only pretty sure that i can't take anymore
first second third fourth fifth
It was later that Dean freaked out.
Sam was asleep; they'd both fallen asleep. Tripped and stumbled down the hallway, tied up in each other and banging off walls, Sam's mouth on the back of Dean's neck like the most obscene promise. They hit Dean's bed skidding, Sam shoving him down and following like his hands were glued to his brother. Dean scrambling up and Sam crawling after, eyes gone that true black and his mouth a wet slash saying all the things they were gonna do.
Hadn't gotten past shirts off, jeans open, shorts twisted down, hips flush rubbing skin to skin and necking like Dean hadn't done since he was about sixteen years old. His brother, Dean kept thinking, and nothing felt better than blood on blood. Everything just fucking insane, heat pounding in him until he couldn't think, catching glimpses of the bright sky outside the window and hardly recognizing the blue.
Sam passed out pretty much immediately after, rolling off Dean with a groan, hand covering himself. He was kinda laughing, neat and happy and amazed in a dim way, his eyes smoothed shut. Sam's squirming had snapped his shorts back into place, but his hand was still down there, lost to the wrist, and he fell asleep just like that, a smile on his face.
Dean had watched him for a few minutes. Sam always looked like a kid when he was asleep. His breathing got deeper and deeper; he hadn't lied about not being able to sleep on the prison bunk. Dean got up carefully and shucked his jeans, tugged Sam's the rest of the way off and Sam barely stirred, murmuring nonsensically and pushing his cheek into the pillow. Dean gently drew Sam's hand free of his shorts, left it to leave damp spots on his stomach, and then he had lain back down next to his brother, heads turned towards each other, and fallen asleep himself.
He'd dreamt of the car. Washing the car with a yellow sponge in the summertime, his dad drinking vodka and orange juice in the shade of one of the salvage yard wrecks, Sam on the roof of their house, slipping on the loose shingles, shouting down how Dean was doing it all wrong.
He woke up when it was still light outside, mid-afternoon and the sunlight across his chest was making him sweat even if it was thirty degrees outside. Dean woke up already panicking.
Sam was on his side, turned away from Dean, and with his back like a wall he seemed impossibly big. The long muscles shifted as he breathed, shoulders looking carved out of stone.
It was just. Sam was in his bed. Dean's throat got tight, flattened like a straw that had been chewed on. His little brother, mostly naked and unnaturally warm, and Dean's palms were slick, making him think about what he could do, the yards of Sam he had yet to learn, and Dean was freaking out so bad.
He slipped out of bed and away, snatching his jeans and shirt to put on in the hallway. His hands were back to shaking, nothing like cooperative as he tried to do up his buttons. He abandoned the top two when he heard Sam cough-snore, jumping from nerves and hurrying to the living room.
Dean paced, ran his hands through his hair a few times before stopping short, sniffing his fingers, and promptly going to wash his hands and scrub a washcloth over his hair. He did it all in jerky motions, scraped the rough cloth over his face until the skin felt abraded and raw. The sun poured through the little window, same side of the house as his bedroom like Dean would never be able to escape it, and Dean blinked against the brightness, thinking dumbly about how it was Sunday.
And three times now, he'd fucked around with his brother.
Dean went into the kitchen, where his and Sam's drinks had been orphaned on the table, forgotten in their heady rush. He finished off both, that too-sharp orange taste back on his tongue. Kept thinking, this is what sam tasted like. Kept thinking about the three times he'd fucked around with his brother, and how it would happen again, it would keep happening, because Sam had figured out the magic word.
It seemed incredible. Dean had to go to work tomorrow, had to stop in the cafe for his egg sandwich and coffee and then jaw with Bobby and rag on the rookie and be a cop and all the while he'd be feeling Sam on him. Just standing here in the living room knowing what it felt like to suck Sam's dick was surreal and slowly undoing him, so Dean didn't know how he was going to maintain his whole outside life.
"One thing at a time," he muttered to himself.
He started washing the dirty dishes in the sink, just because they were there. Usually he and Sam engaged in a protracted battle of wills about the dishes, each only staying one plate ahead, whatever they needed for the next meal while leaving the rest to rot in the sink. Months this could go on before one of them snapped and couldn't take the smell anymore, the slow corpse-buzzing flies. Usually it was Sam.
But the routine of it appealed, the scalding water that bit at his fingertips and wrists, the chemical-lemon smell of the dish soap. Dean distracted himself trying to identify the meal from what was scraped off the plate, resolutely not freaking out anymore.
Floorboards creaked under carpet in the hallway. Dean's head came up, wolf-alert, and he listened as Sam padded into the bathroom, the tumbling sound of him clearing his throat. The shower sputtered on.
Dean rinsed the same bowl for five minutes. His hands were red and sore, a horizontal stripe of damp on his shirt where he leaned against the counter. He had to fight the urge to run, get out before Sam got out of the shower so that Dean wouldn't have to see his face.
But he was still there when Sam came in, thick wet-dark hair curling against his neck, wearing his Godzilla T-shirt and the jeans Dean had taken off him earlier. He was yawning, scratching at the back of his neck.
"Hey," Sam said, the word rounded. Dean echoed it, staring down at the bowl.
Sam opened the refrigerator, peered in without much interest and then straightened. Dean felt dangerously on edge, keeping watch on his brother out of the corner of his eye.
"Gonna watch a movie," Sam told him.
Dean nodded. "Which one?"
