FIC - Lamp
title: Lamp.
pairing: Dean/Sam
rating:NC-17
w/c: ~2600~
a/n: OK, so this is part introspection, part schmoop and part PORN. But it was inspired by Kim Richey’s “A Place Called Home”, which I heard while watching an Angel rerun, and intended to turn into an Angel fandom fic, but then it turned into this. So, yeah.
summary: Dean’s thinking about the future.
I’m not really sure why I got it and Sam didn’t. There is a constant need in me, move, move, move. I can’t get settled. There’s never been a place I can be, not even at the salvage yard, where after a few days I didn’t feel this primal urge. Get back on the road. Find someplace else. Then, after that, find another one.
He didn’t grow up any different than I did. Just hard-wiring into our brains, I guess, mine was ok with the move, move, move, and his wasn’t. Sam has always had this instinctive need to put down roots somewhere, make friends, feel like he had a place that he could call home. Packing up and moving on to the next town was always something that made him feel this hurt, a pain that was strong enough for me to feel it for him. He never got a home, of course, until he left me, left dad, left our life and made one of his own. As angry as I wanted to be when he did it, I couldn’t fault him for it. Like I said, the way our brains were just wired, he needed it. At the same time, I’d always preferred having not looking back, no one to say good-bye to.
I never needed it. The thought of stopping somewhere had never even occurred to me. Life on the road, moving from place to place in the Impala, doing what we did, hunting things, moving on…it was what I knew, what I thought I always wanted. Sure, I’d thought about it. Not a lot, before. But now, now that Sam and I were - fuck- whatever the hell we were, when the lines between brothers and lovers had been blurred, I could understand a little bit better why he felt the way he did, and it made me feel like it was something a part of me might want too.
But we were hunters. Hunters couldn’t put down roots. Hunters didn’t stay in one place for too long. Bobby had managed to pull it off, in the middle of nowhere, keeping his work to mostly research and giving a hand to other folks when they needed help, but his salvage yard and his home belonged to him, and that’s where he stayed, unless something came up that required him to leave. Usually, that meant that Sam or me, or both of us, had gotten into a jam and he had to come pull us out of a fire, which he never hesitated to do. We’d lost our father years ago, and Bobby was the closest thing we had to family except each other. Our dad was long gone, Ellen and Jo were gone. For Sam, before this all started between the two of us, all he knew was that his Jess was gone. Seemed like most everyone we’d ever known was gone.
We were the stereotypical “rolling stones”, never given a chance to land on our feet long enough to have something of our own, except each other. And having each other had moved, slowly, over time, from having each other's backs to actually having each other, growing from tension-relieving handjobs in a motel or in the car, to sleeping in the same bed, to full-on sexual relations, to realizing that we were in love. That right there had been one hell of a long road, but we’d traveled it together. Now even Bobby knew, though he almost certainly suspected from the beginning, maybe even before Sam or I even knew.
I’d thought about it. Really, I had. A chance to settle down. Get a job. Punch a clock. Have someone looking over my shoulder, someone I didn’t know, checking behind me to see if I’d done my work satisfactorily. Collecting a paycheck instead of sending off fake credit card applications or hustling pool or seeing how much cash Sam could come up with hotwiring and stealing cars or taking suckers for everything in their wallet in a game of darts.
All of those things. Was it worth the trade-off? Could I just be still? Could I earn an honest living? Sam was college-educated but had no work experience, unless you counted picking locks and killing monsters. I only had a GED but I had usable life skills like carpentry and auto mechanics. But a place called home? A real live home?
So, the trade-off was the question. I looked at Sam’s face, almost a decade after this - thing - between us had started, as he eyed this pretty small town on the eastern seaboard with its rare-book store and run-down diners and affordable rental rates on apartments and duplexes. I watched him pack his duffle, as he always did, when we were ready to leave for the next hunt. He was getting well up into his thirties, and I was staring down the barrel at forty in just a few short months. Sure, there were a few NFL kickers who had lasted this long, but in our line of work it was even more rare.
