Fic: How Bad I Want This Scandal (Dean/Sam) 1/2
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Dean/Sam, Rhonda Hurley/Dean
Rating: NC-17 - Wordcount: 4,700
Warnings: *will be updated for part 2* Ungerage (Sam is 15, Dean is 19), UST, angst, masturbation, minor spoilers for Dark Side of the Moon (do I honestly still need to warn for that?)
Notes: Once upon a time, peepingdru bought my services in a charity auction. There are no words for how late I am on actually coming through for her (ok, there are, mostly things like ‘year’ and ‘failboat’), but suffice to say I am unworthy of her generosity and patience, particularly since this is only part one.
Props to deirdre_c for the original idea for Flagstaff fix-it fic and helping nudge me in the right direction.
I can’t explain why I have struggled so much with this fic, but hopefully you all will enjoy it and I’ll at last be motivated to fill in the gaps of part two. Title from "In The Next Room" by Neon Trees
Summary - Dad doesn’t stop the car until they’re on the other side of Albuquerque, like Sam’s going to teleport right back to Flagstaff if they don’t get far enough away.
Dad doesn’t stop the car until they’re on the other side of Albuquerque, like Sam’s going to teleport right back to Flagstaff if they don’t get far enough away. Doesn’t say a word even then, just pulls up to the front office of greasy little motel and stomps inside to talk to the guy at the counter. It might bug Sam if he wasn’t too busy slowly suffocating under the weight of Dean ignoring him.
Pink neon blares L_s Lunas Sup__ 8 into the night next to a flickering, electric blue crescent moon. It’s obvious even through the curtains of the room somebody else’s credit card is buying for them, tinting the stain-brown carpet sunset purple and drawing funhouse shadows on the wall. No worse than Sam’s been living for the past two weeks, but not all that much better either.
The same dry air as Arizona sucks the water out of his lips no matter how many times he licks them wet. He’s making it worse, knows it, gets the science behind it and can’t stop anyway. Keeps worrying at a spot on the right side where the skin has cracked, tasting the salt tang of his own blood and imagining it’s a split lip from the right hook Dean's eyes had been promising when he’d busted into Sam’s last motel room.
At the time he’d been knee-jerk glad that Bones had freaked out and started barking because Dean had that look on his face like when he’s just going to wail on something until his fist bleeds and Bones had pulled him up short. Now, though, he’s thinking maybe it would have been better if Dean had laid into him and gotten it out of the way. Maybe then there wouldn’t be this million ants tension marching up the column of his spine.
His stomach clenches sharply at the thought of Bones. Two weeks with some stupid stray he’d pulled in out of the rain and now he’s got a knot the size of a fist in his throat over that dumb mutt. Doesn’t even know what happened to him, didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye before Dad was yanking him up off the couch and practically throwing him into the car, swearing and cursing and “If you ever,” and “What were you,” and “So help me God,”ing. Poor little guy's probably out wandering the street again, cold and alone, not even knowing why Sam isn’t there to take care of him.
Fuck, he’s not a little kid anymore, he’s not going to cry over a dog. His dog. 50% of everything in the world that’s ever been his alone.
Surreptitiously, Sam scrubs at his eyes with the heel of his palm, hoping it’ll come across as sleepy if his father or Dean decide they feel like looking at him instead of acting like there's a Sam-shaped void in the room.
Aint it grand? They get so pissed off over him walking away from them that they won't even look at him. His family makes all kinds of sense.
Sam doesn’t bother to do more than toe out of his shoes and shuck his jeans before he crawls under the flimsy, mesa-printed comforter, leaving his clothes in a wad on the floor right where he stood. Could use a shower, really - he hadn’t been spending too much time on personal hygiene between TV and junk food runs lately - but Dean had followed him into the bathroom to ‘wash his hands’ while Sam brushed his teeth, so he kinda doubts he’ll be getting a lot of privacy in rooms with windows big enough for him to fit through in the foreseeable future.
There’s a lamp still shining from the desk by the door and his hours have been off enough to fuck his sleeping patterns all to hell, but the faded wallpaper is preferable company to the Invisible Man treatment, so he rolls over onto his side and plays at unconsciousness.
Dean follows him a couple of minutes later, early by their standards. Manages to knock painfully into Sam a half dozen times before he settles down, every inch of space between them like a physical thing. Sam can count on both hands the number of times he’s shared a bed with his brother and hasn’t fallen asleep with their backs pressed together or their legs tangled up, some kind of contact. The closest Dean gets to the concept of personal space is that space exists and it's all his, personally.
From the other side of the room the bathroom sink squeaks like crickets in the silence, Dad puttering through his nightly routine.
“Why?” Dean says it almost too soft for Sam to make out, intense enough he can’t miss it. He’s always had their father’s knack of cramming a diatribe into one gruff syllable.
Just the thought of Dean’s eyes boring into the back of his neck raises his hackles, but he hasn’t got anything to say to it that’s not another brand new, perfectly valid reason to want to run all over again, so he tries to will the wallpaper to peel with his mind instead and pretends he doesn’t know that Dean knows he’s still awake.
There’s a clatter as Dad drops something in the bathroom, a muffled rumble of curses that make it wordlessly to Sam’s ears. Dean huffs, as good or better than the whatever he’s not going to let himself say that Sam can feel vibrating on the air. If they were by themselves Sam would probably be pushing now, goading and nagging until Dean came out with it. Or, more likely, decked him for it. It might be better that way and it might not; Dean's a crapshoot in a leather jacket on any given day.
He’s not sure what he’s expecting, but, “I told the desk clerk about the dog,” isn't it. “Promised she’d take care of him. Said you were a sweet kid.”
