FIC: Effect and Cause, Part 2/2
They don’t bother naming the monsters they run into. There are awful nightmare-things, with mottled green scale-skin and gaping maws of teeth. There are people, regular-looking, average people who suddenly spit venom or kill with a touch or set things on fire with their eyes, and Sam and Dean have to burn them or cut off their heads, because everything the Mother made is impervious to the old standbys - bullets, iron, salt, none of it works. Dean buys Zippos by the case, and Sam’s shopping cart always contains so much lighter fluid he gets suspicious looks and curious questions from cashiers.
They stagger back to whatever random motel or truck stop is closest, covered in blood or soot or both, and Dean lets Sam have the first shower while he lays salt lines at the door and cleans their knives and machetes. Sam brings clean clothes into the bathroom and struggles to put them on in the humid, sticky air, bumping his elbows on the towel rack and bruising his ass with the doorknob. Dean is standing in the middle of the room when Sam emerges, bleary eyed and shoulders slumped with exhaustion, too fastidious to sit on the bed covered in monster-filth. His clothes are stiff-dried with gunk and sweat, sticking to him, but he never strips in the bedroom, not once since that night by the pool.
Sam is under the blankets and pretending to sleep by the time Dean comes out, fully clothed. Sam knows that Dean only sleeps in his jeans and shirts and boots when he needs something to protect him even in sleep, when being without clothes is being naked, and he wishes he’d never said anything, had continued to pretend he didn’t know that Dean knew.
Sleep always comes slowly, stalking like a predator and springing only when it’s sure of its prey. Lying awake, listening to his brother breathe, Sam inevitably thinks about what it was like when it wasn’t like that, when Dean would come out of the shower in nothing but a towel slung low across his waist, skin slick and dripping. When he would jump on the bed and shake his head just to get Sam wet and pissed off, would smile like he’d gotten exactly what he wanted when Sam had his wrists pinned to the bed, would let his legs fall open and Sam settle in between them with practiced ease and want, would roll his hips suggestively, just as impetuous and impatient in bed as he was with everything.
Let it go, he tells himself, most nights. But he can’t.
*
Three hikers go missing in as many days outside of Boise, Idaho. The countryside is beautiful, flat wheat-colored plains meeting mountains in the far distance. It doesn’t take Sam and Dean long to find the small group of ... somethings... deep in the foothills. The creatures could have come straight from the mind of Stephen King, strange hybrids with forked tails and wings and long fangs, pointed ears, bulging eyes. They sleep during the day, hanging upside down like giant, terrifying bats, and there are human bones littering the rocky soil beneath the small copse of trees they nest in. Sam sees the set to Dean’s jaw and knows what he’s thinking right away. It’s pretty awful, but they don’t have many other options. Arrows and bullets will just piss them off, and they’ll never get close enough to take off their heads.
They spend the next day clearing vegetation and digging trenches. It’s someone’s land, Sam’s sure, but there’s a damn lot of it out here, all empty as far as the eye can see. No one will know anything’s amiss until they see the smoke. Dean wants to keep digging all night, but Sam points out they’re outnumbered by nocturnal monsters with very large teeth and claws and wings for fuck’s sake, and they go back to the motel to sleep for six hours; it’s late spring, and the days start early.
The area is pretty clean by three in the afternoon, and the weather forecast is predicting rain in the morning, so it’s got to be today. Sam’s chest aches from holding his breath as he and Dean strategically place accelerants under the creatures’ nest.
They’re set up at what they hope will be the outer boundary of the fire. Sam’s hand is already sweaty with nerves and exertion, and the shovel handle feels wet in his grip. His palm is going to blister. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asks.
Dean’s eyebrows go up. “A little late for that question, Sam.” He licks his upper lip, a quick flick of his tongue, anticipatory. Dean’s always been a firebug, been the first one to volunteer to light up the bones or set the charges. The prospect of shooting flaming arrows is probably doing things for his libido.
“I’m supposed to be the crazy one,” Sam mutters, but he trades the shovel for a bow anyway, arrows with gasoline-soaked cloth wrapped around their tips in a five gallon bucket. It takes about five seconds for Dean to start the fire, dry kindling catching the flame from Dean’s lighter. They watch the logs catch, popping and cracking as they split.
When the flame is high and healthy, Dean notches an arrow. He looks positively gleeful when he says, “This is going to be fun.”