“Sam, stop a minute, will you?”, I said, breaking out of my thoughts. He looked up, and for the first time I saw something I very rarely saw there in his eyes. Sam looked weary. Hell, he almost looked older than me.
“What’s the matter, Dean?”, he asked, not stopping the orderly arrangement of his clothes and toiletries in his bag. All right, then. So I walked over and grabbed his hands, forcing him to stop. Sam looked down at me with tenderness, glancing his lips lightly across my forehead. “Dean. I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. What is it?”
I asked him to sit down with me, and in return I got the furrowed brow and narrowed eyes that was my brother’s tell for when he was bracing himself for bad news. I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile as we sat on the side of the bed and I automatically reached for his hand as I began to speak. “Sammy, I - I guess I’m just wondering, do you ever think about how long we’re going to keep doing this?”
His eyes flashed a look of confusion, fear, panic, one right after the other. “You mean this?”, gesturing between the two of our bodies. “Us?”, he asked, his voice shaky and low.
Christ, what the hell was wrong with me? Phrasing it that way…wait, what the hell was wrong with him, thinking I could possibly have meant what he thought?
“No, God, Sammy, no, you know we’re forever. You’ve got to know that. I’m talking about the job. Seems like we started out so long ago, we were just kids, it’s insane that we’ve made it this far, don’t you think? Some days it feels like we’re pushing our luck.”, I said, not really sure where to go next with this conversation. I knew that if he thought for a second that what I was about to suggest was some big sacrifice I was making just for him, he’d refuse.
Sam looked relieved, but still confused. “Dean, we’ve never really known anything else. It’s pretty rare for you to even consider getting off the ride, man. Did something happen?”, he asked.
“Yeah, dude. Something happened. We started getting old, in case you hadn’t noticed”, I responded, giving him a sideways little grin and leaning into his shoulder. “Sometimes when we’re in a real nice little town like this, I think…what would it be like? Not that we couldn’t still take on the occasional hunt if it’s closeby, but what would it be like if we weren’t always winding our way around the country, if we could get, you know, jobs? A house? A lamp? Maybe an end table or a dresser that belongs to us?”
The more I talked about it, the more I realized how much I really did want it. That little piece of me that had considered the possibility of settling down somewhere had taken on a life of its own while I wasn’t watching.
“I’m not sure what you want me to say, Dean”, Sam replied, sounding even more tired than he looked, “You know I always wanted us to have a place of our own someday, but I haven’t really let myself think much about when that ‘someday’ would be for a long time. Makes it harder to move on when you’re always thinking that you want to stop.” He looked away then, but not before I caught another flash in his eyes. Shame. Guilt. He didn’t want to be the one to give up on saving people, and he didn’t want me to think he was weak or afraid. And that one was a doozy. I mean, I’d seen it and heard it a thousand times but he’d just never get it through his thick skull that he was the strongest, bravest man I ever knew.
“Look, Sam, it’s not going to be easy. The transition or the practical aspects of making it happen. But I’m ready to let the younger hunters step up, I’m ready to let our lives be more about us and less about other people, and if that sounds selfish, fine. But we’ve paid our dues. We’ve done enough. More than enough. We deserve something of our own and we shouldn’t feel guilty for wanting it, damn it.” I let out a deep breath that I didn’t even realize I’d been holding, laid my head on his shoulder, and he pulled me close with one gigantic arm.
When I looked up at him, his beautiful hazel eyes were glassy with unshed tears.
“So”, he asked, “you want a lamp, huh?”