Right off the bat, Sam knows which clerk Dean means - Camille. She’d been the one who checked him in, pretended to buy his lame ‘my dad works odd hours’ excuse days and days after it had to have become obvious that nobody but Sam was living in the room. He’d been pretty sure she knew about Bones too, but she’d never mentioned it, never called the cops on the dumb runaway kid in room 9. Knowing she’s taking care of Bones loosens one of the knots in his stomach. Doesn’t do anything for the one that develops from thinking about Dean laying on the charm to get her to take care of Sam’s dog while Sam was getting bitched out in the car.
It’s thoughts like that that got Sam into this mess in the first place, though, so he throttles it as best he can. Feels it start to do the zombie-creep back to life with the sound of Dean shifting on the bed next to him.
His, “Thanks,” leaks out tight enough Dean probably reads it as mad.
The huff Dean gives him back could mean any one of a handful of things, but Dad's flicking the bathroom light out, rustling papers as he settles down at the tiny kitchenette table to look for a new case, so Sam doesn't ask.
===THEN===
There’s no time of year when being a Winchester is anything close to normal, but summer is when things are the most and the least messed up. Dad will pack them up in the car drive for weeks, barely a stop for the night to relive the fatigue of quickie-case after quickie-case. Then something will shift in the air as the tension of being around them both non-stop starts to crawl into Dad's shoulders. Sam watches it like the needle on a pressure gauge, sees him weigh the desire for backup with the ever-present need to get the hell away from his vestigial family.
Mid-June, Sam and Dean are unpacking their stuff in a week-to-week duplex with the sound of the Impala retreating into the distance. It's nothing special on either end of the quality spectrum; full length of the building eaten up by a living room that bleeds into the open-plan kitchen, a blip of a hallway letting onto a perfunctory bathroom and a bedroom just big enough for the two doubles crammed inside it. The furniture was out of style before Sam was born and the muted silver flecks in the yellowed countertops have almost been scraped to non-existence through years of wear on the plastic, but for a while it’ll be home and, if for no other reason than that, Sam’s fond of it.
It never takes them long to settle in anywhere, too much practice to draw the process out. The beds are equidistant to the door, so Dean takes the one on the right. Old springs creak with the weight of his duffle, a feeble cloud of dust motes rising to dance lazily in the slip of afternoon sunlight streaming through the undersized window.
“Not bad,” Dean says, sprawling out on his back on the naked mattress. His arms make a pillow, behind his head, ankles crossing to mirror them, leaving a faint track of rubber-grime from the heel of Dean’s boot.
Sam grunts for lack of a response that wouldn’t make him sound happy to be here or get him bitched at about his ‘attitude’.
It’s a perverse impulse that’s been cropping up more and more the past couple of years, this need to make sure that Dad and Dean know he’s miserable, that their life, that they are the reason he can’t be like everybody else. To never give them the satisfaction of thinking for one second that they can make it better. He doesn’t really understand it, wants to beat the shit out of himself half the time for doing it and can’t stop anyway.
He sees the way they look at him when he does it, disappointment from Dad, hurt and frustration from Dean, both of them wishing that he could just go back in time and be the kid who was content to play car games for hours and got excited by the prospect of every new town they set up in. Back before another town was just another place he was going to be looking at in a rearview mirror and a lot of things he’d never had the chance to do left behind. Before he started resenting all of those normal, white-picket-fence things for not being enough to bury the sick need inside of him.
The thing is, Sam wishes he could go back to that time too. However messed up he may be, feeling like a string pulled too tight every second of every day is not something Sam particularly relishes either.
“Hey, what’s up?”
Dean’s sitting up, feet planted on the floor when Sam turns around and realizes he has no idea how long he just spent staring at the wall.
And this is the part that kills him the most. Because Dad gets it - not all of it, of course, or at least Sam hopes to God he doesn’t - that Sam’s not that kid anymore. He stopped looking for the little boy he probably loved under Sam’s skin a long while ago. Sam could walk out on Dad right now and they'd both be just fine. But Dean, for all the misery Sam deals him with a disinterest so feigned it physically hurts sometimes, Dean still looks at him with ‘Sammy’ in his eyes, promising he could fix everything if Sam would only tell him what’s wrong.
It’s the one thing he can never do, and the one he feels written in every breath and look and motion he makes, a wound that will never seal carved into his flesh by that look on Dean’s face.
“Nothing,” he shrugs and turns back to the bed to start unpacking.
Dean doesn’t call him on it, but Sam can feel green eyes digging holes into his back as he starts shuffling the mound of stuff he turns out onto his bed into organized piles. Just in case, he makes a big deal out of arranging his books underneath the bed by the Dewey decimal system until Dean gets bored and starts going through his own stuff.
It isn’t until Dean’s busy hanging up shirts on the handful of abused wire hangers in the closet that Sam fishes out the dog-eared manila file folder from two states back and sandwiches it inconspicuously between his dictionary and a literature anthology he’d stolen from Gruber High last year. Feels the weight of its presence settle over the room like a dark cloud Dean’ll never notice.
===NOW===
Dean’s got his right arm propped up on the window of the booth. Won’t say so, but Sam knows he’s trying to even it out the tan from his left hanging out the window when he drives.
Dad’s back at the room, having a phone conversation with somebody about ‘the mission’ which is his way of saying ‘none of your business’. It’s such bullshit. Sam could join the friggin’ CIA and he still couldn’t get away with having a damn private thought.
The waitress ambles past, fills up Dean’s coffee and barely bothers to flirt. Sam knows why.
