dean."
"Yeah," Dean finally relented. "Yeah, I'll drive by when it's done."
He didn't, of course.
Sam's right hand still shook when he handled the Glock. If he held the gun straight in front of him for more than a minute, which he would have to if he was to be of any use, his shoulder and pectoral started feeling like they were on fire. These were problems physical therapy couldn't fix, but he had a brilliant (crazy) idea; he was going to learn to shoot with his left.
Being a lefty came easily to him, the grip of the handle fit right into his smooth palm, his thumb flicking the safety off and on. He then tried tucking the gun in its usual place under his waistband, and nearly shot his ass off.
(He would have, if he'd remembered to load the gun.)
Even so, he believed he was born a lefty, a black sheep of the family in this just as in everything else. He must have switched in his childhood from following Dean around (much to Dean's annoyance) and copying his moves--smartass attitude, dexterity with a range of weapons, the complete Winchester package.
Steak knives and a dart board provided him his training range. His aim initially sucked, but brute force made up for its lack. The blades sank the whole way through the board, straight into the wooden door behind it.
Dean did stop by to see Sam after all, but that was two days and several of Sam's pissed off, increasingly anxious messages later. Smack in the middle of exam week, Dean walked into his apartment and whistled approvingly at the TV and the sound system, as if he hadn't picked them and wired them himself. He sat down on Sam's bed and stretched out his legs, sore from gas pedal abuse, like he'd never left Sam's side.
Sam set his books aside and went with Dean to get takeout for dinner. On their way back with the food and a six-pack of beer, they noticed the neighbors' open door--a heady film of smoke lingered in the hallway. Dean peered into their apartment to ask "How's it hangin'?" and ended up bonding with the dudes over shared tastes in slasher flicks.
It usually took many beers and dirty jokes before Dean played well with strangers who possessed the useless Y chromosome, but today he and Sam's neighbors were totally chumming around.
Dean was that smooth of a liar, when he needed to be; Greg-the-neighbor, who was built like a Grizzly, did keg stands and crushed peanuts with his chin, could not act to save his life. The nervous tic below his bloodshot eyes was the damning evidence.
But Sam let it slide.
Alone again in his apartment, they ate and talked and ragged on each other for disgusting choices in food. Sam couldn't believe how much he'd missed this warmth--on impulse, he cracked his cookie in half and read his fortune: You will mend fences with an old friend. Close, but not quite. He folded the slip in half and tucked it into his wallet.
Dean rolled his eyes, but said nothing about this quirk of Sam's. It had to do with faith and hope, and Dean never trampled on those grounds.
Dean read his out loud: "People think you're charming 13 27 30 33 41 45." Sam called bullshit and grabbed the slip of paper, only to confirm that was what it said. They dumped their glasses in the sink and shoved the leftovers in the fridge. The night flowed molten then cooled, air stretching brittle around them. A moment condensed with clarity--Dean patted him on the arm and got up to leave.
"I'm coming with you," he said, pulling on his jacket.
"C'mon, Sam--" Dean didn't miss a beat, voice regretful but backed with steel because he had Sam's best interests at heart. A well-planned, smooth rejection even as scuffed boots took Dean to the door in four unhurried strides. "You were right before. A life on the road's not what you want."
"That's bullshit." The door rattled and Sam had Dean pressed up against the painted wood, hands clenched on the front of his leather jacket. Their knees collided. It felt like déjà vu, except the emotions were skewed. Dean shoved back immediately, one hand moving without thought to touch the corner of his mouth. His eyes were aflame, yet he'd never looked more lost.
The distance between them may be unbridgeable.
Sam tried to hide his grimace but could not help the near-shout, all the words circling in his head over the past week coming out in a deluge of anger. "You don't know a thing about what I want."
"Oh yeah?" And with that, Dean shrugged off the layer of civility like a boxer's robe, snapping into the familiarity of them trading blows. "Changed your mind again, didn't you. You scratched law school off your New Year's resolution and added 'Kick some demon ass' to the list? Or was it 'Add more holes to chest for better ventilation,' because one wasn't fucking enough?"
The tender spot below the clavicle and above the sternum was his Achilles' heel, where a light jab could white-out his vision and double him over in pain. The shove, those words seemed to hit him right at the center of it.
"God, Dean--" He took deep breaths to conquer the nausea, just like they'd taught him. Dean could be that brutally effective at making his point.
"--did you have any idea I was worried out of my mind?"
"Listen..."
"You don't say to someone, 'See you in a few,' then take off in the opposite direction to chase a lead two towns away. You didn't answer the phone--"
"Hey."
