Fic: Broken
Title: Broken
Author: brightly_lit
Rating: PG-13
Genre: gen, intense angst, h/c (mainly hurt!Sam, some emotionally hurt!Dean), brother feels, heroics and badassery, pathetic first time
Characters: Sam, Dean, OCs
Word Count: 16,000
Warnings: language, horrific concepts, mentions of child abuse and torture, PTSD
Summary: Dean spent his whole life searching for the little brother who was taken from him at age 6. He thought once he finally found him, everything would be perfect, but Sam is more broken than Dean could have imagined someone could be and still function. Worse yet, Dean can't even tell if Sam wants his brother back in his life ...
This is a sequel to " Kintsugi." It picks up directly after the last fic leaves off.
Now that Dean had finally found his lost brother, he discovered it wasn’t just easy to keep his promise that he would stay by his side; it was impossible not to. The idea of letting him out of his sight was unthinkable, especially as fragile as Sam had revealed himself to be. When Sam went to work, Dean followed. When he went to the store, Dean tagged along. Maybe he was getting on Sam’s nerves; it was hard to tell, since Sam showed no visible reaction to almost anything after that first night. Sam emerged from his room the next morning and blinked owlishly at him, as if he must be a mirage, then simply went into the bathroom without a word, ate breakfast without looking at him, and headed out the door, Dean on his heels.
At Sam’s tattoo shop, Dean managed to dig up a folding chair from the junk-filled back room while Sam sat at the counter on the only real chair in the joint, working on a laptop, and they sat there together all morning, silent. No customers came in, but that wasn’t surprising, Dean decided, since the shop looked like nothing from outside, no hours on the door, no sign, no advertising, nothing, just the numbers of the address on the window. Sam sat there expressionless, typing, while Dean twiddled his thumbs, but inaction was not his forte. He finally jumped to his feet (Sam flinched and glanced at him for the first time all day), muttering, “May as well make myself useful,” grabbed a broom, and started sweeping up some of the stray needles on the floor. Maybe it was good that Sam didn’t advertise; the health department would have a field day with this place.
The whole day passed with no customers. At dusk, Sam closed up shop, stopped by the little grocery store he’d mentioned, and went home. Sam looked a bit bewildered when Dean followed him back through his apartment door, but seemed helpless to object, allowing it as he’d allowed all Dean’s trespasses on his routine today. Dean had picked up a few things at the store while they were there, too. As Sam got out a pan, Dean stopped him. “No one ever took care of you your whole life, Sam. I wasn’t there. So let me start now. I can cook a few things.”
Sam’s eyes crept up to meet his for a split second. Dean could only describe what he saw there as confusion, but he stepped back and let Dean cook. They ate dinner in silence. Dean asked if he could shower; Sam nodded with a grunt, Dean showered. When he emerged, Sam had already gone to bed. Thus passed his first day back with his brother.
Back on the couch that night, Dean wondered why he hadn’t tried to say more, but he knew why; Sam’s frigid presence froze the words in your throat. It wasn’t that Dean found him intimidating anymore; rather, it was that everything about his demeanor discouraged casual conversation--or any kind of conversation. As Dean drifted off, he realized it was even more something else: It was that any move, any word, even his very presence, frightened Sam. Sam had an impressive poker face, but after his breakdown the night before, Dean could see it there all the time, just beneath the surface. Sam was like a wounded animal. It was better to let him get used to Dean’s presence before trying to advance the development of their relationship. Sam wasn’t doing too bad, all things considered. This new guy pops into his life, turns it on its ear, and he didn’t freak out, just went on as before. It was okay. Just as long as he had Sam back, it was more than okay. It was perfect.
No customers came in the second day, either, or the third. Dean was deciding it was a good thing tattoos cost an arm and a leg and Sam’s rent on his apartment and his shop must be dirt cheap, when on the fourth day, a customer finally arrived--a hunter, getting the same sigil Dean had. Dean cringed inwardly--it was like being a girl at the prom seeing someone else wearing her dress. News of any recently uncovered valuable weapon in the fight against the wicked spread quickly through the hunting community, evidently.
Sam greeted the guy exactly as he’d greeted Dean, with a gruff statement about paying up front, and got to work, only this guy didn’t fuss about the fact that Sam worked freehand and he didn’t try to engage Sam in conversation; they just sat there in silence as Sam worked, which Dean guessed must be the way it usually went with Sam’s customers. Sam barely ever glanced up from what he was doing, like skin was nothing more than a bloody canvas to him.