For a long time, it didn’t matter, Dean was all grown up and cool and Steve fucking McQueen and Sam was just the little squirt tagging along behind him. Nobody questioned what they were to each other, because why the hell would Dean waste his time on a nothing like Sam unless he had to? But then all of a sudden Sam wasn’t just a punk kid hanging on Dean’s shirttails. He grew up and out and up some more, just for good measure. His face started slimming and developing angles and he grew out of muddy-blonde into warm-brown almost overnight. He stopped looking like Dean’s baby brother and started looking like a guy who might not be related to Dean at all.
The first time he noticed it was about a year ago, fourteen and made of all the scraps that were left over after his parents had Dean. An extra inch of height but no muscle to go with it, all the weird ducktail-prone curl that got left out of Dean’s ‘scrub a hand through it and it’s fine’ hair, moles in place of freckles. Basically, life sucked, but it was the kind of suck that Sam was used to.
He’d been up at the register of a roadside shack not nearly different enough form the one they’re in now to not give him weird flashbacks. The sign had named the place Lois’ even though the ancient counter waitress kept yelling orders out to ‘Julio’ in the back while Dean gulped down the last of a peanut butter and chocolate milkshake. In the car later he’d bitched about brainfreeze and cottonmouth.
Sam would give anything not to remember it this well.
He’d handed their ticket over at the register, fished out the twenty he had left over from his split of the money the last time Dad had left them. The old lady rang him up just fine, but Sam had more than enough experience being looked at crossways that it was hard to miss something being off in her eyes. He’d gone for a smile, soft and kiddish, the kind that Dean couldn’t pull off even when he was a kid. That sort of thing usually worked on the post-menopausal set but it didn’t do much good then. He spent the rest of the time she took rattling out his change counting up the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny tray.
On the way out of the door Dean had slung an arm around Sam’s neck, headlocked him to kiss the top of his head because Dean always had issues with appropriate levels of physical contact. When Sam got free again he stuck a hand back through his hair, knowing full-well it wasn’t going to do any good. In the process he caught the old woman looking at them again.
No, not looking, glaring. And it was really weird. He got that they were two young guys, rough enough around the edges to make the occasional convenience store clerk nervous, but they’d been pretty well behaved - Dean knocking at his feet under the table, picking at him like they were both still six, but nothing out of the ordinary - and they were already in the parking lot, pretty obviously not about to start something. So he didn’t understand the stinkeye and Sam had never been very good at letting go of things he didn’t understand.
It wasn’t until later that night with the chorus of his father and Dean snoring settling him in to sleep, his brother using him as a couple extra inches of mattress, when the tumblers in his head finally clicked into place.
Gay. She thought they were gay. Together.
Sam knows he thought about it before then. A lot before then. One way or another it feels like the ideas of himself and Dean have been tangled up like brambles in his head from the day he was born. He’d done research, child psychology and the development of love maps and all of that. That was the first time it really gelled though. That it wasn’t just him being weird or needy or having some kind of attachment disorder. That other people looked at him and Dean and saw more.
This kind of thing probably doesn’t really have a start, but that’s where it started for Sam.
“Sam!” Dean snags Sam’s attention with a terse syllable and a waved hand. “Still with me?”
Sam hums before he’s all the way back in reality, then mumbles, “Yeah. Yeah, gotta hit the head,” for an excuse to get some breathing room.
He can’t say he’s completely shocked to hear the clatter of loose change on the table top and the heavy tread of boots following behind him.
Sweat prickles to life the moment he shoulders his way out the back door, mid-day heat radiating off the oil-spotted parking lot in a haze. The diner’s a standard roadside joint playing at being a truckstop, including the little bathroom out back. Must have been added on to the main building some time in the ‘70s, going by the chipped sienna tile running three-quarters of the way up the wall. It’s muggy inside, an unsavory combination of lemon-scented cleanser and stale urine that doesn’t dissipate in the extended rush of air when the door thunks against Dean’s palm, sun pouring in around the black shape of him at the threshold.
“There’s not even a window!” Sam gripes, holding his arms out as far as he can without actually touching the walls. “I’m not going anywhere!”
Not all that surprisingly, Dean holds his ground. From this position Sam can’t make out his expression all that well, but he’s got his forearms braced on either side of the doorjamb, hips cocked and stance loose like he’s settling in. Like a challenge.
“You wanna hold it for me?” Sam snaps, because it feels good to vent about something. Because that weird tension is riding high in the hairs on the back of his neck when Dean just keeps staring at him.
It's not like Sam's shy or anything. His life is a freaking roadtrip movie with all the fun part cut out and spliced in with horror scenes. He's pissed on the side of most of the major US highways; in woods, and behind buildings, and in bottles in the back of the car in every one of the 48 contiguous states. He can handle his stupid big brother friggin' looming at him while he uses a damn urinal.
It'd help if he actually had to pee, though.
Jumpy with scrutiny, Sam grates the zipper down and tries not to think about anything at all as he pulls himself out of his shorts. Definitely not Dean watching him, looking at Sam with his hand on his dick, seeing it twitch as he tries to make something happen. Or how his thumb has that rough patch along the side from the hammer of a revolver that he likes to rub right across the slit sometimes when he’s jacking off and how he knows Dean’s thumb is just the same, would feel just the same.
Fuck, don’t get hard. Really, do not get hard.
It takes a minute, but Sam finally manages to squeeze out a few drops. Shakes off, cleans up, even though the pump bottle of soap looks dirtier than his hands could ever hope to be. Not quite as dirty as his mind, but that’s yesterday's news.
Dean just sticks there in the doorway, refusing to move even when Sam's standing right there in front of him. Wet handprints are already starting to dry on his thighs where the air just sucks the water up like a sponge. And Dean's still staring.