"--I thought you were dead, Dean!"
"Hey," Dean said again, voice subdued and no longer argumentative. "People needed help. You would've done the same thing."
"No. I wouldn't." Forget the breathing exercises, they both knew that sound was Sam gasping in pain. After all, he was just a guy who saved as many people as he could within his physical limits--limits which had now been indisputably drawn for him. But Sam was not a coward, and he never used the victims to avoid his brother.
A waft of air, then the door closed with a click. This time, Sam didn't stop him from walking away.
He stood at the crossroads and watched the thunderclouds obscure the sun, the rain washing out his paths in every direction. A few figures stood bleakly in the distance. Sam couldn't see their faces or catch their mouths moving, but he knew the reedy sound wasn't the wind. He found himself walking toward them.
Two gunshots rang out, sending crows scattering from skeletal trees.
There was no reason to panic.
Like sound distorted underwater, these were fragments of dreams he'd learned not to chase. "Premonitions are sublime," a dying man once said to him, though he couldn't remember if this, too, happened in a dream. They originate from somewhere the living don't belong; downfall lies waiting in the completion of the puzzle.
When Sam opened his eyes, his head barely hurt, and the sky outside his window was an endless blue.
He was going to find Dean--they needed to stay together to survive.
The one time he went back to the Roadhouse, Sam spent half the cash (left for him in a box with his textbooks) on a plane ticket and a rental car. Ash greeted him with a friendly punch on his bad arm and a "Hey man, where've you been?"
Rumor apparently had it that Sam was living the high life of a drug lord ("Scarf Ace") in Acapulco. Other versions claimed that he'd sampled too much of the goods, or screwed around with too many insatiable girlfriends, and shuffled off the mortal coil a happy, horny sonuvabitch. Sam clung to his mortified smile and prodded Ash for news, cursing Dean in the back of his mind.
Ash's slurred "You sure, you weren't in Mexico?" and the accompanying drug jibes from a few eavesdropping old drunks didn't bother him, but he'd no idea how to deflect the simple question that followed: "So where's Dean?"
"Um." He flicked his gaze significantly over the other patrons staring at him, then nodded toward the office in the back. "That's part of the reason I'm here," he confided in a lowered voice.
Ash reasoned out loud as he started moving along. "So he didn't really shoot a cop either, did--" He suddenly stopped, turned to Sam with an unexpectedly sober expression, and blurted, "Did he?"
Sam grabbed the nearest stool with unsteady hands and sat himself down before he fell. "I don't know."
"Seriously, you guys have a falling out or something?"
The man was just anxiously picking at a piece of the puzzle that didn't fit. Sam understood this, but he'd never been more tempted to punch a genius in the head. That huge brain of Ash's could process five years' worth of data on temperature variance and EM anomalies in the break between his third and fourth beers, yet still manage to miss the most obvious facial cues. It was as if all that spare IQ had fried his humanese interpreter.
Maybe it was the expression on Sam's face, or maybe it was the cash, but Ash let him walk away with a bare bones version of the tracking and analysis program on his laptop. Though nowhere near as sophisticated as the full version that only its creator or a madman could understand, it'd been good enough.
The printouts and notes were spread out on his floor, pages moved around and out of chronological order, the way he left them before crashing in exhaustion last night. There was a string of suicides that started in Cheshire thirty-five years ago. He was sure this was it.
The first was a woman who swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Her husband found her body in the kitchen the next morning. The second was a young boy, not even twelve years old. He rode his bicycle to the edge of the neighbor's pond, left his bike and a half-melted popsicle by the tree and jumped in. Sam doubted children were capable of fully comprehending suicide.
A few more cases scattered over the years had sunk quietly into obscurity, but the most recent was the star of the local high school's basketball team. The night he fouled out and ended the season with a home game loss, his footprints could be tracked for five miles through the dirt. He got past the locks and chains and plummeted from the top of the clock tower. The medical examiner's office ruled out foul play, leaving accident or suicide, while the media ran rampant with statistics on rising alcohol and drug abuse in teenagers, overwhelming the less sensational reports that the senior had already been scouted by two universities--both offering scholarships.
It didn't make sense.
Because it's not supposed to, Dean would say. If Sam called him now, he'd get the Insensitivity 101 lecture along with the denial. You can't expect to understand everyone. This ain't our gig. Why the hell are you losing sleep over this? But Sam knew, with a certainty that didn't rely on fancy programs, that Dean would be following this trail.