It was only when the guy was leaving and Dean struck up a conversation that he learned this guy knew how to deal with Sam because he’d gotten other tattoos from him. Dean asked if he could see them, then if he could photograph the more impressive ones, and the guy reluctantly let him--only the non-hunting-related ones, and only if his face wasn’t visible.
“Sweet,” said Dean, waving his phone at Sam with the pictures on it. “I can get these printed up and put ’em in the window so people know this is a tattoo shop and that you’re really good.” He spent the afternoon at that, then made a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read “TATTOOS” and put that in the window, too. He’d try to get Sam a real sign at some point, but for now, it was better than nothing. Sam seemed baffled by his efforts, but as usual, either untroubled or too afraid to say anything, and let Dean do as he pleased.
In fact, he let Dean make all kinds of changes to the shop over the next several days, scraping the filth off the front windows, cleaning out the back room, generally making the place seem more welcoming ... or at least less off-putting. There was nothing he could do about Sam’s surly attitude, but Dean was there now to greet potential customers with some friendly, encouraging words and to talk up Sam’s talents. Sam allowed it all without comment, letting Dean give his spiel before starting in with his usual statement about money.
They were getting more customers now, but still, long days passed with no one coming through the door. If Dean saw someone outside looking at the pictures, he went out to chat them up, but this crappy part of the city was practically abandoned. “You know,” Dean said one day when it was just the two of them there, eyeing the scuffed walls, plaster peeling off, “most tattoo shops have pictures on the wall, ideas for tattoos you could get. Maybe we should put up some stuff like that.”
Sam looked uncomfortable, out of his depth ... which, for some reason, he usually did whenever Dean tried to talk to him. “I just give them whatever they ask for.”
“I know, you can do that because you’re really good, but most tattoo artists can’t do that, know what I’m saying? They can’t work freehand like you; they have stencils, that print the image on their skin for you to copy. It’s easier.”
Sam got up from his chair, frowning. “No. I can’t work like that. I don’t know how to do that.”
“It’s easy--”
“No!”
Sam had retreated to the far corner of the little space behind the counter, and the way he was looking at Dean, outraged, betrayed ... Dean couldn’t understand it, but he knew for sure he never, ever wanted to give his brother any reason to look at him like that. “Okay, that’s great. I’ll just make this sign, then ....”
Dean cut another piece of cardboard off one of Sam’s supply boxes and wrote “CAN DO ANY TATTOO YOU WANT, JUST BRING PICTURE” on it, and hung it in the window, too. Sam watched the proceedings with sharp suspicion, as confused as ever, finally sinking slowly back into his chair once Dean had sat back in his folding chair and didn’t appear to have any other designs on changing the way Sam did things.
It was always like that. In fact, that little interlude freaked Sam out so much that for several days, he jumped up any time Dean did anything even slightly unusual in his shop and watched hauntedly from that far corner behind the counter, so Dean learned to space out the new ideas over time. Sam didn’t like change, that was plain.
Actually, he didn’t like much of anything. Dean worried he didn’t seem to much like Dean, either. There was no brotherly vibe, not even so much as a recognition on Sam’s part that Dean was someone he should know. There was no talk about their shared past or memories Sam might have of the six years of their lives they’d spent together. Dean decided that if Sam didn’t remember him, surely he would remember their dad, so he told him some stuff about him, but if it affected Sam in any way, he didn’t show it. It was for all the world like to Sam, a stranger had up and decided to move in with him and come to work with him, and he only allowed it because he didn’t know how to refuse. Another person might complain that for a stranger to horn in on his life was inappropriate, but Sam didn’t seem to even have a reference point for that, as if he thought maybe people had to let some dude move in with them all the time. He shared his food without a thought, tried to keep out of Dean’s way (as Dean kept out of his), and that was that.