"Exorcist. Or Rosemary's Baby. Something about the devil." Sam stretched his arms out in front of him, fingers interlaced, and popped his elbows. "Seems like that kind of day."
Dean nodded again, feeling dull-tongued and incompetent, couldn't even handle a simple conversation. He cleared his throat a couple of times, not unaware that Sam was watching him, wishing he would just go watch his movie already.
"I think that bowl's as clean as it's getting, man."
Caught, Dean set the bowl on the rack and twisted off the tap. He glanced at his brother and Sam was smirking at him, expected but no less obnoxious for that.
"I, uh," Dean said, trying to cobble some banter together but he kept getting tripped up. Sam had his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, fingers curled against denim, and his hands looked gigantic like that.
Sam grinned, cheerful and sharp. "Don't bother. Come watch the movie with me."
Dean shook his head, thinking absently that he couldn't, there was a good reason why he couldn't. He needed an hour or two away from Sam, away from the number Sam did on his brain, time enough for Dean to figure out how he was gonna do this.
Sam didn't care, though, rolled his eyes and grabbed a handful of Dean's shirt, tugging him into the living room and pushing him down on the couch.
"Stay," Sam instructed. Dean twitched, as tense as wire, but he did as Sam asked.
Sam crouched to dig in the big cardboard box where they kept their tapes. Dean studied the lines of his legs, the strong flared tendon running into his heel. Dean was still uncomfortable, even though Sam wasn't acting off and nothing was weird about any of this, lazy Sunday afternoon watching a movie they'd both seen six dozen times already. Nothing weird, and maybe that was what had Dean out of sorts, because his heart was still racing, and there was no reason for it at all.
Pushing the tape into the VCR, Sam sat on his heels, waiting for the red FBI warning screen to come before he got up and went into the kitchen and the fridge opened, rubbered closed. Sam came back and sat next to Dean, handing him a cold beer.
Not too close, no arm slung around Dean's shoulders. Sam was a couple feet away, bare feet up on the coffee table, bottle rolled slow on his thigh. This had all happened a thousand times before.
Dean's back was still stiff, hovering a half-inch off the couch. He was waiting for the hidden catch, the other shoe to drop. It didn't seem real that they could have clumsy teenaged sex and take a nap together and then just watch a movie like regular brothers killing time. These things couldn't co-exist.
Sam smacked him upside the head. "Quit it."
Dean hunched, scowling. "Didn't even say anything, fucker."
"Don't care. Just quit it." Sam took hold of his shoulder and Dean went still but Sam only wanted to give him a shake, quick and pointed. "I'll let you know when there's something you need to worry about."
Dean forced his shoulders to relax, sinking back. He huffed out a breath, not happy but not freaking out quite so badly. He watched the movie for awhile, the creepy little girl getting creepier and the sad-eyed priest casting about for the remnants of his faith. When the demon started spouting obscenities, Dean and Sam chimed in, directing hellish insults at each other. Sam was a motherfucking worthless cocksucker. Dean was faithless slime. Once Sam got him laughing, Dean had a hard time stopping.
And that was what it was like.
Nothing was different during the day. Sam was Dean's brother, and he doodled cartoons on the steamed-up bathroom mirror when he got bored brushing his teeth. He toed off his boots in the hallway without finesse and left hunks of muddy snow on the carpet. He went to the salvage yard every day like he was actually holding down a job again, but he only worked on the busted cruisers. He drank gallons of free lemonade from the cafe, bitter from the added vodka. He prowled around with his punkass friends, the Beckett twins, Jake and Ava and Lily, and kicked up trouble at the Spoke, came home late, drunker than when he left.
When Sam got home, when it was night outside, that was when the change showed, revealed by moonlight. Dean didn't wait up, but he was always awake the second the front door rattled. Lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, Dean listened to the creak and stumble of Sam making his way through the house and his heart started going hypersonic again, the fucked up synapses in his mind firing.
Dean never closed his door anymore. It rested against the jamb, hallway light limned neatly geometric, vulnerable to the slightest push. Sam's footsteps approached, and Dean heard him step over the one floorboard that whined particularly loud. Dean thought the anticipation would kill him, every single night.
Sam appeared, clicking the door shut behind him, and he wove, unsteady as a sea as he stripped off his shirts one at a time, three layers and then skin and all the while Sam's mouth running, Sam telling Dean about the people at the bar that night and the ongoing petty dramas of the town and saying, "You shoulda come out with us, 's more fun when you come out."
Dean just lay there, hands folded under his head and his elbows winged. Studiedly casual, his eyes slit and following Sam, nothing on his face to betray the apprehension that had yet to fade, the complicated mash of emotions that rollicked in him. Occasionally saying, "Yeah, Sammy, that's hilarious." Occasionally saying, "Any freakin' day now, Sam." Acting like normal, best he could.
And that lasted until Sam crawled over him, jeans open and tugged off his hips (Sam liked it when Dean finished the job for him). Sam with his elbows to either side of Dean's head, smiling down at him with that hateful drunk smile of his, and Dean wanted to bite it off his face. He couldn't play normal anymore, couldn't hide what Sam did to him.
Sam liked him like that, insensible and broke-open. He drove Dean crazy, hours at time, until Dean stopped worrying about saying something dumb, stopped worrying about what it meant when he wrapped his legs around Sam's waist.
Dean wanted to believe that they weren't brothers in the dark. There was no sign of it; they'd never looked much alike and past midnight Sam was just a rangy silhouette against the sheets, hair gnarled around Dean's fingers. Sloe-eyed, white flash of teeth as he groaned, a sound that Dean had never heard from his brother Sam.