"Enjoy the show?" Sam asks, trying to twist it into something weapon-sharp.
He's never been very good with silence and Dean sucks at it unless there's something serious going down. If there's something serious going down Sam would really love to be let in on it.
For another handful of seconds Dean still doesn't do anything. His fingers rub together with the soft shuff of dry skin. He licks his lips, leans forward, and Sam's brain fries like an egg on the sidewalk right at the same moment that Dean turns the motion into a roll and he's stepping backward out of the doorway, one arm extended all 'after you'.
Despite the heat, Sam shivers as he brushes past, shoving his hands in his pockets the same way he's trying to shove his heart back down out of his throat.
What the fuck?
===THEN===
The other half of the duplex is being rented out by a woman named Rhonda. She’s got a nice smile and a nicer rack. He’d take a guess that she’s not quite ten years older than Dean underneath the makeup, but definitely more than five. She wears cut-off denim shorts and brings them over a bowl of Velveeta dip to introduce herself the day after they move in.
Naturally, Dean is fucking her inside of a week.
It’s all so predictable Sam kind of wants to cry, except crying about it would be maybe even more pathetic than the reasons he wants to, so he tells himself to shut up and ignores that hornets’ nest that starts writhing in his gut every time he knows Dean’s falling into bed with somebody. He’s had plenty of practice.
Just not quite enough to ignore the wall-muted thump of two bodies moving a bed across the floor the hard way.
Rhonda’s place is a mirror of theirs, as near as Sam can figure, which puts her bedroom right on the other side of the wall from Dean’s bed. ‘Wall’ being a very generous term for something that must have started life as a phonebook page. He’s basically got a loudspeaker hooked up to Rhonda’s sex life. Rhonda and Dean’s sex life, and that’s the part that really messing Sam up.
All transcripts to the contrary, times like this Sam’s convinced that he’s got to be the dumbest sonofabitch alive. Because really, who does this? Who tortures themselves listening to the person they spend 90% of their lives wanting to lick bump uglies with somebody else? It’s got to be some kind of derangement or imbalance, and ha! Isn’t that the understatement of the century? Sam’s whole sexuality is a disorder.
The squeak of springs is like nails on a chalkboard and a hand on his dick at the same time, the dull huff of a grunt washing heat through him like that breath is breaking over his own skin. The words that come out of Dean’s mouth get lost in transit, but the tone is crystal clear - rough and deep, barely-controlled. It’s the same as he sounds during a hunt, exactly the way he sounded after that poltergeist threw Sam through the wall a couple of weeks ago, all of that feeling curled around the three letters of Sam’s name. It had been worry then, but the inflection’s not that different, really, not so hard to imagine it all twisted around; if Dad hadn’t been there, and if the world worked like the seediest neighborhoods of Sam’s brain.
Sam would have sat up, coughing plaster dust and picking splinters out of his hair and Dean would have shoved him, sent him sprawling onto the grimy remnants of what used to be a high-dollar rug. Then Dean would have followed, drawn in by Sam’s gravity, all roar and rush as their teeth clacked together and their lips bruised around the shape of mumbled curses.
Dean’s hands are big, but that’s not too hard to fake now that Sam’s developed palms that could measure a frying pan. It feels like that’s exactly what they’ve been doing when he pushes them up under a t-shirt that gets passed back and forth so often it doesn't really belong to him or Dean, skin-soft cloth and scalding hot fingers that are scratchy in just the right places to make the fantasy work.
Dean would have felt up his ribs, his chest, the tender spots where wiry muscles join, like he doesn’t trust Sam to stay put together the same way unless somebody’s keeping tabs on it. Would have rubbed his palms flat over Sam’s nipples, played with them because he’s used to girls. Scraped down his stomach with blunt nails to make a mark, to punish Sam for getting himself hurt again. Slid his hand down into Sam’s boxers and jacked him hard, weird angle, everything as messy and hungry and imperfect as the stunted noises Dean would’ve made against his lips.
A sick, dizzy thrill punches through Sam, leaves him tingling as come coats his fingers and oozes down into the webbing. Gasped breath shunts back at him where he’s got half of his face buried in a spine-broken copy of 1984, dollar-bin sheets sticking to the small of his back where his shirt’s pulled up. Distantly, almost distracted, he lays in his own bed and listens to the sounds from the next room escalate, break down into a stutter until Dean groans loud and long and all the important parts are over.
Sooty-black guilt films up his insides like the smoke off of an oil-fire. Every single time.
He snags a worn shirt from the dirty pile on the floor to clean himself up with, a sudden, intense need to have the evidence off his skin warring with the urge to stay right where he is and let Dean see. Debates opening a window to let out some of the stale air and the stench of spunk - it’s not like Sam hasn’t been stuck in plenty of rooms perfumed by Dean’s conquests - and changes his mind about it four times before he actually hauls himself up and flips the paint-gummed latch.
The night air is as sticky as Sam’s skin but at least it’s cooler pouring in through the screen. Cicadas are screaming in the trees outside, loud enough that Sam’s not as much a party to whatever it is Dean and Rhonda get up to after. Whatever sweet, empty things his brother might whisper to her in the dark won’t really matter in the long run, but still it’s too much, too real.
Sam’s not especially good at real nowadays.
Like casting a thought in their general direction might have made them get up and wander out from under the bed, Sam casts a glance at the stack of books piled there, the infinitesimal shadow where the college brochures are still safely hidden.
The voice that’s been pawing at the back of Sam’s head for months now, ignored, pipes up again. It’s the only way.
From the other side of the wall, Rhonda’s laugh, bright and easy, sears a hole in Sam’s chest like a blowtorch.