We both started to laugh, and our half-cuddle turned to a full on embrace, Sam kissing the top of my head and, of course, talking. “This is going to be a lot of work. We’ll need really good new IDs, and those will take time. A fairly decent amount of money to get started. Either a middle of nowhere place or a really big city. I don’t know what the hell I’ll do to earn a living. Unless you want me to just stay home and make sure I keep up my good looks and cook you dinner every night? Because I could live with that.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t live with your cooking every night, or I’ll waste away to nothing, and if you think I’m going to spend the rest of my life in some freaking metropolis, we clearly haven’t met. Quit with the to-do list already, okay? This isn’t going to happen overnight. I’m just saying I want it to happen, and I know you do too, so let’s please try to get the ball rolling, and in the meantime, we’ll just keep going until we figure it out.”
Sam snuggled his head into the crook of my neck and kept kissing. And kept talking. “So while we keep going, I can ask Bobby to start working on the identity documentation issue, right? And spend a little time looking for a nice town with decent weather?” Sam hated winter, and I hated summer, so there’d have to be a compromise made there, for sure. “Hey, do you think all my experience as a fake FBI agent could get me a job as a real FBI agent?”, he asked, giggling and still kissing, now along my cheek, over my jaw line, down the side of my neck. “I’d totally be good at it.”
I decided I’d stop his insistence on the verbal to-do list by capturing his lips with my own, and pulling my fingers through his hair, which was still so soft and so fucking floppy and goofy, and, for the record, had more gray in it than mine did, despite our very slight age disparity. That shut him up for a minute or five. Until he started rucking up the hem of my t-shirt, and shoving his duffel unceremoniously onto the floor as we fell together onto the bed. Once we’d both been relieved of all our clothes, Sam started moving lower with the kisses, across my chest, licking at my nipples, sucking dark little spots into my belly, finally putting one strong hand onto my left hip as he sucked down my entire length into his throat, a feeling that in all these years never ceased to make me shudder to my very core. I could feel myself moving closer toward the edge, the heat in my spine moving outwards, and I pulled him off my cock, giving him a look that needed no accompanying words. He reached down to the floor to retrieve the lube that he’d thrown into his bag earlier and coated his fingers with it, pushing into me with one, then two, getting me ready to take him inside. Sam almost never got right down to it, as I often did with him, he waited until I was pushing back, fucking myself against his fingers, shaking and writhing every time he hit that spot that made me see stars and I couldn’t stop the few tiny words that I was capable of speaking from making their way out of my mouth.
“Sammy, please, come on, fuck me baby boy, get inside me, please, I need - “, that was all I had, and luckily, all it took, because his fingers were replaced with his cock almost immediately, and even with my eyes closed I knew he was grinning that big dimpled smile that he always had when I finally gave in and begged him for it. Once he was all the way inside, he set our rhythm and put his hand between us, jerking my cock in time with his thrusts, pulling us both closer to orgasm with every movement. Mine crept up on me so fast I was almost surprised when I felt my own cum shooting onto my belly and over Sam’s hand. Another four, five, hard thrusts into my ass and Sam was coming too with a gasp and a shudder.
And you know, here’s the awesome thing about fucking your brother. Well, one of the awesome things. For a minute we did the whole snuggle up and kiss and bask in the afterglow thing. Then I got to say “Dude, come on, get your giant ass the hell off me before you asphyxiate me to death”, and he got to say, “Fine, jerk, you got jizz all over me anyway, I’m going to clean up”, and walked into the bathroom, wiping himself clean, then throwing the wet washcloth at my head, and I called him a bitch, and everything was just fine.
Eventually we got dressed and went back to packing up, headed toward the next hunt we’d already lined up before this life-changing conversation took place. I was amazed at how realizing something that I didn’t even know I wanted all that much made me feel younger, lighter, happier. Partly due to the realization itself, and partly, of course, because I could practically see the rays of sunshine dancing off my baby boy’s face while he sat in the passenger seat of the Impala with a notepad and a pen, brain working furiously and notes made in margins and arrows pointing from one bullet point to another. When he finally set the notepad on his lap, I snuck a look over at the list he was making.
At the top, in his neat all-caps print, was a heading. “DEAN WANTS A LAMP”.