*
Sam is so fucking done when they get back to the room that he doesn’t spare half a thought for propriety or embarrassment or not making both of them think about that. He strips off his clothes as he makes his way toward the bathroom, leaving his boots and socks by the door, his soot-stained shirts in a pile by the desk, his jeans and underwear on the cool tile floor. Dean is doing his usual thing, countless years of training and experience overcoming his fatigue, laying the lines and hanging sigils before letting himself rest. Sam will thank him later by going out to get dinner, something dripping with grease and cheese and salt.
Sam doesn’t bother to shut the door. He turns on the water as hot as it will go, which is plenty hot for a place that charges thirty bucks a night, and gets in under the spray. Miraculously, the pressure is good, a heavy, almost-painful rush of water that feels incredible on his aching muscles. Ash and dirt swirl in the water gathering around his feet - he couldn’t give less of a shit about a clogged drain, not when the temperature is scalding and the water pressure is so fantastic - and Sam’s almost smiling as he works the bar of Ivory soap into a lather between his fingers.
He loses time to pleasure, weariness and tension swirling down the drain like soap suds. He washes his hair twice, some no-name brand they got on sale at Wal-Mart that smells like kiwis, and he’s thinking about whether or not to save some hot water for Dean when the curtain jerks back and Dean climbs into the shower. Sam’s hands go limp and the soap drops somewhere around his left heel. Dean bends to pick it up, the soft tips of his spiky hair brushing against Sam’s upper thighs, his mouth disturbingly and enticingly close to Sam’s dick, half-hard and swollen from the few light pulls he’d given it while washing himself. He slaps the soap in Sam’s hand, and turns around, as though he’s expecting Sam to wash his back and the memories hit like a freight train, leaving Sam breathless and bereft: all the times they’d done this after a hunt in that other world, this exact thing, because Dean loved to have his back rubbed, washed, stroked. His skin was so sensitive there, and his muscles were always tense, always in need of Sam’s hands, working out the knots and loosening the fibers.
Here and now, Dean’s back is beautiful, a single bead of water sliding down his spine, following the curve, pooling in the slight concavity just above the rounded, firm curve of his ass. The back of his neck is smooth, and Sam remembers the taste of the place just beneath his hairline, the place he loved to kiss and nip while Dean writhed, so responsive and easy to please. Sam swallows and tries not to acknowledge the insistent throbbing of his cock, now fully hard and demanding.
Dean looks over his shoulder at Sam, lips pursed in an impatient moue. “What’s the hold up, Sammy?” His voice is hoarse, absolutely wrecked with exhaustion, and his eyes are cloudy and confused, but he smiles lazy and inviting when Sam’s arousal catches his attention. “Oh, I get it. You’ll do mine if I do yours?”
Sam barks out a disbelieving, pained laugh, and the harsh sound seems to bring Dean around. The flush starts at the base of his throat and runs up his cheeks, all the way to his hairline, a wildfire of mortification. Dean looks like he’s about to swallow his tongue trying to get something out, and as much as Sam thinks they should talk about this, that they’ve needed to talk about this and now is the best time because they can’t exactly avoid the obvious, he can’t do it. Not when they’re both exhausted and Sam can’t think properly and Dean looks so scared.
“Hey, man, I know I was taking a while, but this is going a little too far,” Sam says, grabbing blindly for his towel. “I’ll just. I’ll just leave you to it.”
Sam flees the bathroom, and shuts the door behind him because Dean needs some time and the illusion of privacy to get himself back together. Sam dries off on auto-pilot, the cheap motel towel doing nothing to soak up the water. He puts his underwear on while he’s still wet, grimacing at the drag of fabric on moist skin. He’s still half-hard when he puts in his jeans, his cock an obscene bulge, and he wills it to go down.
He can’t stop thinking about the water sluicing along Dean’s skin, and it’s not a memory from an alternate reality so distant it might as well have been a dream. It’s here and now; Sam doesn’t want that Dean, he wants his Dean. The one that’s been to Hell, been battered and bruised and used, fucked up and messy and perfect and his.
And Dean… Dean only wants Sam when he’s wrecked with fatigue, completely out of it; he’d recoiled the instant he realized what he was doing.
Maybe wanting Dean, to be with him, wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Balthazar, but it doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch from where they’ve always been, codependent and connected on a level that no one else has ever come close to reaching. From what he remembers, things weren’t that different there. Ellen and Jo were alive, and the Apocalypse was a distant threat rather than a constant reality, but the basics of Sam and Dean’s lives were essentially the same. Mom’s death, Dad’s crusade, Dean’s deal. All the elements that brought them together there are here as well, and Sam can see hundreds of moments that could have ended with kisses instead of fists.