Pairing: Dean/Sam, Rhonda Hurley/Dean
Rating: NC-17 - Wordcount: 4,700
Warnings: *will be updated for part 2* Ungerage (Sam is 15, Dean is 19), UST, angst, masturbation, minor spoilers for Dark Side of the Moon (do I honestly still need to warn for that?)
Notes: Once upon a time, peepingdru bought my services in a charity auction. There are no words for how late I am on actually coming through for her (ok, there are, mostly things like ‘year’ and ‘failboat’), but suffice to say I am unworthy of her generosity and patience, particularly since this is only part one.
Props to deirdre_c for the original idea for Flagstaff fix-it fic and helping nudge me in the right direction.
I can’t explain why I have struggled so much with this fic, but hopefully you all will enjoy it and I’ll at last be motivated to fill in the gaps of part two. Title from "In The Next Room" by Neon Trees
Summary - Dad doesn’t stop the car until they’re on the other side of Albuquerque, like Sam’s going to teleport right back to Flagstaff if they don’t get far enough away.
Dad doesn’t stop the car until they’re on the other side of Albuquerque, like Sam’s going to teleport right back to Flagstaff if they don’t get far enough away. Doesn’t say a word even then, just pulls up to the front office of greasy little motel and stomps inside to talk to the guy at the counter. It might bug Sam if he wasn’t too busy slowly suffocating under the weight of Dean ignoring him.
Pink neon blares L_s Lunas Sup__ 8 into the night next to a flickering, electric blue crescent moon. It’s obvious even through the curtains of the room somebody else’s credit card is buying for them, tinting the stain-brown carpet sunset purple and drawing funhouse shadows on the wall. No worse than Sam’s been living for the past two weeks, but not all that much better either.
The same dry air as Arizona sucks the water out of his lips no matter how many times he licks them wet. He’s making it worse, knows it, gets the science behind it and can’t stop anyway. Keeps worrying at a spot on the right side where the skin has cracked, tasting the salt tang of his own blood and imagining it’s a split lip from the right hook Dean's eyes had been promising when he’d busted into Sam’s last motel room.
At the time he’d been knee-jerk glad that Bones had freaked out and started barking because Dean had that look on his face like when he’s just going to wail on something until his fist bleeds and Bones had pulled him up short. Now, though, he’s thinking maybe it would have been better if Dean had laid into him and gotten it out of the way. Maybe then there wouldn’t be this million ants tension marching up the column of his spine.
His stomach clenches sharply at the thought of Bones. Two weeks with some stupid stray he’d pulled in out of the rain and now he’s got a knot the size of a fist in his throat over that dumb mutt. Doesn’t even know what happened to him, didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye before Dad was yanking him up off the couch and practically throwing him into the car, swearing and cursing and “If you ever,” and “What were you,” and “So help me God,”ing. Poor little guy's probably out wandering the street again, cold and alone, not even knowing why Sam isn’t there to take care of him.
Fuck, he’s not a little kid anymore, he’s not going to cry over a dog. His dog. 50% of everything in the world that’s ever been his alone.
Surreptitiously, Sam scrubs at his eyes with the heel of his palm, hoping it’ll come across as sleepy if his father or Dean decide they feel like looking at him instead of acting like there's a Sam-shaped void in the room.
Aint it grand? They get so pissed off over him walking away from them that they won't even look at him. His family makes all kinds of sense.
Sam doesn’t bother to do more than toe out of his shoes and shuck his jeans before he crawls under the flimsy, mesa-printed comforter, leaving his clothes in a wad on the floor right where he stood. Could use a shower, really - he hadn’t been spending too much time on personal hygiene between TV and junk food runs lately - but Dean had followed him into the bathroom to ‘wash his hands’ while Sam brushed his teeth, so he kinda doubts he’ll be getting a lot of privacy in rooms with windows big enough for him to fit through in the foreseeable future.
There’s a lamp still shining from the desk by the door and his hours have been off enough to fuck his sleeping patterns all to hell, but the faded wallpaper is preferable company to the Invisible Man treatment, so he rolls over onto his side and plays at unconsciousness.
Dean follows him a couple of minutes later, early by their standards. Manages to knock painfully into Sam a half dozen times before he settles down, every inch of space between them like a physical thing. Sam can count on both hands the number of times he’s shared a bed with his brother and hasn’t fallen asleep with their backs pressed together or their legs tangled up, some kind of contact. The closest Dean gets to the concept of personal space is that space exists and it's all his, personally.
From the other side of the room the bathroom sink squeaks like crickets in the silence, Dad puttering through his nightly routine.
“Why?” Dean says it almost too soft for Sam to make out, intense enough he can’t miss it. He’s always had their father’s knack of cramming a diatribe into one gruff syllable.
Just the thought of Dean’s eyes boring into the back of his neck raises his hackles, but he hasn’t got anything to say to it that’s not another brand new, perfectly valid reason to want to run all over again, so he tries to will the wallpaper to peel with his mind instead and pretends he doesn’t know that Dean knows he’s still awake.
There’s a clatter as Dad drops something in the bathroom, a muffled rumble of curses that make it wordlessly to Sam’s ears. Dean huffs, as good or better than the whatever he’s not going to let himself say that Sam can feel vibrating on the air. If they were by themselves Sam would probably be pushing now, goading and nagging until Dean came out with it. Or, more likely, decked him for it. It might be better that way and it might not; Dean's a crapshoot in a leather jacket on any given day.
He’s not sure what he’s expecting, but, “I told the desk clerk about the dog,” isn't it. “Promised she’d take care of him. Said you were a sweet kid.”