As he stood by the gas station with arm outstretched and thumb sticking up, he wondered whether it was depressing or awesome that all his essential belongings, twenty-seven years of existence distilled and distilled again, still fit in the laptop case and duffle bags sitting by his feet.
A beat-up truck sped by. It braked noisily, rattled for a second then started to back up. It was his neighbor who rolled down the window.
"Sam? What are you doing?"
Good question. All he knew was that when he caught up with Dean, he was going to reclaim his rightful spot in the Impala as the resident smartass. No leaving without him this time. He couldn't explain this, especially not to a well-meaning snitch, so he just shrugged mournfully and said, "Radiator's busted."
Greg-the-neighbor looked appalled and offered to give him a ride at least halfway to wherever he needed to go. Sam accepted.
And with some luck, he'd narrowed down where he might locate Dean. The thing was, Dean had been really good at keeping himself out of the spotlight, but the car hadn't been so cautious; she'd made a guest appearance on the front page of the local student newspaper, where a picture of flowers and candles burned down to the wick left outside the high school gym showed her distinctive rear poking out from behind the buildings. Special Agent Suave-Car had probably been off interviewing students at the time.
At two in the morning, Sam found him in the dinkiest bar in the older part of town, slumping precariously against the counter with a bottle of beer grasped loosely in his hand. There were more empty bottles and a line of shot glasses by his elbow. The okay-looking blonde in the racer jacket and low-cut top must've whispered something intriguing, because Dean was nodding and smiling languidly at her, his face falling closer and closer to her cleavage.
You can't un-teach an old dog old tricks, Sam thought, staying out of sight.
What looked to be the boyfriend picked the moment they started sucking face to return from the men's room. He was buckling up the belt over his leather chaps as he stalked over, angry boom of a voice reaching them before he pulled the woman away by her shoulders. She let out a string of curses as she stumbled.
Dean stood abruptly, knocking over his bar stool. There was that cocksure look on his face Sam recognized, the one that made everyone want to sock him--but his eyes were flat. The other guy stepped right up into Dean's space, taunting.
The bikers gathered stood up from their tables in twos and threes, crowding closer. In the sudden hush, the barkeep yelled at them to take it outside, but his words went unheeded.
Sam debated whether to step in and save Dean's sorry ass or let that muscled monstrosity knock some sense into his brother. The decision was taken out of his hands when the insulted boyfriend smashed his beer bottle and sent glass shards scattering. The woman went hysterical, screaming right behind Sam's ear as he jumped into action. The barkeep--fucking coward--was nowhere in sight.
"I'm awfully sorry--" Sam towered over him but apologized profusely, grabbing the tattooed wrist wielding the broken bottle. "My buddy's Puerto Rican, he thinks he's supposed to kiss everyone hello." Good one, Sam. You moron.
Sam tentatively relaxed his grip and pointed the jagged glass toward the floor, adding sotto voce: "And you see, he don't speak English so good."
The guy turned to give him a disbelieving look that plainly said You're out of your fucking mind.
Dean burped and collapsed back onto another seat. A few in the background were egging them on with screams of "fight, fight, fight." Sam smiled weakly. Total confusion, about to revert to violence.
"Yeah, pull the other one," McTestosterone snarled, spitting, and shrugged his arm free of Sam's grasp. His fist was clenched to punch ... but the momentum had been broken.
"Here, drinks are on me," Sam said, pulling a few bills out of the back pocket of his jeans and laying them politely on the bar. He didn't stand around to see if it would work. Turn his back on the man, dismiss the threat. Resolving the bar fight was the easy part; the real trouble sat there less than an arm's length away, stinking of booze and staring at him.
"You've really perfected your ability to piss people off," Sam whispered as he dropped down on the empty stool beside Dean's.
Dean turned back to the bar, rubbing at his mouth tiredly, and uttered a muffled "I hate you" into his palm. With a look, he signaled the bartender who'd finally reappeared for another beer. There was a brittleness about the way Dean was hunched over, his collars turned up to keep out the cold.
"Hey. You okay?"
"Go away."
He didn't budge when Sam stepped closer, wouldn't meet his eyes.
"I'm not going anywhere, Dean."
The bartender was openly staring in their direction, but Sam slapped a twenty on the counter for the drinks he wasn't ordering, and they were left alone. One step forward, two steps back--Sam placed a hand on Dean's elbow, Dean stiffened. He slid the beer more or less inconspicuously out of Dean's reach; the face reflected in the spill was shadowed and aloof.
He kept his voice low when he asked, calmer than he felt, "How've you been?" If he let his anger show, he'd lose Dean for good. "I've missed you." He was ignored, but that was fine. He could see when he got up and slung his bags over his good shoulder that he'd fared all right.
