Fic: And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds (SPN, Sam/Dean, NC-17)
This is my spn_j2_xmas fic! Almost in time for the original deadline, and totally in time for the extended one. \o/
Title: And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Not my characters, no money made
Summary: Communication is never simple.
Notes: written for earthquakedream, who asked for "Sam/Dean; post s5, they beat Lucifer somehow. Sam ends up deaf after and has to adjust somehow, so Dean gets them a house so they can settle down and figure it out. Lots of angst dealing with issues that happen in s5." It's low on s5 angst, but I hope you like it! Betaed by the ever-fabulous arlad and chash (♥). Any remaining mistakes are my own. Title from Wilfred Owen. ~3000 words.
It’s quieter after they avert the apocalypse, civilian life rolling on, and probably no one even misses the angels and demons mixing in. In September, Dean finds himself sitting on the front porch of a little Sears catalogue house that still had its For Rent sign up when they moved in (the real estate agent looked more kindly on their squatting when Dean gave her a charming grin and three months rent in cash, with a couple hundred thrown on top for her trouble). He can hear cars passing on Main Street (honest to God Main Street) a block to the east. There’s one squirrel chasing another up a tree and chittering wildly, and Dean thinks he could hear the swish of their tails if he listened hard enough. He blasted Metallica all the way to the grocery store this morning and all the way back, just to keep out the quiet.
Sam, on the creaky porch swing the same mossy green as Dean’s Adirondack chair, doesn’t know any of this. He’s contorting his hands over a third sign language book from the public library and frowning. Dean watches until Sam looks up and pins him with one of those sad, half-hearted smiles he’s been practicing nearly as much as his signing lately.
“I’m going inside,” Dean says, jerking his thumb at the front door because Sam’s lip reading is hit or miss. The screen door creaks, then slams, but Dean doesn’t turn to see whether the resounding crack has caught Sam’s attention. He doesn’t want to know that it hasn’t.
He sits down on the sagging couch and turns on the TV. He’s not sure where Sam stole the cable, but it gets a hundred mindless channels and he’s grateful. They always leave the captions on, and Dean sometimes watches Sam mouthing along with the words on the screen, relearning his big, stupid vocabulary by sight, his eyebrows drawn together in concentration.
***
It’s not that Sam can’t talk just because he can’t hear. He’d had 25 years practice running his mouth before he lost his hearing, and he knows how the words should feel in his throat, on his tongue. But volume is harder. He only knows he’s whispering, “Have you seen the book I was reading this morning?” when Dean leans in to hear better. And whispering is still better than shouting. In the beginning he shouted. Of course, in the beginning he had reason to shout.
He’d been fucking terrified, when the ringing drowned out everything else, rolling over the gunshots and the hoarse insistence of Dean’s voice calling him back. Sam pulled his hands away from his ears when the world finally went quiet and found them wet with blood. It turned out that Dean fared better with the voice of the heavenly hosts than Sam did. Go figure.
He didn’t hear the argument Dean had with Castiel after, but he recognized the shape of “You had better fucking do something,” coming out of his brother’s mouth, and just as easily known what the slump of Castiel’s shoulders meant. Sam felt calm then, a cold calm like thin ice before a step breaks through. He fell asleep in the silence, and when he woke up, Dean was sobbing into his hair and Sam was furious. He yelled as hard as he could, straining his throat, but no matter how much he tried, there was no sound. Dean’s devastated look was enough to finally choke him into silence. “I’m sorry, Sammy,” Dean mouthed, words Sam knew deeper than language.
Sam slept again in Dean’s arms, and when he woke the second time, Dean had a plan. Which had eventually brought them here, a shabby but solid suburban house in a shabby but cheerful suburban town where the volunteer firemen’s barbecue is a big-time social event. Maybe it’s retirement, Sam thinks, though Dean insists it’s just a break until Sam’s back on his feet. Not that Sam thinks his feet are the problem.
His hearing is better now, a little. There are certain frequencies he can hear, he guesses, little bits of the world filtering in through the quiet. Every once in a while he imagines he can hear Dean’s voice, low and gruff and familiar-but he heard Dean’s voice when he was at Stanford, too, an echo that would probably follow him to the ends of the earth.
