ummmm
guyssssss i literally wrote this 5 years ago. i mean actually 5 years ago, and i never finished it and i never posted it and i'm pretty sure like no one reads this journal anymore? but anyway, i'm posting it for funzies.
PS HI EVERYONE, HOW ARE YOU, I'M IN GRAD SCHOOL NOW
the telling gets old (1/2)
supernatural; sam/dean; nc-17
a retelling of season one, only with more incest. basically sam and dean drive around the country and kill things and have nightmares and sometimes give each other angry hand jobs.
The night Jess burns alive, Sam doesn’t sleep.
He sits at the table, reading Dad’s journal cover to cover. Most of it is familiar; most of it he remembers. There are four years’ worth of new hunts, however, four years of spirits and monsters and demons, four years of Dean and Dad and death that Sam has missed.
He scans the pages for mention of the Thing that Killed Mom, which is now the Thing that Killed- but anyhow, there isn’t anything new, nothing he didn’t know before, which is just nothing anyway.
“Has it shown up before this? Have you guys found out anything about it?”
Dean is standing by one of the queen beds, folding his clothes, reorganizing his bag. It is 3 AM. Dean never folds his clothes or reorganizes his bag, so Sam knows he’s coming up with reasons to stay awake, to keep Sam company, but he wishes he wouldn’t; he wants Dean asleep, wants the silence of the room, wants to be able to sit in the dark for awhile and watch the shadows shift.
Dean looks up from meticulously balling a pair of socks. “No, Sammy,” he says. He says it patiently, tenderly, the way he used to say Dad will be home soon, Sammy. Sam thinks about shoving those socks down his brother’s throat.
Sam thinks, distantly, wildly, this is all your fault.
He forces the thought away. Swallows around the hysteria building in his throat. Dean regards him with something that looks like pity and something else, that familiar crush of love-resentment-anger-need-love that has been passing over Dean’s features every time he thinks Sam isn’t looking.
When he trusts his voice, Sam says, “You should go to sleep.”
“But I have all these socks to color code,” Dean says.
Dean slips into unconsciousness during 5 AM infomercials, and Sam puts his head down on the table. He turns his head to the window, away from his brother. It is November; clouds hang low over Palo Alto.
The sun doesn’t rise, or at least not that he can see; the night fades instead of recedes, goes from black to grey but lingers, as if the morning will never come.
The week passes in a blur. The days are long and empty, big grieving stretches of time. There is a funeral, there is Jess’ WASPy parents and brother, there are all Sam’s friends, trying to surround Sam with love and warmth and cookies. There is Dean in the background, itchy and uncomfortable in new black slacks and the only nice black shirt he owns, which Sam is pretty sure he stole from an asshole businessman who was hexing anyone who got in his way when Sam was 18.
Then there is the anger, cold and roiling in the pit of Sam’s belly.
The nights are shorter. Sam lies on his stomach, his face pressed against the pillow, and pretends to sleep. He listens to the rhythms of Dean’s slow sleep-breathing, which have changed in the years he has been absent from Sam’s life. He breathes deeper now, more through his nose than his mouth, though he still doesn’t snore.
Sam tries not to look at the ceiling, though he knows there’s nothing on it. Then sometimes he closes his eyes and sees it anyway, sometimes empty, sometimes with Jess pinned to it, sometimes in flames, but always there, always above him, always waiting for him to let down his guard.
On their way to Blackwater Ridge, they drive through the salt flats of Utah. They are on I-80; it’s maybe 6, almost dark, the sun almost vanished. To the east, the Rockies loom, but the salt flats stretch out before them, still glistening white in the last light of the day.
Dean stops at a gas station in Wendover. “You wanna eat?” he asks. “We passed that diner.”
Sam opens the door, stretches his legs out the door-frame. “If you want.”
Dean rests his palm on the hood of the Impala, looking out over the car, to the plains. “We could spend the night,” he says, “If you wanted. Wake up bright and early, get to Grand Junction by noon tomorrow.” He ducks down, peers at Sam across the seats.
“No,” Sam says. “No. We need to-we need to find Dad, and if he’s there, I don’t want him to wait.”
Dean looks at him, steadily, face carefully neutral. Sam doesn’t remember Dean’s poker-face being so good, doesn’t remember the patience with which Dean has been regarding him. He thinks, in almost-shock, you’ve changed.
Dean stands back up, a smile plastered on his face. “We stopped here one night, remember? Chasing a skinwalker. You were what… maybe 8? 9?”
They had been low on money, so they took a room with two twin beds. Dean was 12, edging towards 13, just beginning to hit his growth spurt; his body was a confusing mess of babyfat and bones, still soft in the face but growing longer and leaner in the limbs. He and Sam fought their way through sleep together, still used to sharing a bed but not to such close quarters, so that they woke up bruised from each other’s knees and elbows. Sam had drooled a wet patch onto Dean’s back, where he had smushed his face between Dean’s shoulderblades, but Dean never mentioned it.
Sam remembers.
“No,” he says, shortly. “I don’t remember. Are we going, or what?”
For a moment, in the forest, Sam is lost. His nerves are singing the sweet burn of adrenaline, his heart is thudding in his chest, and he is lost, because Dean is gone.
“Dean?”
Ben, the kid, joins him in the screaming: “Hailey? Dean? Hailey!”
Their voices echo back at them. Panic claws at Sam’s chest. The forest is dark; the trees are close; Dean is gone, gone.
He forces it down. Stands still for a moment, eyes closed, and breathes. There are rules, there are things they do when the one of them gets lost or taken; there is a Winchester way, and Sam knows it deep, knows that it hasn’t faded or been forgotten in the last four years, merely been pushed aside the way sand can be pushed aside-only temporarily, only for a moment, before it begins its slow welling back into the space you tried to empty.
He takes a breath. He lets it in.
“Start looking,” he says to Ben, “Dean will have left a trail.”
Back in the motel room, Dean kicks off his boots and stretches out on his bed. “I hate the wilderness,” he says, lifting his arms above his head and arching his back a little. “I hate all that communing-with-nature bullshit. I prefer communing with a shower on a regular basis, you know what I mean?”
“You liked Hailey,” Sam says, wearily. He sits down on the other bed.
“Yeah, well,” Dean shrugs, as he begins toeing off his socks, “I like ‘em feisty.”
Sam runs a hand through his hair, feels the grease and grit clinging to the roots. He had gone camping with Jess a few times, but it had left him antsy, scratching symbols in the dirt around their tent after she’d fallen asleep.
He hadn’t liked the open dark surrounding them, but crawling into a sleeping bag with Jess and burying his face in her hair, inhaling the warm scent of her, and then waking up in the morning too hot and her legs everywhere-Sam is half-hard, warm arousal spreading through his belly, before he remembers the ceiling, and the fire, and the cookie in his mouth and the blood on his face, and the desire in his stomach turns to ash.
“Dude,” Dean says, lifting his arm again and sniffing his armpit experimentally. “We smell like dead things.”
Sam opens his mouth to automatically correct Dean’s we to you but then the stench overwhelms him-Dean is right. He bends over to sniff at the thighs of his jeans, and blanches at the smell.
“Fuck,” Sam says. “These were my only jeans.” He picks at the cuffs of his jeans, which are caked with mud and possibly fragments of human skeletons, and shudders.
Dean clears his throat. “Uh, there’s a pair at the bottom of my bag if you want. On the left side.”
“Not to offend your fragile man-ego, Dean, but I outgrew your hand-me-downs when I was sixteen.”
“That’s ‘cause you’re a freak,” Dean says, amiably, and Sam relaxes, because this is neutral territory: a conversation they have had a thousand times and will have a thousand times more. Then, unexpectedly, Dean scrubs a hand across his face, suddenly shy. “No. They’re not my jeans.”
“Well, I’m taller than Dad, too, in case you’ve forgotten.” (Which had been unexpected and terrifying, probably more for John than for Sam himself, but he had never quite brought himself to use his height against his father, never quite been brave enough to pull himself up and tower over John the way he could.)
“They’re yours, freakface,” Dean snaps. “You left them in my bag when you-when you left. For school.”
Sam gets up and paws through Dean’s bag, and then there they are, under Dean’s spare .45 which he inexplicably keeps with his socks. Sam remembers them: faded Levis, a ripped belt-loop where Dean had grabbed him during a hunt.
He strips his jeans off, unashamedly, and pulls on the Levis. He has grown, maybe a half-inch, and filled out, so they don’t fit the way they used to, but they’re better than nothing.
“They smell like your fucking Old Spice,” he says. He turns back to Dean, who is watching him, heavy-lidded, an unreadable look on his face. Sam pushes his hand through his hair again, nervous under Dean’s gaze.
Finally, Sam says, “Thanks. For keeping them.”
“Shut up,” Dean says, and turns on the TV.
“Cut your hair,” Dean says, when Sam returns from the Starbucks in Lincoln, Nebraska, bearing the girliest drink he could think to order.
“Fuck you,” Sam says. He pushes his hand through his hair, sweeps it off his face.
