A Womb of His Own - 5/21
Masterpost
Dean Winchester did a lot of stupid things, made a lot of stupid choices, but he wasn’t actually stupid. Just willfully blind sometimes. Or detrimentally stubborn. He knew it was not healthy to have sex with his brother. That one was pretty obvious. And he knew there were all sorts of things about himself that he wasn’t allowing to surface because it was easier to just turn off his brain and let the Sasquatch with the smooth ass and veiny biceps sweet-talk him.
Said Sasquatch was, of course, not all there in the head. The sweet-talking, well, it wasn’t all that sweet. He saw Sam trying valiantly to cover it up, to act normal when he wasn’t. But, try as he might, there was no way for Dean to miss the signals.
Like the time Sam rammed into him as hard as he could without preamble. Dean’s legs bowed a little more than usual afterward, and, fuck you, he’d heard jokes about that since he was fifteen, but he tried to walk with some grace into the bathroom to clean up. Sam didn’t apologize. He didn’t seem to realize there was anything to apologize for.
Or like the time Dean moved to kiss Sam before they left their motel room one morning. It wasn’t something he’d even realized he was doing until Sam neatly dodged him. Sam made it look as natural as he could, but Dean could tell it was rejection. He tried not to let it sting, tried to remind himself that it was all part of Sam’s healing process and that it was his job to be supportive.
Sam was his brother, his hunting partner, and the guy that he had never really learned how to live without, so maybe he chose to pretend he didn’t see the way Sam looked at him during the day. At first it was hot; it was all about the pursuit and conquest. But after they’d been hunting together for awhile, Dean was ready to see some genuine affection coloring all that hunger. This was Sam, after all.
The point was that Dean couldn’t have been blamed for being so wrapped up in the moment that he didn’t see what was happening. He saw, all right. He just chose to ignore.
In hindsight that was probably not a good idea.
It wasn’t long after his late-night visit to her that Lisa told him to fuck off. She put it in slightly nicer terms, because deep down she was a classy chick with a good heart. But because Dean was cursed to hearing the truth, she was honest. Painfully honest.
It started when they took a case that involved people asking for and getting the truth - until they killed themselves because, let’s face it, the truth usually sucked.
Dean was taking a much-needed break from the devil with the Sam dress on. Break, of course, meaning drinking so much that you probably shouldn’t be driving, but since you’re so used to overdoing it, you pretty much drive better after five shots anyway. He tapped the rim of his glass and aimed a half-hearted smile at the friendly bartender.
“I thought you said you were working,” she reminded him.
“I’m working up to it,” he admitted, and she filled his glass anyway.
Two minutes later, she was spilling secrets about her fertility problems and her dependency on Oxycontin, and Dean knew he was screwed.
“Why is half the time you clean up a mess, you get dirty?” Bobby yelled at him when he called to see if the truth curse worked over the phone. For the record, Bobby was probably only pissed because Dean had interrupted an afternoon of watching Tori Spelling - and that was a confession Dean didn’t need to hear.
“This might not be a bad thing,” Dean realized. He could ask Sam point-blank what was going on with him. And then they could stop having sex and get Sammy right again. Or, god, what if it wasn’t Sam at all? What if it was Lucifer? Would a truth curse even work then? And did he even want to know if he’d been banging Satan? Maybe it would be better to continue in a state of ignorance, rather than finding out that he’d been having sex with Sam and it wouldn’t even help him.
Before he got a chance to talk to Sam, though, Lisa called. He’d already left her a million messages, so against his better judgment that today was not the day for him to try to explain his Pattinson impression, he answered.
Except he didn’t get a chance to do any explaining because Lisa just went on and on about what was wrong with him, like she’d been saving everything up for a year and was now merrily unleashing it all. “You’ve got so much buried in there, and you push it down, and you push it down. Do you honestly think that you can go through life like that and not freak out? Just, what, drink half a fifth a night, and you’re good?”
“Hey, you knew what you signed up for.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t expect Sam to come back.”
He wasn’t prepared for the amount of venom in that sentence. He hadn’t realized - she’d seemed so accommodating, and now to find out that she was jealous of Sam? Had she known what exactly she had cause to be jealous for? He thought about asking her because she would have had to answer truthfully, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.
“The minute he walked through that door, I knew it was over,” she continued. “You two have the most unhealthy, tangled-up, crazy thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You have no idea,” he couldn’t help muttering.
“As long as he’s in your life, you’re never gonna be happy.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dean agreed, surprising them both. He wondered if the curse worked on him, too, or if he was just done pretending. “Lis, I’m not gonna lie. Me and Sam, we’ve got issues. No doubt. But you and Ben -”
“Me and Ben can’t be in this with you.” She apologized and hung up. He knew there was no point in trying to call her back, even if he wanted to finish the sentence by telling her that they were the only uncomplicated, purely good things he’d ever had in his life.
When he met up with Sam a few minutes later, he couldn’t help telling him what had happened. He needed to get it off his chest. Old Sam would have offered a hug in sympathy, and Dean would have refused it because come on. But this guy, this walking shell of a man, merely shrugged and said, “That sucks. You want to get some tacos?”
Catching and killing the truth-god ended up being more like getting tied up and fucked over by her. Veritas was easy on the eyes, but that was little compensation for the way she knelt down next to Dean and asked him, “What do you really feel about your brother?”