No victory dances. He was prepared for Dean to try and shake him off at the first opportunity--in his experience, a sense of nostalgia upon waking from a feverish sleep or remembrance of a gentle touch meant only one thing: that Dean would be gone before he woke up.
The smell of alcohol was strong on Dean's breath as he shoved at Sam, stubbornly refusing to hand over the keys to the Impala. Sam had to physically manhandle him into the passenger seat, swipe the keys from his pocket and buckle him in. Dean fought him all the way before giving in with a tired grunt.
"Where're you staying?" Sam asked. Dean kept his mouth shut. Without directions, Sam drove them to the nearest motel he could find. In the thirty seconds that Sam was away, getting a bottle of water for Dean from the vending machine down the corner, Dean almost throttled the little punk behind the front desk. They narrowly avoided getting kicked out, after all the trouble Sam had gone through to secure them the last available room.
The signs weren't subtle--he should've noticed sooner--but they had been lost in the midst of Dean's usual eccentricities and the tension between them.
As soon as he flicked on the lights and locked the door, Sam asked, "Honestly, what's the matter with you?"
Dean had stopped in the center of the room, head tilted slightly, listening for something. He turned around to look at Sam, oddly acquiescent. Sam was just thinking that Dean's skin seemed too pale when Dean opened his mouth and asked, voice almost too faint to hear:
"S'really you, Sammy?"
Sam's shoulder ached. He dumped all his belongings onto the closer of the horribly Impressionistic bed covers. The car keys landed and stayed on the table. Sam took a deep breath and turned back to Dean.
"You're kidding me, right?"
Dean said nothing. His focus was on Sam's shoulder, the crummy one.
"What?" He almost shouted, dread a kick in the guts. "You're worrying me, Dean. You gotta tell me what happened to you."
Crumpling to sit down at the edge of the bed, Dean stayed bent forward. He rested his head in his hands.
Several questions and uninformative grunts for response later, Sam pieced together what he knew of Dean's evening: 1) Dean was seeing things. 2) Dean had seen Sam earlier that day. He was willing to bet it hadn't gone well.
Dean also seemed to think the time was just past 2300, and that if he hit the road now--if only Sam would leave him alone--he could drive out of this stinking town before midnight, as planned. Dean tried to stand up a few times--got somewhere to be, gotta get there soon, why are you here, Sam?--it was like a flawed feedback loop. Sam drew back his sleeve and held his wrist in front of Dean's eyes; the numbers on his watch didn't register.
"Never mind," he sighed, sitting Dean back down. "You didn't know the meaning of time management anyway."
Sam upended his bags and spread the contents over the bed, rummaging through notebooks and printouts until he found the information he was looking for.
He took one look at Dean's hunched form, grabbed the Impala's keys and headed out, almost knocking over a kid and his sister in his rush down the stairway. He stumbled, apologized dizzily, then jogged the rest of the way to the car. Dean's bags and the shovel Sam might need were still in the trunk.
Sam broke several traffic laws in his haste to get to the city cemetery.
The problem with successfully keeping himself shielded for so long was that when he came back in the business, he re-experienced how much of a headcase he must've become, near the end. On top of that, getting shot at seemed to have kicked his abilities into overdrive. Dean had good reasons to send him away. Images and smells assaulted Sam as he wandered between rows of headstones.
They were nothing like the closure of seeing Jessica in her white sundress a day after her death. Instead, he smelled blood where there were no stains and saw rotting flowers in the sodden darkness.
At the little boy's grave he distantly felt the confusion, the murky questions and a persistent, low wail. The headstone after that, a shotgun was fired, a body with its head missing. He arrived at a plot where he felt nothing--not because of a peaceful death. It was empty.
The name on the headstone read Felicia Donoghue, the first incident in his notes.
The freshly turned earth meant that Dean could've been on to something before the good workout failed to give him any answers.
Scribbled on the back of one sheet of printout was an address over three decades old. Sam didn't have much expectations for finding it, but he drove down one narrow trail after another and ended up nearly running over the For Sale sign in front of the old Colonial-style house. It appeared to have been on the market for years.
The house hasn't been lived in and all the broken locks have yet to be replaced. Armed with only a flashlight and the rock salt gun, Sam stumbled his way down to the basement. He was immediately aware of a tickling at the back of his mind. There was something lying low in one corner: blackened fragments and melted debris, covered by dirt and crumbles of the wall. Human remains.