It was stupid, though--irredeemably so. Dean never lost track of Sam. He never forgot exactly whose dick he had his hand on.
Divided world, the sheer light and sound of day contrasted with the drift and quiet of night, freezing cold out on the streets and insanely hot in bed with Sam, sweat slick and the corner of the sheet sticking to Dean's back when he rolled over. Dean was paranoid all the time, careful not to mention Sam's name to third parties because he was sure it would catch in his throat.
Dean went through the motions. He did his job and ate lunch with Bobby and smiled at girls he knew and counted the hours. Dean lived for nightfall, feeling vampiric and dying of thirst.
The first time he let Sam fuck him, Dean was panicking on the inside. He didn't understand what Sam was doing to his body, how he could have all these triggers and weaknesses without knowing it. Couldn't get his head around Sam's hand fit around his thigh, holding him open, and Sam's forehead dropped against his own, Sam's breath searing on Dean's mouth. Dean was blind from pleasure but that didn't do anything for the fear. This couldn't be his brother; Sam would never do this to him.
But Sam did, and afterwards as Dean lay there panting, he thought maybe that would be enough. They'd crossed every line, nowhere else for them to go. Maybe the memory of Sam when Sam had been in him like a second soul, maybe that was all Dean needed.
He held the thought, clung to it, and fell asleep next to his brother. Woke up in the night to Sam's mouth on his neck, Sam rolling him onto his side so carefully, and the idea of enough blew like ash out of Dean's mind. Sam eventually fucked him in every room of the house except their father's. In the daytime, Dean was aghast at himself. But that was the daytime. That was a different Dean.
Sam came down from the salvage yard one afternoon and brought Dean a lemon square from the cafe, knocking on the glass of the station window and waving at him. They ate on the Impala's bumper, because Sam was antsy about going into the station, probably thought Bobby would sling him in lock-up for breathing wrong. Sam had a court date in three weeks, but remained stubbornly convinced that if he had both cruisers fixed by then, all charges would be dropped.
Sam with his cheeks and nose red in the cold, flyaway brown hair obscuring his eyes, and Dean watched him licking powdered sugar off his fingers. Sam's hip right up against his and it didn't look strange, they'd always stayed too close to one another.
Back in the station, Dean took his time hanging up his coat, looking out the front window at the Impala diminishing down the road. It was difficult to put into words the feeling of watching Sam drive away in Dean's old car.
He had some paperwork to finish but he could see Bobby tipped back in his chair, hands laced on his gut, gazing serenely at the ceiling, so he went back to bug him.
"You need a nap, old man?"
Bobby grunted, sparing him a withering look. Dean grinned back, pushing with his legs to make the chair rotate sixty degrees or so, back and forth. He was feeling wired, all of a sudden; the sugar in the lemon square, he assumed.
"Ain't I given you enough work to keep you busy?" Bobby asked, gruff but not really serious about it.
"I'm very good at my job, you know," Dean said. "I'm like Robo-Cop."
Bobby looked at him, nonplussed. "I don't know who that is." Dean started to explain, and he held up a hand. "Wasn't asking."
Dean sat back, feeling pretty good still. "Listen, if there's still nothing going on later, how'd you feel about me knocking off early to hit the firing range? Gettin' a little rusty."
Another grunt, this one vaguely affirmative. Dean pushed off and lifted his feet, let the chair complete a slow rotation. Bobby's office spun past, a panorama. There was a picture of Dean on the wall, the day he got his badge, Bobby's arm around his shoulders and corny grins on both their faces. There was a faceless shoulder in the side of the frame that Dean knew was Sam.
"Glad you came in, actually," Bobby said when Dean was facing him again. "Let's talk about your brother."
Dean was good, didn't react outwardly save for every muscle's slight tensing. There was a vibrant stab of adrenaline through the heart of him, immediate and overwhelming as a car crash. Bobby knew. Bobby knew.
"What about him?" Dean managed. He fought the urge to put his hand over a mark Sam had left on his neck--it was below his collar and he thought it'd be fine, he thought no one would see it.
Bobby sighed, world-weary. "Look, this ain't fun for me either. But Sam's out of control."
That was true; the whole goddamn thing had gotten out of control.
But Dean held his tongue, figured out what Bobby was talking about. Not the fucking his brother part, but instead every other way in which Sam was fucked up.
"He's getting better, Bobby," Dean said.
"How's that, runt?"
"Hasn't been out past one all week." That was also true, but it probably had more to do with Dean not-waiting at home, and the thought sent an odd little thrill through him. He clamped it down, met Bobby's eyes. "Drinking less, not just at the bars but during the day too. Used to go through two sixers a day at our house, now I just have to buy one. He's back at the yard, doin' a hell of a job on those cruisers."
"He already did a hell of a job on the cruisers."
"Yeah, and he's making his amends now. He knows he fucked up."
"Of course he knows." Bobby gave Dean a hard look. "He doesn't care, Dean, that's the problem."
"He does," Dean insisted. He thought he might be lying a little bit now. "He's trying to put it right."
"I think he's doing what he knows you want him to do, and maybe it'll last a week if we're lucky."
"Come on, man." Dean slouched back, exasperated. "You know Sam, you know he's not a bad guy."
