(no subject)
the telling gets old (2/2)
February is always a busy month: dead lovers pop up all over the nation to haunt their exes. They’re on the move every few days, hitting every metropolis on the West coast, except they avoid California like the plague. They don’t talk about it; Sam brings up a possible case in Santa Cruz-kids keep disappearing at the board walk-but Dean shrugs him off, says it’s too far away and they have enough to do as it is.
“Women, man,” Dean says, shaking his head as they leave Cheyenne, having salted and burned the bones of four separate women who were each trying to kill the new girlfriends of their old boyfriends. “Even being dead doesn’t stop a jealous woman in her fucking tracks.”
“Hell hath no fury,” Sam agrees, vaguely. He scrubs a hand across his face. He is wearing his old jeans, the ones Dean saved for him, and the waistband is uncomfortably tight and the hems itch where they rub at his ankles.
“Tell me again why you burned all my jeans,” Sam says.
Dean stretches his arm out over the seat between them. “They were unflattering,” he says. “You should really consider a darker wash, Samantha, it’s more slimming.”
“I hate you,” Sam says, and slumps lower in his seat.
“Yeah, well,” Dean says comfortably. He swipes his fingers through the hair on the back of Sam’s neck, tugs a little on a lock of hair. “You’re stuck with me, so deal with it.”
On Valentine’s day they’re caught in a blizzard and have to stop in a nameless town somewhere in the Rockies, in Colorado. They get the last room in the only motel in town.
“Well, Sammy,” Dean says, putting his duffel on a chair, “Looks like we’re stuck here.”
“Looks like,” Sam says, as he squeezes through the door with his own bag, which is suspiciously full. “Just because you put your dirty laundry in my bag doesn’t mean I’m going to wash it for you,” he adds.
They sprawl bonelessly on one of the beds for awhile, not touching, contemplating the ceiling. Sam thinks of Jess, last Valentine’s day, how he had slaved for four hours to make her dinner, all organic of course, and cake baked from scratch. He is almost embarassed by this gesture now, the terrifying sincereness of it, the way he had believed so deeply in the world that he had created for himself.
“I hate Valentine’s day,” Dean says. “Let’s go drink our faces off.”
Dean, who has a sixth sense about these things, finds the only bar still open in 20 miles, and Sam settles down to watch his brother actually try to drink his own face off. Sam sits in a corner booth, nursing a beer, and Dean sometimes sits with him but mostly lingers near the bar, chasing shots of tequila with beer and flirting, increasingly outrageously, with the bartender.
Sam tries to watch Dean without being obvious that he’s watching Dean. He spreads out a paper in front of him, but his eyes inevitably drift upward, find Dean across the room. He looks at Dean’s right hand, wrapped firmly around the neck of his beer bottle, the way Dean’s ring catches the dim light of the bar, the blunt square edges of Dean’s nails, and shifts uncomfortably, tries not to think of how Dean’s hands feel on him, wrapped around him in the same sure way.
Sam is confused. It hasn’t been often-Dean has climbed into his bed only twice since Iowa-but each time Sam falls apart a little more. The motivations aren’t clear anymore, if they ever were; he wants to ask Dean why he keeps doing it, why he keeps sliding under the covers with Sam, but then he’d have to ask himself why he keeps letting Dean into his bed. There are too many whys, really, too many questions, and Sam is frightened that if he asks one he’ll have to ask them all, and they go too far, too deep inside him. Neither of them have the answers, anyway, and it’s easier, so much easier, to relax into Dean’s touch, into Dean’s fingers sweeping through the hair on the back of his head, or Dean’s arm wrapped around Sam’s neck, pressing Sam’s face to Dean’s chest.
Dean wobbles over somewhere between beer three and shot five or six. “You’re staring at me,” he says, accusingly.
“Just waiting for your inevitable bout of projectile vomiting,” Sam says. He turns a page of the paper in front of him. “I have napkins, but if you hit that bartender in the face, we probably can’t pay for her therapy.”
“You’re staring at me,” Dean repeats.
Sam leans forward, pinches Dean’s cheek. “Can you feel your face still?” he asks.
Dean, belatedly, bats Sam’s hand away. “Shut up,” he says, which means no, and then continues, “That’s not why you’re staring at me.”
“Go away, Dean,” Sam says, resolutely picking up his newspaper and holding it in front of his face, and he doesn’t put it down until he is sure Dean’s gone.
Dean fucks the bartender in the bathroom after closing while Sam waits in the Impala, trying not to be annoyed. In revenge, he unearths his old Third Eye Blind tape and plays it so loudly he thinks his ears might bleed. It is worth it to see Dean’s face as he slides into the car 20 minutes later.
It bothers Sam later though, like it is somehow unfair that Dean left him in the car-then, and every other time he’s done it, which is more times then Sam really wants to count-like it is somehow an outrageous thing to do.
He lets it build up in him, the irritation, and the pressure condenses it, turns it thick inside him, until he finds himself snapping at Dean for no reason.
“You should cut your hair,” Dean says, for the thousandth time, this time from the passenger seat of the Impala.
“I’m not a fucking child,” Sam snaps back, his hands tightening around the wheel.
“Uh, okay,” Dean says, shifting a little in his seat, “but I’d appreciate you warning me next time it’s your special time of the month.”
Dean hates being in the passenger seat. He lets Sam drive out of pity, or when he is too exhausted to see straight, but he feels out of place when he’s not behind the wheel. His limbs don’t fit quite right under the dashboard; the headrest is never where he thinks it is; Sam can tell from Dean’s eternal shifting and increasingly pissed off face just how much, exactly, Dean hates being where he is.
Sam knows, though, that Dean will let Sam drive whenever he asks; he thinks it’s some kind of tonic, some kind of magical cheering up method, and also Dean has trouble saying no to Sam on the best of days. And it is nice to drive the Impala-Sam likes driving, likes the power of it, but mostly he likes it because he knows how crazy it makes Dean.
“Stop fucking shifting around, you’re driving me nuts,” Sam says, and doesn’t let Dean drive for the next two weeks.
They go for three weeks without finding a real job, and Dean is antsy but Sam is a fucking wreck. His need to find Dad is constantly with him; it’s the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up, and most of the time it is only Dean’s hand that can coax him into sleep.
Sam tries to talk about it, he does, but he never gets any further than “Dean…” before his throat closes up and his eyes start to burn. He watches Dean’s hands all the time, watches them as Dean drives, watches the tendons in Dean’s wrist strain as Dean ties his bootlaces.
He doesn’t think about Jess for nine days in a row, and when she finally creeps back into his dreams-just a vague, golden blur-he is startled and slightly ashamed that it’s been so long.
“Quit starin’ at me,” Dean says, somewhere between Chicago and Peoria. “You’re giving me the creeps.”
“It’d be easier not to stare at you if you weren’t taking up 80% of the room in this car,” Sam says.
“You’re one to talk, Gigantor,” Dean replies, but he meets Sam’s eyes in the rearview mirror and Sam, obediently, turns his face away.
“Do you think we’ll find him?” Sam asks, keeping his eyes fixed on the road.
“Yeah, Sammy,” Dean says, but it sounds more like I don’t know than it ever has before.
That night, Sam is brushing his teeth when Dean shoves his way into the bathroom. Dean is fresh from the shower, wearing only boxers, and he elbows Sam into the sink so that he can hang his wet towels on the rack.
Sam turns around at the same time Dean does, so they are facing each other with very little space between them, trapped between the sink and the towel rack on the wall.
Sam regards Dean’s chest with his toothbrush still in his mouth. There’s an old, faded scar across Dean’s right shoulder and another trailing across Dean’s lower abdomen. Sam remembers the shoulder-Dean got hit with a cursed knife when he was 17 and Sam and John had spent all night trying to dig the remnants out of Dean’s skin-but the scar on Dean’s belly is new to him.