Jess had said the same thing, after watching him toss his bangs aside for the eightieth time while he studied for his Chem final. You look stupid, she said, and wound her arms around his neck and pressed close against his back. She hadn’t been wearing perfume.
Sam wonders how long it will be before he forgets that evening, and how long after that it will be before he forgets the details of Jess altogether. Maybe it is already happening.
“Seriously, dude,” Dean begins, but catches sight of Sam’s face and shuts up.
Sam looks at himself in the side mirror. He sees the thin set of his mouth, the blooming shadows beneath his eyes, the way the drift of his hair obscures his pupils.
Dean sighs, and starts the car. Sam can tell there are things Dean wants to say from the way he shifts in his seat and works his jaw muscle in silence. But Sam doesn’t want to hear it, and Dean is probably tired of saying it, so they pull out of the parking lot with nothing said and nothing solved.
Sam sweeps the hair out of his eyes again. He catches Dean’s eyes in the rearview mirror and tries to smile.
And then again, some things never change. Sam is almost charmed by Dean’s attempts to seduce Andrea, the familiar tricks, the pitching low of his voice, the way his shoulders roll back and his spine straightens. Girls love that kind of shit usually, the way Dean is effortlessly rebel and hero at once.
He had tried it himself, at 14 and 15, tried to mimic his brother’s walk, the slow drawl of his brother’s voice, but it was unbelievable on Sam; he looked and felt stupid, and more than once a girl had told him to knock it off and stop trying so hard.
He had tried it on Jess, too; had tried Dean’s easy deflections whenever she asked about his family, but she had stopped him in the hallway outside her dorm room and said, tall, dark, and mysterious isn’t really my thing, Sam, and he had blushed a little and said, lamely, I guess it’s not mine either.
He had had a million and one reasons not to tell Jess about his family, but it was freshman year and the wounds were still fresh, so that was what he had told her: look, I’m sorry, but it’s too hard.
Now, standing in the doorway with Andrea, watching Dean whisper to Lucas, he thinks maybe there are things he could have told her. There is a gentleness in Dean as he talks to the little boy, a softness Sam thought at first was new and unfamiliar but realized it’s just how Dean’s been talking to Sam his entire life.
They don’t save Andrea’s dad.
Sam tries not to start the count up in his head, how many saved and how many lost, but he knows Dean keeps track anyway.
He wonders which side Dad will belong to, by the time they find him; he wonders if he is one of Dean’s saved, since it was Dean who wrenched him from the fire.
Twice.
They’re on I-90, passing through Cleveland, when Dean screws up his face like he is bracing for something and says, “I think you should talk about it.”
Dean’s arm is stretched out across the bench-seat between them. His hand is couched behind Sam’s neck, his knuckles occasionally scraping against Sam’s hairline.
Sam is startled out of half-sleep. He had been watching the road roll by and thinking of nothing in particular, thinking of how many times he has watched this particular stretch of road from this particular seat, thinking of how many times he will watch it again.
He presses his palms against his eyeballs. “Talk about what?”
Dean purses his lips. “You know,” he says, “Jess. I think you should talk about… her.”
Sam snorts, laughs through the tightening in his belly. “Dean. You hate talking. You hate me talking.”
“Whatever,” Dean mumbles, looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Look, it’s just, it’s that kid back there. Lucas. He couldn’t… he couldn’t talk, you know, so everything just kind of… ate him up.”
“He was like, seven years old, Dean. He saw his dad get killed by a ghost. He was traumatized.”
Dean looks at him then, meets his eyes in defiance. “Exactly.”
Sam turns to the window again. A month ago he had been in Palo Alto, watching Jess try on Halloween costumes.
“I don’t know, man,” he says, finally. “You’re not exactly a licensed psychiatrist.”
“Whatever,” Dean says again. “I’m obviously not gonna say anything that’ll turn your frown upside-down. I just, you know.” He takes a breath. “I wanna help. I want to, I want to get you through this, you know.”
There is emotion in Dean’s voice, raw and honest, and it makes Sam uncomfortable. He dislikes the way Dean is scraping himself open a little at a time, dislikes the way he himself is still stony-faced and untouched. Hey, who’s girlfriend just got murdered, he wants to ask, but he knows it’s an unfair impulse.
“I don’t have the flu, Dean,” he says, and his voice is a little colder than he expected.
“You can’t feed me chicken soup and put me to bed. You can’t get me through this.”
Dean shuts down, almost visibly: a narrowing of his eyes, a shifting of his shoulders. He adjusts his grip on the wheel and refuses to meet Sam’s eye.
“Yeah,” Dean says, finally, his voice neutral. “All right.”
They are at cruising altitude and dropping when the demon brings up Jess.
Sam feels Dean spark next to him, and the fear in Dean’s eyes glazes over with something that more closely resembles the same way he used to look at Billy Rogers, the kid who kicked Sam’s ass after school in third grade. It’s a you’re in for it now, buddy, kind of look, and Sam waits to feel the answering spark in his chest, the yeah, and fuck you too.
It never comes.
“She must have died screaming,” the demon says, and instead of anger, Sam just sits back and feels the roaring inside him.
Later, after they have listened to their dad’s new message 10 times, Dean slides off the car. Sam is leaned forward, elbows to knees. Dean claps a hand on Sam’s shoulder and leaves it there, squeezing a little, a gesture he learned from John.
“Sammy,” Dean says, and somehow pulls him in, gets Sam’s forehead pressed against his own, his callused palm flush against Sam’s neck.
Sam lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.
“Sammy,” Dean says again, and his hand on Sam’s neck tightens. “Demons lie, man.”
“He didn’t lie,” Sam says. “She died screaming.”
There is a roaring inside him still. It’s in his ears and his stomach; it’s pressing down on him from all sides. He leans into Dean, into the weight of his brother, lets himself be held up for a moment by the force of Dean’s hand on his neck, Dean’s forehead against his own.
Dean takes his weight. He holds Sam up, and Sam holds on, until the roaring dies away.
Christmas takes them up to Vermont, chasing an abominable snowman that turns out to be just a run-of-the-mill spirit. Dean is pissed, dispirited, but cold enough to get them a room in a nice-enough bed and breakfast that would normally be out of their price range.
“Let’s stay for a few days,” Dean says, jovially, and he rents the room for three nights even though they’ve finished the job.
“Yeah, maybe you can finally learn to ski,” Sam says, drily, but Dean just beams at him and says, “Who knows? Maybe.”
Jess had brought Sam up to Killington every winter, taught him how to ski herself, and he had been awful but it had been fun. At night they drank wine with her parents and then sat in the hot tub for hours with the snow drifting down around them.
Still, there had been dark times; it wasn’t perfect, they hadn’t gone four years without their fights. Last new year’s eve Jess had been kissed by her high school boyfriend, and Sam had felt hot, sick jealousy waving through him for the first time. He had been alive with it, bright and raw with alcohol, and for the first time in a year and a half he had wanted a gun in his hands, wanted something to kill or to try to kill him, wanted his body to come awake again, the way it had been when he’d hunted.
Because it had gone soft at college, sleepy with safety. It’d been what he wanted; he wanted to be able to sleep through the night without clutching at a knife, wanted to shake the muscle-memories of trigger pulling and roundhouse kicks out of his limbs. He ran every morning, but it wasn’t the same, because being out of shape didn’t make anything but climbing the stairs to his dorm room harder.
“Dude,” Dean says, bumping his shoulder against Sam’s. He cocks his head towards the bar, a leer beginning to slip over his face. “Ski bunnies.”
“Naw,” Sam says, and stands. He shakes out his legs, which have gone slightly numb. He puts his hand on Dean’s shoulder to steady himself.
Dean’s face is instantly rearranged, concern etching out new lines on his face. “You okay? You need me to-”
“No,” Sam says, more firmly. “You stay here.”
He turns around before Dean can protest.
He’s jolted awake at 3 AM by Dean, standing in the doorway, sending some girl off.
“Yeah,” Dean says, his voice pitched low, “I’ve got your number,” and then there is the soft sound of kissing, the little ah of pleasure the girl makes, and then more whispered goodbyes.
Dean closes the door. Sam hears him bolt the doors and redraw the salt lines Sam has laid out. Then the rustle of Dean drawing his shirt off; the clink of Dean’s belt buckle as he begins to undo it.
Sam has been wakened from some dream, not the usual dream of fire but of something more hazy, a vague, warm dream that has him still heavy-limbed. He realizes, belatedly, that he is achingly hard, cock straining against the fabric of his boxers.
Sam bites his lip. He doesn’t remember the dream.
He shifts to adjust himself, but the brush of his knuckles against the sheets is enough to catch Dean’s attention.
“Sam?” Dean whispers. “Are you awake?”
Sam stays quiet. Shame and arousal wash through him in tandem, and the burn of both together is enough to make Sam’s eyes sting.
After a moment, Dean continues to move about the room, carelessly shucking his jeans, peeling back the sheets on his bed and crawling in.
“She was hot,” Dean says, almost inaudibly. “But dumb as fucking rocks.”