He watches Dean’s mouth move as they argue over how Dean treats Sam’s library books, tries to ignore the look on Dean’s face that says Sam’s voice is never going to sound right again. This is their life now, however much Dean wants to imagine it’s just a temporary setback. Sam is determined to get used to it.
***
Sam’s out. He took the car, and Dean feels jittery and helplessly protective at the thought of his little brother navigating without the help of his ears, talking to shop clerks in his soft voice and watching their unfamiliar mouths shape words he may or may not understand.
Dean takes a wrench to the dripping bathroom sink to distract himself, but with his head in the darkness of the plumbing, he just has more time to think about every single mistrustful thing he’s said to Sam over the past two years. As guilty as he feels when he thinks about his time in hell, as much as it never stops hurting, he doesn’t have to look the souls he tortured in the face every day. Or imagine them confused and disoriented at the checkout desk of the public library. Every day Dean wishes he could apologize better than he can, give Sam back some of what they lost.
***
Dean must think Sam doesn’t know that he’s jerking off, this morning like almost every other, back to Sam and hips twitching beneath the afghan. But Sam’s deaf, not stupid. If Dean doesn’t want to touch him anymore, then that’s not Sam’s choice. But it makes sharing a bed and a house in a town where no one knows they’re brothers cold comfort after the end of the world that wasn’t.
He lets the rhythm of Dean’s hips rock him, stares past the curl of Dean’s shoulders and out the window into the pale daylight, orange-splotched leaves shuddering on the trees. He wants to slide his hand around Dean’s hip and help, hold the heat of Dean’s cock in his hand, stroke the tensed muscle of his thighs, the soft weight of his balls. He wants to feel the hitch of Dean’s breath against his lips and lick the slick bitterness of Dean’s come from his fingertips. But if Dean said, “Stop,” Sam couldn’t hear it, and the thought of that keeps him still, his eyes resting on the shiver and slump of Dean’s shoulders as he comes, following the rise and fall of Dean’s slowing breath.
They used to talk about how it would be afterwards, in the cold nights when strategizing ways to kill the devil got old. Dean wanted a hot tub and a circular bed and all the porn trappings. “We can fuck for days straight, Sammy. Not a thing to bother us.”
“Yeah, because everyone else will be dead,” Sam replied, but he got a little giddy thinking about it, imagining a time when he and Dean could just be together, not heroes, not vessels, just them. Sam watches through slitted eyes as Dean rises and heads for the bathroom. What he imagined hadn’t been anything like this.
***
Throughout the fall, they circle each other in the house. Dean keeps his head down and invents chores while Sam studies sign language and practices lip reading from old episodes of ER on TNT. Because knowing how it looks when someone says, “28 ET tube, stat” is really going to help him in his everyday life. Julianna Marguiles is hot, but Dean’s pretty sure that’s not what Sam’s looking at.
***
Sam can’t tell what Dean’s saying when he’s drunk. He forms his words with the kind of sloppy deliberation that makes it harder rather than easier to read. He pointed this out to Dean the first and only time he got drunk at home, and Dean muttered something Sam couldn’t decipher and went to sulk on the porch. Now he goes out to bars some nights, comes home smelling sourly like beer, and if Sam’s awake when he gets there, they both pretend he’s not.
In the morning, Dean is contrite, frying up eggs and bacon and leaving enough coffee for Sam in the coffeemaker that is one of the few luxuries of their new home. Sam can’t tell what Dean’s saying when he has his mouth full either, but usually he gets the gist.
***
One night just after the first frost of the year, Sam wakes up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, head echoing with the cacophony of the last fight, Dean screaming incantations and then screaming for Sam. Sam remembers what it sounded like, so when he wakes up, it’s still there, washing over him, swamping him in fear. He doesn’t know what sound he makes now that wakes Dean up, but in the darkness Dean’s suddenly kneeling over him, arms bracketing Sam’s shoulders, mouth moving too fast for Sam to read in the dim light. He lies still, looking up into Dean’s face, and after a while the words Sam can barely see stop coming, and Dean’s just looking at him, considering his next move. Sam reaches up a hand, curving it around Dean’s ribs, and Dean shivers and closes his eyes before letting himself settle into Sam’s body. They don’t fuck anymore, and Sam doesn’t know if that’s going to change, but right now, Dean’s giving him exactly what he needs, and Sam feels full to brimming with gratitude.