He isn’t really thinking about it, but he reaches out and lays his hand on Dean’s stomach anyway, the pad of his thumb against the ridge of Dean’s scar, the palm of his hand laid flat against Dean’s stomach.
“What’re you doing, Sam,” Dean says. His voice is low and his eyes are unreadable, but his chest heaves a little, and his stomach shudders with his exhale.
“I don’t know,” Sam says, honestly, and drops his hands.
The model home they squat in in Oklahoma is nice in an empty kind of way. It’s weird to be in a kitchen again, to be sharing a space with Dean that isn’t essentially a glorified closet with a bathroom attached. Dean cheerfully calls dibs on the master bedroom, so Sam takes the second, smaller bedroom on the second floor.
He investigates the cupboards but of course, everything is empty. It reminds him of the furnished apartments Dad gave in and rented once or twice a year, promising Sam they could settle down long enough for Sam to at least get through a term of school. Sam had prided himself on stocking the cupboards with shit no one ever ate-creamed corn and tomato soup-just so the place looked more lived in. He’d like to think that maybe they’d live there long enough to need those kinds of things, as if one day Dean would pull himself together and make green bean casserole for them, except they never did quite stay long enough, and Dean, of course, never cooked unless he had to.
Dean wanders in during Sam’s reverie.
“Maybe if you stare at it long enough it’ll turn into a skin mag and some Fritos,” Dean suggests.
“You were a pretty decent cook when you tried,” Sam says absently. He turns from the cabinets, leans back against the long tiled counter. “You used to make a stirfry even Dad couldn’t pass up.”
Dean squints at him. “Huh,” he says, finally.
Sam crosses his arms over his chest, feels his shoulders begin to creep towards his ears. There is something in Dean’s tone that Sam recognizes from years of being on the end of it; that older-brother derision, the hint of patronizing scorn Dean can unleash on him without blinking. “Huh, what,” he says.
“Nothing,” Dean says, “It’s just this afternoon you couldn’t wait to tell me everything that was wrong with our childhood, and now you’re all starry-eyed about chicken and broccoli.”
“I am not,” Sam huffs, “I just, it was nice, it was a nice memory. For once.”
“For once,” Dean echoes, narrowing his eyes. “Yeah, Sammy, for fucking once, keep telling yourself that.”
Part of Sam aches to get into this with Dean. They’ve been circling it for months, ever since Dean interrupted Sam’s life at Stanford, but every time they get near of it one of them backs down. It’s an impossible argument, one they’ll have forever, because there are only so many ways for Dean to say we gave you all we had and Sam to say it wasn’t enough.
Sam shrugs at his brother, shakes his head, tries to say with his body all the ways he is sorry and all the ways he’s not. What comes out of his mouth, though, is only, “I’ll go get dinner.”
Dinner is pizza and a fifth of Jack Daniels. Sam finishes the former and Dean the latter, and they both lie groaning on the floor of the living room afterwards.
“I think I may have eaten myself into paralysis,” Sam says, sprawling on his back. “Is it possible for your stomach to weigh so much it crushes your spine?”
“You’re the college boy, not me,” Dean says. He is on his stomach, stretched out beside Sam. He pulls a pillow off the couch, and Sam raises his head so Dean can position it underneath both of them. “Do you think my puke will taste more like pizza or Jack’s?”
“Ugh,” Sam says, turning his face towards his brother’s. “It will taste gross, because you’re… really gross.”
Dean finished the whiskey, but Sam had his fair share, and his head is swimming pleasantly. He is probably drunker than he thinks, but since he hasn’t stood in up in an hour it’s hard to tell.
“You’re gross,” Dean says. He regards Sam with one eye; the other is smushed closed against the pillow. His mouth is open, and Sam can see the fabric ruffle with the force of Dean’s breath.
Sam has been looking at Dean for too long to ever really think about things like his mouth, but he knows, ostensibly, that it’s a nice mouth-that Dean’s lips are full and soft, that when he chews on them, or kisses someone, they grow bright with blood.
He’s been looking at Dean, really looking at Dean more and more often these days, and usually it bothers him but now, his limbs heavy and warm with alcohol, all he can really think is, I should do this more often.
“Sam,” Dean says, voice low and sort of wretched, and reaches for him.
Sam goes willingly. They have never done this before this way, with the lights on, not hidden underneath sheets and bed covers. They have never looked at each other, really, before, never made eye contact; Sam has never watched Dean’s face as Dean tries to undo Sam’s jeans, or reaches past the elastic of Sam’s boxers.
“Close your eyes,” Dean says, roughly.
Sam says, “No.”
Dean’s hand stutters, slow to a halt, and he grasps the base of Sam’s cock, loosely.
Sam pushes up into Dean’s hand, tries to encourage Dean to move again, but Dean is looking at him with yet another fucking unreadable expression in his eyes.
“Sammy,” Dean begins, but Sam pushes up again, begins fucking himself against Dean’s fist in earnest, rocking into a slow, steady rhythm.
Dean’s hand tightens, almost imperceptibly, and Sam arches into it, “Come on, Dean,” Sam says, gasping a little, aware of how he must look-shirt pushed up, jeans around his knees, and begging for it, like all he wants in the world is Dean’s hands, moving with him, or maybe Dean’s mouth-
Dean has somehow inched closer, so that his hip and thigh is flush with Sam’s and Dean, Dean is hard against Sam’s leg, Sam can feel it.
“Dean,” Sam says, letting his head fall back against the pillow, “come on, Dean, please.”
Dean leans his forehead against Sam’s, and finally begins to move his hand.
Sam is so grateful he comes almost instantaneously, still watching Dean’s mouth, still thinking, abstractly, of the heat of it, the dark stain of it when Dean returns from fucking whatever local girl he’s managed to charm into a bathroom stall, the way he knows without having to ask that Dean has never sucked another guy off.
Dean pulls him through it, and he is still hard against Sam’s thigh, and his breath is hot against Sam’s neck and ear.
Sam twists, begins to reach for Dean, but his hand gets no closer than Dean’s ribs before Dean is abruptly pulling away and scrambling to his feet.
Sam is cold in Dean’s sudden absence, and sober enough now to be embarassed. He tucks himself back into his jeans, his boxers slightly sticky with sweat and come, and shame rises in him, as hot and fast as arousal had moments before.
Dean’s boots are loud on the stairs, and the slamming of the master bedroom door even louder. Sam lies on the floor of the living room, and he wants to say come back, he wants to say I’m sorry, but there is no one there to hear him, not Dean or Jess or even Dad, and he is drunk and alone and it’s so pathetically sad he almost weeps.
He pukes instead. It doesn’t taste like anything other than stomach acid, and his throat burns for hours after.
They finish the job in Oklahoma. Dean doesn’t touch Sam after the night in the living room, and in the space he leaves Sam’s nightmares comes swooping back. He tries to hold them back, tries to clench his jaw as he wills himself to sleep in the hopes that it’ll stay shut through the night.
It’s stubborn, and it’s stupid, but Sam wants to keep his distance from Dean as much as Dean seems to want to keep his from Sam. It is kind of fear, fear of all the lines they have crossed and all the lines that remain between them still, but mostly it’s just the creeping flush of humiliation and rage every time he remembers the way he reached for Dean, and the way Dean pushed his hands away.
The dreams shift and change, though; Jess on the ceiling becomes Jess in a window, screaming. Then it’s not Jess at all, but a stranger, and the dreams lose their vagueness, become sharp and too-bright and painful, so that Sam wakes up with his head pounding and blood on his mouth from where he bit his tongue and lips.
He wakes up with a shout one night. Dean is awake, Sam can hear him shift restlessly, but Dean says nothing, feigns sleep.
Sam thinks about the tree and the woman. He wishes for Dean’s hands, for Dean’s soothing voice, but at the same time is glad that they’re being withheld. This is important, he knows; this isn’t something that should be smoothed away and forgotten.
