A Womb of His Own - 2/21
Masterpost
When Sam called three weeks later to say he needed Dean’s help, Dean knew right away he’d go. It didn’t matter that he’d already told Sam his place was with Lisa and Ben. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t even finished unpacking the new house. He felt bad, but Lisa assuaged his guilt, nearly shoving him out the door.
He came home two days later, disgusted with himself and creeped out by the Campbells, who tingled his spidey sense. And he was more worried than ever about Sam. Even though his brother had lied to him every second of the case, he’d still allowed Sam to jerk him off before he got back into his truck and headed home. He didn’t understand what about a case of baby shapeshifters turned Sam on so much that he wanted it.
He didn’t understand why he’d agreed.
As soon as he walked inside, he hit the shower to try to scrub away everything that had happened. But Sam’s musky smell was still fresh in his mind. He went down to the kitchen, ready to apologize to Lisa for things she didn’t - couldn’t ever - know about, ready to stay put forever if she wanted him to, ready to leave if she wanted out.
“I don’t know what to do here, Lis.” He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, so he chose his next words carefully. “I mean, if I knew for sure what the safest thing was, then I’d do it. Stay here and look after you guys, or get as far away as I possibly can, but I don’t know. And I get what I’ve been doing lately, with the yelling and the - acting like a prison guard. It’s just - that’s not me.”
Unexpectedly his eyes filled with tears. “You tell yourself you’re not gonna be something, you know?” And, yet, in spite of all the promises he’d made to Dad and to himself to keep Sam safe, in spite of Sam’s promises back, they’d both turned into monsters.
“Dean, can I be honest?”
For a moment Dean thought he knew what she was going to say - that she’d finally decided she’d had enough of his drinking and his nightmares. Of the way he was short-tempered for no reason. She’d freaked out a little when they’d had to move, but she was the first to tell Ben to quit griping about it and try to make it work. She’d only timidly broached the subject of Sam’s surprise reappearance, and she’d learned how to use a gun like nobody’s business. But all civilians had their limits.
From the moment he’d knocked on her door, Dean had always expected this to be the end result.
“You’re a hunter. And now you know your brother’s out there, things are different.”
They really were.
“You don’t want to be here, Dean.”
“Yes, I do,” he swore. He wanted to be where things weren’t complicated and where people smiled and laughed and believed in the future. He wanted it. He just didn’t really believe he had a right to it.
Lisa gave him a long, appraising look. He thought maybe she’d be able to tell about him and Sam just by that look. “Okay, but you also want to be there.”
The unspoken part of that sentence was “with Sam.”
“I need you to go.”
“I can’t just lose you and Ben.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“You’re saying hit the road.”
“If there’s some rule that says this all has to be either-or,” she said, offering him a smile, “how about we break it? Me and Ben will be here, and you come when you can. Just come in one piece, and don’t tell me what’s out there?”
It hadn’t occurred to Dean that he could live in both worlds. Sam didn’t want any part of his domestic life - one brief mention of watching Sunday football together had made that clear - and Lisa was saying she didn’t want him bringing hunting home. He could maybe keep working alongside Sam, trying to figure out what he needed in order to be whole again, without ruining everything he’d worked for in the last year, if he put all behind him when he came home. And if he came home regularly. It sounded too good to be true.
“You really think we could pull something like that off?” he asked hopefully.
“It’s worth a shot.”
“How’d she take it when you bailed?” Sam asked as they loitered outside a police station in Easter, Pennsylvania, on their first official case together.
Now that they were back on the road, Dean planned to make a full inventory of the ways in which Sam had changed. The first thing out of his mouth, and Dean already had item number one for the list. The brother he knew would have asked, of course, but he wouldn’t have framed it as Dean bailing. Dean hadn’t bailed. He and Lisa had made a decision together.
“Shockingly cool, actually.”
“Better for everybody,” Sam determined with a seedy wink. He turned around to go into the station.
“Hey, Sam, wait.” When Sam looked at him, Dean tried to channel all his authority and sincerity into his voice. “No. I’m here, hunting with you, but that’s it.”
Sam smirked and went inside the building, leaving Dean to trail behind.
“Hey,” Dean murmured as he ran a hand over Sam’s shoulder. The skin there was tan and soft but stretched taut over hard muscle. Dean could hear how gentle his voice sounded, how it practically screamed, Last night was special.
“Hey.” In a sweeping motion, Sam threw back the sheets and climbed out of bed. “Shower.”
