Title: Making The Best Of It
Rating: Hard R, I think
Recipient:
blackrabbit42Disclaimer: It’s all LIES.
Genre: Sam/Dean, slash but not graphic
Wordcount: ~2000
Characters/Pairings: Dean/Sam
Spoilers: Supposed to be set kind of currently but doesn’t mention much that’s happened in canon. You might wonder who Garth is if you haven’t watched at least partway through S7.
Prompt: Snowed in playing board games. Hope you like it, honey!!
A/N: Extra special thanks to
etoile_etiolee for the lovely banner!
Surprisingly enough, Sam was the one who was fine. Sam, who insists on planning everything, who hates cold weather more than anyone else Dean had ever known, who didn’t have a single spontaneous bone in his body (well, maybe there was that one)…he was the one who was trying to get Dean to just calm the hell down. His logic was solid, even Dean had to admit that much. As they’d slept the previous night, somewhere around three and a half feet of snow had fallen. So now, they were stuck. The snow wasn’t going to disappear, the Impala sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to get back to a highway in these conditions, and it was ridiculous to take the risk of stumbling through a blizzard when they were already in a place that they knew had firewood and canned food and running water. The two of them weren’t going anywhere.
Once they realized the situation they were in, Sam had simply said, “At least we’ve got a roof over our heads and a way to keep warm until this blows over”.
Dean, on the other hand, busied himself pacing, cursing the damned souls of every witch in existence, and lamenting what all that snow could be doing to his Baby’s undercarriage, staring at the piled high snowdrifts as if he could melt them with his eyes.
It wasn’t supposed to go like that, though. If we can just sneak on back to the beginning of the story…
The Winchester brothers had planned to settle in to this old hunter’s cabin in Montana for a day or so. It was the closest place Garth knew of that he could direct them to, and they needed the rest. Dean had knocked his head - okay, so this witch (has Dean ever mentioned how much he hates witches?) had knocked his head into the corner of a stone table. He was actually unconscious for two or three minutes; long enough for Sam to dispatch the witch and immediately slide to his knees to check his brother’s pulse. It was there, strong and steady, but another 45 seconds went by before Dean opened his eyes, which was approximately 44 seconds too long for Sam’s comfort level. After calling Garth and asking about a place to stay, Sam only got more concerned when Dean didn’t give him any shit about it. No I’m fine or I’m not a delicate flower like you, Sammy or any of the other thousand things Dean said when he didn’t want anyone fussing over him. Or to admit that he’d been fairly severely injured by a twenty three year old woman who might have been 110 pounds if she was wearing heavy boots. Or to concede to the reality that sometimes even he had to just fucking stop every now and then. He’d even voluntarily handed the car keys over to Sam. So, a day. Dean had agreed to a day off the road and not looking for another hunt. Sam was convinced he could talk him into a day and a half if he timed their arrival just right.
And at first, Dean really was fine. Still a little loopy from getting his head smashed like that, maybe he’d just been too tired to argue. Of course, the possibility, though very slight, did exist that he recognized that he needed to take it easy for a little bit while the goose egg sized lump on his left temple shrunk to, oh, let’s say a golf ball sized lump.
The place was actually in good shape. It was just a one-room cabin, living/kitchen area combined with one tiny bathroom. No electricity, but it was on well water so they could shower and brush their teeth. Hell, they could even flush the toilet. (Sam was secure enough in his manhood that he freely admitted that taking a shit outside in the woods, under any conditions, was on his list of least favorite parts of living on the road.) No actual heater, but a large stone fireplace with a tall stack of split and aged firewood next to it. No stove or fridge, but a good bit of non-perishable foods and a perfectly serviceable propane fueled camp stove. And it wasn’t like they were moving in.
Sam got his brother into bed the minute they got there (okay, there was just one mattress on the floor but it’s not like they hadn’t been sharing a bed for quite some time now) and thankfully, Dean had fallen asleep right away. As soon as Dean was sleeping, Sam started going through the kitchen to make sure there was something they could eat for breakfast and lunch, and was surprised at the amount and variety of food in the pantry - canned soup, canned fruit, beef jerky, granola bars, bottled water, several cans of vegetables and oh my God, was that SPAM? It was pretty obvious which one of them would be eating what, though Sam was determined to get at least one serving of a fruit or vegetable (if you could count that canned shit as vegetables) into Dean before they left the next day. Stoking the fire, Sam changed into sweats and lay down next to Dean, holding him close because he could, since Dean was too out of it to yell at him about cuddling and being the little spoon. Under a thick blanket, in front of a fire and holding his lover, Sam fell asleep easily, feeling relaxed and comfortable.
That was not, however, how he woke up. There’s no way to wake up relaxed and comfortable when what had woken you was the sound of loud profanity.