Dean breathes, too loudly, in the bed next to him.
“I know you’re awake,” Sam says, angrily, and closes his eyes and tries to sleep.
Sam drives the last 300 miles to Lawrence, because he doesn’t trust Dean to not just pull a u-turn on the interstate and drive as far and fast as he can in the opposite direction. Dean sits in the passenger seat and looks like he’s considering the option anyway, even with the added steps of knocking Sam out and wrenching the wheel from his hands.
“I just don’t see why-” Dean begins, for the ninth time.
“I told you,” Sam cuts off him, a little harshly. “And I’m too fucking tired to tell you again, so just shut up.”
Surprisingly, Dean does.
Twenty minutes later, though, Dean is shifting in his seat again, and opening his mouth to say something, then shutting it again with a loud snap of his jaw.
He does this four times before Sam gives in.
“Something you’d like to say?” Sam asks.
Dean’s voice is surprisingly quiet when he says, “It’s why your eyes bled, right?”
Sam looks up into the rearview mirror. Only his eyes, his normal eyes, are staring back at him, but he still somehow expects his reflection-mouth to open up and ask things like, How could you leave her alone to die? Really, he’s been expecting it every time he looks in a mirror, because there’s still no real answer to the question; Jess may be fading, the nightmares of her death less frequent, but guilt is a constant pit in Sam’s stomach, which will never fade or lessen, he is sure.
“Yeah,” he says finally.
Dean looks away, out the window. There are so many things between them, but Sam knows that one of them is Dean wishing Sam hadn’t shared. Dean won’t look at him because Dean is scared, and Dean’s eyes are the tell, always, so he looks away.
Sam wipes his palms on his jeans, first one and then the other, but they are clammy again almost immediately. “Now you know why I didn’t want to tell you,” he says, slowly. “It freaks the shit out of me, and I know it freaks the shit out of you, and I know you wish you didn’t know, but. Now you do.”
Dean keeps his head turned away. Sam expects him to fall silent, to let Sam have the last word, so he is surprised when Dean speaks up.
“You’re my brother,” Dean says, and if his voice is gruff Sam will pretend not to notice. “There isn’t anything I don’t want to know about you.”
He doesn’t look at Sam. Sam doesn’t look at Dean. He wipes his palms on his jeans again, keeps his eyes to the road, and tries to believe.
After Lawrence, Sam feels stronger, better. Mostly it’s because he knows he’s not crazy, though of course there are other implications to consider now that the question of his sanity has been gotten out of the way. Still, his head feels clear for days after, and he does not wake with his throat and eyes burning anymore, and he doesn’t want to jinx it by saying the nightmares are gone, but deep inside him it’s what he’s hoping.
Dean, however, is the opposite. Sam doesn’t know what part of going back was hard for Dean, or maybe it was all of it, but something is off about his brother for days after. Dean is softer, less quick to mock Sam for all the hundreds of embarassing things he does, and he barely asks for the keys. Instead he sits in the passenger seat and stares out the window.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re deep in thought,” Sam jokes, lamely, but Dean barely even looks at him.
There’s only one thing for it, really. Or probably there are lots of things for it, but Sam can only think of one. It weirds him out a little, and maybe scares him, but every time he starts to feel anxiety creeping along inside him he takes a deep breath and thinks, Dean, it’s for Dean, and the anxiety fades.
And so it is with a clear head and an only slightly shaky hand that Sam pins Dean against the sink in their hotel room. Dean is fresh from the shower; a too-small towel is wrapped around his waist, and water from his hair drips, loudly, into the sink basin. Sam uses the extra 30 pounds he has on Dean to keep him still, and drops to his knees in front of his brother.
“Sam-” Dean says, his voice sharp and shocked.
“Shut up,” Sam says, determinedly, and reaches for Dean’s towel.
Dean fists a hand into Sam’s hair and pulls, jerks Sam’s head up, so that Sam’s neck is craned at an awkward angle and they are staring at each other. “Sam, goddamnit, no,” Dean says. “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing, but it stops right now.”
“Shut up,” Sam says again, fiercely, and even though Dean’s grip in his hair tightens, he turns his attention back to the towel, which he works open with one hand.
It drops to the floor, and Dean’s cock is hard and red and twitching a little with the force of the blood pumping through it, and Sam does the only thing he can really think of doing, which is open his mouth and swallow Dean down.
He has done this a couple times before, freshman year, before Jess, so it’s been years, really, but he figures it’s like riding a bike. And it is, kind of; Sam chokes, gags a little when he tries to take Dean too far into his throat, so he pulls back and contents himself with circling the head of Dean’s dick with his lips and sucking, hard.
Dean’s grip in Sam’s hair loosens only slightly, and Sam’s scalp burns but he doesn’t really mind. Sam takes a chance, releases Dean’s hip, which he’s been gripping hard enough to bruise, and wraps his hand around Dean’s shaft.
He works into a clumsy rhythm. Dean tastes like hotel soap and, beneath that, like Dean, like the body Sam has sweated with and stitched up and lain beside, like the brother who put him to bed when he was 5 and taught him how to shave when he was 13 and came back for him when he was 22. Sam’s jaw aches, a little, but he welcomes it, tries to stretch his jaw farther, take Dean deeper into his mouth.
He chances a glance up. He expects Dean’s eyes to be closed, his head to be thrown back, but instead Dean is watching him, jaw clenched, eyes hooded and fierce.
Sam sits back, his mouth easing off Dean with a wet pop. The head of Dean’s cock smears across Sam’s chin and jaw as it bobs, and Sam feels an answering twinge in himself, finally recognizes the almost painful pressure as his own erection presses against the stretched fabric of his jeans.
“You can close your eyes, if you want,” Sam says, softly.
Dean shakes his head, once, and he opens his mouth like he wants to say something, but then shuts it again. He tightens his hand in Sam’s hair again, guides Sam’s mouth back towards him, and Sam lets himself be guided; he latches on to Dean, lets Dean guide his head back and forth with rough strokes.
He undoes his own jeans with one shaky hand, palms his cock through his boxers before drawing it out and wrapping his fist around it. Dean fucks his mouth, and Sam strokes himself, in the same rough rhythm, and Sam is close to gagging and maybe a little lightheaded from lack of air, but it doesn’t matter, it’s Dean, who smells and tastes so warm and familiar, who is thick and heavy and good, so good, in Sam’s mouth, and the only coherent thoughts Sam can really piece together are more and closer.
Dean chokes out a warning and then is coming, hot and salty, down Sam’s throat, and it is the taste of him, the feel of Dean pulsing against his tongue, that pushes Sam over the edge, and then he is coming all over his own fist and belly.
He lets Dean’s dick slide out of his mouth, and then presses his face to Dean’s hip instead. He knows his thighs will shake when he stands, and when he inhales and exhales the air shudders through his chest a little. His mouth is sore, his jaw more so, and Dean’s hand in his hair is still fisted so tightly that the side of Sam’s head has gone numb.
Sam doesn’t know what to say. He wants to say thank you, really, though that is a weird impulse to have after giving a blowjob. But still, it’s all he wants to say.
Dean is silent above him, but whatever he’s thinking it must not be thank you, because he pushes Sam away suddenly and unceremoniously. Sam, unprepared, overbalances, and falls backwards against the wall.
“No means no, didn’t they teach you that at Stanford?” Dean says, and his voice is meant to be firm but it wavers and cracks a little, and he doesn’t really meet Sam’s eye.
Sam stares up at him, uncomprehending, so after a moment, Dean steps over Sam and leaves the bathroom. He shuts the door, gently, behind him.
Sam leans against the wall, draws his knees up to his chest.
“Thank you,” he says, to no one in particular, then, “Fuck.”
The plaster is cool against the back of his neck.