And fuck all if that didn’t just sum everything up right there.
pairing: Dean/Sam
rating:NC-17
w/c: ~2600~
a/n: OK, so this is part introspection, part schmoop and part PORN. But it was inspired by Kim Richey’s “A Place Called Home”, which I heard while watching an Angel rerun, and intended to turn into an Angel fandom fic, but then it turned into this. So, yeah.
summary: Dean’s thinking about the future.
I’m not really sure why I got it and Sam didn’t. There is a constant need in me, move, move, move. I can’t get settled. There’s never been a place I can be, not even at the salvage yard, where after a few days I didn’t feel this primal urge. Get back on the road. Find someplace else. Then, after that, find another one.
He didn’t grow up any different than I did. Just hard-wiring into our brains, I guess, mine was ok with the move, move, move, and his wasn’t. Sam has always had this instinctive need to put down roots somewhere, make friends, feel like he had a place that he could call home. Packing up and moving on to the next town was always something that made him feel this hurt, a pain that was strong enough for me to feel it for him. He never got a home, of course, until he left me, left dad, left our life and made one of his own. As angry as I wanted to be when he did it, I couldn’t fault him for it. Like I said, the way our brains were just wired, he needed it. At the same time, I’d always preferred having not looking back, no one to say good-bye to.
I never needed it. The thought of stopping somewhere had never even occurred to me. Life on the road, moving from place to place in the Impala, doing what we did, hunting things, moving on…it was what I knew, what I thought I always wanted. Sure, I’d thought about it. Not a lot, before. But now, now that Sam and I were - fuck- whatever the hell we were, when the lines between brothers and lovers had been blurred, I could understand a little bit better why he felt the way he did, and it made me feel like it was something a part of me might want too.
But we were hunters. Hunters couldn’t put down roots. Hunters didn’t stay in one place for too long. Bobby had managed to pull it off, in the middle of nowhere, keeping his work to mostly research and giving a hand to other folks when they needed help, but his salvage yard and his home belonged to him, and that’s where he stayed, unless something came up that required him to leave. Usually, that meant that Sam or me, or both of us, had gotten into a jam and he had to come pull us out of a fire, which he never hesitated to do. We’d lost our father years ago, and Bobby was the closest thing we had to family except each other. Our dad was long gone, Ellen and Jo were gone. For Sam, before this all started between the two of us, all he knew was that his Jess was gone. Seemed like most everyone we’d ever known was gone.
We were the stereotypical “rolling stones”, never given a chance to land on our feet long enough to have something of our own, except each other. And having each other had moved, slowly, over time, from having each other's backs to actually having each other, growing from tension-relieving handjobs in a motel or in the car, to sleeping in the same bed, to full-on sexual relations, to realizing that we were in love. That right there had been one hell of a long road, but we’d traveled it together. Now even Bobby knew, though he almost certainly suspected from the beginning, maybe even before Sam or I even knew.
I’d thought about it. Really, I had. A chance to settle down. Get a job. Punch a clock. Have someone looking over my shoulder, someone I didn’t know, checking behind me to see if I’d done my work satisfactorily. Collecting a paycheck instead of sending off fake credit card applications or hustling pool or seeing how much cash Sam could come up with hotwiring and stealing cars or taking suckers for everything in their wallet in a game of darts.
All of those things. Was it worth the trade-off? Could I just be still? Could I earn an honest living? Sam was college-educated but had no work experience, unless you counted picking locks and killing monsters. I only had a GED but I had usable life skills like carpentry and auto mechanics. But a place called home? A real live home?
So, the trade-off was the question. I looked at Sam’s face, almost a decade after this - thing - between us had started, as he eyed this pretty small town on the eastern seaboard with its rare-book store and run-down diners and affordable rental rates on apartments and duplexes. I watched him pack his duffle, as he always did, when we were ready to leave for the next hunt. He was getting well up into his thirties, and I was staring down the barrel at forty in just a few short months. Sure, there were a few NFL kickers who had lasted this long, but in our line of work it was even more rare.