The words were at war with Dean’s will to keep them inside. The words won. “I wanted to kill him in his sleep. I thought he was a monster. But now -”
“Now you think what?” Veritas prodded.
“Now I think we deserve each other.”
“What else?”
“I told myself I wanted out, that I wanted a family.”
“But you were lying.”
“No,” he swore. “But when Sam showed up -” Dean froze for a second, realizing that Lisa was right. He hadn’t realized it at the time, not even when he’d first slept with Sam, not even when Lisa had said they could try a long-distance thing. But she was right: the minute Sam walked back into his life, there was no room for anybody else. He’d always care for others, like Lisa and Bobby and Cas, but Sam would always come first. He said as much to Veritas and Sam.
Veritas smiled and swiveled her head toward Sam, causing all the charms and necklaces she was wearing to swish and tinkle. “Sam, is it true? Do you always come first?”
“No,” Sam answered automatically. “Usually Dean does.”
Everything stopped for a second. Sam was lying. Sam always came first, because Sam was the one who thought the two of them being together was hot, because it was what Sam wanted, because Dean was pretty fucking generous in the sack. Sam was pretty considerate, all things considered, and it was reasonably enjoyable, but anal really wasn’t in the top three list of ways Dean liked it. It made tough conditions for showing an o-face.
“You’re lying!” Veritas screamed at Sam, and things got a little ugly from there.
Once she was dead, Dean held a knife at Sam. “You are not my brother. What are you?”
“It’s me, Dean,” Sam kept repeating. “You want the truth? Here it is. God’s honest. There’s something wrong with me, really wrong. I’ve known it for awhile. I’ve lied to you, yeah. And I let you get turned by that vamp because I knew there was a cure, and I knew you could handle it - ”
“Handle it?” Dean growled. “I could have died! I could have killed Ben!”
“But you didn’t,” Sam reminded him. “And they were slowing you down. Look how much better we did on this case now that she dumped you.”
“Do you care about anything? At all?”
“I just don’t feel it.”
“Feel what?”
“Ever since I came back, I am a better hunter than I’ve ever been. Nothing scares me anymore because I can’t feel it.” The fucker was actually smiling; Dean had a sociopath on his hands. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I don’t care.”
“Don’t you care about anyone?” Dean couldn’t help asking. “About me? Us?”
Sam opened his mouth to say something, but the look in his eyes, like he knew he was going to disappoint Dean and kind of regretted it but not entirely, said everything Dean needed to hear. He didn’t even realize he was throwing punches until Sam was unconscious.
“Glory be to Cas,” Dean called to the ceiling, “who, I guess, is a son, and kind of a spirit. It’s Sam. I need your help. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. A world without end, which frankly sounds miserable. Amen.”
Castiel arrived within a minute, grumbling about being interrupted from whatever he was doing, but he stopped cold when he saw Sam tied to a motel room chair. “What happened to him?”
“Um, my fist,” Dean confessed. “He said - he could lie, and then he said he doesn’t feel things, and - I think he came back wrong.”
Castiel leaned in close to Sam. “He looks terrible. You did this?”
Dean stood, leaning against the wall on the far side of the room. He didn’t really need to tell everyone a second time. Yes, he’d beaten his brother up. Yes, he had an anger management issue. He’d been lied to for months by someone he thought he could trust. He’d been thrown to a vampire as a freaking experiment. He’d screwed somebody only to find out that it wasn’t sexual healing so much as manipulation. He’d gotten carried away. It wasn’t like Cas couldn’t fix it.
No, Dean was not justifying domestic violence. It was just that sometimes he wanted to bash Sam’s head in. Didn’t all brothers feel that way about each other?
Cas poked and prodded at Sam while asking him a barrage of questions. Sam tried to pull away, but Dean put him in his place. “You think there’s a clinic for people who pop out of hell wrong? He asks, you answer, then you shut your hole. You got it?”
“How much do you sleep?” Cas asked.
“I don’t,” Sam answered quietly.
That was freaky as fuck, but it certainly explained why it had been so hard to get the jump on him in the morning.
Cas rolled up his sleeve and stuck his fist inside Sam, the same way they’d seen him do with the kid a few months back. Sam bit down on Cas’s belt but still screamed, and even though Dean hated him right then, he couldn’t stomach hearing his brother in so much pain. Then Cas withdrew and rearranged his clothing.
“It’s his soul,” Cas announced. “It’s gone.”
Sam didn’t have a soul.
Dean had slept with a dude who didn’t have a soul. Dean had ridden around in the car with somebody who couldn’t even care about him if he wanted to - which he didn’t, because no soul. Suddenly the months of questionable morality made sense. The glint in Sam’s eye right before he would shove Dean into the mattress, the way he didn’t offer a hug when Lisa dumped him - the way he didn’t hug at all, not even before or after sex - the way he thought it was okay for them to have sex in the first place. Even if it left Dean feeling sick that Sam at least had an excuse, he was marginally reassured to know that the embarrassing time Dean actually asked, “Sammy, is something wrong? I mean, is it me?” could be written off because Sam didn’t have a soul.
Dean looked at his bloodied brother and then surged forward, but before he could land another punch on the lying traitor’s face, Cas had him pinned to a wall on the far side of the room.
That was the moment Dean decided that enough was enough. It was time to figure out how to get his real brother back.
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