They lie awake, in silence. Sam listens to his brother breathing, the huff of air whistling past Dean’s lips. He presses the heel of his hand against the hard line of his erection, gritting his teeth, waiting for it to go away or for Dean to fall asleep, whichever happens first.
“’Night, Sammy,” Dean says, finally, and rolls over.
They pass uneasy nights. Dean waits too long to apply for a new card so for nine days they scrape by, sleeping in the car when they can, living out of gas stations. Dean tries to hustle a few locals in a seedy bar in Niagara Falls, but he ends up with a split lip and bruised ribs for his troubles, and after that they are both gun-shy.
Sam never sleeps through the night. Sometimes he wakes up screaming, Jess’ name being ripped from his throat, Dean pressing his shoulders back down to the mattress and holding him there until he is steady.
Other times, he wakes up too hot, his dreams a vague, foggy mess, his skin slick with sweat. Arousal trips through him; blood flushes his cheeks and his dick. Sometimes in desperation he reaches down, jerks himself off in a few brutal strokes, his mouth open, his chest heaving. Sometimes he wakes up and his boxers are already sticky, come beginning to clump in his pubic hair.
Sometimes he wakes up and he doesn’t know which kind of dream he’s had, only that his eyes are burning, only that his heart is racing.
For days after the Bloody Mary hunt, Dean is furious with Sam.
In a diner, Sam asks to eat Dean’s left-over fries.
Dean says, “Look, Sam, you’re my brother. I’d die for you. But there are some things I need to keep for myself.”
He says it again when Sam asks to borrow one of Dean’s shirts, because his last clean one just got covered in ectoplasm.
“I hate you,” Sam says, as he tries to fit his head under a gas-station sinkhead to get ectoplasm out of his hair.
Dean just looks at him, hard, and then slams out of the bathroom.
When Sam asks him to please roll the window up and turn the goddamn music down, Dean begins, “You’re my brother…”
“Yeah, I get it, Dean,” Sam interrupts.
“No you don’t, Sam,” Dean snaps back, and then he turns the music up instead.
Sam does, though. For Dean there is no difference between “brother” and “self,” no lines to draw in the sand. There is nothing between Dean and family, and there is no word for family that doesn’t mean Sam.
When Dean pulls off the highway into a motel parking lot and kills the engine, Sam grabs at Dean’s wrist. Dean stills but keeps his eyes to the front.
“Your eyes bled too,” Sam says, and his voice is sharp with annoyance. “Your eyes bled too, Dean, so you can fucking stop it with the self-righteous act.”
Dean looks at him then, head-on, and his mouth is set in the same stubborn line Sam can feel his own mouth settling into. “Yeah, Sam,” Dean says, slowly. “I got secrets. But I keep ‘em because you don’t want to hear them, not because I don’t want to tell them.”
Sam holds Dean’s gaze for a moment, but there is something hard and unflinching in Dean’s eyes, something he can’t bring himself to break open. Sam is carrying enough inside him already.
“Whatever,” he mutters, dropping Dean’s wrist. “Just let it go, okay?”
“Yeah,” Dean says, still looking at Sam with unblinking deliberateness. “I guess I’ll do that.”
He gets out of the car, and closes the door, almost gently, behind him.
A hedgewitch hits Sam simultaneously with a curse that leaves him woozy and wobbly-legged and a gunshot to the shoulder.
Dean somehow manages to take her out and get Sam back to the car. He wrestles Sam into the backseat. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” he grumbles, as he tries to shove Sam further across the seat. “You’re a freak.” There’s panic in Dean’s voice, a high whine of it creeping in, but Sam pretends not to notice.
“Sorry I can’t do anything but lie here and bleed,” Sam says, muzzily. His tongue feels thick and too big in his mouth.
“Yeah, whatever, it’s all you’re good for anyway,” Dean says.
The hum of the Impala, the tires against the road, is a soothing rhythm to Sam. He relaxes into it, lets his eyes drift closed, thinks of all the lazy summer afternoons spent sprawled bonelessly against Dean as their childhood passed them by. Every now and then the car hits a bump and his body shifts and his eyes fly open and he’s made aware of the blood, how it’s everywhere, sticking his shirt to his skin and soaking through.
“Blood on the upholstery,” he slurs.
“Nothing new,” Dean says, and drives faster.
Somehow, Dean manhandles Sam out of the car, up a flight of stairs and into their hotel room. “Freak, freak, freak,” Dean chants under his breath, but what he means is stay with me, what he means is I’m scared.
“Learn to use your words, Dean,” Sam lectures, as Dean dumps him on his bed.
“Yeah, why don’t you learn to not chase hedgewitches into the fucking dark forest behind their house without me, fucktard.” Dean gets a good grip on Sam’s collar, and adds, “I’m ripping your shirt off now, try not to get too aroused.”
“Manly,” Sam says, and then the room shifts, frighteningly, around him. “I think I may have lost too much blood,” he manages, and then blacks out.
He comes to in hot water. There is cool porcelain at his back. He opens his eyes and regards the tiled wall in front of him for a moment, before realizing where he is. “Am I in the bath?” he asks, enraged. “Dean?”
Dean is sitting on the floor, next to the tub, his knees pulled to his chest. “Yeah, well,” he says, sullenly. “You fucking reeked, man.”
Sam slumps a little. The bath is too small for him, almost comically so, and Dean has run the bath only half full. Sam leans back and rests his head on the wall behind him.
“Don’t get your stitches wet,” Dean warns, and Sam looks down to regard the neat row of black stitches marching up and over the front of his shoulder.
They sit in silence for awhile. The only noise is the water plashing softly against Sam’s skin whenever he shifts. The room is hot with steam.
“Did you actually undress me and carry me to the bath?” Sam asks, belatedly, lifting his head. “Can you actually carry me?”
“Stop gay panicking, dude,” Dean says. “I gave you baths until you were 7 years old. It’s not that weird.”
It kind of is, and Sam opens his mouth to say so, but after a moment he shuts it. In the two months since Stanford they have fallen back into their old intimacy, the lack of modesty or personal space that comes from living in small enclosed spaces together for long periods of time. Dean’s body bears new scars, has changed shape a little in the years since Sam saw it last, but he still knows his brother in the same way he knows maps of the major highways. Little things change, but the big things remain the same, and Dean’s body is just a part of Dean himself, something Sam lives with, something he knows, something he isn’t afraid of. He guesses he doesn’t mind if Dean feels the same way.
Dean is watching him again, and when Sam catches his eye, Dean pulls a face and says, pitching his voice high and girly, “Thanks for saving my life, again, for the eighty thousandth time, Dean.”
“Thanks for saving my life, again, for the eighty thousandth time, Dean,” Sam parrots obediently.
Sam closes his eyes. He lets his head drift backwards again. He can smell Dean now, the combination of Old Spice, leather, sweat and blood, but the scent of Dean’s sweat stopped bothering him years ago, and, he supposes, pretty soon the smell of blood will stop too.
Things are easier between them after that. Sam stops fighting Dean on every little thing; he tries to say yes, he tries to say thank you. In turn Dean stops pushing Sam so hard, stops with his hold-my-hand-and-I’ll-lead-you-through routine. In the absence of the tension between them, their push-and-pull rhythm, Sam relaxes, breathes a little easier.
He can almost forget. Sometimes, on the road, with Dean driving beside him, and the windows rolled up and the winter sun coming in, he lets himself forget that it hasn’t always been like this, or that he ever wanted anything different. Dean is relaxed and easy beside him, whistling and singing, and they are brothers again, they are family again.
St. Louis changes that. Sam guesses it was only a matter of time.
Sam’s dreams come back, full-force, the night after they leave St. Louis. It’s seeing Becky again, he’s sure of it; he had never been attracted to her, but she had the same long-limbed grace as Jess, the same slow swing of blond hair, and it was enough. That, and she reeked of Stanford, of his old life, and the smell of it-salt and sun and dust-woke the roaring in him again.
He wakes up dizzy sometimes with the emptiness, his throat raw from shouting, and Dean is always there with him, sitting beside him, holding him down and coaxing him back into reality. The first night Sam shudders away from Dean’s hands, looks up at him with something like fear, in his hazy dream-clogged mind remembering Dean’s face with a monster inside of it. Dean looks at him, hurt, and slides away, but the next time Sam wakes up screaming-which is only three hours later-Dean is there again.
“Come on, Sammy, come back to me,” Dean says, his hands smoothing the sleeves of Sam’s shirt, ghosting over Sam’s face. Sam knuckles his eyes, tries to hide the way they are leaking, but Dean just says, “It’s okay, man, I’m here. Go back to sleep. It’s okay.”
Somehow, Sam’s two kinds of dreams get confused, begin to meld, so he wakes up three days out of St. Louis so hard it almost hurts and all he can smell is ash, all he can think of is Jessica on the ceiling, and fuck, he’s so turned on. It’s sick, and it’s sad, and Sam is torn between throwing up or creaming his pants like a thirteen year old boy, and Dean is there above him, holding onto him, saying, “It’s okay.”
It’s not okay, it’s so not okay, and Dean is too close to him, Dean is hauling Sam in to get his arms around him, and Sam knows Dean can tell that his cheeks are wet and his boxers are tented, and it’s humiliating.