Dean lay back on his pillow with a small frown. He wasn’t sure what was causing Sam’s hot and cold routine, if it was morning-after regret or if it was some kind of hell fallout. Or maybe Dean was projecting - because as much as he wanted to cling to Sam and never get out of bed again, he knew it had been a bad idea. And yet…
It wasn’t every day that they went through such a big ordeal as the apocalypse and came out okay. Sam had pulled a Jesus act. Somehow he was here again, in one piece. It was everything Dean had dreamed about for a year. So, yeah, it was a big deal that they were hunting again, and, okay, maybe falling into bed together was kind of an excessive response, but how else were they supposed to handle all the emotions of their reunion?
Well, that sounded better in his head.
He wanted to get in the shower with Sam, but it was hard to ignore the “leave me alone” vibe Sam was giving off. Instead Dean just stepped into the pile of his shorts and jeans on the floor and drew them up. He’d just deal with smelling like sex all day.
Everyone always complimented Dean on his good genes, his strong arms, his handsome face, his cock-sucking lips, blah blah blah. Dean knew he had a pretty awesome haircut for a guy who went to ten dollar barbers, and his eyes were unusually gorgeous, but actually Sam was the hottie. Sam was fucking ripped. And, okay, so Dean had a tendency to tease Sam about his stupid hair and his ginormous nose. But at the end of the day, Sam was a goddamn Greek god, so carefully crafted that changing any one feature would upset the whole package.
These were the thoughts that tumbled around Dean’s brain as he reclined on the second, unused bed, still hazy from a damn good all-night workout.
When Sam came out of the shower, he went about getting dressed as efficiently as possible, not sparing a moment to tease Dean with patches of bare skin. Not even checking to see if Dean was watching. He just threw on his jacket and called over his shoulder, “Hey, we should get moving.”
“Yeah.” Dean pocketed his cell phone and ignored the hollow pit in his chest. “Let’s roll.”
Dean frowned at his caller ID, which gave a number with a 605 area code. “Hello?”
“Dean.” It was Bobby.
“Hey, man, what’s up?” Dean glanced across the table at Sam, who was looking through the world’s bloodiest crime scene photos while Dean was trying to eat a sandwich. Bobby, he mouthed. Sam raised his eyebrows to his hairline, but he didn’t say anything.
“Just calling to see how you’re doing back in the life. Big change, I imagine.”
Dean put his sandwich down. “I guess.”
“You know you can talk to me if you need to.”
It felt as if he’s swallowed a marble. It caught in his throat and rolled down his insides until it settled heavy and hard in his stomach. “It’s fine, Bobby,” he managed to say.
Sam looked up at him with a question written on his face. Dean pushed back from his chair and went into the bathroom. He locked the door and turned the faucet on. “Hey, uh, you didn’t - during that year, you didn’t notice anything, did you?”
“Like what?” Bobby was immediately suspicious, like any good hunter.
“Just, like…” Dean didn’t know what evidence he could offer. Hey, Bobby, did Sam ever try to jump you? That was going to scar both of them for life - before Bobby even gave an answer. “How often did you two talk, anyway?”
“Not much,” Bobby admitted. “Just like the last you time you were…gone.” Dead, Bobby meant. When Dean was dead and being tortured in hell. Fun times. “He came by once or twice, and I called a lot more, but he just started ignoring my calls. Probably ’bout the time he started huntin’ with your grandpappy.” Dean felt like a jerk for not realizing it sooner, but of course Bobby was hurt that Sam had ignored him for Samuel.
And if he’d spent the last year with Samuel, then, spidey sense or not, Samuel was the one Dean needed to talk to. Samuel might have more answers about his brother’s odd behavior.
“Hey, I gotta go, he’s right outside, and we’re working on a case,” Dean told Bobby.
“Do I want to know?”
Dean thought about the full-color glossies scattered around the table. They looked like something that would be hanging above Jeffrey Dahmer’s sofa. “Nope. I’ll call you later.”
Very soon into the case, they determined they needed Castiel’s help. Dean’s feelings about being reunited with the angel were much more confusing than his feelings about being reunited with Sam. On the one hand, the nerdy little dude held a special place in his heart, and he was interested to find out how Cas had been faring as heaven’s new sheriff. On the other hand, Cas might take one look at him and Sam and know. And, because he was so poorly trained in etiquette, he’d probably say something about it out loud.
The thing about sleeping with your brother is that you can almost pretend it’s okay as long as you don’t talk about it.