“Sam, stop a minute, will you?”, I said, breaking out of my thoughts. He looked up, and for the first time I saw something I very rarely saw there in his eyes. Sam looked weary. Hell, he almost looked older than me.
“What’s the matter, Dean?”, he asked, not stopping the orderly arrangement of his clothes and toiletries in his bag. All right, then. So I walked over and grabbed his hands, forcing him to stop. Sam looked down at me with tenderness, glancing his lips lightly across my forehead. “Dean. I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. What is it?”
I asked him to sit down with me, and in return I got the furrowed brow and narrowed eyes that was my brother’s tell for when he was bracing himself for bad news. I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile as we sat on the side of the bed and I automatically reached for his hand as I began to speak. “Sammy, I - I guess I’m just wondering, do you ever think about how long we’re going to keep doing this?”
His eyes flashed a look of confusion, fear, panic, one right after the other. “You mean this?”, gesturing between the two of our bodies. “Us?”, he asked, his voice shaky and low.
Christ, what the hell was wrong with me? Phrasing it that way…wait, what the hell was wrong with him, thinking I could possibly have meant what he thought?
“No, God, Sammy, no, you know we’re forever. You’ve got to know that. I’m talking about the job. Seems like we started out so long ago, we were just kids, it’s insane that we’ve made it this far, don’t you think? Some days it feels like we’re pushing our luck.”, I said, not really sure where to go next with this conversation. I knew that if he thought for a second that what I was about to suggest was some big sacrifice I was making just for him, he’d refuse.
Sam looked relieved, but still confused. “Dean, we’ve never really known anything else. It’s pretty rare for you to even consider getting off the ride, man. Did something happen?”, he asked.
“Yeah, dude. Something happened. We started getting old, in case you hadn’t noticed”, I responded, giving him a sideways little grin and leaning into his shoulder. “Sometimes when we’re in a real nice little town like this, I think…what would it be like? Not that we couldn’t still take on the occasional hunt if it’s closeby, but what would it be like if we weren’t always winding our way around the country, if we could get, you know, jobs? A house? A lamp? Maybe an end table or a dresser that belongs to us?”
The more I talked about it, the more I realized how much I really did want it. That little piece of me that had considered the possibility of settling down somewhere had taken on a life of its own while I wasn’t watching.
“I’m not sure what you want me to say, Dean”, Sam replied, sounding even more tired than he looked, “You know I always wanted us to have a place of our own someday, but I haven’t really let myself think much about when that ‘someday’ would be for a long time. Makes it harder to move on when you’re always thinking that you want to stop.” He looked away then, but not before I caught another flash in his eyes. Shame. Guilt. He didn’t want to be the one to give up on saving people, and he didn’t want me to think he was weak or afraid. And that one was a doozy. I mean, I’d seen it and heard it a thousand times but he’d just never get it through his thick skull that he was the strongest, bravest man I ever knew.
“Look, Sam, it’s not going to be easy. The transition or the practical aspects of making it happen. But I’m ready to let the younger hunters step up, I’m ready to let our lives be more about us and less about other people, and if that sounds selfish, fine. But we’ve paid our dues. We’ve done enough. More than enough. We deserve something of our own and we shouldn’t feel guilty for wanting it, damn it.” I let out a deep breath that I didn’t even realize I’d been holding, laid my head on his shoulder, and he pulled me close with one gigantic arm.
When I looked up at him, his beautiful hazel eyes were glassy with unshed tears.
“So”, he asked, “you want a lamp, huh?”