“Sammy,” Dean says, roughly, and he has one arm around Sam’s neck, mashing Sam’s face against his collarbones, and his other hand comes to rest, slowly, on Sam’s hip.
Dean moves deliberately, always, and Dean touches, if possible, even more deliberately, so Sam knows that this hand on his hip means exactly what he thinks it means: it’s a question, or more specifically, it’s an offer. It’s Dean trying to take care of him, and Sam is too caught in the refrain of ash-Jess-shame-death to really think about it, so he does what he has been practicing, what he has been doing his whole life: he shifts his hips, he says yes.
And then Dean’s hand is between them.
He doesn’t bother with Sam’s boxers, just slides his cock out of the opening in the front. Dean’s hand is calloused and rough, and the only barrier between Sam and Dean’s palm is sweat and pre-come. Dean wraps his hand around Sam, firmly, and begins to stroke, a steady rhythm. The friction is almost too much, Sam’s skin is almost burning, but it is right, it is good, it is holding Sam in place.
“It’s okay, Sammy,” Dean says again, and his other hand is gentle on the back of Sam’s neck.
Sam is making these kind of terrible noises, these awful gasping noises that are kind of like sobs and kind of like dry-heaves, and he would be embarassed, but he is light-headed from hyperventilating and part of him is going wrong, sick, Dean, but most of him is just going, please.
“Close your eyes,” Dean says, and Sam does.
He can see Jess. Pleasure is racking through him, and he is shaking, and Dean is still jerking him off in long, sure strokes, but when he closes his eyes he can see Jess, and she is beautiful. She is dead, he knows she’s dead, but in his head she is beautiful, she is smiling, she’s reaching for him-
“Think about Jess, Sam,” Dean says, his voice soft and steady, “It’s okay. It will help. Think about her.”
“Augh,” Sam says, and comes so hard he thinks his chest might have imploded, streaking Dean’s wrist and shirt with white.
They sit there together for a moment, Sam slumped against Dean’s chest, a wet spot forming in the cotton of Dean’s shirt where Sam has pressed his mouth. Eventually, Dean pushes Sam away, gently, and Sam settles, half-slumped against the wall.
“Lie down like a normal person,” Dean says, as he stands.
“Shut up,” Sam says, automatically.
He rearranges himself, gets his body aligned properly. He feels wrung out, and his head is beginning to ache, but his eyelids are already drifting closed.
Sam hears Dean move towards the bathroom. The door snicks shut behind Dean, and Sam thinks he can maybe hear the lock sliding into place.
He’s asleep before Dean comes back out.
The morning after is easy, too easy; Sam is suspicious, but he is also better-rested than he has been in days, so he’s a little reticent to push things off balance again.
He tries to bring it up once, in the car, says, “Dean…” in this little weird voice he can’t really imagine coming from himself.
Dean hunches his shoulders but looks him in the eye and says, “Yeah?” The set of his lips says I dare you to bring this up right now, and Sam backs down, because really, at this moment, there is pretty much nothing in the world he wants to do less than have this conversation with Dean.
So he finishes up with, “You are so stuck in the eighties, sometimes I feel sorry for you.”
Dean flashes him a shit-eating grin and claps his hand on Sam’s knee. “You’re just jealous,” he says.
Sam laughs, and for a moment he is grateful, glad that Dean is beside him, smiling, glad that nothing has changed, glad that they are brothers and the world is stretched out wide before them.
In Iowa, Dean pushes Sam at Lori, the pastor’s daughter, with a vengeance, and it doesn’t bother Sam until Dean tries to leave him at a frathouse party. He chases Dean out onto the lawn, catches him by the cuff of his sleeve.
“Wait,” Sam says when Dean turns to face him, “How about you stay here, and I go dig up the grave?”
Dean shakes Sam’s hand off. “Dude,” he says, making his have-I-taught-you-nothing face. “There are hot chicks playing pool in there, Sam. Hot chicks playing pool. And furthermore, there is also a hot chick who obviously fucking digs you in there, and she’s kind of in mortal danger, and maybe you’ll get to swoop in there all manly and save her, and that is just not an opportunity you pass up.”
“I don’t swoop in all manly,” Sam says desperately, “and I don’t like hot chicks who play pool.”
“Well, that would be because you’re a shame to the Winchester name, Sam, but it’s never too late to redeem yourself.” Dean turns away, and begins to walk towards the car.
Sam considers tackling him to the ground. Panic is rising up in him, hot and sick. He doesn’t want to be here; he hated parties like this in college, and he hates them even more now. And Lori-Lori frightens him, he doesn’t like the way she softens and opens to him; it puts him on edge, because he wants it but he doesn’t want her.
“I want to dig the grave up!” he shouts after Dean, and ignores the weird looks he draws from a passing frat boy.
“Redeem yourself,” Dean yells back over his shoulder, as he opens the Impala door. “Uphold the family honor, for once in your fucking life.”
He gets in the car and slams the door before Sam can reply.
Dean offers to stay.
It’s a nice gesture, kind of an empty one because if they did stay it would only be for a few days, but Sam looks him in the eye and shakes his head, and Dean drives away.
There is nothing for him in Ankeny, Iowa; Sam is smart enough to know that, though maybe if he was four years younger he wouldn’t have. It isn’t about Jess, not really, though of course it is. Mostly he just knows that Lori didn’t want him, not really, didn’t want the dark thing Sam feels himself becoming, just the soft little smile and the white teeth, just the shoulder to cry on.
Maybe Jess wouldn’t have wanted what he really had to offer, either, but he can’t let himself think about that.
Sam startles himself out of sleep in the middle of the night and he hasn’t been dreaming but his heart is racing all the same. His mouth is dry, too dry, and he can feel the blood pounding in his head.
Dean is still awake, flipping through late night infomercials with the sound off. He looks over at Sam, raising his eyebrows.
“You okay, Sammy?” Dean asks.
“Dean,” Sam says, and he can already smell the ash upon the air. He knows if he closes his eyes it will be to fall into a dream of Jess, and he can’t do it, not tonight.
Dean looks at him, steadily. Sam watches his brother, watches the rise and fall of Dean’s chest, the roll of Dean’s thigh as he shifts his legs.
“I…” Sam tries to begin, but Dean is already standing up, crossing the barrier between their beds.
Dean nudges Sam over, climbs under the covers. He props himself up on his elbow so that he is looming over Sam, and then his other hand is cool against the pane of Sam’s stomach, below Sam’s belly-button.
Dean’s thumb sweeps soothingly against Sam’s skin. “Yeah?” he asks.
Sam tries to say yes, he tries to say thank you, but it’s as if his throat is closed up, so he nods instead, and hopes it’s enough.
It is. Dean’s hand slides underneath the elastic of Sam’s boxers, slips past the tangle of his pubic hair, and closes, firmly, around Sam. Sam’s half-hard already, but blood rushes down his body at the contact.
He feels awkward, too open, on his back with Dean above him. Dean’s palm is sweaty, but it isn’t lubrication enough, and after a few moments Dean pulls his hand back and spits on his palm. Sam watches this, watches the way Dean’s eyebrows draw together as he leans forward to adjust his position, and it frightens him a little, the reality of it.
Sam’s eyes flutter shut when Dean’s hand returns to his cock, wraps around him with something like confidence. With his brother’s hands on him he feels safe to close his eyes, safe to think about Jess, the taste of her, the look on her face as he slid two slick fingers deep inside her-
He moans a little, ratchets his hips up, and Dean, obligingly, speeds up. Sam can’t resist pumping his hips, and Dean stutters a little, fucks up the rhythm, but soon catches on and they are working together, Sam’s hips and Dean’s hands and the mattress creaking beneath them. Sam screws his eyes shut, tries to convince himself it’s not Dean’s hand he’s thrusting into, but he can’t quite do it-Jess’ hands were smaller, her grip more tentative, and even though Dean’s hands are smaller than Sam’s own they feel larger somehow, like he is more completely surrounded by Dean’s grip than by his own.
He can feel his orgasm approaching, tight in his belly and his balls. He keeps his eyes shut, draws in deep ragged breaths. Thinks of Jess, the smell of her hair, how sometimes he fucked her from behind and buried his face in it.
“It’s okay, Sammy, come on,” Dean whispers, and Sam comes with a choked off moan, his eyes shut so tight he sees white, his stomach and thigh muscles clenching.
Dean strokes him through it; holds on until Sam blindly pushes his hand away from his over-sensitized skin.
Dean pulls away from Sam, rolls off the bed. He reaches down and picks up something to begin wiping off his hand and forearm, then throws it at Sam, who catches it and begins to wipe himself off.
“This is my shirt,” Sam says in realization. He is too sleepy to be properly enraged by it, though, already slipping into the welcome embace of sleep.
“Did you think I was gonna use my own?” Dean asks.
Sam watches as Dean climbs into his own bed, settles down with his back to Sam. Sam’s eyelids are drifting closed. He rolls onto his side, away from Dean, and presses his face into his pillow.