Sam falls asleep in the bathroom, still slumped against the wall. At some point in the night he tips over, stretches out along the tiled floor, his cheek pressed against the towel Dean had laid out by the shower. He wakes up periodically, uncomfortable and aching, and he knows Dean is awake because he can hear the TV blaring and, underneath that, the rhythmic sounds of Dean cleaning his guns.
Dean wakes him up in the morning by slamming the door, unforgivingly, into Sam’s feet. He steps over Sam’s body to the toilet, lifts the seat, and begins to piss. He tilts his head back and sighs a little.
Sam watches his brother, squinting in the bright fluorescent. The towel has imprinted rough squiggly lines on his face and neck.
“Morning, sunshine,” Dean says, as he zips himself back into his jeans.
Sam doesn’t bother getting out of Dean’s way as Dean moves back towards the door. Dean leaves without washing his hands, which Sam normally finds gross, but at the moment Sam is almost incapacitated with anger, close to blind from it.
After a moment, he drags himself to his feet. He leans against the bathroom door. Dean has his back to him, is busy shuffling through his bag.
“Okay,” Sam says. His lips are dry. They have cracked and bled in the night, and when Sam opens his mouth he can taste the dried blood. “Okay,” he tries again.
“Okay…” Dean prompts him, still busying himself with pawing through his bag, though he doesn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular.
Sam works his mouth around a lot of things, but what he says is, “I think I kind of hate you.”
“Yeah, so what else is new,” Dean says, and pulls a pair of clean socks, triumphantly, from his bag.
Dr. James Ellicott is a good therapist, probably, but Sam’s smarter than him. Sam’s been to a therapist before-at Stanford, when he was still all wrapped up in being a freak and a loner no matter where he was and Jess hadn’t come along yet to save him-so he knows all the right answers, knows the cards he’s expected to play.
Dr. Ellicott says, tell me something honest about yourself, and Sam leans forward, puts his game face on, and gets ready to talk a blue streak about how Dean doesn’t respect him and treats him like a child and how he went on this road trip to get away but now it’s Dean he needs to get away from.
Then he realizes that yeah, he’s pretty much being honest.
“Huh,” he says, after twenty minutes of what turned out to be a very long involved rant about how Dean always uses Sam’s toothbrush after he’s puked.
“Feels good to be honest, right?” Dr. Ellicott says, with a fatherly smile.
It does, and Sam rides that high for the next day, lets his anger with Dean wash over him whenever he looks at his brother, telling himself, honest, I’m just being honest with myself. He’s angry with Dean for a million things, all the reasons he told Dr. Ellicott and then the other, more unspeakable things, and then he is angry at Dean for making them so unspeakable, and then he is angry at his father for essentially making them into emotional cripples. By the end of it he is incandescent with rage, so full of it he thinks he might choke.
Then he tries to shoot Dean in the face. Four times.
So maybe he should rethink the whole being honest with himself thing.
Sam tries to say I’m sorry on the car ride back to the motel, only he keeps saying it at the wrong times, for the wrong things, and really he’s unsure if he wants to say it at all.
“Can you please stop shaking your goddamned knee,” Dean says.
“Sorry,” Sam mumbles, and puts a hand to his thigh to try and still it.
Fifteen minutes later he’s trying to stretch out his arms, get comfortable, and he somehow ends up jabbing Dean in the eye.
“God damnit, Sam,” Dean says, as the Impala swerves sharply on the road.
“Fuck, sorry,” Sam says, hurriedly, retracting his arm.
Dean rights the wheel and cuts a glare in Sam’s direction. “Just try and keep shit out of my face for like a day, okay?”
They drive the rest of the way to the motel in sullen silence, both of them staring pointedly out the windshield, watching the road pass by, pretending that they’re alone.
When they get to the motel room, though, and Sam watches Dean pull his shirt off to reveal the scattershot of bruises blooming on his sternum from where Sam hit him with a cartridge of rock salt, he can’t really hold back, so he tries again.
“I’m sorry, Dean,” Sam says.
“Yeah,” Dean sighs, “I guess we’re gonna have to go get some more rock salt.”
“I think we should talk about it,” Sam says, firmly, with more conviction than he really feels.
Dean laughs, sharply, as if Sam has said something sad and disgusting and funny, like a dead baby joke. He laughs himself into the bathroom, and shuts the door in Sam’s face.
After their father calls, it takes Dean exactly four minutes to bundle Sam out of their motel room and into the Impala. They pull out onto the highway in the early dark, Dean too anxious to drive and Sam still half-asleep and numb from shock.
“There’s this thing, it’s called the gas pedal,” Dean says, as he paws through the glove compartment.
“There’s this thing, it’s called shutting up,” Sam shoots back. His head is aching, and his mouth is sour with sleep because Dean didn’t let him brush his teeth. He rubs his temples. Perversely, he takes his foot off the gas entirely, lets the car coast. They lose speed gradually, the speedometer’s needle drifting from 65 to 55 before Dean notices.
Dean reaches over and smacks the back of Sam’s head. “Stop fucking around,” he says.
It’s the first time he’s purposefully touched Sam in days.
The thing is, the more Sam wakes up the more he realizes that the resistance in him isn’t about sleep but about something else entirely. He doesn’t want to be going to Indiana; there is nothing for them there, only another job, only one more step towards giving up the search for their father entirely.
He tries to talk to Dean about it, but communication with Dean is no longer easy. Sam tries to talk reasonably, tries to break through the silence that has lingered between them since Lawrence. He takes a deep breath, reminds himself that Dean doesn’t say no to him, not when it counts, not when he is really asking.
Five minutes later, Sam is on the side of the road and the Impala’s headlights are disappearing into the greying horizon. Sam feels a hollow sense of victory, because at least he’s alone now, at least he won’t be driven to distraction by the sullen weight of Dean beside him everywhere he goes; at least he can go back to California.
The light slips from black to grey to warm morning yellow as Sam walks down the road. He half expects the Impala to come back, to come cresting over the hill with Dean in the driver’s seat, an awkward half-smile on his face, his shoulders already raising in a shrug of apology and forgiveness.
Dean doesn’t come back for him. Sam keeps walking. It reminds him of nothing more than leaving for Stanford, the same way he’d hoped Dean or Dad would come and send him off with a smile and a clap on the back. He is filled now with the same feeling of independence and agency, flushed with the power of making his own decisions.
He tries not to think about how, exactly, going to Stanford turned out for him.
He meets Meg on a long straight stretch of road, three miles outside of Elwood, Indiana. She doesn’t stay for long-she’s gone before he really has time to register her presence-but her smile sends a warm shudder down his spine all the same.
She reminds him of Jess. Nothing specific; Meg is sharp, her hair obviously bleached and slightly brittle, and shorter than Jess was. Jess was long lines of gold hair and skin-or maybe he is idealizing her. Maybe it’s been long enough; maybe the reality of Jess-the weird animal-brown mole tucked under her left breast, her occasional outbursts of violent, manipulative emotion-has faded into the recesses of his memory.
It’s okay. It’s okay that Jess is slipping away from him; that is, after all, what dead people do.
It’s still morning, though the sun is crawling towards the high center of the sky. It’s warm; it’s spring. Somehow, on this bright highway, Sam decides to let Jess go. She’s dead, and it’s his fault, and he’ll seek vengeance until he dies, but this, the unadulterated presence of her, the sick heat she brings to his dreams, can go.
A car passes him. He thinks of Dean, the way Dean’s palms are dry and smooth, the way Dean sleeps on his belly with his mouth half-open. Dean has taken up all the spaces in Sam that Jess has left empty; Dean has taken him up, pulled him along, bore his weight until Sam could bear his own.
By the time Dean calls, his voice soft and warm and strained with the work of saying goodbye, Sam has already decided to go back to him. The decision doesn’t surprise him. It has been sitting patiently within him all day.
It’s the easiest decision, really, that Sam’s made in a long time.