Right off the bat, Sam knows which clerk Dean means - Camille. She’d been the one who checked him in, pretended to buy his lame ‘my dad works odd hours’ excuse days and days after it had to have become obvious that nobody but Sam was living in the room. He’d been pretty sure she knew about Bones too, but she’d never mentioned it, never called the cops on the dumb runaway kid in room 9. Knowing she’s taking care of Bones loosens one of the knots in his stomach. Doesn’t do anything for the one that develops from thinking about Dean laying on the charm to get her to take care of Sam’s dog while Sam was getting bitched out in the car.
It’s thoughts like that that got Sam into this mess in the first place, though, so he throttles it as best he can. Feels it start to do the zombie-creep back to life with the sound of Dean shifting on the bed next to him.
His, “Thanks,” leaks out tight enough Dean probably reads it as mad.
The huff Dean gives him back could mean any one of a handful of things, but Dad's flicking the bathroom light out, rustling papers as he settles down at the tiny kitchenette table to look for a new case, so Sam doesn't ask.
===THEN===
There’s no time of year when being a Winchester is anything close to normal, but summer is when things are the most and the least messed up. Dad will pack them up in the car drive for weeks, barely a stop for the night to relive the fatigue of quickie-case after quickie-case. Then something will shift in the air as the tension of being around them both non-stop starts to crawl into Dad's shoulders. Sam watches it like the needle on a pressure gauge, sees him weigh the desire for backup with the ever-present need to get the hell away from his vestigial family.
Mid-June, Sam and Dean are unpacking their stuff in a week-to-week duplex with the sound of the Impala retreating into the distance. It's nothing special on either end of the quality spectrum; full length of the building eaten up by a living room that bleeds into the open-plan kitchen, a blip of a hallway letting onto a perfunctory bathroom and a bedroom just big enough for the two doubles crammed inside it. The furniture was out of style before Sam was born and the muted silver flecks in the yellowed countertops have almost been scraped to non-existence through years of wear on the plastic, but for a while it’ll be home and, if for no other reason than that, Sam’s fond of it.
It never takes them long to settle in anywhere, too much practice to draw the process out. The beds are equidistant to the door, so Dean takes the one on the right. Old springs creak with the weight of his duffle, a feeble cloud of dust motes rising to dance lazily in the slip of afternoon sunlight streaming through the undersized window.
“Not bad,” Dean says, sprawling out on his back on the naked mattress. His arms make a pillow, behind his head, ankles crossing to mirror them, leaving a faint track of rubber-grime from the heel of Dean’s boot.
Sam grunts for lack of a response that wouldn’t make him sound happy to be here or get him bitched at about his ‘attitude’.
It’s a perverse impulse that’s been cropping up more and more the past couple of years, this need to make sure that Dad and Dean know he’s miserable, that their life, that they are the reason he can’t be like everybody else. To never give them the satisfaction of thinking for one second that they can make it better. He doesn’t really understand it, wants to beat the shit out of himself half the time for doing it and can’t stop anyway.
He sees the way they look at him when he does it, disappointment from Dad, hurt and frustration from Dean, both of them wishing that he could just go back in time and be the kid who was content to play car games for hours and got excited by the prospect of every new town they set up in. Back before another town was just another place he was going to be looking at in a rearview mirror and a lot of things he’d never had the chance to do left behind. Before he started resenting all of those normal, white-picket-fence things for not being enough to bury the sick need inside of him.
The thing is, Sam wishes he could go back to that time too. However messed up he may be, feeling like a string pulled too tight every second of every day is not something Sam particularly relishes either.
“Hey, what’s up?”
Dean’s sitting up, feet planted on the floor when Sam turns around and realizes he has no idea how long he just spent staring at the wall.
And this is the part that kills him the most. Because Dad gets it - not all of it, of course, or at least Sam hopes to God he doesn’t - that Sam’s not that kid anymore. He stopped looking for the little boy he probably loved under Sam’s skin a long while ago. Sam could walk out on Dad right now and they'd both be just fine. But Dean, for all the misery Sam deals him with a disinterest so feigned it physically hurts sometimes, Dean still looks at him with ‘Sammy’ in his eyes, promising he could fix everything if Sam would only tell him what’s wrong.
It’s the one thing he can never do, and the one he feels written in every breath and look and motion he makes, a wound that will never seal carved into his flesh by that look on Dean’s face.
“Nothing,” he shrugs and turns back to the bed to start unpacking.
Dean doesn’t call him on it, but Sam can feel green eyes digging holes into his back as he starts shuffling the mound of stuff he turns out onto his bed into organized piles. Just in case, he makes a big deal out of arranging his books underneath the bed by the Dewey decimal system until Dean gets bored and starts going through his own stuff.
It isn’t until Dean’s busy hanging up shirts on the handful of abused wire hangers in the closet that Sam fishes out the dog-eared manila file folder from two states back and sandwiches it inconspicuously between his dictionary and a literature anthology he’d stolen from Gruber High last year. Feels the weight of its presence settle over the room like a dark cloud Dean’ll never notice.
===NOW===
Dean’s got his right arm propped up on the window of the booth. Won’t say so, but Sam knows he’s trying to even it out the tan from his left hanging out the window when he drives.
Dad’s back at the room, having a phone conversation with somebody about ‘the mission’ which is his way of saying ‘none of your business’. It’s such bullshit. Sam could join the friggin’ CIA and he still couldn’t get away with having a damn private thought.
The waitress ambles past, fills up Dean’s coffee and barely bothers to flirt. Sam knows why.