Bobby didn't answer. He held Dean's gaze, implacable and colored all wise and sad. Dean looked away first, swallowing fast. A picture came to him suddenly, Sam's hands last night against the pale skin of Dean's stomach, the fresh scrapes across his knuckles, the road rash on the heel of his palm, and Dean hadn't asked, hadn't wanted to threaten the delicate thing between them. Dean didn't want to think about that stuff anymore.
"Look," Dean said, his throat thick. "Just let me stay on him for now. He is doing better, he's gonna be fine. We'll just, we'll see how this plays out, at least until he goes to court, and if something happens between then and now, we'll. We'll figure out something else."
Bobby shook his head, but the look on his face was resigned, not contrary. Dean's lungs unlocked a little, and he breathed in gingerly.
"All right," Bobby said, grudging. "I think he'll be back in here on a D and D before the weekend, though, and then it's on my terms, agreed?"
Dean's back went stiff. Absolutely not, he wanted to say. He wasn't gonna write a blank check on Sam's account, just let Bobby do whatever he thought was best. Dean would trust Bobby with his life, but not with his brother.
He gave Bobby a long, considering look, and inclined his head ever so slightly. He knew Bobby would take it as consent, but Dean had never actually said the word, a technicality but it was all he had.
Bobby sighed again. His face was seamed and scruffed and hung heavy with concern. "That boy's gonna be the death of you, Dean."
Dean worked out a smile, shrugged. What could you do? Sometimes people bound themselves to you before you were old enough to fight back. Sometimes you were only meant to fit against one other body in this world, and if that body drowned, down you went too. None of this surprised Dean in the least.
When he got home that night, hands smelling of gunpowder and ears still ringing, Sam was making macaroni and cheese. Dean changed out of his uniform and came back barefoot. Sam had a beer waiting for him on the table, cap cracked off already.
Nothing particularly interesting had happened to either of them since they had lemon squares a few hours before, so they shared a companionable silence. Dean drank his beer, watching how Sam's hair crinkled in the steam rising from the pot.
Sam reached for his own beer and Dean saw the scabs across his knuckles, his conversation with Bobby crashing back in on him. He studied Sam carefully, given the leisure now with him busy at the stove. Sam didn't look any more tired or fucked up than he usually did. Dean hadn't lied, Sam had been drinking less, at least marginally, but he still carried a flask and still drank uninterrupted from the time he left the yard until when he crawled into Dean's bed. He'd been with Dean at the threes and fours in the morning that before would have found him face down in a parking lot somewhere.
"Hey, Sam?"
Sam looked back at him, something simple and soft in his expression. He didn't look damaged at all, at that moment. "Yeah?"
"You. You'd say you're doing okay, right?" Dean clenched his hands under the table, irritated with himself. Stupid question.
Sam looked a little surprised, uncertain smile tugging at his mouth. "You mean like, in the grand scheme of things?"
"Uh, sure. I guess." Pressing his fists into the table from underneath, Dean struggled to keep his face from warping. "I mean, okay considering. Are you doing okay considering that nobody could really expect you to be okay with all the shit you have to deal with. So, are you. Are you at least kinda okay? Considering?"
A blank stare followed by a short laugh, and then Sam turned to face him, laying the big spoon on a cheese-smeared plate. Sam leaned back against the counter, arms crossed over his chest. He gave Dean a slow dark look.
"Right now I am."
Dean nodded, foolish and relieved. It was all so idiotic. Sam was still drinking himself to death, still walking into bar fights holding fists against cue sticks and switchblades, still driving too fast everywhere he went, but right now. Right now he was okay, making dinner and sharing the room with his brother.
Dean took a long drink, let it slide down his throat icy and sharp. Sam's eyes followed the move of his Adam's apple, and Dean winked at him around the bottle, making Sam snort and grin.
right now, Dean thought again. right now is what it would be like if things were okay.
*
The call came in around midnight.
Dean was finishing a Hot Pocket, fingers shining with orangish grease, and he swiped them on his uniform shirt before reaching for the phone, hearing Bobby's rebuke in his head. The rookie was napping in the empty cell block; nothing at all had happened all night.
"Sheriff's department."
"Dean. Dean."
Ellen, but an unseen strain of her, her voice shaky and weak and making Dean's stomach turn sick-slow. He sat up, his boots thudding against the floor.
"What happened?"
"I, it's, it's Sam, Dean, he-" and Ellen became faint and Dean heard her cover something that sounded like a sob, the phone held away.
Terror, again, Dean's oldest friend. Like a flood, an earthquake with fault lines in his bones, trail of devastation left in its wake. Sam was on the floor of the Roadhouse with a knife sticking out of his eye, sawdust in his hair. Sam was dead from a shotgun blast in the side lot where the truckers parked, his whole chest blown open. Sam had passed out and been put in the back office and he'd choked on his own vomit. Sam had in some way or another stopped breathing.
Dean could see it so clearly, he could smell it. Blood and beer and sawdust and sulfur, the gray tone of Sam's skin, the peaceful look on his face. More like a memory than a premonition, it was that real.
"What?" he managed, the phone too tight against his face. "He's, is he-"
Ellen must have heard it in his tone, cut him off before Dean had to ask and wait. "He's alive, he's, Jesus, he's fine, it's not him."
Dean made an inarticulate sound of pure relief. "Who is it, what happened?"
Ellen hid another horrible far-away sob. She came back hardly sounding human. "Sam killed Gordon Walker."
"No," Dean said automatically, sure that Ellen had that wrong.
"He, he stuck a broken bottle into Gordon's throat."
"No," Dean said more forcefully. There was no way in the world Sam had done that.