The signs told him that Dean had been here tonight, but others had broken into this place long before that. Sam's flashlight revealed symbols spray-painted in red on the walls--he didn't recognize any of them. In the far corner, what might've been a room before the enclosure was knocked down, the floor smelled like old piss.
It stank in here.
He'd seen many final resting places that offered neither rest nor finality, but the saddest conditions still managed to get at him. He covered his nose with a sleeve and got to work.
Dean must've rigged explosives to the wall to blow an opening for digging out the remains, but the rest were done by the book: salted and burned outside, brought back in and reburied. That last part was a mess, for there simply wasn't a neat way to hide the remains back into the wall without a drywaller on hand. Otherwise, there was little amiss that Sam could detect.
To be safe, Sam walked between the four corners of the room and concentrated on purification and closure, words he still remembered coming fast but quietly under his breath. He repeated them outside in the dewy darkness, all along the perimeter of the house.
Then he waited.
It was perfectly quiet.
It wouldn't be the first time that Dean had thrown Sam off the scent.
The room might be empty by the time he made it back, but Sam gave the gas pedal his all.
In his distraction, he drove past the Sharp Curves sign twice before he caught on to what was happening. He had only the high beams to see by. The features of the road not directly in front of him were swallowed immediately by the night, but he knew it was the same road sign, the same series of curves he'd been wearing the tires out on.
As he made the next turn more carefully, he noticed in the mirror the dark, vaguely human shape in his back seat. He reached for the duffle to find the rock salt or flask of holy water, anything that might help, but his eyes kept being drawn to the mirror even though he knew better than to look--
Two hollows for eyes, in what should've been a face.
Sam was slipping.
No sound.
No heat.
Dean.
He snapped back to himself, cold and shivering, as the steep drop opened up before him. He swerved back onto the road, numb and helpless as the car accelerated along the stretch of familiar territory. His spine felt frozen, his body locked from neck to arms.
He bit his tongue and let the taste of blood fill the inside of his mouth. The brakes weren't working and he could only watch as his hands slipped off the steering wheel, his arms falling leaden to his sides.
The same road sign rushed past him again.
"Donoghue," he tried, but it was the wrong thing to say. The wheels screeched and Sam was being slammed into the door frame despite his seatbelt. The car hit an uneven bank and skidded on the loose gravel, rear end spinning out.
The first of the cases scribbled in his notes, Felicia Donoghue née Young had been married to William Donoghue for more than a decade. The couple had one child. After her suicide, William had, in his grief, sent the boy away to live with some relatives.
Sam's head felt like it was being split open. Another jolt slammed him back into the seat, and he felt the front of the car lift off the ground.
"Listen to me, Felicia..." There was only so much he knew about her, but he told her everything: She used to volunteer at the local hospice and orphanage. Her only son had moved to California when he turned eighteen, and is still living there with his wife and kids.
The road changed, scenery warping. He'd made it out of the dangerous stretch.
"I suspect your husband murdered you. You wouldn't have taken your own life."
There was a low, distorted bellow as the tires were ripped apart on the rocks, a noise so loud--but not coming from the outside. It was right behind his shoulder. He thought, this could be the way it ends. Christ. He didn't want to die.
The jagged cliff face loomed up in his view. He braced for impact--
--and found himself staring at the NO VACANCY neon sign, only the sounds of his panting echoing harshly in his ears. He slumped over the steering wheel.
He was back in the parking lot of the motel, and his tires were smoking.
Sam reached for the door, fumbling for a minute with his seatbelt. Sweat drenched his face and ran down his chin and neck, pooling at the base of his throat. Both the front and back of his shirt were soaked; his sweat was ice cold. He was going to puke, lie down or pass out-- later. The shivering was out of control, but he didn't have the leisure of waiting for it to run its course.
He took only a moment, then hauled himself up to his room on rubbery legs. What he found was Dean standing up from a crouch, releasing the safety on the Glock--Sam's gun, fully loaded--
"Dean!"
--and placing it in his mouth. Dean's index finger curled around the trigger, and there was a look of contentment in his eyes that Sam hadn't seen in a long time. It was completely wrong.
Sam placed one hand on the barrel, murmuring, "Hey, easy now." He wrapped the fingers of his other hand gently around Dean's wrist--feeling the pulse beating low and steady in that moment--before he flipped the gun around and knocked Dean out.
Dean's favorite leather jacket was tossed onto the back of a chair, followed by his long-sleeved shirt and a tee, until Sam could examine the expanse of skin above Dean's waist: healing cuts on his chest and a bruise near his ribcage. Those seemed to be older injuries, the bruise already fading to green at its edges.