***
They haven’t fucked in three months. For the first one of those, Sam was alternately raging and crying, and Dean wasn’t much better off. But since then, it’s just been them in the quiet. Dean thinks about it like a living thing sitting in between them. It makes it manageable somehow, if the quiet is like a creature he can salt and burn, or banish, even if he doesn’t know the right incantation yet. He can’t imagine this is permanent, won’t let himself contemplate a never again where easy banter and fighting over the radio is concerned. He talks behind Sam’s back sometimes, cracks bad jokes just to see if this time Sam will groan and turn to tell him off. The fact that Sam never does just makes it feel as though the quiet is squeezing tighter. Like maybe this really is a fight Dean can’t win.
They took a day off, just one, allowed themselves 24 hours to pretend they were free before stepping up for a fight they both knew they might not come back from. Bobby bought them as much protection as he could, and Dean talked Castiel into pulling a Jedi mind trick on their behalf. “We’re exhausted,” Dean explained. “What the fuck good do you expect Sammy and me to do when we can barely stand up straight?”
Cas had known what that meant, the grim, pinched expression on his face saying just how much good he thought it would do to let Dean fuck his brother one last time. But it was what Dean needed, what Sam needed, in the end, that one day to act like they were still people and not chess pieces. They charged a night in the fanciest hotel in a bland suburb to someone else’s credit card, and Dean spent a good hour teasing Sam to the brink of madness, working him over with tongue and teeth and slippery fingers. They had been fumbling for months, rubbing off against each other when they weren’t too stiff or drained or bloody to want to, but it had been too goddamn long since Dean got to make his baby brother moan like that, stroke him loose and wet on three fingers before working into him with his cock. Cas couldn’t understand that, but when Sam rolled them over and started to ride him, there was no place Dean needed to be more.
And afterwards, they’d gone out and won, against heaven and hell and all the odds, and now the world was quiet. Dean wonders now why he’d ever thought that would be a good thing, when the closest he’s been to Sam since the summer is when Sam woke up snotty and sobbing from a nightmare.
***
In December, they argue over which way the toilet paper roll should face. It’s almost like it used to be, easier than anything’s been in months, like the first uneasy thaw of spring. Dean looks at Sam from under his raised eyebrows, and there’s a sarcastic twist to his mouth Sam would recognize a mile away. Sam folds his arms and rolls his eyes in reply, and it’s not like it even matters all that much which way the toilet paper faces, but that’s not what’s important now. They’re talking, arguing, calling each other stupid names, and Sam trusts that he knows every movement of Dean’s mouth, doesn’t hesitate in his replies. They’re standing in the living room, and Sam keeps taking steps forward, and Dean is watching him warily but not stepping away.
Sam kisses Dean first, has to because Dean won’t, not even when they’re standing toe to toe. He hates keeping his eyes open, but he needs to know what Dean’s thinking, and he won’t be able to hear Dean’s broken denials. Only then there aren’t any broken denials to hear because Dean doesn’t pull away, he just kisses Sam back on a shudder and a deep breath, and Sam feels almost sick with gratitude. Because this is all he’s wanted for weeks, and Dean is letting him have it, returning it in kind. Dean’s mouth opens hot and slow against his, and Sam drinks him in, smoothing his tongue in between Dean’s parted lips, and letting his eyes fall shut just for a second, dizzy in the silent darkness where he can feel every heartbeat under his skin. The world narrows down to the slick rhythm of their mouths together, the shiver running down Dean’s spine where Sam’s hand strokes.
The nearest horizontal surface is the couch, and Sam barely fits on it by himself, but he’s willing to squeeze for the sake of this, if only Dean doesn’t stop kissing him. But then Dean does, starts forming urgent words against Sam’s lips, and Sam can’t hear them, can only feel the changing shape of Dean’s mouth under his. He pulls back, tries to focus his attention on what Dean’s saying rather than the smudged softness of his lips.
“I’m sorry,” Dean says, and then he wipes a hand down his face and Sam can’t tell what comes next. He grabs Dean’s hands, twists their fingers together and pulls them down to his sides. “I don’t know what to do,” Dean tells him. “I don’t want it to be like this.”