He can see hundreds of moments more, in the future, stretching in front of them like sun-baked highway, nothing but possibilities, and his chest aches with how much he wants that, and how much Dean doesn’t.
*
The shower incident seems to trigger something in Dean, like he suddenly remembers that he’s a very hot guy who hasn’t gotten laid in at least six months. Every pretty girl, even some not to pretty ones, in every diner, every gas station, every witness, gets Dean’s unique brand of sexual attention, this impossible combination of utterly sleazy and temptingly innocent. He knows how to use his eyes, and his pretty mouth, and the size and shape of his body to get people to look at him, and want, and Sam endures it. Traditionally, Sam doesn’t do well with other people touching his things, so endures is the word. His jaw hurts from clenching it, from keeping his mouth shut, and his head throbs constantly with high blood pressure. His evolved brain gets that Dean isn’t his, isn’t gonna be his, but his lizard brain and his stupid, idiotic heart have other ideas.
One night, in Birmingham, Dean suggests they take advantage of being in civilization, for once. He puts on jeans that are a size to small, a black t-shirt with sleeves that end right at the perfectly defined line of his bicep, and the expensive aftershave.
Sam doesn’t want to go, isn’t a masochist, but he’s not willing to let Dean go without him, either.
*
The problem with being in the South is that they’re in the South. It’s fucking hot outside, and inside, it’s all glistening sweat on skin, long, lean, tan legs in denim skirts and shorts, plaid cowboy shirts tied up and knotted, showing all varieties of belly, all of them equally enticing when you’re Dean Winchester, apparently.
Sam winces when Dean slaps a hand on his back, surveying the bar’s patrons with approval, already nodding his head to the beat of the pounding cock rock blaring from speakers about the size of refrigerators. “My kind of place,” he says, signalling the waitress for a beer as soon as he snags them one of the few free tables.
“Right,” Sam says. He doesn’t know what he’s doing here. He should have stayed in the room. He can’t drink, and he can’t watch the mess Dean is about to make of himself, and he really can’t watch Dean go home with some gorgeous girl, or girls.
“Aw, come on Sammy, don’t be like that,” Dean says, an old teasing line that falls as flat as his eyes.
“Have fun,” Sam says, standing abruptly. There’s a pool table in the corner, and Sam figures he might as well make some money while Dean is working his magic.
Dean’s “Oh, I will,” is almost lost to the crowd noise and the music, but Sam catches it, and it hurts.
The thing is, Sam figures they need this. Dean needs to prove to himself that in this reality he doesn’t want to fuck his brother, and Sam needs to have the point hammered home - that Dean doesn’t want Sam the way Sam wants Dean, that somewhere between Balthazar’s Titanic alternate universe and Cas breaking Sam’s wall, his wires got crossed, and they can be uncrossed, with time and effort.
Sam settles onto a barstool in the corner near the cue rack, having called next game, and watches Dean do his part. The woman he’s talking to is cute, an inch or two over five feet with short, spiky brown hair and a taut, athletic body. Dean looms over her, bending down to hear what she’s trying to say as she stretches up to her tiptoes. Dean is smiling, his head turned in Sam’s direction while he says something that makes the brunette throw her head back and laugh.
Sam takes a deep, fortifying breath, and turns away from his brother.
*
He doesn’t win much. He’s thinking too much about what Dean is doing - who Dean is doing - to concentrate on working a mark. He runs the table twice in a row, and gets no comers for the next game. The guys he’d won the first twenty off of are standing in the corner glaring, and Sam decides he’s done with this failed experiment.
The music is slower now, more bass. Dirtier. It pounds through Sam’s body and makes his want worse, and he is so, so tempted to leave without bothering to tell Dean, but he can’t do that to him, even if it means seeing someone’s arms wrapped around Dean’s neck, pressing hips to hips.
It’s not as bad as that, but it’s not good, either. Dean’s still at the bar, with the pixie-like brunette, which means she’s interesting enough to keep his attention beyond the obvious motivations. Sam can’t resist pressing his hand against the small of Dean’s back, a touch that could mean hey, I’m here, when it really means mine.
Dean looks up and grins, big and open, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Hey! Sammy! Stephanie, this is my brother Sam.” He gestures back and forth between them, like their introduction is vitally important. He looks pleased when they both nod and smile politely.