“Goodnight, Dean,” Sam mumbles, but if Dean replies he doesn’t hear it, already too far gone into the darkness.
part 2
PS HI EVERYONE, HOW ARE YOU, I'M IN GRAD SCHOOL NOW
the telling gets old (1/2)
supernatural; sam/dean; nc-17
a retelling of season one, only with more incest. basically sam and dean drive around the country and kill things and have nightmares and sometimes give each other angry hand jobs.
The night Jess burns alive, Sam doesn’t sleep.
He sits at the table, reading Dad’s journal cover to cover. Most of it is familiar; most of it he remembers. There are four years’ worth of new hunts, however, four years of spirits and monsters and demons, four years of Dean and Dad and death that Sam has missed.
He scans the pages for mention of the Thing that Killed Mom, which is now the Thing that Killed- but anyhow, there isn’t anything new, nothing he didn’t know before, which is just nothing anyway.
“Has it shown up before this? Have you guys found out anything about it?”
Dean is standing by one of the queen beds, folding his clothes, reorganizing his bag. It is 3 AM. Dean never folds his clothes or reorganizes his bag, so Sam knows he’s coming up with reasons to stay awake, to keep Sam company, but he wishes he wouldn’t; he wants Dean asleep, wants the silence of the room, wants to be able to sit in the dark for awhile and watch the shadows shift.
Dean looks up from meticulously balling a pair of socks. “No, Sammy,” he says. He says it patiently, tenderly, the way he used to say Dad will be home soon, Sammy. Sam thinks about shoving those socks down his brother’s throat.
Sam thinks, distantly, wildly, this is all your fault.
He forces the thought away. Swallows around the hysteria building in his throat. Dean regards him with something that looks like pity and something else, that familiar crush of love-resentment-anger-need-love that has been passing over Dean’s features every time he thinks Sam isn’t looking.
When he trusts his voice, Sam says, “You should go to sleep.”
“But I have all these socks to color code,” Dean says.
Dean slips into unconsciousness during 5 AM infomercials, and Sam puts his head down on the table. He turns his head to the window, away from his brother. It is November; clouds hang low over Palo Alto.
The sun doesn’t rise, or at least not that he can see; the night fades instead of recedes, goes from black to grey but lingers, as if the morning will never come.
The week passes in a blur. The days are long and empty, big grieving stretches of time. There is a funeral, there is Jess’ WASPy parents and brother, there are all Sam’s friends, trying to surround Sam with love and warmth and cookies. There is Dean in the background, itchy and uncomfortable in new black slacks and the only nice black shirt he owns, which Sam is pretty sure he stole from an asshole businessman who was hexing anyone who got in his way when Sam was 18.
Then there is the anger, cold and roiling in the pit of Sam’s belly.
The nights are shorter. Sam lies on his stomach, his face pressed against the pillow, and pretends to sleep. He listens to the rhythms of Dean’s slow sleep-breathing, which have changed in the years he has been absent from Sam’s life. He breathes deeper now, more through his nose than his mouth, though he still doesn’t snore.
Sam tries not to look at the ceiling, though he knows there’s nothing on it. Then sometimes he closes his eyes and sees it anyway, sometimes empty, sometimes with Jess pinned to it, sometimes in flames, but always there, always above him, always waiting for him to let down his guard.
On their way to Blackwater Ridge, they drive through the salt flats of Utah. They are on I-80; it’s maybe 6, almost dark, the sun almost vanished. To the east, the Rockies loom, but the salt flats stretch out before them, still glistening white in the last light of the day.
Dean stops at a gas station in Wendover. “You wanna eat?” he asks. “We passed that diner.”
Sam opens the door, stretches his legs out the door-frame. “If you want.”
Dean rests his palm on the hood of the Impala, looking out over the car, to the plains. “We could spend the night,” he says, “If you wanted. Wake up bright and early, get to Grand Junction by noon tomorrow.” He ducks down, peers at Sam across the seats.
“No,” Sam says. “No. We need to-we need to find Dad, and if he’s there, I don’t want him to wait.”
Dean looks at him, steadily, face carefully neutral. Sam doesn’t remember Dean’s poker-face being so good, doesn’t remember the patience with which Dean has been regarding him. He thinks, in almost-shock, you’ve changed.
Dean stands back up, a smile plastered on his face. “We stopped here one night, remember? Chasing a skinwalker. You were what… maybe 8? 9?”
They had been low on money, so they took a room with two twin beds. Dean was 12, edging towards 13, just beginning to hit his growth spurt; his body was a confusing mess of babyfat and bones, still soft in the face but growing longer and leaner in the limbs. He and Sam fought their way through sleep together, still used to sharing a bed but not to such close quarters, so that they woke up bruised from each other’s knees and elbows. Sam had drooled a wet patch onto Dean’s back, where he had smushed his face between Dean’s shoulderblades, but Dean never mentioned it.
Sam remembers.
“No,” he says, shortly. “I don’t remember. Are we going, or what?”
For a moment, in the forest, Sam is lost. His nerves are singing the sweet burn of adrenaline, his heart is thudding in his chest, and he is lost, because Dean is gone.
“Dean?”
Ben, the kid, joins him in the screaming: “Hailey? Dean? Hailey!”
Their voices echo back at them. Panic claws at Sam’s chest. The forest is dark; the trees are close; Dean is gone, gone.
He forces it down. Stands still for a moment, eyes closed, and breathes. There are rules, there are things they do when the one of them gets lost or taken; there is a Winchester way, and Sam knows it deep, knows that it hasn’t faded or been forgotten in the last four years, merely been pushed aside the way sand can be pushed aside-only temporarily, only for a moment, before it begins its slow welling back into the space you tried to empty.
He takes a breath. He lets it in.
“Start looking,” he says to Ben, “Dean will have left a trail.”
Back in the motel room, Dean kicks off his boots and stretches out on his bed. “I hate the wilderness,” he says, lifting his arms above his head and arching his back a little. “I hate all that communing-with-nature bullshit. I prefer communing with a shower on a regular basis, you know what I mean?”
“You liked Hailey,” Sam says, wearily. He sits down on the other bed.
“Yeah, well,” Dean shrugs, as he begins toeing off his socks, “I like ‘em feisty.”
Sam runs a hand through his hair, feels the grease and grit clinging to the roots. He had gone camping with Jess a few times, but it had left him antsy, scratching symbols in the dirt around their tent after she’d fallen asleep.
He hadn’t liked the open dark surrounding them, but crawling into a sleeping bag with Jess and burying his face in her hair, inhaling the warm scent of her, and then waking up in the morning too hot and her legs everywhere-Sam is half-hard, warm arousal spreading through his belly, before he remembers the ceiling, and the fire, and the cookie in his mouth and the blood on his face, and the desire in his stomach turns to ash.
“Dude,” Dean says, lifting his arm again and sniffing his armpit experimentally. “We smell like dead things.”
Sam opens his mouth to automatically correct Dean’s we to you but then the stench overwhelms him-Dean is right. He bends over to sniff at the thighs of his jeans, and blanches at the smell.
“Fuck,” Sam says. “These were my only jeans.” He picks at the cuffs of his jeans, which are caked with mud and possibly fragments of human skeletons, and shudders.
Dean clears his throat. “Uh, there’s a pair at the bottom of my bag if you want. On the left side.”
“Not to offend your fragile man-ego, Dean, but I outgrew your hand-me-downs when I was sixteen.”
“That’s ‘cause you’re a freak,” Dean says, amiably, and Sam relaxes, because this is neutral territory: a conversation they have had a thousand times and will have a thousand times more. Then, unexpectedly, Dean scrubs a hand across his face, suddenly shy. “No. They’re not my jeans.”
“Well, I’m taller than Dad, too, in case you’ve forgotten.” (Which had been unexpected and terrifying, probably more for John than for Sam himself, but he had never quite brought himself to use his height against his father, never quite been brave enough to pull himself up and tower over John the way he could.)
“They’re yours, freakface,” Dean snaps. “You left them in my bag when you-when you left. For school.”
Sam gets up and paws through Dean’s bag, and then there they are, under Dean’s spare .45 which he inexplicably keeps with his socks. Sam remembers them: faded Levis, a ripped belt-loop where Dean had grabbed him during a hunt.
He strips his jeans off, unashamedly, and pulls on the Levis. He has grown, maybe a half-inch, and filled out, so they don’t fit the way they used to, but they’re better than nothing.
“They smell like your fucking Old Spice,” he says. He turns back to Dean, who is watching him, heavy-lidded, an unreadable look on his face. Sam pushes his hand through his hair again, nervous under Dean’s gaze.
Finally, Sam says, “Thanks. For keeping them.”
“Shut up,” Dean says, and turns on the TV.
“Cut your hair,” Dean says, when Sam returns from the Starbucks in Lincoln, Nebraska, bearing the girliest drink he could think to order.
“Fuck you,” Sam says. He pushes his hand through his hair, sweeps it off his face.
Jess had said the same thing, after watching him toss his bangs aside for the eightieth time while he studied for his Chem final. You look stupid, she said, and wound her arms around his neck and pressed close against his back. She hadn’t been wearing perfume.