"God, Dean, the whole bar saw, I can't, I'm so sorry."
Dean got to his feet but then his legs gave out almost immediately and he fell back in his chair, hitting hard and making his teeth clack together painfully. There was this wild flicker in him like his heart had become a panicked bird, like it would fly up his throat and escape out his mouth and leave him hollow.
"Why did he do that?" he heard himself ask, plaintive as a child.
"I don't know, I wasn't. I wasn't close enough. They were arguing, they were by the juke arguing and then Gordon punched Sam and they were fighting and I hollered and they didn't stop so I sent a couple of the boys over to break it up, but before they got there, Sam, he."
She let it die. She couldn't say it again and Dean couldn't hear it. He kept thinking, by the juke, wondering desperately if his brother had killed a man over a song.
"Where is he?" Dean demanded. "Tell me you have him, Ellen, tell me he's handcuffed in the back room."
A staticky moment of silence, then Ellen was saying brokenly, "No, he made it out. He. He broke Andy's nose when they tried to grab him. He's in the Impala, he was headed north."
"Oh Jesus, Ellen." Dean's stomach suddenly heaved, shock wearing off and letting the visceral assert itself. Sam had cut someone's throat. The Roadhouse would be painted in blood. A horror movie of their very own.
"I know," she told him. "I'm so sorry, Dean."
Dean flinched, couldn't hear that again either, and stammered, "I gotta go, I gotta get him," before hanging up on her. He didn't know how he was ever going to look Ellen in the eye again.
He half-ran to the cell block, fumbling with his keys and shouldering the door open. "Max!" he yelled, distantly surprised that he actually knew the kid's name.
The rookie jerked up on the bunk of the cell closest to the door, narrowly missing racking his head. He blinked owlishly at Dean, mostly asleep and Dean was hammering under his skin, he didn't have time for this.
"Get the fuck up. Get up, get. Call Bobby and Doc Masters and meet them at Harvelle's Roadhouse. Are you fucking getting up? Go to the Roadhouse. Gordon Walker's been murdered. Hey, hey, c'mon. Wake the fuck up."
The rookie boggled at him, forcing his heavy eyelids up. Dean glared at him, half his body through the door and the other half striving for the exit. "Do you understand what I just told you?"
The rookie nodded quick, a look in his eyes like he wasn't a hundred percent sure he wasn't dreaming, but Dean didn't care as long as he did what he was told.
"Tell Bobby I went after Sam," Dean said.
"Your brother Sam?" the kid asked, latching on like it was the clue that would crack this whole case wide open. For some reason undiluted rage flashed through Dean, making his fingers clench on the door.
"Just do it. Don't say his name, just." Dean stopped. He wasn't helping anybody right now. He left without another word.
The night barreled into him, the lancing cold on his face, and Dean had forgotten his coat but he didn't go back for it. He ran to his cruiser, almost losing everything on a patch of black ice, and jumped in, peeled out. He hit the lights and siren and went screaming north out of Kingston.
North, and Dean realized belatedly, canada. Sam was making a run for the border, and if he made it, Dean would never see him again. Sam would vanish like a white feather in snow, never again say the name Winchester out loud.
Dean stood on the gas. He was already into the outskirts, the speedometer's needle shivering at one hundred and ten miles an hour. He tried to calculate what kind of head start Sam had gotten, what the Impala's limits were and how long Sam could push her to them. Dean had basically rebuilt her engine piece by piece over the past ten years, and he knew in his heart that he would never catch her if she didn't want to be.
Snowbound trees streamed past, strobed in red and blue. Occasionally there would be taillights, red as eyes, pulled over onto the shoulder as he flew by. The siren sounded unearthly, a werewolf's howl climbing towards the moon. It was something around four hundred miles to Saskatchewan, backcountry interstate all the way through both Dakotas.
Every car Dean saw ahead of him caused his heartbeat to stutter and clutch. At first almost buried in the dark, taillights would swim clear, far far down the road. Dean pushed his cruiser faster, long draining minutes passing as he caught up, got close enough to see that the lights were too close together, the shape of them all wrong. Dean could tell his car in the pitch black from a hundred yards. He could pick her out from the sound of her engine, if he could hear anything above the wail of the siren.
Dean thought about the car, trying not to think about Sam. Trying not to picture the Sunday a month from now, or five years or fifteen or twenty, when he would drive to the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls and sit across from his brother at a metal picnic table riddled with dents, studying Sam's new scars and tattoos, both of them trying not to cry.
Sam was out there ahead of him. Dean's world was the rural highway, steady headlights and whisking cherry-top and snow and moon. His defenses faltered, flickered, and he imagined the drive home, Sam chained in the back. Sam would beg Dean through the thick mesh, he would pull out every dirty trick. Slam his bound hands on the metal right behind Dean's head, tell Dean that he loved him, swear that it wasn't like he'd been told.
Dean got off that train of thought as quickly as he could, punching himself in the forehead a few times. He wove into the southbound lane to get around a brief caravan of semi-trucks. He was just over the North Dakota state line.
He thought for awhile about Gordon Walker, a bad person who hadn't deserved to die bloody on a barroom floor if only because no one really did. They used to go out drinking in high school, him and Dean, out at the ravine on the bed of Gordon's pick-up, a rifle and a cluster of glass bottles to be made sacrifice. Gordon was an awesome shot even in the dark, got better the more beers he got in him. Dean thought he was a good guy for awhile, but Sam had always hated him.