Sam spreads his fingers on Dean’s lower back, letting his brother’s heat soak into his palm, feeling the solid mass of his muscles, indulging the possessiveness that is snarling inside his head. “Hey, Dean. Pool was a bust. I’m just gonna head back to the room, okay?”
“You want me to come with you?” Dean asks. His eyes are glassy and his cheeks are flushed, signs that he’s well on his way to being completely drunk, and hell yes, Sam wishes that Dean was coming home with him instead of taking that random girl to the backseat of the Impala, where he’ll have to smell their combined scents for the rest of the day on their way to Kentucky.
“No, it’s fine. I’ll be alright,” he says, sliding his hand up Dean’s back and squeezing his shoulder. “You have fun.”
*
Sam isn’t asleep, not really - even after all this time he can’t go into a deep sleep without Dean in the room - but he’s hovering in that half-wakeful place where you might go to sleep at any moment when he hears Dean’s key in the door.
Sam looks at the clock; it’s early, just past midnight, and though it’s been awhile, Sam remembers that this is not Dean’s usual M.O. He likes to take his time, especially with the ones he smiles at the way he’d smiled at Stephanie tonight.
“Hey,” he says, not sure if Dean can hear him over the rattle of the air conditioner. Sam sits up when Dean doesn’t respond, makes out the lines of Dean’s body in the light seeping under the door from the parking lot. His hands are braced against the dresser, and his head is bowed.
“Dean?”
“Sam,” Dean says. His voice is rough, something burning in it like whiskey going down.
“Are you okay?” Sam blurts.
“No,” Dean says, and that one word is so wrecked that Sam is out of bed and next to his brother in an instant, hands roving all the usual places, checking for breaks and blood.
It takes a moment for Sam to register that Dean is batting at his hands, trying to get him to stop. “Would you knock it off? Damn it, Sam, quit it!”
“What’s wrong?” Sam asks, his hand wrapped around Dean’s wrist, refusing to relinquish the point of contact until he knows Dean is physically, at least, okay.
Dean tugs and pulls to no effect, and his shoulders slump when he gives up. Sam takes advantage and drags him closer, using his other hand to tilt Dean’s chin up so Sam can see his face. Dean’s pupils are huge in the scant light, just a ring of green that looks like quicksilver. His color is still high, his lips are swollen and bitten red, and there’s a small, dark bruise forming on his neck. Sam’s hand clenches instinctively, tightening on Dean’s jaw, and Dean whimpers, the black bleeding to almost demon-dark. It takes everything Sam has not to throw him down on the bed and follow through with what he knows Dean likes, use his hands to hold Dean down and get him to make just that noise over and over again.
He doesn’t do that, but he doesn’t let go, either. He nudges Dean, a reminder that he’s asked a question and Dean isn’t going anywhere until Sam gets an answer.
“It’s your fault,” Dean says. “I was with that girl - I bet you remember her name, huh? I don’t - and she was all over me, so into it. She was a biter, Sam.”
Sam swallows, torn between jealousy and lust. “Yeah, I noticed.”
“So, she’s a biter, and you know I like that - you really do know I like that, which is so beyond fucked up - and she’s spread across the backseat with her hand down her panties, and it’s not like I can’t get it up, because I’m not a monk and it’s a very, very pretty picture,” Dean says, licking his lips, as if he can still taste her there, or wanted to taste her then. “But I don’t. God, I’ve turned into you. I’ve gone emo.”
“You don’t what, Dean?” Sam tries not to get his hopes up, he really does, but his heart is not getting the message. He’s jumping ahead already, anticipating what this means, where it could go.
“I don’t want her,” he says, penitent, confessing. “I don’t want anybody that isn’t you, can’t even be with anybody who isn’t you.” He sounds so defeated and miserable that any elation Sam might have felt at Dean actually admitting it doesn’t have a chance to take shape.
“Is that so terrible?” Sam says, abruptly noticing the chill in the room and feeling vulnerable and ridiculous in the face of Dean’s unhappiness, too aware of his white boxer briefs and gray socks, bright against his skin.
“Yes, Sam! It’s fucking terrible! You’re my brother,” he says, spitting out the word like a piece of rotten fruit. “You want to know why I didn’t make you stop touching me when you were all one-flew-over-the-cuckoo’s-nest? Because I liked it, Sam. Because I wanted it. Because I knew I couldn’t and you didn’t know better, so I let you. Now tell me that’s okay? What’s okay about that?”