With a sigh Dean sat down on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes. Praying to Cas was always an awkward affair, but without his current cell phone number - if he even carried a cell phone these days - there wasn’t really any other way to get his attention. “Uh, now I lay me down to sleep,” Dean began, pointedly ignoring Sam’s derisive snort. “I pray to Castiel to get his feathery ass down here.”
There was a swoosh of air and then Castiel was standing behind Sam, wearing the same suit and trenchcoat he’d been wearing for the past three years. “Hello.”
Fuck, Dean thought. Fuck, he knows.
But Cas didn’t know. He was acting weird about not having seen either of them in a year, but that was okay because Dean was feeling just as weird. It was one thing to have Sam back in his life - even a screwed-up version of him - because Sam had always been there. But Cas had never been associated with anything other than the apocalypse, and that wasn’t really something Dean was eager to start thinking about again.
Especially when Cas gave them the bad news that Raphael, one of the few archangels left, was trying to restart it, to erase everything Sam had sacrificed himself for.
And so Dean’s panic over whether or not the angels knew about the Winchesters’ horizontal tango was temporarily cast by the wayside. They had work to do.
Their case quickly turned from the stuff of Friday the 13th to Dogma. On the upside, Sam’s car got totaled, which - okay, yeah, it was kind of douchey to be happy about it, but it was an ugly, stupid car, and they really should have been saving gas money by carpooling anyway. On the downside, they’d kidnapped a kid, and then Cas stuck his arm inside him while the kid screamed bloody murder. Apparently, it was heaven’s way of copping a soul-feel. And then they met a bunch of new angels, each of whom was a bigger asshole than the one before.
At the top of that totem pole was Balthazar. He spoke with a phony British accent and wore skinny jeans. He had on a goddamned velvet blazer and rings and necklaces, and it was pretty hard to miss the little spark in his eye whenever he looked at Cas. Further proof, Dean decided, that Cas was the only angel who had a sex hang-up. This guy looked like he regularly time-traveled to Times Square, circa before Giuliani.
Only whatever judgments Dean might have made about the angel were skewed by the fact that he was buying and selling human souls like a crossroads demon. So, like a crossroads demon in a devil’s trap, they got him trapped in a ring of holy fire.
“Why you buying up human souls, anyway?”
“In this economy?” Balthazar said. “It’s probably the only thing worth buying. Do you have any idea what souls are worth?”
Ten years and then damnation to hell, Dean thought. Or, in his case, just the one year.
“Now, release me,” the angel ordered.
“Suck it, ass clown,” Dean responded, but Cas held up a palm for him to be quiet. Then he snuffed the fire out. “Cas, what the hell?”
“My debt to you is cleared,” Cas said to Balthazar.
“Fair enough,” Balthazar agreed, and then he vanished.
“Cas, you out of your mind?” Dean demanded, but then Cas was gone, too. He and Sam looked around the empty mansion. Not only were they left with about fifty unanswered questions, but they were also stranded. “Frigging angels. Come on!”
“House this big probably has three or four cars in the garage,” Sam suggested.
“Yeah, okay.”
“Hey, you want to check out the pool?”
Dean glanced over at his brother. “What?”
“I mean, the case is wrapped up, and we can’t go back to the motel anyway.” Sam shrugged, like taking off his ugly ass flannel shirt and going for a quick dip in a pool in the backyard of the house of some sleazy angel - who was probably squatting anyway - like all of that made sense. “Or, if you don’t want to, probably big beds. Soft. Get some rest before we head out. Whatever you want.”
The way he said rest didn’t mean sleep.
Dean scrubbed a hand over his face. “What I want is to get back to my car, hit the road, and look for our next case.”
“Okay,” Sam agreed. He pushed past Dean toward the expansive staircase. “But there’s nothing wrong with enjoying yourself for five minutes when a case ends.”
“Who taught you that?” Dean heard himself sniping. “Samuel?”
“No,” Sam replied. “You.”
Dean didn’t say anything on the way out, but he did pause in the kitchen long enough to jack a bag of fancy potato chips and a six-pack of microbrew. Payment for emotional trauma.
They were silent the whole drive back to Easter. Sam drove while Dean ate and drank and, after eating and drinking, dozed in a pleasantly buzzed state. It was too early in the morning for there to be much going on at the motel, so they were able to sneak under the police tape to round up their stuff.