A quick check of Dean's pupils and head showed no signs of head trauma--the kiss from the Glock, courtesy of Sam, was necessary for keeping that stupid head in one piece. He turned Dean around so he could examine his back, palm sweeping up the dip and curve of spine, the sharp shoulder blades. When he got to Dean's shoulders, he felt a chill.
Dean was slowly regaining consciousness. Sam resolutely ignored his groans.
There were shallow cuts high up on his neck, sluggishly oozing blood. They looked to be from some sort of sharp metal object--barbed wire or maybe shrapnel. Dean's hair had grown longer, covering the nape of his neck as though he were more vulnerable there, now that no one watched his back.
Should've never listened to him. Sam tugged on the stubborn lobe of Dean's ear, combing his fingers down through the hair as he pulled back.
They came away dirty. It looked like a black residue muddied by Dean's blood, and it sure wasn't gunpowder.
He got up to check the inside of Dean's jacket, and found traces of the same.
"How did you survive all this time?"
Another groan was his reply.
The jacket was a goner, so he wiped Dean's neck as best as he could with the sleeve lining, then tugged off the well-worn jeans despite the lack of cooperation. He half-carried, half-dragged Dean into the shower and ran the water, just hot enough to be tolerated. Dean didn't look like he was going to remain upright, so Sam pressed his knees to the back of Dean's thighs and folded him to sit under the steaming spray. The glass door slammed as he hurried out, his own clothes wet.
Sam bundled up Dean's jacket and shirts and even the ugly bed cover inside a trash bag. He confiscated both of Dean's handguns and remembered to take his own with him this time around--feeling like a walking arsenal. The freaking car was staying in the lot.
He jogged for less than a mile before he found a grassless, secluded area where he could dump the contents of the bag on the ground, add salt and start a bonfire going. If it didn't work, they were shit out of luck.
"What the hell?" Dean asked, arms wrapped around himself even though the water was still warm. Sam tested the temperature just to be sure, sending a sudden spray right in Dean's face. The humidity flattened the attitude out of the spikes of hair above Dean's forehead, and the rapid blinking of waterlogged lashes made him look years younger. Vulnerable, Sam thought.
Dean scowled and spit out a mouthful of water that splattered the hems of Sam's jeans. Or more like something the cat dragged in. Yeah, the pain in the ass was mostly back, charming as ever. Sam saw the swollen cuts on Dean's neck, the wisps of red running down his skin, and stopped smiling.
Dean's eyes were more angry than alert. "What the hell, Sam."
"You're welcome, now stop yelling in my ear." Sam hesitated for only a second before stripping off his own clothes to join Dean in the already crammed shower. He soaped and scrubbed at Dean's neck and back with the pads of his fingers, ignoring Dean's manly curses of pain, until he was convinced there was no dirt hidden in the wounds, and the surrounding skin had flushed pink in protest.
Those muscles were so tightly strung, he seemed likely to snap any minute.
"Will you just relax?"
Dean turned, one eye blinking at him over the hunched shoulders. "Where're my clothes?"
"Toasted them, sorry. If it makes you feel better, I'm now naked because of you."
There was an unfunny sound. "Dude, I don't think I'm drunk enough for this."
Sam huffed and pressed Dean's head back under the spray, shampooing his hair twice for good measure. He silently mouthed the one protection spell he believed in, in simple English and basic truths: He's important to me. Shield him, keep him safe.
In return for this kindness, Dean jabbed him in the eye with his elbow and complained about the shampoo smelling girly.
At least Dean's teeth had stopped chattering. He was being more and more of a dick by the minute which, all things considered, was status normal, but the tension still clung to him like armor. Hackles raised. Untouchable. It made Sam's neck hurt in sympathy. Has Dean forgotten what it's like to be in human company?
Sam had known what it meant to sleep with someone. Not fucking, but sleeping together, sharing warmth and weight of limbs, skin brushing in the background reassurance of I'm here, I'm not going anywhere. It was obvious Dean didn't have the first clue about it: he drew close to the edge of the bed early on, determined to put up a tough guy act yet not stoic enough to turn away Sam's touch, the contact he clearly needed. He didn't even waste the energy to snipe at Sam ("You need help finding your bed? And I'm supposed to be the drunk one.") and that was the most telling sign.
Hunting alone is going to kill him.
The drowsing body jerked, almost toppled off the bed. Sam could see Dean's hair sticking up over the waves of the covers, a mess even in the darkness. Dean was breathing deeply, trying to relax without shifting, but it was impossible when he just didn't know how.