“Son of a bitch!” Dean yelled, looking out the front window. “You have got to be fucking kidding me. Get up, Sam. Get your lazy ass out of that bed and come over here.”
Sam wasn’t really sure what could be so bad, it’s not like someone would come and steal the car out in the middle of nowhere. That was the only thing he could think of that would have Dean so pissed at whatever was outside that window. Better cursing and yelling than sobbing and rocking back and forth on the floor, which Sam thought would probably be Dean’s reaction if anyone ever really did steal the Impala.
Until he did as he was told, and looked outside for himself. There was no way for Sam to keep himself from repeating his brother’s patented “Son of a bitch!” Sam hated cold weather. And that was a lot of snow. Higher than the Impala’s wheel wells. He hadn’t seen snow like this in years, and Sam could have certainly been happy to go on forever like that. Looking up at a completely gray sky, no hint of sunlight, made him realize that they were, in fact, stuck here.
So, that’s where we join Sam finding his zen-like acceptance of their fate and attempting to get a little of it to rub off on his brother. As a distraction, Sam opened a closet over next to the bathroom and BINGO! Well, okay, so it wasn’t actually Bingo. But piled up on a shelf, there was a deck of cards, Battleship, Connect Four and Scrabble.
“Dean! Check it out, man! There’s games in here. We can eat some breakfast, then maybe play some games, help pass the time?”
By then, Dean had walked over to look into the closet, but he was still being pissy. “They’re all stupid games. Since when do we ever play board games, Sam? Seriously?”
“Since we’re stuck in this cabin for at least another day and it will help us pass the time. And it’ll be fun. Come on! You can’t be so mad that you don’t think it would be fun to sink my battleship?” Sam gave Dean that sweet little grin of his and the patent-pending fake-innocent look, taking a chance that it might turn his brother’s mood just a bit.
And it worked. “Yeah, I’ll sink your - Christ Sam, you suck so bad at sexual innuendo. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean”, Dean replied, but his voice was already growly and the mattress was right there and breakfast got delayed a little while.
As much as they’d both like to fill up every spare moment with sex, they weren’t exactly teenagers anymore and a man’s refractory period had to be taken into consideration. As did a man’s possible concussion. So, canned ‘fruit cocktail’ and granola bars it was, despite Dean’s desperate search through the kitchen cabinet for instant pancake mix or something a little more manly. Dean did, however, concede that they could play board games as they waited out their forced vacation. He had agreed to one day of rest anyway, (which Sam was happy to point out helpfully) so even if they hadn’t been snowed in, they would still have been there all day.
They kept the fire going nicely as they got bored with Connect Four in about half an hour and moved on to Battleship. That one was more fun, at least it took a little bit of strategy. But Sam ending up getting eye-roll-y because Dean kept winning easily and Sam cursed his brother’s ability to practically read his freaking mind. Which was why Sam refused to let them move on to poker as their next game. He was one hell of a player with strangers but he knew he didn’t have a chance against Dean.
Scrabble, though…now there was a good compromise. You might not guess it, but the two of them were almost exactly evenly matched in a game like that. Sam had the SAT and the college experience to have a pretty extensive vocabulary, but he’d had the advantage of spell-check in college and even some in high school. Dean might not have the wide range of vocabulary that Sam had, but he could spell almost anything. If he’d given a shit about school, he’d have won all of the spelling bees. It was some kind of innate talent he’d had since he was a kid. A talent that Sam had not been blessed with. This was about an even a match as they could find, as far as board games go.
Not surprisingly, the game got intense pretty quickly. They agreed that using names of creatures they’d encountered was allowed, but Sam kept spelling them wrong (and yes, Dean did, in fact, use their dad’s journal as a reference since none of this shit was in the dictionary). After a while, though, they just started making up all their own rules. Extra points for words that were related to sex. Dean got way ahead when he used Sam’s lame “F E L L” and turned it into “F E L L A T I O”. Eventually they were randomly picking letters from the little pouch and just spelling out sex stuff. Sam conceded defeat in a fit of uncontrollable laughter when Dean managed to fit “D I R T Y S A N C H E Z” down the side of the board.
After finishing their soup heated on the propane stove, Sam said, “So, guess taking a day off ended up being pretty cool after all.”
Pulling Sam over toward the mattress, Dean responded, “Maybe we can play some more games tomorrow, since it looks like we’re not leaving til this snow melts enough that I can get the car back onto the road.”
Sam flopped down on the mattress and looked up at Dean. “I think I saw Scattergories in there, too.”
“I can think of a better game than that, Sammy.”
Dean figured he could worry about his car’s condition in a day or two. They were gonna have a hell of a lot of fun in this place. He guessed a day or two of forced down time wasn’t so bad after all.