“Well, this is how it is,” Sam replies, and Dean flinches, from the words or from the volume of Sam’s voice, Sam can’t tell. “This is how it is,” he repeats in a whisper, a breath away from Dean’s mouth, Dean’s sweaty palms clenched tight to his own. “And I still want you.”
Dean’s trembling. Sam feels it down in the tips of his fingers all the way up to the stiff hunch of Dean’s shoulders. “Sammy,” Dean says, the shape of his name both a prayer and a plea. And then Sam kisses him again, and there are no more words, at least not as far as Sam can tell, just breath and heat and more and more warm skin as he pulls at Dean’s clothes.
They stumble into the bedroom, and Sam licks along Dean’s collarbone as Dean tugs at the hem of Sam’s shirt. Once they’re both naked, it’s even easier than arguing, tumbling into the big bed, making it shudder into the wall, Dean’s hands on Sam’s ass pulling him down. It’s been so long, but every inch of Dean’s body feels right under Sam’s hands, and he presses his fingers to Dean’s throat to feel the sounds Dean’s making, changing vibrations under his skin.
Sam’s cock rests warm and firm against Dean’s belly, smearing thin fluid across Dean’s abs, and this is going to be enough, Sam knows already, just the building heat where their bodies meet. Dean shudders under him and shuts his eyes, and Sam rolls his hips down harder, falling into a new rhythm. Dean’s cock is swollen and full, and Sam wants it in his mouth, but he can’t stop looking at Dean’s face, the wet pink of his lips, the crease of his eyelids. He takes his hand off Dean’s voice box, strokes over his cheek and up into his hair. Dean’s eyes fly open, and Sam watches him come, feels the hot spatter of it against his stomach, Dean’s fingers tightening on Sam’s ass.
“Come on, Sammy,” he sees Dean say, “Come-” and then Sam does, has to shut his eyes against the rush of it, the sharp twist of sensation in his belly. Dean holds onto him in the disorienting silence before Sam can open his eyes again, and Sam lets a smile curl up at the corners of his mouth. They can live like this, and Sam thinks maybe he can even make Dean believe that.
~fin~
Title: And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Not my characters, no money made
Summary: Communication is never simple.
Notes: written for earthquakedream, who asked for "Sam/Dean; post s5, they beat Lucifer somehow. Sam ends up deaf after and has to adjust somehow, so Dean gets them a house so they can settle down and figure it out. Lots of angst dealing with issues that happen in s5." It's low on s5 angst, but I hope you like it! Betaed by the ever-fabulous arlad and chash (♥). Any remaining mistakes are my own. Title from Wilfred Owen. ~3000 words.
It’s quieter after they avert the apocalypse, civilian life rolling on, and probably no one even misses the angels and demons mixing in. In September, Dean finds himself sitting on the front porch of a little Sears catalogue house that still had its For Rent sign up when they moved in (the real estate agent looked more kindly on their squatting when Dean gave her a charming grin and three months rent in cash, with a couple hundred thrown on top for her trouble). He can hear cars passing on Main Street (honest to God Main Street) a block to the east. There’s one squirrel chasing another up a tree and chittering wildly, and Dean thinks he could hear the swish of their tails if he listened hard enough. He blasted Metallica all the way to the grocery store this morning and all the way back, just to keep out the quiet.
Sam, on the creaky porch swing the same mossy green as Dean’s Adirondack chair, doesn’t know any of this. He’s contorting his hands over a third sign language book from the public library and frowning. Dean watches until Sam looks up and pins him with one of those sad, half-hearted smiles he’s been practicing nearly as much as his signing lately.
“I’m going inside,” Dean says, jerking his thumb at the front door because Sam’s lip reading is hit or miss. The screen door creaks, then slams, but Dean doesn’t turn to see whether the resounding crack has caught Sam’s attention. He doesn’t want to know that it hasn’t.
He sits down on the sagging couch and turns on the TV. He’s not sure where Sam stole the cable, but it gets a hundred mindless channels and he’s grateful. They always leave the captions on, and Dean sometimes watches Sam mouthing along with the words on the screen, relearning his big, stupid vocabulary by sight, his eyebrows drawn together in concentration.