Gordon turned out less than right, unnecessarily cruel beneath his laidback calm, stomping truckers who gave him shit and beating up on his wife, who stood all of four feet ten and wouldn't have broken a hundred pounds wearing steel-toed boots. Dean admitted to Sam that he'd been right about Gordon the first time he was actually on duty when the domestic call came in, and had had to stand in the neat little house with their class picture framed on the wall and see her swelling once-pretty face for himself. Sam had huffed wordlessly, 'course I was right, but he ended up kicking the shit out of Gordon outside the Spoke a couple weeks later, a fight widely agreed to be mutually instigated. Dean didn't say anything, didn't bawl him out for brawling like usual, and bought a few sixers of Sam's brand without making a big deal out of it.
encouraged him, Dean thought, and it made him jerk, pain blooming suddenly under his ribs. It was like he'd been numb up until now, like a landmine set off. What had he done to Sam, buying him beer since he was fourteen years old, toothlessly condemning the violence worsening in him like a blood disease, bailing him out of jail and bringing him a damn sandwich? Was this his punishment? Dean had never said no to Sam, not really, not once. Let Sam do anything he wanted, even knowing that Sam's impulses ran counter to his welfare, Dean couldn't stop him.
And even this last, letting Sam jerk him off in a motel room in Lawrence and kiss him in a prison cell (what had Dean been thinking, oral sex like Sam's reward for getting arrested) and fuck him all over their house. Sam had pushed, chipped away at Dean for weeks. He'd talked him into it, all huge hands and foggy eyes. And Dean had known that you had to be crazy to want this with your brother, literally insane to wish this on your family, and he'd known that Sam was already crazy enough, but he went right along. Obsessed with Sam's smart sneering mouth and the diagonal cuts of his hips, Dean had damned his brother, and so had damned them both.
There were lights ahead, town lights wavering and blurry and Dean thought it was just exhaustion until he went to rub his eyes and his fingers came away wet. He felt his cheeks, slick to the touch, wondering how long he'd been crying.
He'd ridden the tank dry and he had to stop for gas, wide spot in the road called Belfield. Freezing in his thin uniform shirt, Dean left the pump running and went to ask the clerk if he'd seen a '67 Impala pass by any time recently. All Dean got in response was a shrug, the clerk noting, "It's dark out," like that answered everything.
Dean ran circles around his cruiser, trying to stay warm as he waited for the pump to click. His heels skidded on the ice, his service revolver riding shotgun and the empty holster banging against his hip. It felt like his lungs were barely working, like the air was too cold to be properly inhaled. It was been the dead of winter for as long as Dean could remember.
Back out on the highway, Dean felt some of his initial panic scratch back under his skin. He had taken too long, getting the gas and not moving, not closing the gap. Sam was already over the border, lost to him. Dean would receive blank postcards for the rest of his life, scenes from all over the world, and he would stand at the mailbox searching each for clues, for patterns in the pictures and the postmarks and the captions and the stamps, and Dean would come up empty-handed every time. Sam would die at some point, in decades maybe or only a few short months, and all Dean would know was that the postcards had stopped coming.
Dean would never catch him. The Impala was built to outrun. Like Sam, she was designed for flight.
The night passed, lifelong and cancerous by the end. Dean's eyes burned. He went a hundred miles trying to define the feeling in his chest and the closest he got was that it was like yearning over a corpse. It was like Sam had died in his arms.
He broke over a shallow rise, and down in the valley headlights flared in the graying dark. Dean's breath caught. There was a car down there, getting back on the highway and speeding up and Dean watched the lights accelerating smooth and even, great pieces of dim road swallowed up under the wheels. That steady humming growl, Dean knew all about that.
The pedal was already on the floor and Dean couldn't go any faster, but he strained over the steering wheel, peering ahead. He rocketed past the crossroads where the other car had been, fresh dirt tire tracks bent onto the interstate. Sam had stopped; Sam had waited for him.
Dean pulled nearer, mile by mile then yard by yard. It was a true chase now, adrenaline and anticipation cut loose. The Impala's taillights grew, an endless traveling shot. They blew past a sign that said 'Canadian Border 20 MI 32 KM.' It was mostly prairie out here, flat and stale and so full of nothing it ached.
Dean could taste his heart in his mouth. He killed the cherries and siren, rolled down his window so that he could hear the roar of the Impala as he closed in.
They were just a few miles shy of the border, just a few car lengths apart, and Sam took his foot off the gas. The Impala slowed swiftly, and Dean had to punch his brakes, still hunched over the wheel so he could be that extra foot closer.
The Impala rolled onto the shoulder. She came to a stop.
Dean pulled up right behind and sat still for a moment, his headlights pouring over the car, steam boiling out of the Impala's muffler and the taillights staring back at Dean unblinkingly. His throat felt like sandpaper, his pulse a terrible racket in his head. He had to go arrest his brother now, because Sam had killed someone.
His baby brother. The very best part of Dean, the only reason he tried to be brave and honest and too tough to fuck with, the only good thing that had ever happened to him and look at them now. Dean wasn't sure he'd be physically able to do it, especially not if Sam fought--oh god sammy please don't fight.
Dean reached blindly for his service revolver, sliding it into the holster but leaving the snap undone. He got out of the cruiser and the cold assaulted him, a slamming arctic wind that plastered his shirt to his body and dug at his exposed skin. He started shivering so hard and deep. One hand on his revolver, he moved towards the Impala, legs stiff and unsure.