Sam sensed when Dean woke up for the third time, wary and almost quaking with tension. "Jesus." He couldn't stand it anymore, so he reached out and hooked an arm across Dean's chest, pulled the cold stretch of Dean's back in toward him, tight against his own chest.
It was some time before Dean eased back into a shallow, uneasy sleep--the rest of the weary.
He kept watch for as long as he could, counting the soft exhalations for company.
Sam woke much later than expected, feeling drained. He left Dean catching up on the sleep he needed. The Impala looked surprisingly intact in the light of day, even though Sam had to replace one of the tires. Dean was going to be pissed about the scratched paint no matter what.
He went back to the Donoghue house to gather details he missed last night: beer bottles smashed and crushed into small glass fragments in one corner of the basement, cigarette butts at the bottom step of the stairs. He hadn't recognized the symbols on the walls at first because they weren't ritualistic--graffiti was all they were. It was no longer necessary, but he replaced the broken locks on the door when he left.
It started to drizzle by the time he headed back, dark clouds looming overhead. His legs were fatigued and left deep shoeprints in the mud. He wondered if Dean was still wallowing in bed, wrapped up in his cave of pillows and sheets. It was a long trek back to the motel on the broken trail.
The hazy landscape was eerily familiar, blurring the line between reality and his dreams; if Sam wasn't careful, he could easily lose himself in this fog. There was no reason for them to stay more than a few days, and he made a mental note to ask about in-room Net access. Now that he had an idea how it began, it was time to wrap up the case.
More mud in his shoes and an hour later, Sam unlocked the door to their room to find Dean sitting on the edge of his bed, a damp towel draped around his neck. The bandages there had been torn off. His face was dripping wet and the skin of his arms exposed by the white t-shirt looked cold to the touch. Clutched in his hand was Sam's note saying that he shouldn't be gone long. A few words scrawled in pencil--chicken scratches, if he were honest. Nothing about it deserved that sort of rapt attention.
The bed on Sam's side of the room was in the same condition as when they checked in: undisturbed. No imprint of a body, not a trace of human warmth. The afternoon light fell pristine across the bed spread. In Dean's position, Sam might've wondered, too, if his mind was playing cruel tricks on him.
He cleared his throat.
Dean stiffened and, in that moment before he remembered to look bored, his emotions were laid bare: Relieved. Terrified.
Sam's chest felt constricted. The gulf between them had formed, eroded layer by layer--would they ever learn? He kicked off his muddy shoes at the door and trod in uncomfortably wet socks to the desk, where he sat and spread out his notes as if the hours he'd been gone were mere minutes.
He heard Dean moving after a while, the sounds of him pulling on another shirt and digging out the kit to sharpen his knives. Sam had missed this, the strange way Dean's body relaxed as he settled cross-legged on the bed, surrounded by his favorite hazards. The tip of his tongue showed as he frowned at the blades dulled by recent graveyard escapades.
Between drying out his socks and reordering the sheaf of papers, Sam heard himself say, "I'm not running anymore. I know you--you never make things easy, but I'm not leaving without you."
Dean scarcely looked up from his work, not wanting to slice a finger in his distraction, but there was a cynical little smile appearing on his lips. One that gave away his tack before he opened his mouth to ask, "No?"
"Unless," Sam rushed to add. "Unless you're more of a jackass than usual and start the pranking thing before we even hit the road."
Dean actually let out a laugh. He had to put the knife down on the abrasive before accidentally stabbing himself in his amusement.
"Hey, I thought you loved mushrooms--"
"Yeah, on my pizza!" And that still excluded the hallucinogenic family.
"--so why the hate, Chief Samohawk?"
"You--I can't believe--For Christ's sake--"
And Dean was cracking up at last. "I love you Sam," he managed in between wheezes, the smile crinkling his eyes and taking over the rest of his face irrepressible and real. "You're the fucking light of my life."
The restlessness behind Sam's ribcage expanded a little more. All this time, its susurration had been, Tell him. Fix it. They had a tradition of forcing themselves into a corner, fuck or fight; he craved change. He never wanted to fight Dean again.
"I know."
Nothing more needed to be said. Truth cut sharper than a blade, and Dean looked away. He stared dazed at his empty hands, then remembered to pick up the hunting knife.
There was an old lady in Sam's neighborhood whom he greeted every other morning, when he went for a jog. She never looked up from her backyard when he or the mailman passed by, so he'd guessed that she was perhaps hard of hearing. Two days before Sam packed his bags and hitchhiked his way to Dean, she'd taken one look at him and said, "You'll get your answer."