For a long time, it didn’t matter, Dean was all grown up and cool and Steve fucking McQueen and Sam was just the little squirt tagging along behind him. Nobody questioned what they were to each other, because why the hell would Dean waste his time on a nothing like Sam unless he had to? But then all of a sudden Sam wasn’t just a punk kid hanging on Dean’s shirttails. He grew up and out and up some more, just for good measure. His face started slimming and developing angles and he grew out of muddy-blonde into warm-brown almost overnight. He stopped looking like Dean’s baby brother and started looking like a guy who might not be related to Dean at all.
The first time he noticed it was about a year ago, fourteen and made of all the scraps that were left over after his parents had Dean. An extra inch of height but no muscle to go with it, all the weird ducktail-prone curl that got left out of Dean’s ‘scrub a hand through it and it’s fine’ hair, moles in place of freckles. Basically, life sucked, but it was the kind of suck that Sam was used to.
He’d been up at the register of a roadside shack not nearly different enough form the one they’re in now to not give him weird flashbacks. The sign had named the place Lois’ even though the ancient counter waitress kept yelling orders out to ‘Julio’ in the back while Dean gulped down the last of a peanut butter and chocolate milkshake. In the car later he’d bitched about brainfreeze and cottonmouth.
Sam would give anything not to remember it this well.
He’d handed their ticket over at the register, fished out the twenty he had left over from his split of the money the last time Dad had left them. The old lady rang him up just fine, but Sam had more than enough experience being looked at crossways that it was hard to miss something being off in her eyes. He’d gone for a smile, soft and kiddish, the kind that Dean couldn’t pull off even when he was a kid. That sort of thing usually worked on the post-menopausal set but it didn’t do much good then. He spent the rest of the time she took rattling out his change counting up the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny tray.
On the way out of the door Dean had slung an arm around Sam’s neck, headlocked him to kiss the top of his head because Dean always had issues with appropriate levels of physical contact. When Sam got free again he stuck a hand back through his hair, knowing full-well it wasn’t going to do any good. In the process he caught the old woman looking at them again.
No, not looking, glaring. And it was really weird. He got that they were two young guys, rough enough around the edges to make the occasional convenience store clerk nervous, but they’d been pretty well behaved - Dean knocking at his feet under the table, picking at him like they were both still six, but nothing out of the ordinary - and they were already in the parking lot, pretty obviously not about to start something. So he didn’t understand the stinkeye and Sam had never been very good at letting go of things he didn’t understand.
It wasn’t until later that night with the chorus of his father and Dean snoring settling him in to sleep, his brother using him as a couple extra inches of mattress, when the tumblers in his head finally clicked into place.
Gay. She thought they were gay. Together.
Sam knows he thought about it before then. A lot before then. One way or another it feels like the ideas of himself and Dean have been tangled up like brambles in his head from the day he was born. He’d done research, child psychology and the development of love maps and all of that. That was the first time it really gelled though. That it wasn’t just him being weird or needy or having some kind of attachment disorder. That other people looked at him and Dean and saw more.
This kind of thing probably doesn’t really have a start, but that’s where it started for Sam.
“Sam!” Dean snags Sam’s attention with a terse syllable and a waved hand. “Still with me?”
Sam hums before he’s all the way back in reality, then mumbles, “Yeah. Yeah, gotta hit the head,” for an excuse to get some breathing room.
He can’t say he’s completely shocked to hear the clatter of loose change on the table top and the heavy tread of boots following behind him.
Sweat prickles to life the moment he shoulders his way out the back door, mid-day heat radiating off the oil-spotted parking lot in a haze. The diner’s a standard roadside joint playing at being a truckstop, including the little bathroom out back. Must have been added on to the main building some time in the ‘70s, going by the chipped sienna tile running three-quarters of the way up the wall. It’s muggy inside, an unsavory combination of lemon-scented cleanser and stale urine that doesn’t dissipate in the extended rush of air when the door thunks against Dean’s palm, sun pouring in around the black shape of him at the threshold.
“There’s not even a window!” Sam gripes, holding his arms out as far as he can without actually touching the walls. “I’m not going anywhere!”
Not all that surprisingly, Dean holds his ground. From this position Sam can’t make out his expression all that well, but he’s got his forearms braced on either side of the doorjamb, hips cocked and stance loose like he’s settling in. Like a challenge.
“You wanna hold it for me?” Sam snaps, because it feels good to vent about something. Because that weird tension is riding high in the hairs on the back of his neck when Dean just keeps staring at him.
It's not like Sam's shy or anything. His life is a freaking roadtrip movie with all the fun part cut out and spliced in with horror scenes. He's pissed on the side of most of the major US highways; in woods, and behind buildings, and in bottles in the back of the car in every one of the 48 contiguous states. He can handle his stupid big brother friggin' looming at him while he uses a damn urinal.
It'd help if he actually had to pee, though.
Jumpy with scrutiny, Sam grates the zipper down and tries not to think about anything at all as he pulls himself out of his shorts. Definitely not Dean watching him, looking at Sam with his hand on his dick, seeing it twitch as he tries to make something happen. Or how his thumb has that rough patch along the side from the hammer of a revolver that he likes to rub right across the slit sometimes when he’s jacking off and how he knows Dean’s thumb is just the same, would feel just the same.
Fuck, don’t get hard. Really, do not get hard.
It takes a minute, but Sam finally manages to squeeze out a few drops. Shakes off, cleans up, even though the pump bottle of soap looks dirtier than his hands could ever hope to be. Not quite as dirty as his mind, but that’s yesterday's news.
Dean just sticks there in the doorway, refusing to move even when Sam's standing right there in front of him. Wet handprints are already starting to dry on his thighs where the air just sucks the water up like a sponge. And Dean's still staring.