***
It’s not that Sam can’t talk just because he can’t hear. He’d had 25 years practice running his mouth before he lost his hearing, and he knows how the words should feel in his throat, on his tongue. But volume is harder. He only knows he’s whispering, “Have you seen the book I was reading this morning?” when Dean leans in to hear better. And whispering is still better than shouting. In the beginning he shouted. Of course, in the beginning he had reason to shout.
He’d been fucking terrified, when the ringing drowned out everything else, rolling over the gunshots and the hoarse insistence of Dean’s voice calling him back. Sam pulled his hands away from his ears when the world finally went quiet and found them wet with blood. It turned out that Dean fared better with the voice of the heavenly hosts than Sam did. Go figure.
He didn’t hear the argument Dean had with Castiel after, but he recognized the shape of “You had better fucking do something,” coming out of his brother’s mouth, and just as easily known what the slump of Castiel’s shoulders meant. Sam felt calm then, a cold calm like thin ice before a step breaks through. He fell asleep in the silence, and when he woke up, Dean was sobbing into his hair and Sam was furious. He yelled as hard as he could, straining his throat, but no matter how much he tried, there was no sound. Dean’s devastated look was enough to finally choke him into silence. “I’m sorry, Sammy,” Dean mouthed, words Sam knew deeper than language.
Sam slept again in Dean’s arms, and when he woke the second time, Dean had a plan. Which had eventually brought them here, a shabby but solid suburban house in a shabby but cheerful suburban town where the volunteer firemen’s barbecue is a big-time social event. Maybe it’s retirement, Sam thinks, though Dean insists it’s just a break until Sam’s back on his feet. Not that Sam thinks his feet are the problem.
His hearing is better now, a little. There are certain frequencies he can hear, he guesses, little bits of the world filtering in through the quiet. Every once in a while he imagines he can hear Dean’s voice, low and gruff and familiar-but he heard Dean’s voice when he was at Stanford, too, an echo that would probably follow him to the ends of the earth.
He watches Dean’s mouth move as they argue over how Dean treats Sam’s library books, tries to ignore the look on Dean’s face that says Sam’s voice is never going to sound right again. This is their life now, however much Dean wants to imagine it’s just a temporary setback. Sam is determined to get used to it.
***
Sam’s out. He took the car, and Dean feels jittery and helplessly protective at the thought of his little brother navigating without the help of his ears, talking to shop clerks in his soft voice and watching their unfamiliar mouths shape words he may or may not understand.
Dean takes a wrench to the dripping bathroom sink to distract himself, but with his head in the darkness of the plumbing, he just has more time to think about every single mistrustful thing he’s said to Sam over the past two years. As guilty as he feels when he thinks about his time in hell, as much as it never stops hurting, he doesn’t have to look the souls he tortured in the face every day. Or imagine them confused and disoriented at the checkout desk of the public library. Every day Dean wishes he could apologize better than he can, give Sam back some of what they lost.
***
Dean must think Sam doesn’t know that he’s jerking off, this morning like almost every other, back to Sam and hips twitching beneath the afghan. But Sam’s deaf, not stupid. If Dean doesn’t want to touch him anymore, then that’s not Sam’s choice. But it makes sharing a bed and a house in a town where no one knows they’re brothers cold comfort after the end of the world that wasn’t.
He lets the rhythm of Dean’s hips rock him, stares past the curl of Dean’s shoulders and out the window into the pale daylight, orange-splotched leaves shuddering on the trees. He wants to slide his hand around Dean’s hip and help, hold the heat of Dean’s cock in his hand, stroke the tensed muscle of his thighs, the soft weight of his balls. He wants to feel the hitch of Dean’s breath against his lips and lick the slick bitterness of Dean’s come from his fingertips. But if Dean said, “Stop,” Sam couldn’t hear it, and the thought of that keeps him still, his eyes resting on the shiver and slump of Dean’s shoulders as he comes, following the rise and fall of Dean’s slowing breath.
They used to talk about how it would be afterwards, in the cold nights when strategizing ways to kill the devil got old. Dean wanted a hot tub and a circular bed and all the porn trappings. “We can fuck for days straight, Sammy. Not a thing to bother us.”