February is always a busy month: dead lovers pop up all over the nation to haunt their exes. They’re on the move every few days, hitting every metropolis on the West coast, except they avoid California like the plague. They don’t talk about it; Sam brings up a possible case in Santa Cruz-kids keep disappearing at the board walk-but Dean shrugs him off, says it’s too far away and they have enough to do as it is.
“Women, man,” Dean says, shaking his head as they leave Cheyenne, having salted and burned the bones of four separate women who were each trying to kill the new girlfriends of their old boyfriends. “Even being dead doesn’t stop a jealous woman in her fucking tracks.”
“Hell hath no fury,” Sam agrees, vaguely. He scrubs a hand across his face. He is wearing his old jeans, the ones Dean saved for him, and the waistband is uncomfortably tight and the hems itch where they rub at his ankles.
“Tell me again why you burned all my jeans,” Sam says.
Dean stretches his arm out over the seat between them. “They were unflattering,” he says. “You should really consider a darker wash, Samantha, it’s more slimming.”
“I hate you,” Sam says, and slumps lower in his seat.
“Yeah, well,” Dean says comfortably. He swipes his fingers through the hair on the back of Sam’s neck, tugs a little on a lock of hair. “You’re stuck with me, so deal with it.”
On Valentine’s day they’re caught in a blizzard and have to stop in a nameless town somewhere in the Rockies, in Colorado. They get the last room in the only motel in town.
“Well, Sammy,” Dean says, putting his duffel on a chair, “Looks like we’re stuck here.”
“Looks like,” Sam says, as he squeezes through the door with his own bag, which is suspiciously full. “Just because you put your dirty laundry in my bag doesn’t mean I’m going to wash it for you,” he adds.
They sprawl bonelessly on one of the beds for awhile, not touching, contemplating the ceiling. Sam thinks of Jess, last Valentine’s day, how he had slaved for four hours to make her dinner, all organic of course, and cake baked from scratch. He is almost embarassed by this gesture now, the terrifying sincereness of it, the way he had believed so deeply in the world that he had created for himself.
“I hate Valentine’s day,” Dean says. “Let’s go drink our faces off.”
Dean, who has a sixth sense about these things, finds the only bar still open in 20 miles, and Sam settles down to watch his brother actually try to drink his own face off. Sam sits in a corner booth, nursing a beer, and Dean sometimes sits with him but mostly lingers near the bar, chasing shots of tequila with beer and flirting, increasingly outrageously, with the bartender.
Sam tries to watch Dean without being obvious that he’s watching Dean. He spreads out a paper in front of him, but his eyes inevitably drift upward, find Dean across the room. He looks at Dean’s right hand, wrapped firmly around the neck of his beer bottle, the way Dean’s ring catches the dim light of the bar, the blunt square edges of Dean’s nails, and shifts uncomfortably, tries not to think of how Dean’s hands feel on him, wrapped around him in the same sure way.
Sam is confused. It hasn’t been often-Dean has climbed into his bed only twice since Iowa-but each time Sam falls apart a little more. The motivations aren’t clear anymore, if they ever were; he wants to ask Dean why he keeps doing it, why he keeps sliding under the covers with Sam, but then he’d have to ask himself why he keeps letting Dean into his bed. There are too many whys, really, too many questions, and Sam is frightened that if he asks one he’ll have to ask them all, and they go too far, too deep inside him. Neither of them have the answers, anyway, and it’s easier, so much easier, to relax into Dean’s touch, into Dean’s fingers sweeping through the hair on the back of his head, or Dean’s arm wrapped around Sam’s neck, pressing Sam’s face to Dean’s chest.
Dean wobbles over somewhere between beer three and shot five or six. “You’re staring at me,” he says, accusingly.
“Just waiting for your inevitable bout of projectile vomiting,” Sam says. He turns a page of the paper in front of him. “I have napkins, but if you hit that bartender in the face, we probably can’t pay for her therapy.”
“You’re staring at me,” Dean repeats.
Sam leans forward, pinches Dean’s cheek. “Can you feel your face still?” he asks.
Dean, belatedly, bats Sam’s hand away. “Shut up,” he says, which means no, and then continues, “That’s not why you’re staring at me.”
“Go away, Dean,” Sam says, resolutely picking up his newspaper and holding it in front of his face, and he doesn’t put it down until he is sure Dean’s gone.
Dean fucks the bartender in the bathroom after closing while Sam waits in the Impala, trying not to be annoyed. In revenge, he unearths his old Third Eye Blind tape and plays it so loudly he thinks his ears might bleed. It is worth it to see Dean’s face as he slides into the car 20 minutes later.
It bothers Sam later though, like it is somehow unfair that Dean left him in the car-then, and every other time he’s done it, which is more times then Sam really wants to count-like it is somehow an outrageous thing to do.
He lets it build up in him, the irritation, and the pressure condenses it, turns it thick inside him, until he finds himself snapping at Dean for no reason.
“You should cut your hair,” Dean says, for the thousandth time, this time from the passenger seat of the Impala.
“I’m not a fucking child,” Sam snaps back, his hands tightening around the wheel.
“Uh, okay,” Dean says, shifting a little in his seat, “but I’d appreciate you warning me next time it’s your special time of the month.”
Dean hates being in the passenger seat. He lets Sam drive out of pity, or when he is too exhausted to see straight, but he feels out of place when he’s not behind the wheel. His limbs don’t fit quite right under the dashboard; the headrest is never where he thinks it is; Sam can tell from Dean’s eternal shifting and increasingly pissed off face just how much, exactly, Dean hates being where he is.
Sam knows, though, that Dean will let Sam drive whenever he asks; he thinks it’s some kind of tonic, some kind of magical cheering up method, and also Dean has trouble saying no to Sam on the best of days. And it is nice to drive the Impala-Sam likes driving, likes the power of it, but mostly he likes it because he knows how crazy it makes Dean.
“Stop fucking shifting around, you’re driving me nuts,” Sam says, and doesn’t let Dean drive for the next two weeks.
They go for three weeks without finding a real job, and Dean is antsy but Sam is a fucking wreck. His need to find Dad is constantly with him; it’s the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up, and most of the time it is only Dean’s hand that can coax him into sleep.
Sam tries to talk about it, he does, but he never gets any further than “Dean…” before his throat closes up and his eyes start to burn. He watches Dean’s hands all the time, watches them as Dean drives, watches the tendons in Dean’s wrist strain as Dean ties his bootlaces.
He doesn’t think about Jess for nine days in a row, and when she finally creeps back into his dreams-just a vague, golden blur-he is startled and slightly ashamed that it’s been so long.
“Quit starin’ at me,” Dean says, somewhere between Chicago and Peoria. “You’re giving me the creeps.”
“It’d be easier not to stare at you if you weren’t taking up 80% of the room in this car,” Sam says.
“You’re one to talk, Gigantor,” Dean replies, but he meets Sam’s eyes in the rearview mirror and Sam, obediently, turns his face away.
“Do you think we’ll find him?” Sam asks, keeping his eyes fixed on the road.
“Yeah, Sammy,” Dean says, but it sounds more like I don’t know than it ever has before.
That night, Sam is brushing his teeth when Dean shoves his way into the bathroom. Dean is fresh from the shower, wearing only boxers, and he elbows Sam into the sink so that he can hang his wet towels on the rack.
Sam turns around at the same time Dean does, so they are facing each other with very little space between them, trapped between the sink and the towel rack on the wall.
Sam regards Dean’s chest with his toothbrush still in his mouth. There’s an old, faded scar across Dean’s right shoulder and another trailing across Dean’s lower abdomen. Sam remembers the shoulder-Dean got hit with a cursed knife when he was 17 and Sam and John had spent all night trying to dig the remnants out of Dean’s skin-but the scar on Dean’s belly is new to him.