We both started to laugh, and our half-cuddle turned to a full on embrace, Sam kissing the top of my head and, of course, talking. “This is going to be a lot of work. We’ll need really good new IDs, and those will take time. A fairly decent amount of money to get started. Either a middle of nowhere place or a really big city. I don’t know what the hell I’ll do to earn a living. Unless you want me to just stay home and make sure I keep up my good looks and cook you dinner every night? Because I could live with that.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t live with your cooking every night, or I’ll waste away to nothing, and if you think I’m going to spend the rest of my life in some freaking metropolis, we clearly haven’t met. Quit with the to-do list already, okay? This isn’t going to happen overnight. I’m just saying I want it to happen, and I know you do too, so let’s please try to get the ball rolling, and in the meantime, we’ll just keep going until we figure it out.”
Sam snuggled his head into the crook of my neck and kept kissing. And kept talking. “So while we keep going, I can ask Bobby to start working on the identity documentation issue, right? And spend a little time looking for a nice town with decent weather?” Sam hated winter, and I hated summer, so there’d have to be a compromise made there, for sure. “Hey, do you think all my experience as a fake FBI agent could get me a job as a real FBI agent?”, he asked, giggling and still kissing, now along my cheek, over my jaw line, down the side of my neck. “I’d totally be good at it.”
I decided I’d stop his insistence on the verbal to-do list by capturing his lips with my own, and pulling my fingers through his hair, which was still so soft and so fucking floppy and goofy, and, for the record, had more gray in it than mine did, despite our very slight age disparity. That shut him up for a minute or five. Until he started rucking up the hem of my t-shirt, and shoving his duffel unceremoniously onto the floor as we fell together onto the bed. Once we’d both been relieved of all our clothes, Sam started moving lower with the kisses, across my chest, licking at my nipples, sucking dark little spots into my belly, finally putting one strong hand onto my left hip as he sucked down my entire length into his throat, a feeling that in all these years never ceased to make me shudder to my very core. I could feel myself moving closer toward the edge, the heat in my spine moving outwards, and I pulled him off my cock, giving him a look that needed no accompanying words. He reached down to the floor to retrieve the lube that he’d thrown into his bag earlier and coated his fingers with it, pushing into me with one, then two, getting me ready to take him inside. Sam almost never got right down to it, as I often did with him, he waited until I was pushing back, fucking myself against his fingers, shaking and writhing every time he hit that spot that made me see stars and I couldn’t stop the few tiny words that I was capable of speaking from making their way out of my mouth.
“Sammy, please, come on, fuck me baby boy, get inside me, please, I need - “, that was all I had, and luckily, all it took, because his fingers were replaced with his cock almost immediately, and even with my eyes closed I knew he was grinning that big dimpled smile that he always had when I finally gave in and begged him for it. Once he was all the way inside, he set our rhythm and put his hand between us, jerking my cock in time with his thrusts, pulling us both closer to orgasm with every movement. Mine crept up on me so fast I was almost surprised when I felt my own cum shooting onto my belly and over Sam’s hand. Another four, five, hard thrusts into my ass and Sam was coming too with a gasp and a shudder.
And you know, here’s the awesome thing about fucking your brother. Well, one of the awesome things. For a minute we did the whole snuggle up and kiss and bask in the afterglow thing. Then I got to say “Dude, come on, get your giant ass the hell off me before you asphyxiate me to death”, and he got to say, “Fine, jerk, you got jizz all over me anyway, I’m going to clean up”, and walked into the bathroom, wiping himself clean, then throwing the wet washcloth at my head, and I called him a bitch, and everything was just fine.
Eventually we got dressed and went back to packing up, headed toward the next hunt we’d already lined up before this life-changing conversation took place. I was amazed at how realizing something that I didn’t even know I wanted all that much made me feel younger, lighter, happier. Partly due to the realization itself, and partly, of course, because I could practically see the rays of sunshine dancing off my baby boy’s face while he sat in the passenger seat of the Impala with a notepad and a pen, brain working furiously and notes made in margins and arrows pointing from one bullet point to another. When he finally set the notepad on his lap, I snuck a look over at the list he was making.
At the top, in his neat all-caps print, was a heading. “DEAN WANTS A LAMP”.
And fuck all if that didn’t just sum everything up right there.