“Yeah, because everyone else will be dead,” Sam replied, but he got a little giddy thinking about it, imagining a time when he and Dean could just be together, not heroes, not vessels, just them. Sam watches through slitted eyes as Dean rises and heads for the bathroom. What he imagined hadn’t been anything like this.
***
Throughout the fall, they circle each other in the house. Dean keeps his head down and invents chores while Sam studies sign language and practices lip reading from old episodes of ER on TNT. Because knowing how it looks when someone says, “28 ET tube, stat” is really going to help him in his everyday life. Julianna Marguiles is hot, but Dean’s pretty sure that’s not what Sam’s looking at.
***
Sam can’t tell what Dean’s saying when he’s drunk. He forms his words with the kind of sloppy deliberation that makes it harder rather than easier to read. He pointed this out to Dean the first and only time he got drunk at home, and Dean muttered something Sam couldn’t decipher and went to sulk on the porch. Now he goes out to bars some nights, comes home smelling sourly like beer, and if Sam’s awake when he gets there, they both pretend he’s not.
In the morning, Dean is contrite, frying up eggs and bacon and leaving enough coffee for Sam in the coffeemaker that is one of the few luxuries of their new home. Sam can’t tell what Dean’s saying when he has his mouth full either, but usually he gets the gist.
***
One night just after the first frost of the year, Sam wakes up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, head echoing with the cacophony of the last fight, Dean screaming incantations and then screaming for Sam. Sam remembers what it sounded like, so when he wakes up, it’s still there, washing over him, swamping him in fear. He doesn’t know what sound he makes now that wakes Dean up, but in the darkness Dean’s suddenly kneeling over him, arms bracketing Sam’s shoulders, mouth moving too fast for Sam to read in the dim light. He lies still, looking up into Dean’s face, and after a while the words Sam can barely see stop coming, and Dean’s just looking at him, considering his next move. Sam reaches up a hand, curving it around Dean’s ribs, and Dean shivers and closes his eyes before letting himself settle into Sam’s body. They don’t fuck anymore, and Sam doesn’t know if that’s going to change, but right now, Dean’s giving him exactly what he needs, and Sam feels full to brimming with gratitude.
***
They haven’t fucked in three months. For the first one of those, Sam was alternately raging and crying, and Dean wasn’t much better off. But since then, it’s just been them in the quiet. Dean thinks about it like a living thing sitting in between them. It makes it manageable somehow, if the quiet is like a creature he can salt and burn, or banish, even if he doesn’t know the right incantation yet. He can’t imagine this is permanent, won’t let himself contemplate a never again where easy banter and fighting over the radio is concerned. He talks behind Sam’s back sometimes, cracks bad jokes just to see if this time Sam will groan and turn to tell him off. The fact that Sam never does just makes it feel as though the quiet is squeezing tighter. Like maybe this really is a fight Dean can’t win.
They took a day off, just one, allowed themselves 24 hours to pretend they were free before stepping up for a fight they both knew they might not come back from. Bobby bought them as much protection as he could, and Dean talked Castiel into pulling a Jedi mind trick on their behalf. “We’re exhausted,” Dean explained. “What the fuck good do you expect Sammy and me to do when we can barely stand up straight?”
Cas had known what that meant, the grim, pinched expression on his face saying just how much good he thought it would do to let Dean fuck his brother one last time. But it was what Dean needed, what Sam needed, in the end, that one day to act like they were still people and not chess pieces. They charged a night in the fanciest hotel in a bland suburb to someone else’s credit card, and Dean spent a good hour teasing Sam to the brink of madness, working him over with tongue and teeth and slippery fingers. They had been fumbling for months, rubbing off against each other when they weren’t too stiff or drained or bloody to want to, but it had been too goddamn long since Dean got to make his baby brother moan like that, stroke him loose and wet on three fingers before working into him with his cock. Cas couldn’t understand that, but when Sam rolled them over and started to ride him, there was no place Dean needed to be more.
And afterwards, they’d gone out and won, against heaven and hell and all the odds, and now the world was quiet. Dean wonders now why he’d ever thought that would be a good thing, when the closest he’s been to Sam since the summer is when Sam woke up snotty and sobbing from a nightmare.
