Fic: Turn to run
Title : Turn to run
Author : Joans23
Rating : NC-17
Paring : girl!Sam/Dean
Words : 2120
Summary : au apocafic where Sam and Dean are CDC agents. Sam has always been a girl.
He touched her. God help him, he touched her.
They were never partners. The agency just wouldn’t allow it and Dean’s not convinced that they weren’t entirely wrong. He couldn’t stand the thought of Sam putting her life at risk every day. He’d picture her in that orange suite with the Plexiglas mask covering her face and feel the bile rising in his throat. He could never say anything. Sometimes their paths would cross, he’d be turning a corner and she’d be there at the end of the hallway, about to disappear around the next one. Her eyes would catch his, hold them, challenging him.
She’s sixteen. Sixteen and looking at him with those eyes and asking him to do these things with those lips.
He left home … right after. He was twenty years old, living in a room above the garage. He knew his life would never amount to much. He wasn’t smart like Sammy. He didn’t have grand dreams of conquering the world or making a difference. He just wanted a nice normal life, maybe there would be a wife and some kids in there somewhere in the future, maybe he’d take over the garage from his dad one day. Maybe he’d be happy.
Instead he joined the army. Took to it like a duck to water. Listened to the drill sergeant screaming in his ear that it would have been a goddamned shame to loose him to suburbia as he did another hundred push-ups for feeling up the general’s daughter. He gave a cocky grin and said Yes, sir and tried not to think about another pair of legs parting under his hands.
He should have been stronger, he should have resisted her. Resisted how much he wanted her to seduce him.
Mom wrote a letter every week, telling him the news, sending him their love. He read every word a thousand times over, traced the curve of each letter with his eyes until they were burned into his mind. Sam’s doing so well … Dad would phone on his birthday, his rough voice telling him about the business and the car he’s fixing up for him. He didn’t say he missed him, that he was proud of him. Dean could feel it in every breath rasping through the earpiece. After he hangs up he wonders what he’d hear in his father’s voice if he knew what he’d done to his baby sister and vomits into the small trash can next to the desk. He hides it under crumpled papers, discarded scribbled messages covering his sins.
When they said he had a phone call he had to quickly add up the days in head. He wasn’t due for a call yet. When he picked up the receiver his palms were so sweaty he nearly dropped it. He didn’t wait for the other person to speak, just asked What’s wrong? Sam was going to work for the CDC. They were so proud of her; she was going to head up one of their foremost research programs. His mom tried not to cry. His dad didn’t ask him to look out for her. He didn’t have to. Dean put in for the transfer the next day.
Sammy, it’s going to hurt.
It’s kinda funny, thinking about it now. He was worried about the viruses she peered at through her microscope. That the diseases she studied and fought would harm her and it turns out they are both immune to the plague that ends the world.
She didn’t come to him and he didn’t go to her. They just turned around and the other one was there, their backs against each other. She smiled and he quirked an eyebrow and they were brother and sister again.
They loaded up all the equipment they could into her SUV, the quarantine finally lifted because there was no one left to enforce it. They headed for Kansas, taking for granted their parents would share their immunity. Maybe one or both started to doubt as they forged a path through the corpses and debris, but they didn’t let it show.
They buried them in the backyard. Next to each other, together forever, John & Mary carved into the wooden cross Dean hammers into the cold earth holding them. Sam wouldn’t let him fill it up alone, sobs racking her shoulders with each spade of dirt she pitches, filling the hole with their silence and her tears. They sleep in her old room that night, curled around each other for warmth and comfort like when they were little and she woke up from a bad dream.
Dean tries not to notice that it looks exactly the way he left it, doesn’t think about the last time they were together in her bed.
It’s not wrong.
He doesn’t know if it’s because of some misplaced sense of duty or just because there’s not much else to do, but they transfer all the equipment they can fit into the trunk of the black Impala his dad never saw him drive and set out looking for survivors, for answers. Sam slides into the passenger seat and says she always wanted to take a road trip with her big brother. Dean just slides a tape into the deck and backs out of the driveway a little too fast.
She’s tough, uses her training to get through it. Doesn’t gag at the decomposing bodies, doesn’t show any emotion when she de-tangles a little girl from her mother’s arms where the pathetic little family were huddled together in the kitchen, waiting to die. She must’ve been a beautiful child once, the apple of her daddy’s eye.
He knows Sam doesn’t sleep. He feels her turning over and over, the dip of the squeaky motel mattress under his back betraying her every move. He watches her growing thinner, the dark circles under her eyes so deep he can barely see the colour of her eyes anymore. She won’t let him worry, smiles and says she’s fine. Just lets him curl up behind her and hangs onto the arm that he slings around her. When he wakes up in the morning, the pillow is wet under his arm and she’s quietly humming in the shower.
She said his name over and over until it rang in his ears . A masked curse.
They don’t find any alive.