The driver's door opened, and Sam unfolded himself, turning to Dean with a gut-wrenching expression on his face.
"Dean," Sam said like a moan, over the screech of the wind. He staggered towards Dean and Dean went to him instinctively, catching Sam's arms.
"Sammy."
Sam's biceps like stone under his hands, and Dean pressed against Sam's shoulders, his neck, unable to help himself. Sam should feel different, his skin should be cold or his eyes dead, but he was just as ever, almost vibrating he was so warm and that wrecked look on his face, streaked and sticky with tears. His coat was open and Dean could see rusty streaks of blood on his shirt and he stared for a long minute, his mind gone echo-silent and awed.
"I'm sorry, Dean, I didn't mean to." Sam was clutching at him, huge hands folded over Dean's arms and they were the only places he wasn't freezing to death. "I don't understand how this happened to me."
"'s okay, Sam," Dean said without thought. Sam moaned, crumpling against Dean and his weight staggered Dean back a step.
He locked his arms around Sam's body. Buried his face in Sam's shoulder and had to force his gorge down, his body wracked by the cold, the desolate feeling of holding a murderer in his arms.
"I gotta take you back, Sammy," Dean said muffled. He bit the coarse fabric of Sam's coat, twisting hard. Sam's hair swept across his cheek as he shook his head.
"No, no, you're gonna come with me."
Sam's hands palmed across Dean's head, long fingers curving and pressing at the base of Dean's skull. It made Dean feel deranged, like Sam was changing him, molding him the way he wanted. He moved his head in an abortive shake, saying no, no way.
"Please Dean, you gotta." Tugging at the back of his neck, Sam pulled Dean's face up, forcing Dean to watch him beg. "Can't do it without you, you gotta come."
Something cratered in Dean, and he made a pained noise, an inchoate half-cry. Sam was all savage fell eyes, red-tipped nose, pleading mouth. His hands felt like cuffs on the back of Dean's neck, the broken cloud of his breath mixing with Dean's between their bodies.
"You have to go to jail," Dean said, unable to summon more than a whisper and it was almost lost in the wind. "You killed Gordon, Sammy, you. You can't leave."
Sam half-gasped, tears leaking randomly from his eyes. He shook his head, jostling Dean a little. "Don't, don't say that, Dean, you wouldn't do that to me."
Dean tore away from his brother, having difficulty thinking straight with Sam that close. The cold attacked again, redoubled and debilitating. Dean hunched into his shoulders, battered by the wind. He wondered if Sam was telling the truth. Four hundred miles between them and Kingston and Dean wondered if he could really take Sam all that way just to see him thrown in prison for the better part of the rest of his life.
"I can't just let you disappear," Dean said. He clung to that, repeated it to himself like some kind of nonsense childhood incantation, can't let you disappear.
"So you're gonna put me in a cell?" Sam asked, thick with disbelief and god, everything else.
"Sam, you're, please, you can't ask me-"
"That's my life, you couldn't. I'd rather you shoot me where I stand."
Dean's hand flew off his gun, where he hadn't even realized it had been. Sam caught it, his eyes flicking down and then up, incandescent. He took a step towards Dean, daring him. Dean couldn't move except to shatter apart from the cold.
"Get in the car," Sam said. "Just. Can't you see? We'll just keep going for awhile, thousands of miles, Dean, anywhere. Nobody will know who we are. We won't have to be brothers and I. This won't have happened. None of it, we'll be clean. Made new. It'll be enough, I swear to you it will, so please, please, Dean, get in the car."
And Dean could see it, scrawled all over Sam's face, promised in the lines of the Impala at his back. The small space around them was drenched in light from the cruiser, casting Sam in steeply angled shadows, and Dean read the highway in his eyes, a road unrolling straight-shot and deathless, gas stations and diners and motel rooms populating the refugee life Sam wanted for them. Sam at his side, every day and every night, the only familiar face in a country of strangers, and he was right, no one would know they were brothers. No one would know about the blood on Sam's shirt.
It would be between them and God.
Dean covered his mouth with the back of his hand, turning his face down and away. A pit was opening up in him, something that had happened before, on a charred front lawn in Lawrence and in a hospital corridor in Sturgis, this horrific yawning abyss as bottomless as need. He knew what he had to say but he didn't think his mouth would let him.
"No," Dean told his brother. "No, we're not gonna do that."
Sam crumbled, his face going and then his shoulders. He swayed, giving Dean a look of devastation so acute it felt like a blade. Sam's mouth moved, formed the word please again and pushed it out towards Dean, and Dean didn't know if he should blame the wind or the tidal rush in his own ears or Sam for not giving it voice, but he couldn't hear it.
He shook his head anyway. There was something stuck in his throat, small places on his face that burned and he thought he might be crying and the tears might have frozen. He thought that seemed appropriate.
Sam broke, jerking around with an anguished sound and reaching for the Impala. Dean's instincts snapped, his numbed juddering hand snatching at his weapon and he drew, folded his left around his right.
"Sam!" A cry, a thing ripped loose from his throat. "Don't."
Sam turned. He was openly weeping. Hands like claws, gesturing helplessly at Dean and casting sinister shadows on the asphalt. Dean had never seen him in more pain.
"Do it, do it or let me go and don't, don't let me go, Dean, please."
Dean's whole arm shook, worse than the rest of his body, the gun still pointed down and to the side. He stared at Sam and his mouth worked but nothing came out. He imagined raising his weapon, pulling the trigger, a small hole in the center of Sam's chest bleeding smoke. His hands loosened, went slack all at once, and his gun clattered to the ground. Sam's face twisted again, and another piece of Dean came tearing free.