He isn’t really thinking about it, but he reaches out and lays his hand on Dean’s stomach anyway, the pad of his thumb against the ridge of Dean’s scar, the palm of his hand laid flat against Dean’s stomach.
“What’re you doing, Sam,” Dean says. His voice is low and his eyes are unreadable, but his chest heaves a little, and his stomach shudders with his exhale.
“I don’t know,” Sam says, honestly, and drops his hands.
The model home they squat in in Oklahoma is nice in an empty kind of way. It’s weird to be in a kitchen again, to be sharing a space with Dean that isn’t essentially a glorified closet with a bathroom attached. Dean cheerfully calls dibs on the master bedroom, so Sam takes the second, smaller bedroom on the second floor.
He investigates the cupboards but of course, everything is empty. It reminds him of the furnished apartments Dad gave in and rented once or twice a year, promising Sam they could settle down long enough for Sam to at least get through a term of school. Sam had prided himself on stocking the cupboards with shit no one ever ate-creamed corn and tomato soup-just so the place looked more lived in. He’d like to think that maybe they’d live there long enough to need those kinds of things, as if one day Dean would pull himself together and make green bean casserole for them, except they never did quite stay long enough, and Dean, of course, never cooked unless he had to.
Dean wanders in during Sam’s reverie.
“Maybe if you stare at it long enough it’ll turn into a skin mag and some Fritos,” Dean suggests.
“You were a pretty decent cook when you tried,” Sam says absently. He turns from the cabinets, leans back against the long tiled counter. “You used to make a stirfry even Dad couldn’t pass up.”
Dean squints at him. “Huh,” he says, finally.
Sam crosses his arms over his chest, feels his shoulders begin to creep towards his ears. There is something in Dean’s tone that Sam recognizes from years of being on the end of it; that older-brother derision, the hint of patronizing scorn Dean can unleash on him without blinking. “Huh, what,” he says.
“Nothing,” Dean says, “It’s just this afternoon you couldn’t wait to tell me everything that was wrong with our childhood, and now you’re all starry-eyed about chicken and broccoli.”
“I am not,” Sam huffs, “I just, it was nice, it was a nice memory. For once.”
“For once,” Dean echoes, narrowing his eyes. “Yeah, Sammy, for fucking once, keep telling yourself that.”
Part of Sam aches to get into this with Dean. They’ve been circling it for months, ever since Dean interrupted Sam’s life at Stanford, but every time they get near of it one of them backs down. It’s an impossible argument, one they’ll have forever, because there are only so many ways for Dean to say we gave you all we had and Sam to say it wasn’t enough.
Sam shrugs at his brother, shakes his head, tries to say with his body all the ways he is sorry and all the ways he’s not. What comes out of his mouth, though, is only, “I’ll go get dinner.”
Dinner is pizza and a fifth of Jack Daniels. Sam finishes the former and Dean the latter, and they both lie groaning on the floor of the living room afterwards.
“I think I may have eaten myself into paralysis,” Sam says, sprawling on his back. “Is it possible for your stomach to weigh so much it crushes your spine?”
“You’re the college boy, not me,” Dean says. He is on his stomach, stretched out beside Sam. He pulls a pillow off the couch, and Sam raises his head so Dean can position it underneath both of them. “Do you think my puke will taste more like pizza or Jack’s?”
“Ugh,” Sam says, turning his face towards his brother’s. “It will taste gross, because you’re… really gross.”
Dean finished the whiskey, but Sam had his fair share, and his head is swimming pleasantly. He is probably drunker than he thinks, but since he hasn’t stood in up in an hour it’s hard to tell.
“You’re gross,” Dean says. He regards Sam with one eye; the other is smushed closed against the pillow. His mouth is open, and Sam can see the fabric ruffle with the force of Dean’s breath.
Sam has been looking at Dean for too long to ever really think about things like his mouth, but he knows, ostensibly, that it’s a nice mouth-that Dean’s lips are full and soft, that when he chews on them, or kisses someone, they grow bright with blood.
He’s been looking at Dean, really looking at Dean more and more often these days, and usually it bothers him but now, his limbs heavy and warm with alcohol, all he can really think is, I should do this more often.
“Sam,” Dean says, voice low and sort of wretched, and reaches for him.
Sam goes willingly. They have never done this before this way, with the lights on, not hidden underneath sheets and bed covers. They have never looked at each other, really, before, never made eye contact; Sam has never watched Dean’s face as Dean tries to undo Sam’s jeans, or reaches past the elastic of Sam’s boxers.
“Close your eyes,” Dean says, roughly.
Sam says, “No.”
Dean’s hand stutters, slow to a halt, and he grasps the base of Sam’s cock, loosely.
Sam pushes up into Dean’s hand, tries to encourage Dean to move again, but Dean is looking at him with yet another fucking unreadable expression in his eyes.
“Sammy,” Dean begins, but Sam pushes up again, begins fucking himself against Dean’s fist in earnest, rocking into a slow, steady rhythm.
Dean’s hand tightens, almost imperceptibly, and Sam arches into it, “Come on, Dean,” Sam says, gasping a little, aware of how he must look-shirt pushed up, jeans around his knees, and begging for it, like all he wants in the world is Dean’s hands, moving with him, or maybe Dean’s mouth-
Dean has somehow inched closer, so that his hip and thigh is flush with Sam’s and Dean, Dean is hard against Sam’s leg, Sam can feel it.
“Dean,” Sam says, letting his head fall back against the pillow, “come on, Dean, please.”
Dean leans his forehead against Sam’s, and finally begins to move his hand.
Sam is so grateful he comes almost instantaneously, still watching Dean’s mouth, still thinking, abstractly, of the heat of it, the dark stain of it when Dean returns from fucking whatever local girl he’s managed to charm into a bathroom stall, the way he knows without having to ask that Dean has never sucked another guy off.
Dean pulls him through it, and he is still hard against Sam’s thigh, and his breath is hot against Sam’s neck and ear.
Sam twists, begins to reach for Dean, but his hand gets no closer than Dean’s ribs before Dean is abruptly pulling away and scrambling to his feet.
Sam is cold in Dean’s sudden absence, and sober enough now to be embarassed. He tucks himself back into his jeans, his boxers slightly sticky with sweat and come, and shame rises in him, as hot and fast as arousal had moments before.
Dean’s boots are loud on the stairs, and the slamming of the master bedroom door even louder. Sam lies on the floor of the living room, and he wants to say come back, he wants to say I’m sorry, but there is no one there to hear him, not Dean or Jess or even Dad, and he is drunk and alone and it’s so pathetically sad he almost weeps.
He pukes instead. It doesn’t taste like anything other than stomach acid, and his throat burns for hours after.
They finish the job in Oklahoma. Dean doesn’t touch Sam after the night in the living room, and in the space he leaves Sam’s nightmares comes swooping back. He tries to hold them back, tries to clench his jaw as he wills himself to sleep in the hopes that it’ll stay shut through the night.
It’s stubborn, and it’s stupid, but Sam wants to keep his distance from Dean as much as Dean seems to want to keep his from Sam. It is kind of fear, fear of all the lines they have crossed and all the lines that remain between them still, but mostly it’s just the creeping flush of humiliation and rage every time he remembers the way he reached for Dean, and the way Dean pushed his hands away.
The dreams shift and change, though; Jess on the ceiling becomes Jess in a window, screaming. Then it’s not Jess at all, but a stranger, and the dreams lose their vagueness, become sharp and too-bright and painful, so that Sam wakes up with his head pounding and blood on his mouth from where he bit his tongue and lips.
He wakes up with a shout one night. Dean is awake, Sam can hear him shift restlessly, but Dean says nothing, feigns sleep.
Sam thinks about the tree and the woman. He wishes for Dean’s hands, for Dean’s soothing voice, but at the same time is glad that they’re being withheld. This is important, he knows; this isn’t something that should be smoothed away and forgotten.