It sounded cryptic, but so did most of her crazy talk.
Late in the afternoon, they drove by the local news press, where Sam dashed through the downpour to slide an envelope of photocopies of documents (temporarily missing from a storage facility) through a slot in the door. His typed note pointed out the deviations from procedure in the 1972 case that had been hastily closed, files sealed, by then Corporal of the now defunct MDC police--Warren A. Roberts, classmate of a certain William Donoghue. The dates were telltale signs.
He hadn't been sure where to begin. An empty casket remains at the city cemetery while the murder victim was never laid to rest--
"So where's old Billy, the murdering bastard?"
"I think Mr. Donoghue has been dead for a long time, Dean."
Surprisingly, Dean hadn't grilled him on how he knew this. Sam had continued typing up the suspicious points that would hopefully lead to a reopened investigation while Dean hovered over his shoulder like a malevolent gargoyle, tossing out smart-ass remarks on how law school sucked the life out of his writing. Where's the punch line, huh? Dean had asked.
At some point, the words 'Magnum, P.I.' were added in black ink to resemble a byline. Sam had been preoccupied with how Dean might react upon seeing the damage to the car that by the time he noticed, it'd been too late.
"It's not really an editorial, you know," Sam said as he carefully pulled the door shut--remember, car trauma--and shook the water from his hair.
Dean gave him the What? shrug and stomped on the gas. Leaning over to search for bills in the glove compartment, Dean said, "I didn't edit squat and you know I could've done worse."
"Eyes on the road!"
"Get with the program, Sam, I'm starving. Find us some place to eat."
The night trod the safe side of some invisible boundary, potent as a circle of salt, until they were both full, warm, and tired of talking. Dean snoozed on his bed by the light of a single lamp, newspaper over his face, while Sam sat sprawled in the armchair. It was peaceful. He stared, dry-mouthed, at the ceiling for thirty minutes before he found the courage to move to Dean's side, maneuvering on hands and knees to press a wobbly kiss to the shirt-covered stomach.
There was only the thunder of blood rushing in his head, heart tripping in his chest. Dean probably could feign sleep until the apocalypse came knocking.
He popped the button on those worn jeans--tips of his fingers grazing below the dip of Dean's navel--unzipped and tugged to pull the rain-smelling denim open and down. Before he could talk himself out of it, he traced the outline of Dean's half-hard cock with his mouth, breathing hotly on the boxer briefs to get a taste of Dean's scent.
Dean yelled Jesus and then Sam! as he shot upright in bed, knocking Sam backwards more forcefully than necessary. He seemed shocked, almost apoplectic, but there was this knowledge in his eyes. If he'd truly been dozing with the crossword section leaving its inky grid of an unsolved puzzle over his eyes, he was definitely awake now.
"I would say sorry, but I'm really not."
Sam knew how he must look to Dean: respectfully defiant, but with mussed hair falling in his eyes, sweat above his lips and the tent in the front of his jeans, also fucking turned on. Dean could accuse him of fighting dirty, he didn't mind.
If he was waiting for Dean to recognize this thing between them, to reach out first and pull Sam back into the space he once occupied--or anything to suggest that he was still welcome company--he'd be waiting for a long time. His whole lifetime.
"Fuck," Dean was saying, collapsing back on the bed and throwing his arm over his eyes. "What the hell you think you're doing, Sam?"
"I know what I'm doing. Do you?" Sam thought he should stay back for now but couldn't help inching closer, longing to touch Dean again, to connect no matter how briefly.
Dean lay deceptively still, showing clenched teeth below the line of his sleeve, his hands in fists, when Sam knew he wanted nothing better than to bolt out the door and hurt someone. Break some knuckles, bleed all over the place.
That was the last thing Sam wanted.
"If punching me will make you feel better..."
"Don't think I won't," and Dean was up and lunging halfway across the bed, one hand on Sam's throat. He was going to deck him hard this time, punch that smart mouth and put an end to the bold words. Eyes scrunched shut for the blow, Sam couldn't help the instinctive flinch.
It came, not a fist but an open, searching palm on Sam's chin ... Dean was cradling his face with his hands. Just holding on and taking a good, hard look, as if this close they still failed to see each other. Whispering, "Why" and "Sam" and "Damn you." He didn't seem completely aware of what he was doing, a finger absent-mindedly skimming Sam's cheekbones. The world had blurred for him.
Sam released the breath he'd been holding, eyes opening fully to catch the emotions contorting Dean's face. There was no hurry now. He brought his hand up to his own face and slipped his fingers inside Dean's palm, holding him in this way.
Continued here...