"Enjoy the show?" Sam asks, trying to twist it into something weapon-sharp.
He's never been very good with silence and Dean sucks at it unless there's something serious going down. If there's something serious going down Sam would really love to be let in on it.
For another handful of seconds Dean still doesn't do anything. His fingers rub together with the soft shuff of dry skin. He licks his lips, leans forward, and Sam's brain fries like an egg on the sidewalk right at the same moment that Dean turns the motion into a roll and he's stepping backward out of the doorway, one arm extended all 'after you'.
Despite the heat, Sam shivers as he brushes past, shoving his hands in his pockets the same way he's trying to shove his heart back down out of his throat.
What the fuck?
===THEN===
The other half of the duplex is being rented out by a woman named Rhonda. She’s got a nice smile and a nicer rack. He’d take a guess that she’s not quite ten years older than Dean underneath the makeup, but definitely more than five. She wears cut-off denim shorts and brings them over a bowl of Velveeta dip to introduce herself the day after they move in.
Naturally, Dean is fucking her inside of a week.
It’s all so predictable Sam kind of wants to cry, except crying about it would be maybe even more pathetic than the reasons he wants to, so he tells himself to shut up and ignores that hornets’ nest that starts writhing in his gut every time he knows Dean’s falling into bed with somebody. He’s had plenty of practice.
Just not quite enough to ignore the wall-muted thump of two bodies moving a bed across the floor the hard way.
Rhonda’s place is a mirror of theirs, as near as Sam can figure, which puts her bedroom right on the other side of the wall from Dean’s bed. ‘Wall’ being a very generous term for something that must have started life as a phonebook page. He’s basically got a loudspeaker hooked up to Rhonda’s sex life. Rhonda and Dean’s sex life, and that’s the part that really messing Sam up.
All transcripts to the contrary, times like this Sam’s convinced that he’s got to be the dumbest sonofabitch alive. Because really, who does this? Who tortures themselves listening to the person they spend 90% of their lives wanting to lick bump uglies with somebody else? It’s got to be some kind of derangement or imbalance, and ha! Isn’t that the understatement of the century? Sam’s whole sexuality is a disorder.
The squeak of springs is like nails on a chalkboard and a hand on his dick at the same time, the dull huff of a grunt washing heat through him like that breath is breaking over his own skin. The words that come out of Dean’s mouth get lost in transit, but the tone is crystal clear - rough and deep, barely-controlled. It’s the same as he sounds during a hunt, exactly the way he sounded after that poltergeist threw Sam through the wall a couple of weeks ago, all of that feeling curled around the three letters of Sam’s name. It had been worry then, but the inflection’s not that different, really, not so hard to imagine it all twisted around; if Dad hadn’t been there, and if the world worked like the seediest neighborhoods of Sam’s brain.
Sam would have sat up, coughing plaster dust and picking splinters out of his hair and Dean would have shoved him, sent him sprawling onto the grimy remnants of what used to be a high-dollar rug. Then Dean would have followed, drawn in by Sam’s gravity, all roar and rush as their teeth clacked together and their lips bruised around the shape of mumbled curses.
Dean’s hands are big, but that’s not too hard to fake now that Sam’s developed palms that could measure a frying pan. It feels like that’s exactly what they’ve been doing when he pushes them up under a t-shirt that gets passed back and forth so often it doesn't really belong to him or Dean, skin-soft cloth and scalding hot fingers that are scratchy in just the right places to make the fantasy work.
Dean would have felt up his ribs, his chest, the tender spots where wiry muscles join, like he doesn’t trust Sam to stay put together the same way unless somebody’s keeping tabs on it. Would have rubbed his palms flat over Sam’s nipples, played with them because he’s used to girls. Scraped down his stomach with blunt nails to make a mark, to punish Sam for getting himself hurt again. Slid his hand down into Sam’s boxers and jacked him hard, weird angle, everything as messy and hungry and imperfect as the stunted noises Dean would’ve made against his lips.
A sick, dizzy thrill punches through Sam, leaves him tingling as come coats his fingers and oozes down into the webbing. Gasped breath shunts back at him where he’s got half of his face buried in a spine-broken copy of 1984, dollar-bin sheets sticking to the small of his back where his shirt’s pulled up. Distantly, almost distracted, he lays in his own bed and listens to the sounds from the next room escalate, break down into a stutter until Dean groans loud and long and all the important parts are over.
Sooty-black guilt films up his insides like the smoke off of an oil-fire. Every single time.
He snags a worn shirt from the dirty pile on the floor to clean himself up with, a sudden, intense need to have the evidence off his skin warring with the urge to stay right where he is and let Dean see. Debates opening a window to let out some of the stale air and the stench of spunk - it’s not like Sam hasn’t been stuck in plenty of rooms perfumed by Dean’s conquests - and changes his mind about it four times before he actually hauls himself up and flips the paint-gummed latch.
The night air is as sticky as Sam’s skin but at least it’s cooler pouring in through the screen. Cicadas are screaming in the trees outside, loud enough that Sam’s not as much a party to whatever it is Dean and Rhonda get up to after. Whatever sweet, empty things his brother might whisper to her in the dark won’t really matter in the long run, but still it’s too much, too real.
Sam’s not especially good at real nowadays.
Like casting a thought in their general direction might have made them get up and wander out from under the bed, Sam casts a glance at the stack of books piled there, the infinitesimal shadow where the college brochures are still safely hidden.
The voice that’s been pawing at the back of Sam’s head for months now, ignored, pipes up again. It’s the only way.
From the other side of the wall, Rhonda’s laugh, bright and easy, sears a hole in Sam’s chest like a blowtorch.