Dean breathes, too loudly, in the bed next to him.
“I know you’re awake,” Sam says, angrily, and closes his eyes and tries to sleep.
Sam drives the last 300 miles to Lawrence, because he doesn’t trust Dean to not just pull a u-turn on the interstate and drive as far and fast as he can in the opposite direction. Dean sits in the passenger seat and looks like he’s considering the option anyway, even with the added steps of knocking Sam out and wrenching the wheel from his hands.
“I just don’t see why-” Dean begins, for the ninth time.
“I told you,” Sam cuts off him, a little harshly. “And I’m too fucking tired to tell you again, so just shut up.”
Surprisingly, Dean does.
Twenty minutes later, though, Dean is shifting in his seat again, and opening his mouth to say something, then shutting it again with a loud snap of his jaw.
He does this four times before Sam gives in.
“Something you’d like to say?” Sam asks.
Dean’s voice is surprisingly quiet when he says, “It’s why your eyes bled, right?”
Sam looks up into the rearview mirror. Only his eyes, his normal eyes, are staring back at him, but he still somehow expects his reflection-mouth to open up and ask things like, How could you leave her alone to die? Really, he’s been expecting it every time he looks in a mirror, because there’s still no real answer to the question; Jess may be fading, the nightmares of her death less frequent, but guilt is a constant pit in Sam’s stomach, which will never fade or lessen, he is sure.
“Yeah,” he says finally.
Dean looks away, out the window. There are so many things between them, but Sam knows that one of them is Dean wishing Sam hadn’t shared. Dean won’t look at him because Dean is scared, and Dean’s eyes are the tell, always, so he looks away.
Sam wipes his palms on his jeans, first one and then the other, but they are clammy again almost immediately. “Now you know why I didn’t want to tell you,” he says, slowly. “It freaks the shit out of me, and I know it freaks the shit out of you, and I know you wish you didn’t know, but. Now you do.”
Dean keeps his head turned away. Sam expects him to fall silent, to let Sam have the last word, so he is surprised when Dean speaks up.
“You’re my brother,” Dean says, and if his voice is gruff Sam will pretend not to notice. “There isn’t anything I don’t want to know about you.”
He doesn’t look at Sam. Sam doesn’t look at Dean. He wipes his palms on his jeans again, keeps his eyes to the road, and tries to believe.
After Lawrence, Sam feels stronger, better. Mostly it’s because he knows he’s not crazy, though of course there are other implications to consider now that the question of his sanity has been gotten out of the way. Still, his head feels clear for days after, and he does not wake with his throat and eyes burning anymore, and he doesn’t want to jinx it by saying the nightmares are gone, but deep inside him it’s what he’s hoping.
Dean, however, is the opposite. Sam doesn’t know what part of going back was hard for Dean, or maybe it was all of it, but something is off about his brother for days after. Dean is softer, less quick to mock Sam for all the hundreds of embarassing things he does, and he barely asks for the keys. Instead he sits in the passenger seat and stares out the window.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re deep in thought,” Sam jokes, lamely, but Dean barely even looks at him.
There’s only one thing for it, really. Or probably there are lots of things for it, but Sam can only think of one. It weirds him out a little, and maybe scares him, but every time he starts to feel anxiety creeping along inside him he takes a deep breath and thinks, Dean, it’s for Dean, and the anxiety fades.
And so it is with a clear head and an only slightly shaky hand that Sam pins Dean against the sink in their hotel room. Dean is fresh from the shower; a too-small towel is wrapped around his waist, and water from his hair drips, loudly, into the sink basin. Sam uses the extra 30 pounds he has on Dean to keep him still, and drops to his knees in front of his brother.
“Sam-” Dean says, his voice sharp and shocked.
“Shut up,” Sam says, determinedly, and reaches for Dean’s towel.
Dean fists a hand into Sam’s hair and pulls, jerks Sam’s head up, so that Sam’s neck is craned at an awkward angle and they are staring at each other. “Sam, goddamnit, no,” Dean says. “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing, but it stops right now.”
“Shut up,” Sam says again, fiercely, and even though Dean’s grip in his hair tightens, he turns his attention back to the towel, which he works open with one hand.
It drops to the floor, and Dean’s cock is hard and red and twitching a little with the force of the blood pumping through it, and Sam does the only thing he can really think of doing, which is open his mouth and swallow Dean down.
He has done this a couple times before, freshman year, before Jess, so it’s been years, really, but he figures it’s like riding a bike. And it is, kind of; Sam chokes, gags a little when he tries to take Dean too far into his throat, so he pulls back and contents himself with circling the head of Dean’s dick with his lips and sucking, hard.
Dean’s grip in Sam’s hair loosens only slightly, and Sam’s scalp burns but he doesn’t really mind. Sam takes a chance, releases Dean’s hip, which he’s been gripping hard enough to bruise, and wraps his hand around Dean’s shaft.
He works into a clumsy rhythm. Dean tastes like hotel soap and, beneath that, like Dean, like the body Sam has sweated with and stitched up and lain beside, like the brother who put him to bed when he was 5 and taught him how to shave when he was 13 and came back for him when he was 22. Sam’s jaw aches, a little, but he welcomes it, tries to stretch his jaw farther, take Dean deeper into his mouth.
He chances a glance up. He expects Dean’s eyes to be closed, his head to be thrown back, but instead Dean is watching him, jaw clenched, eyes hooded and fierce.
Sam sits back, his mouth easing off Dean with a wet pop. The head of Dean’s cock smears across Sam’s chin and jaw as it bobs, and Sam feels an answering twinge in himself, finally recognizes the almost painful pressure as his own erection presses against the stretched fabric of his jeans.
“You can close your eyes, if you want,” Sam says, softly.
Dean shakes his head, once, and he opens his mouth like he wants to say something, but then shuts it again. He tightens his hand in Sam’s hair again, guides Sam’s mouth back towards him, and Sam lets himself be guided; he latches on to Dean, lets Dean guide his head back and forth with rough strokes.
He undoes his own jeans with one shaky hand, palms his cock through his boxers before drawing it out and wrapping his fist around it. Dean fucks his mouth, and Sam strokes himself, in the same rough rhythm, and Sam is close to gagging and maybe a little lightheaded from lack of air, but it doesn’t matter, it’s Dean, who smells and tastes so warm and familiar, who is thick and heavy and good, so good, in Sam’s mouth, and the only coherent thoughts Sam can really piece together are more and closer.
Dean chokes out a warning and then is coming, hot and salty, down Sam’s throat, and it is the taste of him, the feel of Dean pulsing against his tongue, that pushes Sam over the edge, and then he is coming all over his own fist and belly.
He lets Dean’s dick slide out of his mouth, and then presses his face to Dean’s hip instead. He knows his thighs will shake when he stands, and when he inhales and exhales the air shudders through his chest a little. His mouth is sore, his jaw more so, and Dean’s hand in his hair is still fisted so tightly that the side of Sam’s head has gone numb.
Sam doesn’t know what to say. He wants to say thank you, really, though that is a weird impulse to have after giving a blowjob. But still, it’s all he wants to say.
Dean is silent above him, but whatever he’s thinking it must not be thank you, because he pushes Sam away suddenly and unceremoniously. Sam, unprepared, overbalances, and falls backwards against the wall.
“No means no, didn’t they teach you that at Stanford?” Dean says, and his voice is meant to be firm but it wavers and cracks a little, and he doesn’t really meet Sam’s eye.
Sam stares up at him, uncomprehending, so after a moment, Dean steps over Sam and leaves the bathroom. He shuts the door, gently, behind him.
Sam leans against the wall, draws his knees up to his chest.
“Thank you,” he says, to no one in particular, then, “Fuck.”
The plaster is cool against the back of his neck.