***
In December, they argue over which way the toilet paper roll should face. It’s almost like it used to be, easier than anything’s been in months, like the first uneasy thaw of spring. Dean looks at Sam from under his raised eyebrows, and there’s a sarcastic twist to his mouth Sam would recognize a mile away. Sam folds his arms and rolls his eyes in reply, and it’s not like it even matters all that much which way the toilet paper faces, but that’s not what’s important now. They’re talking, arguing, calling each other stupid names, and Sam trusts that he knows every movement of Dean’s mouth, doesn’t hesitate in his replies. They’re standing in the living room, and Sam keeps taking steps forward, and Dean is watching him warily but not stepping away.
Sam kisses Dean first, has to because Dean won’t, not even when they’re standing toe to toe. He hates keeping his eyes open, but he needs to know what Dean’s thinking, and he won’t be able to hear Dean’s broken denials. Only then there aren’t any broken denials to hear because Dean doesn’t pull away, he just kisses Sam back on a shudder and a deep breath, and Sam feels almost sick with gratitude. Because this is all he’s wanted for weeks, and Dean is letting him have it, returning it in kind. Dean’s mouth opens hot and slow against his, and Sam drinks him in, smoothing his tongue in between Dean’s parted lips, and letting his eyes fall shut just for a second, dizzy in the silent darkness where he can feel every heartbeat under his skin. The world narrows down to the slick rhythm of their mouths together, the shiver running down Dean’s spine where Sam’s hand strokes.
The nearest horizontal surface is the couch, and Sam barely fits on it by himself, but he’s willing to squeeze for the sake of this, if only Dean doesn’t stop kissing him. But then Dean does, starts forming urgent words against Sam’s lips, and Sam can’t hear them, can only feel the changing shape of Dean’s mouth under his. He pulls back, tries to focus his attention on what Dean’s saying rather than the smudged softness of his lips.
“I’m sorry,” Dean says, and then he wipes a hand down his face and Sam can’t tell what comes next. He grabs Dean’s hands, twists their fingers together and pulls them down to his sides. “I don’t know what to do,” Dean tells him. “I don’t want it to be like this.”
“Well, this is how it is,” Sam replies, and Dean flinches, from the words or from the volume of Sam’s voice, Sam can’t tell. “This is how it is,” he repeats in a whisper, a breath away from Dean’s mouth, Dean’s sweaty palms clenched tight to his own. “And I still want you.”
Dean’s trembling. Sam feels it down in the tips of his fingers all the way up to the stiff hunch of Dean’s shoulders. “Sammy,” Dean says, the shape of his name both a prayer and a plea. And then Sam kisses him again, and there are no more words, at least not as far as Sam can tell, just breath and heat and more and more warm skin as he pulls at Dean’s clothes.
They stumble into the bedroom, and Sam licks along Dean’s collarbone as Dean tugs at the hem of Sam’s shirt. Once they’re both naked, it’s even easier than arguing, tumbling into the big bed, making it shudder into the wall, Dean’s hands on Sam’s ass pulling him down. It’s been so long, but every inch of Dean’s body feels right under Sam’s hands, and he presses his fingers to Dean’s throat to feel the sounds Dean’s making, changing vibrations under his skin.
Sam’s cock rests warm and firm against Dean’s belly, smearing thin fluid across Dean’s abs, and this is going to be enough, Sam knows already, just the building heat where their bodies meet. Dean shudders under him and shuts his eyes, and Sam rolls his hips down harder, falling into a new rhythm. Dean’s cock is swollen and full, and Sam wants it in his mouth, but he can’t stop looking at Dean’s face, the wet pink of his lips, the crease of his eyelids. He takes his hand off Dean’s voice box, strokes over his cheek and up into his hair. Dean’s eyes fly open, and Sam watches him come, feels the hot spatter of it against his stomach, Dean’s fingers tightening on Sam’s ass.
“Come on, Sammy,” he sees Dean say, “Come-” and then Sam does, has to shut his eyes against the rush of it, the sharp twist of sensation in his belly. Dean holds onto him in the disorienting silence before Sam can open his eyes again, and Sam lets a smile curl up at the corners of his mouth. They can live like this, and Sam thinks maybe he can even make Dean believe that.
~fin~