She kisses him after he breaks down in a little apartment in a small town they run across in Colorado. There’s a little boy of about four sitting in the floor of the nursery, desperately clinging to his baby sister. He find their names printed on the back of pictures stuck to the refrigerator with ABC magnets. Kurt and Jessie. Dean plants his fist through the wall when Sam tells him they don’t have any lesions, they died from dehydration and starvation.
Too late. They were too late.
He’s not even aware of the tears falling, dripping on his bleeding fingers until she falls to her knees beside him. She cradles his broken hand against her chest as she wipes them away and lifts his face to hers. For a moment the anguish is too great, the comfort too welcome and he fervently bruises her lips before he catches himself. With a strangled NO, he pushes her away and runs down the stairs as fast as his trembling legs will take him.
He doesn’t look at her for five days, sleeps in the car for eight. By day they cover twice the distance they did before, an urgency driving Dean beyond the desperation of time running out, of not getting there in time. On the ninth day when they finally do stop for the night - only reaching the next town in the early hours of the morning - he lets her drag him inside. He’s too cold and exhausted to put up much of a fight, but he sleeps as far away from her as he can get.
He can still feel her skin beneath his fingers.
Eventually she gets him to slow down, her logic winning out. There are just too many places to get too. If they’re going to make it, they will. If not, there’s nothing they can do. Every night she creeps closer to him. Until one morning he wakes up and she’s close enough that he can reach out and touch her. It never occurs to him to get separate beds.
In San Francisco she looks up from where she’s sitting under the tree, scribbling her latest notes and observations into another dog-eared notebook. Waits until he raises his eyes to check on her and tells him It’s not wrong. Not anymore. It never was. He just gives her a sad smile and goes back to digging the graves. Swinging shovel after shovel over his shoulder until his screaming muscles concede punishment enough and he can be sure exhaustion will bring sleep swiftly.
He wakes up in the middle of the night. For a moment he doesn’t know why and tightens his hand around the gun hidden beneath his pillow. Then he hears her. Please. A hitched breath. Fuck, Dean. He lies staring at the opposite wall, frozen in terror until she falls asleep, her even breaths eventually lulling him along. He wakes up with her naked breasts pushed against his back and his cock half hard. He slides out of bed quietly, careful not to wake her up. She rolls over onto her stomach and he can’t help but look. At the smooth line of her back, the curve of her hip where it disappears beneath the sheet, her cheek resting on her hand.
Her hips quiver beneath his hands as the sweet taste of her cunt explodes on his tongue.
When he comes under the shower’s numbing spray, he falls to his knees with his sister’s name on his lips.
They pack up in silence, both pretending that the other doesn’t know what’s happened. Throwing the bags into the trunk, Dean jerks away when their fingers accidentally touch and slams it shut with enough force to rattle Sam’s teeth. She looks at him standing there, his fisted hands pushing against the black metal, his face distorted until she can hardly recognize him and let’s go. Let’s go of what she wants, of hoping that he’d want it too. Turns around and makes her twisty way between abandoned sedans and hatch-backs until she can’t smell his aftershave or feel his anger anymore.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
He doesn’t realize she’s gone until he walks around to get in and sees only an empty space where she should be. For a moment he’s relieved, glad to be on his own. It’s only a moment, but almost immediately the blush of shame raises high on his cheeks and he hates himself even more. Then he takes in the complete silence, the stillness surrounding him and panic stabs his belly like a thousand knives.
He calls to her, endless repetitions of Sam and Sammy until his throat burns and his voice falters. He comes to a stop in the middle of an intersection, wild eyes searching for some clue as to which road to take. He thinks about all the times they played hide and seek as children and knows it’s no use. She’ll come out when she’s ready, won’t be found one second before or after. His heart is beating slow and heavy in his chest as more and more memories flood through him, taking him back to a time he’s run from far and hard.
He’s got two fingers inside of her and she’s begging him to make her come.
He finds her sitting on the bridge just as the sun is setting, her feet dangling over the abandoned freeway. Slides in next to her and lets her push her fingers into his clenched fist until he opens his hand, letting his fingers twine with hers. He wants to tell her he’s sorry, but the words just won’t come, so he just closes his mouth again. They sit like that until the last rays of colour start to fade from deep orange to dark purple and the first stars start to appear. They’re looking out at the vast city surrounding them, thinking about all the roads they’ve traveled and all the bodies they’ve buried and it’s easy to believe they’re the last two people left in the world.
She sighs and let’s her head fall against his shoulder when he slides his hand up her leg, slowly disappearing beneath her skirt.
Pushing inside of her, filling her makes him whole and breaks him apart.
Notes : I’ve been in such a mood for apocafic and girl!Sam/Dean, so I wrote some. It might be awful, but I had a blast writing it! It's also my longest piece of writing to date, so jay me! Title and cut from Trouble, an old Coldplay favourite.