Sam falls asleep in the bathroom, still slumped against the wall. At some point in the night he tips over, stretches out along the tiled floor, his cheek pressed against the towel Dean had laid out by the shower. He wakes up periodically, uncomfortable and aching, and he knows Dean is awake because he can hear the TV blaring and, underneath that, the rhythmic sounds of Dean cleaning his guns.
Dean wakes him up in the morning by slamming the door, unforgivingly, into Sam’s feet. He steps over Sam’s body to the toilet, lifts the seat, and begins to piss. He tilts his head back and sighs a little.
Sam watches his brother, squinting in the bright fluorescent. The towel has imprinted rough squiggly lines on his face and neck.
“Morning, sunshine,” Dean says, as he zips himself back into his jeans.
Sam doesn’t bother getting out of Dean’s way as Dean moves back towards the door. Dean leaves without washing his hands, which Sam normally finds gross, but at the moment Sam is almost incapacitated with anger, close to blind from it.
After a moment, he drags himself to his feet. He leans against the bathroom door. Dean has his back to him, is busy shuffling through his bag.
“Okay,” Sam says. His lips are dry. They have cracked and bled in the night, and when Sam opens his mouth he can taste the dried blood. “Okay,” he tries again.
“Okay…” Dean prompts him, still busying himself with pawing through his bag, though he doesn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular.
Sam works his mouth around a lot of things, but what he says is, “I think I kind of hate you.”
“Yeah, so what else is new,” Dean says, and pulls a pair of clean socks, triumphantly, from his bag.
Dr. James Ellicott is a good therapist, probably, but Sam’s smarter than him. Sam’s been to a therapist before-at Stanford, when he was still all wrapped up in being a freak and a loner no matter where he was and Jess hadn’t come along yet to save him-so he knows all the right answers, knows the cards he’s expected to play.
Dr. Ellicott says, tell me something honest about yourself, and Sam leans forward, puts his game face on, and gets ready to talk a blue streak about how Dean doesn’t respect him and treats him like a child and how he went on this road trip to get away but now it’s Dean he needs to get away from.
Then he realizes that yeah, he’s pretty much being honest.
“Huh,” he says, after twenty minutes of what turned out to be a very long involved rant about how Dean always uses Sam’s toothbrush after he’s puked.
“Feels good to be honest, right?” Dr. Ellicott says, with a fatherly smile.
It does, and Sam rides that high for the next day, lets his anger with Dean wash over him whenever he looks at his brother, telling himself, honest, I’m just being honest with myself. He’s angry with Dean for a million things, all the reasons he told Dr. Ellicott and then the other, more unspeakable things, and then he is angry at Dean for making them so unspeakable, and then he is angry at his father for essentially making them into emotional cripples. By the end of it he is incandescent with rage, so full of it he thinks he might choke.
Then he tries to shoot Dean in the face. Four times.
So maybe he should rethink the whole being honest with himself thing.
Sam tries to say I’m sorry on the car ride back to the motel, only he keeps saying it at the wrong times, for the wrong things, and really he’s unsure if he wants to say it at all.
“Can you please stop shaking your goddamned knee,” Dean says.
“Sorry,” Sam mumbles, and puts a hand to his thigh to try and still it.
Fifteen minutes later he’s trying to stretch out his arms, get comfortable, and he somehow ends up jabbing Dean in the eye.
“God damnit, Sam,” Dean says, as the Impala swerves sharply on the road.
“Fuck, sorry,” Sam says, hurriedly, retracting his arm.
Dean rights the wheel and cuts a glare in Sam’s direction. “Just try and keep shit out of my face for like a day, okay?”
They drive the rest of the way to the motel in sullen silence, both of them staring pointedly out the windshield, watching the road pass by, pretending that they’re alone.
When they get to the motel room, though, and Sam watches Dean pull his shirt off to reveal the scattershot of bruises blooming on his sternum from where Sam hit him with a cartridge of rock salt, he can’t really hold back, so he tries again.
“I’m sorry, Dean,” Sam says.
“Yeah,” Dean sighs, “I guess we’re gonna have to go get some more rock salt.”
“I think we should talk about it,” Sam says, firmly, with more conviction than he really feels.
Dean laughs, sharply, as if Sam has said something sad and disgusting and funny, like a dead baby joke. He laughs himself into the bathroom, and shuts the door in Sam’s face.
After their father calls, it takes Dean exactly four minutes to bundle Sam out of their motel room and into the Impala. They pull out onto the highway in the early dark, Dean too anxious to drive and Sam still half-asleep and numb from shock.
“There’s this thing, it’s called the gas pedal,” Dean says, as he paws through the glove compartment.
“There’s this thing, it’s called shutting up,” Sam shoots back. His head is aching, and his mouth is sour with sleep because Dean didn’t let him brush his teeth. He rubs his temples. Perversely, he takes his foot off the gas entirely, lets the car coast. They lose speed gradually, the speedometer’s needle drifting from 65 to 55 before Dean notices.
Dean reaches over and smacks the back of Sam’s head. “Stop fucking around,” he says.
It’s the first time he’s purposefully touched Sam in days.
The thing is, the more Sam wakes up the more he realizes that the resistance in him isn’t about sleep but about something else entirely. He doesn’t want to be going to Indiana; there is nothing for them there, only another job, only one more step towards giving up the search for their father entirely.
He tries to talk to Dean about it, but communication with Dean is no longer easy. Sam tries to talk reasonably, tries to break through the silence that has lingered between them since Lawrence. He takes a deep breath, reminds himself that Dean doesn’t say no to him, not when it counts, not when he is really asking.
Five minutes later, Sam is on the side of the road and the Impala’s headlights are disappearing into the greying horizon. Sam feels a hollow sense of victory, because at least he’s alone now, at least he won’t be driven to distraction by the sullen weight of Dean beside him everywhere he goes; at least he can go back to California.
The light slips from black to grey to warm morning yellow as Sam walks down the road. He half expects the Impala to come back, to come cresting over the hill with Dean in the driver’s seat, an awkward half-smile on his face, his shoulders already raising in a shrug of apology and forgiveness.
Dean doesn’t come back for him. Sam keeps walking. It reminds him of nothing more than leaving for Stanford, the same way he’d hoped Dean or Dad would come and send him off with a smile and a clap on the back. He is filled now with the same feeling of independence and agency, flushed with the power of making his own decisions.
He tries not to think about how, exactly, going to Stanford turned out for him.
He meets Meg on a long straight stretch of road, three miles outside of Elwood, Indiana. She doesn’t stay for long-she’s gone before he really has time to register her presence-but her smile sends a warm shudder down his spine all the same.
She reminds him of Jess. Nothing specific; Meg is sharp, her hair obviously bleached and slightly brittle, and shorter than Jess was. Jess was long lines of gold hair and skin-or maybe he is idealizing her. Maybe it’s been long enough; maybe the reality of Jess-the weird animal-brown mole tucked under her left breast, her occasional outbursts of violent, manipulative emotion-has faded into the recesses of his memory.
It’s okay. It’s okay that Jess is slipping away from him; that is, after all, what dead people do.
It’s still morning, though the sun is crawling towards the high center of the sky. It’s warm; it’s spring. Somehow, on this bright highway, Sam decides to let Jess go. She’s dead, and it’s his fault, and he’ll seek vengeance until he dies, but this, the unadulterated presence of her, the sick heat she brings to his dreams, can go.
A car passes him. He thinks of Dean, the way Dean’s palms are dry and smooth, the way Dean sleeps on his belly with his mouth half-open. Dean has taken up all the spaces in Sam that Jess has left empty; Dean has taken him up, pulled him along, bore his weight until Sam could bear his own.
By the time Dean calls, his voice soft and warm and strained with the work of saying goodbye, Sam has already decided to go back to him. The decision doesn’t surprise him. It has been sitting patiently within him all day.
It’s the easiest decision, really, that Sam’s made in a long time.