"Oh god," he said, strangled, and covered his face with his hands. All he did was shake; all he was was cold.
Dean heard Sam's steps coming towards him and he wanted to shove him away, not let Sam touch him because it would be the last time and Dean, he just couldn't. But Sam's hands landed hard and solid on his shoulders and Dean fell into him without thought, that perfect addictive heat of Sam out here in this wasteland.
Sam pulled Dean's hands away, took Dean's face in his own and pressed a kiss to his forehead. Dean shut his eyes as tight as they would go, tasting salt on his lips. He leaned against his brother, rested all his weight for a long moment. sam, Dean thought, kinda stunned and quiet, like it was a new word he was learning, a shibboleth for the next life. sammy.
Then Sam was pulling away, whispering Dean's name over and over without seeming to realize it. His hands slid off Dean's face, and Dean immediately started trembling again. Sam tried a heartbroken smile, pulled his coat off and wrapped it around Dean, his hands fumbling on Dean's chest.
"Comin' out here without a coat, you idiot," Sam told him softly. He touched Dean's face, the fine skin over the line of his jaw.
Sam moved away, back to the Impala. Dean watched him go, Sam's coat heavy with his warmth and his smell and Dean was standing under it, still shaking.
Sam opened the door, looked back. He raised one hand to Dean, his lips moving but Dean couldn't make it out, and then Sam was sliding into the Impala. Dean jolted forward, his mouth falling open.
"Wait," Dean said, but his voice was destroyed and hardly audible to his own ears. "Wait, Sam, what'd you say?"
The car door slammed. The cold had gotten in Dean past skin and blood and muscle and bone and he couldn't move, saying his brother's name again and still too low, still not good enough.
The engine roared. Filled Dean up like grace, a momentary breath of hope and salvation, but that left with the Impala. Taillights shrinking away like the thing in Dean that had believed the world and his brother were both inherently good, and Dean watched until they disappeared.
He pushed his arms through the sleeves of his brother's coat, zipped it up to the neck. He picked up his gun and looked down at it for a long while.
Dean looked back up. He didn't feel like crying anymore. His voice was back, and though it didn't really matter at that point, he said out loud:
"Come back, Sam, I didn't hear what you said."
The wind howled. Dean stood on the side of the road, as far north as he'd ever been. He thought maybe he would go after Sam and make him repeat it, hold Sam down until Dean had every lie and promise, every fraction of Sam down to his last breath, but instead he thumbed the safety on and got back in the car.
It was an awful long drive home. Dawn broke over the badlands; it was the next day.
THE END
Endnotes: Kingston, SD, totally made up. Located about a half-hour north of Sturgis, as I've imagined it. Sister city to El Rey, Mexico, for those of you paying attention. Jesse January, real guy. Drives a bus tour in Washington, DC, is surpassingly awesome.
That whole bit with 'the pictures and the postmarks and the captions and the stamps' is ripped off a really good Mountain Goats song called 'Source Decay,' which contains a shout-out: "see all the chevy impalas in their front yards up on blocks."
And yes, it was excessively depressing, but I at least have an excuse this time, because Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called 'Highway Patrolman,' and twenty-five years later I tried to do right by it.
My name's Joe Roberts I work for the state
I'm a sergeant out of Perrineville barracks number 8
I always done an honest job as honest as I could
I got a brother named Frankie, and Frankie ain't no good
Now ever since we was young kids it's been the same come down
I get a call on shortwave Frankie's in trouble downtown
Well if it was any other man, I'd put him straight away
But when it's your brother sometimes you look the other way
Me and Frankie laughin' and drinkin'
Nothin' feels better than blood on blood
Takin' turns dancin' with Maria as the band played
"Night of the Johnstown Flood"
I catch him when he's strayin' like any brother would
Man turns his back on his family he just ain't no good
Well Frankie went in the army back in 1965
I got a farm deferment, settled down,
took Maria for my wife
But them wheat prices kept on droppin'
Till it was like we were gettin' robbed
Frankie came home in '68, and me, I took this job
Yea, we're laughin' and drinkin'
Nothin' feels better than blood on blood
Takin' turns dancin' with Maria as the band played
"Night of the Johnstown Flood"
I catch him when he's strayin', teach him how to walk that line
Man turns his back on his family he ain't no friend of mine
Well the night was like any other, I got a call 'bout quarter to nine
There was trouble in a roadhouse out on the Michigan line
There was a kid lyin' on the floor lookin' bad bleedin' hard from his head
Was a girl cryin' at a table and it was Frank, they said
Well I went out and I jumped in my car and I hit the lights
I must've done a hundred and ten through Michigan county that night
It was out at the crossroads, down round Willow Bank
Seen a Buick with Ohio plates behind the wheel was Frank
Well I chased him through them county roads till a sign said
Canadian border five miles from here
Pulled over the side of the highway
And watched his tail lights disappear
Me and Frankie laughin' and drinkin'
Nothin' feels better than blood on blood
Takin' turns dancin' with Maria as the band played
"Night of the Johnstown Flood"
I catch him when he's strayin' like any brother would
Man turns his back on his family he just ain't no good
eta: christmas day 2008, happened to be watching tremors and that's not a telephone pole edgar died on, it is an electrical tower. fixed the relevant bit, because i am compulsive about that sort of thing.