Sam wonders how long it will be before he forgets that evening, and how long after that it will be before he forgets the details of Jess altogether. Maybe it is already happening.
“Seriously, dude,” Dean begins, but catches sight of Sam’s face and shuts up.
Sam looks at himself in the side mirror. He sees the thin set of his mouth, the blooming shadows beneath his eyes, the way the drift of his hair obscures his pupils.
Dean sighs, and starts the car. Sam can tell there are things Dean wants to say from the way he shifts in his seat and works his jaw muscle in silence. But Sam doesn’t want to hear it, and Dean is probably tired of saying it, so they pull out of the parking lot with nothing said and nothing solved.
Sam sweeps the hair out of his eyes again. He catches Dean’s eyes in the rearview mirror and tries to smile.
And then again, some things never change. Sam is almost charmed by Dean’s attempts to seduce Andrea, the familiar tricks, the pitching low of his voice, the way his shoulders roll back and his spine straightens. Girls love that kind of shit usually, the way Dean is effortlessly rebel and hero at once.
He had tried it himself, at 14 and 15, tried to mimic his brother’s walk, the slow drawl of his brother’s voice, but it was unbelievable on Sam; he looked and felt stupid, and more than once a girl had told him to knock it off and stop trying so hard.
He had tried it on Jess, too; had tried Dean’s easy deflections whenever she asked about his family, but she had stopped him in the hallway outside her dorm room and said, tall, dark, and mysterious isn’t really my thing, Sam, and he had blushed a little and said, lamely, I guess it’s not mine either.
He had had a million and one reasons not to tell Jess about his family, but it was freshman year and the wounds were still fresh, so that was what he had told her: look, I’m sorry, but it’s too hard.
Now, standing in the doorway with Andrea, watching Dean whisper to Lucas, he thinks maybe there are things he could have told her. There is a gentleness in Dean as he talks to the little boy, a softness Sam thought at first was new and unfamiliar but realized it’s just how Dean’s been talking to Sam his entire life.
They don’t save Andrea’s dad.
Sam tries not to start the count up in his head, how many saved and how many lost, but he knows Dean keeps track anyway.
He wonders which side Dad will belong to, by the time they find him; he wonders if he is one of Dean’s saved, since it was Dean who wrenched him from the fire.
Twice.
They’re on I-90, passing through Cleveland, when Dean screws up his face like he is bracing for something and says, “I think you should talk about it.”
Dean’s arm is stretched out across the bench-seat between them. His hand is couched behind Sam’s neck, his knuckles occasionally scraping against Sam’s hairline.
Sam is startled out of half-sleep. He had been watching the road roll by and thinking of nothing in particular, thinking of how many times he has watched this particular stretch of road from this particular seat, thinking of how many times he will watch it again.
He presses his palms against his eyeballs. “Talk about what?”
Dean purses his lips. “You know,” he says, “Jess. I think you should talk about… her.”
Sam snorts, laughs through the tightening in his belly. “Dean. You hate talking. You hate me talking.”
“Whatever,” Dean mumbles, looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Look, it’s just, it’s that kid back there. Lucas. He couldn’t… he couldn’t talk, you know, so everything just kind of… ate him up.”
“He was like, seven years old, Dean. He saw his dad get killed by a ghost. He was traumatized.”
Dean looks at him then, meets his eyes in defiance. “Exactly.”
Sam turns to the window again. A month ago he had been in Palo Alto, watching Jess try on Halloween costumes.
“I don’t know, man,” he says, finally. “You’re not exactly a licensed psychiatrist.”
“Whatever,” Dean says again. “I’m obviously not gonna say anything that’ll turn your frown upside-down. I just, you know.” He takes a breath. “I wanna help. I want to, I want to get you through this, you know.”
There is emotion in Dean’s voice, raw and honest, and it makes Sam uncomfortable. He dislikes the way Dean is scraping himself open a little at a time, dislikes the way he himself is still stony-faced and untouched. Hey, who’s girlfriend just got murdered, he wants to ask, but he knows it’s an unfair impulse.
“I don’t have the flu, Dean,” he says, and his voice is a little colder than he expected.
“You can’t feed me chicken soup and put me to bed. You can’t get me through this.”
Dean shuts down, almost visibly: a narrowing of his eyes, a shifting of his shoulders. He adjusts his grip on the wheel and refuses to meet Sam’s eye.
“Yeah,” Dean says, finally, his voice neutral. “All right.”
They are at cruising altitude and dropping when the demon brings up Jess.
Sam feels Dean spark next to him, and the fear in Dean’s eyes glazes over with something that more closely resembles the same way he used to look at Billy Rogers, the kid who kicked Sam’s ass after school in third grade. It’s a you’re in for it now, buddy, kind of look, and Sam waits to feel the answering spark in his chest, the yeah, and fuck you too.
It never comes.
“She must have died screaming,” the demon says, and instead of anger, Sam just sits back and feels the roaring inside him.
Later, after they have listened to their dad’s new message 10 times, Dean slides off the car. Sam is leaned forward, elbows to knees. Dean claps a hand on Sam’s shoulder and leaves it there, squeezing a little, a gesture he learned from John.
“Sammy,” Dean says, and somehow pulls him in, gets Sam’s forehead pressed against his own, his callused palm flush against Sam’s neck.
Sam lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.
“Sammy,” Dean says again, and his hand on Sam’s neck tightens. “Demons lie, man.”
“He didn’t lie,” Sam says. “She died screaming.”
There is a roaring inside him still. It’s in his ears and his stomach; it’s pressing down on him from all sides. He leans into Dean, into the weight of his brother, lets himself be held up for a moment by the force of Dean’s hand on his neck, Dean’s forehead against his own.
Dean takes his weight. He holds Sam up, and Sam holds on, until the roaring dies away.
Christmas takes them up to Vermont, chasing an abominable snowman that turns out to be just a run-of-the-mill spirit. Dean is pissed, dispirited, but cold enough to get them a room in a nice-enough bed and breakfast that would normally be out of their price range.
“Let’s stay for a few days,” Dean says, jovially, and he rents the room for three nights even though they’ve finished the job.
“Yeah, maybe you can finally learn to ski,” Sam says, drily, but Dean just beams at him and says, “Who knows? Maybe.”
Jess had brought Sam up to Killington every winter, taught him how to ski herself, and he had been awful but it had been fun. At night they drank wine with her parents and then sat in the hot tub for hours with the snow drifting down around them.
Still, there had been dark times; it wasn’t perfect, they hadn’t gone four years without their fights. Last new year’s eve Jess had been kissed by her high school boyfriend, and Sam had felt hot, sick jealousy waving through him for the first time. He had been alive with it, bright and raw with alcohol, and for the first time in a year and a half he had wanted a gun in his hands, wanted something to kill or to try to kill him, wanted his body to come awake again, the way it had been when he’d hunted.
Because it had gone soft at college, sleepy with safety. It’d been what he wanted; he wanted to be able to sleep through the night without clutching at a knife, wanted to shake the muscle-memories of trigger pulling and roundhouse kicks out of his limbs. He ran every morning, but it wasn’t the same, because being out of shape didn’t make anything but climbing the stairs to his dorm room harder.
“Dude,” Dean says, bumping his shoulder against Sam’s. He cocks his head towards the bar, a leer beginning to slip over his face. “Ski bunnies.”
“Naw,” Sam says, and stands. He shakes out his legs, which have gone slightly numb. He puts his hand on Dean’s shoulder to steady himself.
Dean’s face is instantly rearranged, concern etching out new lines on his face. “You okay? You need me to-”
“No,” Sam says, more firmly. “You stay here.”
He turns around before Dean can protest.
He’s jolted awake at 3 AM by Dean, standing in the doorway, sending some girl off.
“Yeah,” Dean says, his voice pitched low, “I’ve got your number,” and then there is the soft sound of kissing, the little ah of pleasure the girl makes, and then more whispered goodbyes.
Dean closes the door. Sam hears him bolt the doors and redraw the salt lines Sam has laid out. Then the rustle of Dean drawing his shirt off; the clink of Dean’s belt buckle as he begins to undo it.
Sam has been wakened from some dream, not the usual dream of fire but of something more hazy, a vague, warm dream that has him still heavy-limbed. He realizes, belatedly, that he is achingly hard, cock straining against the fabric of his boxers.
Sam bites his lip. He doesn’t remember the dream.
He shifts to adjust himself, but the brush of his knuckles against the sheets is enough to catch Dean’s attention.
“Sam?” Dean whispers. “Are you awake?”
Sam stays quiet. Shame and arousal wash through him in tandem, and the burn of both together is enough to make Sam’s eyes sting.
After a moment, Dean continues to move about the room, carelessly shucking his jeans, peeling back the sheets on his bed and crawling in.
“She was hot,” Dean says, almost inaudibly. “But dumb as fucking rocks.”
They lie awake, in silence. Sam listens to his brother breathing, the huff of air whistling past Dean’s lips. He presses the heel of his hand against the hard line of his erection, gritting his teeth, waiting for it to go away or for Dean to fall asleep, whichever happens first.