Then they were left trying to figure out how to get it all into the car. Sam had acquired a lot of his own weapons over that year, and there wasn’t exactly enough space. At some point, maybe the next time they stopped for the night, they’d need to reorganize the weapons chest and decide what really needed to be kept. Yeah, that sounded like a much more productive use of their time than what they had done the last time they’d ended a case.
What Sam needed, Dean decided, was direction. He needed to be kept busy - eyes on the prize - and then he wouldn’t have time for whatever game he was trying to play.
Just before Dean slammed the trunk shut, Sam reached for a small white mask that was inside. It was part of Ben’s Halloween costume, which they’d been working on together since mid-August. Ben had decided he wanted to be a wendigo, which Lisa thought was cool and which Dean thought meant Ben looking through his stuff. As if she could sense a major freak-out on the horizon, Lisa had held up a DVD of Pet Sematary in a Netflix sleeve. “It’s too early to think about Halloween,” Dean had protested feebly. Later that night in bed, Lisa had persuaded him that Ben could trick-or-treat as a monster without it meaning anything other than being an ordinary kid, and once he’d cottoned onto the idea, Dean was kind of touched that Ben wanted his help with the costume.
“Wendigo?” Sam guessed.
“Yeah,” Dean answered nervously. He didn’t really like Sam holding the mask.
“Accurate.”
Dean felt relieved when Sam put it down. He slammed the trunk closed. “Hey, so, uh…are you okay?”
“Me?” Sam said, as if maybe Dean was talking to the four other guys standing around with them. “I’m great.”
Sam was smiling a little, with just a little bit of his dimples showing, and it was tempting to just let it slide. But neither of them was okay, Dean knew. People who were okay didn’t do the things they did. He was the older brother, the one who went to hell first. It was his job to make sure everything was right. If Sam wasn’t going to volunteer anything, then Dean was going to make him talk.
“Really? Because there’s been a few times you’ve got me wondering.”
“Come again?” Sam asked, with yet another one of those creepy head tilts.
Yeah, nice pun, Sammy. “Well, like where were you when Cas was giving the holy-taser treatment to that kid?”
“I was right there.”
“Really? Because, honestly, I felt like I was the only one raising a card.”
“Right. I mean, I was with you, but…I don’t know, we needed the intel.”
“Yeah, I know, but we tortured that kid to get it.” Sometimes it was best to just lay it all out there. “I just didn’t get the feeling you even cared.”
“You’re wrong,” Sam said with no conviction.
“I mean, I’m just trying to figure this out, because something’s different with you.” He looked at Sam. “You know that.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Yeah, I know.”
Dean hadn’t expected that. He certainly hadn’t been willing to admit anything was wrong after he’d been brought back. “Really?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’ve been hunting nonstop for the past year. Kind of out in the wild, you know? So, yeah, I suppose I’m a little rough around the edges.”
Willing to participate, yes, but not willing to address the big giant incestuous elephant in the room. Hunting, he wanted to tell Sam, did not make you suddenly want to fuck your brother. Hunting did not make you rip apart a family that was trying really hard to work. Hunting did not make you avoid calling your only family member for an entire year, even though you should have known with every fiber of your being that the one thing - the only thing - that would make that person able to sleep through the night was knowing you were okay.
Dean knew he had to press the issue, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at Sam while he said it. “Yeah, I get that, but what about the other stuff?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sam lied.
“Yes, you do,” Dean insisted. He sighed. “But it’s not your fault. You went to hell, Sam. And, believe me, I know what that does to a guy.”
“To you.”
Dean turned to face Sam, only to find that his brother had circled in front of the car and was closing in on him. “You know what it does to you. It tortured you, you know? I think it still does. But, Dean, I’m okay,” he insisted with a smile that showed his crooked teeth. “I’m alive, and I’m okay.” He took a few steps closer. “So, yeah, maybe I want to enjoy that.”
“So, what, you’re saying…it’s just about celebrating?”
“You make it sound cheap,” Sam pointed out. “Like it could just be anybody.”
This was not the direction Dean had planned for the conversation to go, but he was stuck falling right into Sam’s trap nonetheless. “Couldn’t it?”
Two more steps, and Sam had Dean pressed up against the driver’s side door. “Of course not,” he murmured, right in Dean’s ear. Dean shivered. Sam gave him a long look, their faces just an inch or two apart, their breath mingling, and Dean’s mouth opened all on its own. Then Sam gave him a tight smile and hustled back to the passenger side.
Once Sam was in the car, Dean took a second to collect himself. After a few deep breaths, he shook his shoulders out and then dutifully got behind the wheel.
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