“Dean-”
“Nothing is okay about that,” Dean says, self-loathing written all over him. He jerks his hand out of Sam’s grip, and goes to his bag, coming up with a whiskey bottle.
Sam wants to have something to say, the words to make Dean understand that what they have - what they could have - isn’t wrong, and that what he did wasn’t selfish, but he isn’t that person anymore. He feels boiled down, reduced, less volume but more substance.
He acts without letting himself think, following his instincts because that seems to be what works best for him these days.
Sam approaches Dean slowly, giving Dean the space to escape if that’s what he needs to do, but Dean doesn’t bolt, not when Sam steps up so close that Dean’s heat warms his skin, not when Sam lowers his head and presses his lips against Dean’s shoulder where it meets the strong line of his neck, not when Sam noses his ear and whispers, “It’s okay.”
*
They hit the road again, leaving Alabama for the sultry heat of the Atlantic coast, following leads that get fewer and further in between, and there’s not a little pride in that, that they’re making a difference; saving people, hunting things. They have the time now to enjoy the travel, checking out tourist traps and pulling over just to have a beer and enjoy the scenery.
After Alabama, Sam stops stopping himself.
When he wants to touch Dean, he does. He puts his hand on the back of Dean’s neck while Dean drives, he lets his legs fall apart and their knees touch while they’re waiting for takeout, he stands beside Dean at the sink in the mornings, brushing his teeth while Dean shaves, and bumps their almost-bare hips together.
When he wants to look, he does. He watches unabashedly as Dean licks his fingers clean after ribs at that place in South Carolina, letting the heat in his eyes show until Dean blushes and starts using the moist towelettes instead. He doesn’t turn away when Dean starts coming out of the bathroom in nothing but a towel again, licking his lips as water pools in the vee framing Dean’s lean hips. He loves to see Dean in the morning, messy hair and pillow-creased cheeks, or at night, when the circles under his eyes look like bruises and his stubble glints gold in the lamplight.
He doesn’t push it any further than that, understands that in some ways Dean has had less time to come to terms with this than Sam, because he was alone with the knowledge of it for so much longer. But the touches and the looks seem to be enough for both of them now. Sam is able to do what he’s wanted to do all along - with a few notable exceptions - and Dean is slowly, slowly (god, so slowly) beginning to grasp that Sam isn’t nuts, isn’t confused about what reality they’re in, doesn’t want the Dean from another world, doesn’t need Dean to protect him from himself, or from what they could have.
*
It’s not a pretty beach. Driftwood litters the grainy sand, itself a dull, unappealing gray-brown, and trash has washed up with the tide. Clouds are rolling in like waves, but the wind hasn’t picked up yet, and the strip of land is deserted, too rugged and rural to attract tourists on a Tuesday afternoon.
Sam is having his second beer since Dean decreed that drinking a very small amount of an admittedly mind-altering substance wouldn’t completely crack him up. It tastes good and goes down easy. Sam squints at Dean, who looks relaxed and healthy and happy leaning against the Impala’s flank with his boots crossed. He hisses when the cool glass bottle makes contact with his newly split lip (and bruised ribs, goddamn things were fast and strong, but their heads came off clean), but that doesn’t stop him from guzzling a few gulps. Sam watches his throat work, admires the stretch of his lip around the mouth of the bottle. He’s so used to the sensation of wanting and not being able to take that it’s almost sexually satisfying just to look. Damn Dean, turning him into a pervert.
Dean notices Sam’s stare, and smiles. It’s the one Sam’s been seeing a lot lately, a little bit cocky, a little bit shy. It seems to be saying soon.
Sam’s okay with that. He’s got memories to hold him over until Dean’s ready.
*
He doesn’t have to wait long. Dean puts his empty bottle into the cooler, and gets right up into Sam’s space. He cups Sam’s jaw, the cold metal of his ring a stinging contrast on Sam’s skin.
“Is this good?” Dean asks, and Sam nods, wants to say are you kidding me? but doesn’t have the air in his lungs to make a sound. He wants to keep his eyes open, too, but the instant Dean’s mouth touches his, they slip closed, his other senses taking over, his body no longer under his control.
Dean’s lips are soft and moist, and he tastes like beer. His body slots against Sam’s in a warm, hard line of muscle, and Sam’s hands fall to Dean’s hips while his heart slides into his stomach.
Sam remembers this, and yet he doesn’t. It’s different, and better, so much better, Dean’s hot mouth, just a tease of tongue, Sam trapped between Dean’s weight and the Impala. It’s familiar, and completely new, and very, very good.
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