“’Night, Sammy,” Dean says, finally, and rolls over.
They pass uneasy nights. Dean waits too long to apply for a new card so for nine days they scrape by, sleeping in the car when they can, living out of gas stations. Dean tries to hustle a few locals in a seedy bar in Niagara Falls, but he ends up with a split lip and bruised ribs for his troubles, and after that they are both gun-shy.
Sam never sleeps through the night. Sometimes he wakes up screaming, Jess’ name being ripped from his throat, Dean pressing his shoulders back down to the mattress and holding him there until he is steady.
Other times, he wakes up too hot, his dreams a vague, foggy mess, his skin slick with sweat. Arousal trips through him; blood flushes his cheeks and his dick. Sometimes in desperation he reaches down, jerks himself off in a few brutal strokes, his mouth open, his chest heaving. Sometimes he wakes up and his boxers are already sticky, come beginning to clump in his pubic hair.
Sometimes he wakes up and he doesn’t know which kind of dream he’s had, only that his eyes are burning, only that his heart is racing.
For days after the Bloody Mary hunt, Dean is furious with Sam.
In a diner, Sam asks to eat Dean’s left-over fries.
Dean says, “Look, Sam, you’re my brother. I’d die for you. But there are some things I need to keep for myself.”
He says it again when Sam asks to borrow one of Dean’s shirts, because his last clean one just got covered in ectoplasm.
“I hate you,” Sam says, as he tries to fit his head under a gas-station sinkhead to get ectoplasm out of his hair.
Dean just looks at him, hard, and then slams out of the bathroom.
When Sam asks him to please roll the window up and turn the goddamn music down, Dean begins, “You’re my brother…”
“Yeah, I get it, Dean,” Sam interrupts.
“No you don’t, Sam,” Dean snaps back, and then he turns the music up instead.
Sam does, though. For Dean there is no difference between “brother” and “self,” no lines to draw in the sand. There is nothing between Dean and family, and there is no word for family that doesn’t mean Sam.
When Dean pulls off the highway into a motel parking lot and kills the engine, Sam grabs at Dean’s wrist. Dean stills but keeps his eyes to the front.
“Your eyes bled too,” Sam says, and his voice is sharp with annoyance. “Your eyes bled too, Dean, so you can fucking stop it with the self-righteous act.”
Dean looks at him then, head-on, and his mouth is set in the same stubborn line Sam can feel his own mouth settling into. “Yeah, Sam,” Dean says, slowly. “I got secrets. But I keep ‘em because you don’t want to hear them, not because I don’t want to tell them.”
Sam holds Dean’s gaze for a moment, but there is something hard and unflinching in Dean’s eyes, something he can’t bring himself to break open. Sam is carrying enough inside him already.
“Whatever,” he mutters, dropping Dean’s wrist. “Just let it go, okay?”
“Yeah,” Dean says, still looking at Sam with unblinking deliberateness. “I guess I’ll do that.”
He gets out of the car, and closes the door, almost gently, behind him.
A hedgewitch hits Sam simultaneously with a curse that leaves him woozy and wobbly-legged and a gunshot to the shoulder.
Dean somehow manages to take her out and get Sam back to the car. He wrestles Sam into the backseat. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” he grumbles, as he tries to shove Sam further across the seat. “You’re a freak.” There’s panic in Dean’s voice, a high whine of it creeping in, but Sam pretends not to notice.
“Sorry I can’t do anything but lie here and bleed,” Sam says, muzzily. His tongue feels thick and too big in his mouth.
“Yeah, whatever, it’s all you’re good for anyway,” Dean says.
The hum of the Impala, the tires against the road, is a soothing rhythm to Sam. He relaxes into it, lets his eyes drift closed, thinks of all the lazy summer afternoons spent sprawled bonelessly against Dean as their childhood passed them by. Every now and then the car hits a bump and his body shifts and his eyes fly open and he’s made aware of the blood, how it’s everywhere, sticking his shirt to his skin and soaking through.
“Blood on the upholstery,” he slurs.
“Nothing new,” Dean says, and drives faster.
Somehow, Dean manhandles Sam out of the car, up a flight of stairs and into their hotel room. “Freak, freak, freak,” Dean chants under his breath, but what he means is stay with me, what he means is I’m scared.
“Learn to use your words, Dean,” Sam lectures, as Dean dumps him on his bed.
“Yeah, why don’t you learn to not chase hedgewitches into the fucking dark forest behind their house without me, fucktard.” Dean gets a good grip on Sam’s collar, and adds, “I’m ripping your shirt off now, try not to get too aroused.”
“Manly,” Sam says, and then the room shifts, frighteningly, around him. “I think I may have lost too much blood,” he manages, and then blacks out.
He comes to in hot water. There is cool porcelain at his back. He opens his eyes and regards the tiled wall in front of him for a moment, before realizing where he is. “Am I in the bath?” he asks, enraged. “Dean?”
Dean is sitting on the floor, next to the tub, his knees pulled to his chest. “Yeah, well,” he says, sullenly. “You fucking reeked, man.”
Sam slumps a little. The bath is too small for him, almost comically so, and Dean has run the bath only half full. Sam leans back and rests his head on the wall behind him.
“Don’t get your stitches wet,” Dean warns, and Sam looks down to regard the neat row of black stitches marching up and over the front of his shoulder.
They sit in silence for awhile. The only noise is the water plashing softly against Sam’s skin whenever he shifts. The room is hot with steam.
“Did you actually undress me and carry me to the bath?” Sam asks, belatedly, lifting his head. “Can you actually carry me?”
“Stop gay panicking, dude,” Dean says. “I gave you baths until you were 7 years old. It’s not that weird.”
It kind of is, and Sam opens his mouth to say so, but after a moment he shuts it. In the two months since Stanford they have fallen back into their old intimacy, the lack of modesty or personal space that comes from living in small enclosed spaces together for long periods of time. Dean’s body bears new scars, has changed shape a little in the years since Sam saw it last, but he still knows his brother in the same way he knows maps of the major highways. Little things change, but the big things remain the same, and Dean’s body is just a part of Dean himself, something Sam lives with, something he knows, something he isn’t afraid of. He guesses he doesn’t mind if Dean feels the same way.
Dean is watching him again, and when Sam catches his eye, Dean pulls a face and says, pitching his voice high and girly, “Thanks for saving my life, again, for the eighty thousandth time, Dean.”
“Thanks for saving my life, again, for the eighty thousandth time, Dean,” Sam parrots obediently.
Sam closes his eyes. He lets his head drift backwards again. He can smell Dean now, the combination of Old Spice, leather, sweat and blood, but the scent of Dean’s sweat stopped bothering him years ago, and, he supposes, pretty soon the smell of blood will stop too.
Things are easier between them after that. Sam stops fighting Dean on every little thing; he tries to say yes, he tries to say thank you. In turn Dean stops pushing Sam so hard, stops with his hold-my-hand-and-I’ll-lead-you-through routine. In the absence of the tension between them, their push-and-pull rhythm, Sam relaxes, breathes a little easier.
He can almost forget. Sometimes, on the road, with Dean driving beside him, and the windows rolled up and the winter sun coming in, he lets himself forget that it hasn’t always been like this, or that he ever wanted anything different. Dean is relaxed and easy beside him, whistling and singing, and they are brothers again, they are family again.
St. Louis changes that. Sam guesses it was only a matter of time.
Sam’s dreams come back, full-force, the night after they leave St. Louis. It’s seeing Becky again, he’s sure of it; he had never been attracted to her, but she had the same long-limbed grace as Jess, the same slow swing of blond hair, and it was enough. That, and she reeked of Stanford, of his old life, and the smell of it-salt and sun and dust-woke the roaring in him again.
He wakes up dizzy sometimes with the emptiness, his throat raw from shouting, and Dean is always there with him, sitting beside him, holding him down and coaxing him back into reality. The first night Sam shudders away from Dean’s hands, looks up at him with something like fear, in his hazy dream-clogged mind remembering Dean’s face with a monster inside of it. Dean looks at him, hurt, and slides away, but the next time Sam wakes up screaming-which is only three hours later-Dean is there again.
“Come on, Sammy, come back to me,” Dean says, his hands smoothing the sleeves of Sam’s shirt, ghosting over Sam’s face. Sam knuckles his eyes, tries to hide the way they are leaking, but Dean just says, “It’s okay, man, I’m here. Go back to sleep. It’s okay.”
Somehow, Sam’s two kinds of dreams get confused, begin to meld, so he wakes up three days out of St. Louis so hard it almost hurts and all he can smell is ash, all he can think of is Jessica on the ceiling, and fuck, he’s so turned on. It’s sick, and it’s sad, and Sam is torn between throwing up or creaming his pants like a thirteen year old boy, and Dean is there above him, holding onto him, saying, “It’s okay.”
It’s not okay, it’s so not okay, and Dean is too close to him, Dean is hauling Sam in to get his arms around him, and Sam knows Dean can tell that his cheeks are wet and his boxers are tented, and it’s humiliating.
“Sammy,” Dean says, roughly, and he has one arm around Sam’s neck, mashing Sam’s face against his collarbones, and his other hand comes to rest, slowly, on Sam’s hip.
Dean moves deliberately, always, and Dean touches, if possible, even more deliberately, so Sam knows that this hand on his hip means exactly what he thinks it means: it’s a question, or more specifically, it’s an offer. It’s Dean trying to take care of him, and Sam is too caught in the refrain of ash-Jess-shame-death to really think about it, so he does what he has been practicing, what he has been doing his whole life: he shifts his hips, he says yes.
And then Dean’s hand is between them.
He doesn’t bother with Sam’s boxers, just slides his cock out of the opening in the front. Dean’s hand is calloused and rough, and the only barrier between Sam and Dean’s palm is sweat and pre-come. Dean wraps his hand around Sam, firmly, and begins to stroke, a steady rhythm. The friction is almost too much, Sam’s skin is almost burning, but it is right, it is good, it is holding Sam in place.
“It’s okay, Sammy,” Dean says again, and his other hand is gentle on the back of Sam’s neck.
Sam is making these kind of terrible noises, these awful gasping noises that are kind of like sobs and kind of like dry-heaves, and he would be embarassed, but he is light-headed from hyperventilating and part of him is going wrong, sick, Dean, but most of him is just going, please.
“Close your eyes,” Dean says, and Sam does.
He can see Jess. Pleasure is racking through him, and he is shaking, and Dean is still jerking him off in long, sure strokes, but when he closes his eyes he can see Jess, and she is beautiful. She is dead, he knows she’s dead, but in his head she is beautiful, she is smiling, she’s reaching for him-
“Think about Jess, Sam,” Dean says, his voice soft and steady, “It’s okay. It will help. Think about her.”
“Augh,” Sam says, and comes so hard he thinks his chest might have imploded, streaking Dean’s wrist and shirt with white.
They sit there together for a moment, Sam slumped against Dean’s chest, a wet spot forming in the cotton of Dean’s shirt where Sam has pressed his mouth. Eventually, Dean pushes Sam away, gently, and Sam settles, half-slumped against the wall.
“Lie down like a normal person,” Dean says, as he stands.
“Shut up,” Sam says, automatically.
He rearranges himself, gets his body aligned properly. He feels wrung out, and his head is beginning to ache, but his eyelids are already drifting closed.
Sam hears Dean move towards the bathroom. The door snicks shut behind Dean, and Sam thinks he can maybe hear the lock sliding into place.
He’s asleep before Dean comes back out.
The morning after is easy, too easy; Sam is suspicious, but he is also better-rested than he has been in days, so he’s a little reticent to push things off balance again.
He tries to bring it up once, in the car, says, “Dean…” in this little weird voice he can’t really imagine coming from himself.
Dean hunches his shoulders but looks him in the eye and says, “Yeah?” The set of his lips says I dare you to bring this up right now, and Sam backs down, because really, at this moment, there is pretty much nothing in the world he wants to do less than have this conversation with Dean.
So he finishes up with, “You are so stuck in the eighties, sometimes I feel sorry for you.”
Dean flashes him a shit-eating grin and claps his hand on Sam’s knee. “You’re just jealous,” he says.
Sam laughs, and for a moment he is grateful, glad that Dean is beside him, smiling, glad that nothing has changed, glad that they are brothers and the world is stretched out wide before them.
In Iowa, Dean pushes Sam at Lori, the pastor’s daughter, with a vengeance, and it doesn’t bother Sam until Dean tries to leave him at a frathouse party. He chases Dean out onto the lawn, catches him by the cuff of his sleeve.
“Wait,” Sam says when Dean turns to face him, “How about you stay here, and I go dig up the grave?”
Dean shakes Sam’s hand off. “Dude,” he says, making his have-I-taught-you-nothing face. “There are hot chicks playing pool in there, Sam. Hot chicks playing pool. And furthermore, there is also a hot chick who obviously fucking digs you in there, and she’s kind of in mortal danger, and maybe you’ll get to swoop in there all manly and save her, and that is just not an opportunity you pass up.”
“I don’t swoop in all manly,” Sam says desperately, “and I don’t like hot chicks who play pool.”
“Well, that would be because you’re a shame to the Winchester name, Sam, but it’s never too late to redeem yourself.” Dean turns away, and begins to walk towards the car.
Sam considers tackling him to the ground. Panic is rising up in him, hot and sick. He doesn’t want to be here; he hated parties like this in college, and he hates them even more now. And Lori-Lori frightens him, he doesn’t like the way she softens and opens to him; it puts him on edge, because he wants it but he doesn’t want her.
“I want to dig the grave up!” he shouts after Dean, and ignores the weird looks he draws from a passing frat boy.
“Redeem yourself,” Dean yells back over his shoulder, as he opens the Impala door. “Uphold the family honor, for once in your fucking life.”
He gets in the car and slams the door before Sam can reply.
Dean offers to stay.
It’s a nice gesture, kind of an empty one because if they did stay it would only be for a few days, but Sam looks him in the eye and shakes his head, and Dean drives away.
There is nothing for him in Ankeny, Iowa; Sam is smart enough to know that, though maybe if he was four years younger he wouldn’t have. It isn’t about Jess, not really, though of course it is. Mostly he just knows that Lori didn’t want him, not really, didn’t want the dark thing Sam feels himself becoming, just the soft little smile and the white teeth, just the shoulder to cry on.
Maybe Jess wouldn’t have wanted what he really had to offer, either, but he can’t let himself think about that.
Sam startles himself out of sleep in the middle of the night and he hasn’t been dreaming but his heart is racing all the same. His mouth is dry, too dry, and he can feel the blood pounding in his head.
Dean is still awake, flipping through late night infomercials with the sound off. He looks over at Sam, raising his eyebrows.
“You okay, Sammy?” Dean asks.
“Dean,” Sam says, and he can already smell the ash upon the air. He knows if he closes his eyes it will be to fall into a dream of Jess, and he can’t do it, not tonight.
Dean looks at him, steadily. Sam watches his brother, watches the rise and fall of Dean’s chest, the roll of Dean’s thigh as he shifts his legs.
“I…” Sam tries to begin, but Dean is already standing up, crossing the barrier between their beds.
Dean nudges Sam over, climbs under the covers. He props himself up on his elbow so that he is looming over Sam, and then his other hand is cool against the pane of Sam’s stomach, below Sam’s belly-button.
Dean’s thumb sweeps soothingly against Sam’s skin. “Yeah?” he asks.
Sam tries to say yes, he tries to say thank you, but it’s as if his throat is closed up, so he nods instead, and hopes it’s enough.
It is. Dean’s hand slides underneath the elastic of Sam’s boxers, slips past the tangle of his pubic hair, and closes, firmly, around Sam. Sam’s half-hard already, but blood rushes down his body at the contact.
He feels awkward, too open, on his back with Dean above him. Dean’s palm is sweaty, but it isn’t lubrication enough, and after a few moments Dean pulls his hand back and spits on his palm. Sam watches this, watches the way Dean’s eyebrows draw together as he leans forward to adjust his position, and it frightens him a little, the reality of it.
Sam’s eyes flutter shut when Dean’s hand returns to his cock, wraps around him with something like confidence. With his brother’s hands on him he feels safe to close his eyes, safe to think about Jess, the taste of her, the look on her face as he slid two slick fingers deep inside her-
He moans a little, ratchets his hips up, and Dean, obligingly, speeds up. Sam can’t resist pumping his hips, and Dean stutters a little, fucks up the rhythm, but soon catches on and they are working together, Sam’s hips and Dean’s hands and the mattress creaking beneath them. Sam screws his eyes shut, tries to convince himself it’s not Dean’s hand he’s thrusting into, but he can’t quite do it-Jess’ hands were smaller, her grip more tentative, and even though Dean’s hands are smaller than Sam’s own they feel larger somehow, like he is more completely surrounded by Dean’s grip than by his own.
He can feel his orgasm approaching, tight in his belly and his balls. He keeps his eyes shut, draws in deep ragged breaths. Thinks of Jess, the smell of her hair, how sometimes he fucked her from behind and buried his face in it.
“It’s okay, Sammy, come on,” Dean whispers, and Sam comes with a choked off moan, his eyes shut so tight he sees white, his stomach and thigh muscles clenching.
Dean strokes him through it; holds on until Sam blindly pushes his hand away from his over-sensitized skin.
Dean pulls away from Sam, rolls off the bed. He reaches down and picks up something to begin wiping off his hand and forearm, then throws it at Sam, who catches it and begins to wipe himself off.
“This is my shirt,” Sam says in realization. He is too sleepy to be properly enraged by it, though, already slipping into the welcome embace of sleep.
“Did you think I was gonna use my own?” Dean asks.
Sam watches as Dean climbs into his own bed, settles down with his back to Sam. Sam’s eyelids are drifting closed. He rolls onto his side, away from Dean, and presses his face into his pillow.
“Goodnight, Dean,” Sam mumbles, but if Dean replies he doesn’t hear it, already too far gone into the darkness.
part 2