It was a good thing Sam acted so intimidating and unfriendly, Dean decided, or someone else might have taken advantage of him like this a long time ago. Searching for Sam had been the only thing Dean had ever done, the only thing his father had ever asked of him. He wouldn’t know what else to do, so he stayed by the brother who didn’t remember him or care about him, even though it kind of hurt his feelings. Okay, more than ‘kind of.’ Dean had spent countless hours over the past decade thinking about Sam, remembering playing together, memorizing his face, collating the little quirks that made the boy the person he was. Had Sam never in all those years thought of Dean at all? Dean didn’t know much about Sam’s captors, but one thing he knew was that they’d brainwashed him into believing he never had any other family, and that explained it, it did. He had no right to expect more from Sam. How could he? Expecting him to be able to get up in the morning, pay the rent, and take care of himself seemed a bit much, given the challenges Sam had had to grapple with. So Dean stayed by his side, and burned with the agony of Sam’s indifference to him.
One night, lying on the couch, unable to sleep, Dean considered taking off. It wasn’t like he had to stay. He’d found Sam, and Sam was all right. Was that what their dad had planned, just to find him and make sure he was okay? Sam would have been eighteen when their dad died, and Dean often thought maybe that was why, because Sam was grown then, an adult, and any hope their dad had of getting to be a real dad to him was gone. If John had lived, though, and found Sam like this ... what would he have done? What could he do? Make sure he was doing all right, Dean guessed. What else really was there to do? It scared Dean how fragile Sam was under the surface, so he dreaded the idea of leaving him like that, alone in the world ... but was Dean just another person terrorizing Sam unwittingly, making his life harder than it had to be? Sam seemed to have everything pretty much figured out in terms of making a living and getting by--better than Dean did, having grown up outside the law, never having a permanent address or a real job.
Maybe in his heart, Sam wished Dean would just go away. Maybe Dean was a painful reminder of a past he lost long ago, a youth he could never recapture, a family he never got to have. The whole idea of having a brother seemed beyond Sam ... which only made sense, raised by a bunch of hostile adults who, from what little Dean had been able to gather, didn’t treat him as family in any sense of the word, more like a dangerous animal they kept locked up. Sam had no idea what it meant to have a family. He had no idea what it meant to be cared about by another human being. He asked nothing of Dean, expected nothing of him, and seemed simply to hope that Dean would never ask anything of him he really didn’t want to give.
He’d already given him food and a place to stay--not because Dean was his brother, Dean could tell; more because he seemed to believe you had to do whatever anyone asked you to ... which, come to think of it, must have been the rule where he grew up, contemplating other similar behaviors Sam engaged in--like feeling compelled to answer any question, no matter how much he didn’t want to; refusing certain things (like Dean’s idea for the flash images on the walls) while still believing he would be forced to comply. That must have been how it was, raised by strangers he had to obey, no matter what they demanded.
Dean cringed, wondering again what Sam had been put through. Even if Sam wanted him to leave ... how could he abandon Sam in this broken state, scarcely able to refuse anyone anything? Yet, what good was he really doing Sam, other than helping him bring in a little more business? Maybe it was time to think about moving on, getting his own place, figuring out what to do with his life now that the only goal he’d ever had had been realized. He could come through town to check on Sam now and then, tell him to call him if he needed anything, and leave the poor kid in peace. He’d talk to him about it tomorrow.
The idea seared him. He didn’t spend his life searching for his brother so he could be treated like an unwelcome invader in his life. He’d imagined a joyful reunion, relieved hugs, something--sure as hell not this. But this was what he got, and it was time to deal with reality instead of clinging to hopes that plainly were never going to pan out. There were no guarantees in this life. Just because you loved your brother didn’t mean he would love you back. Just because he’d been everything to you didn’t mean you meant anything to him. Just because all you’d ever wanted was to see him again didn’t mean he felt the same way. It didn’t seem fair, didn’t seem right ... but just because he’d hung so many hopes on it didn’t mean they would come true.
He heard a sound--unusual in this mostly empty building in this deserted area of town. He tilted his head to hear better, and heard nothing. When he finally decided it was an anomaly and rolled over, he heard it again, unmistakeable. The third time, he knew it was Sam, shouting. Dean flung off the ratty blanket he brought up from the Impala and ran into Sam’s room. Sam was thrashing in his bed, bashing parts of himself against the wall and still not waking himself up. Dean grabbed him. “Sam!” he shouted, shaking him. “Sam, wake up, it’s okay. It’s okay, it’s just a dream!”
He had to shake him several times, but at last Sam awoke with a flinch, his eyes huge in the dark, and shrieked, “Dean, Dean, they got me! Hunters, they got me!”
“I know, Sam, I know,” Dean said, holding him tight, “but I got you back, it’s over now. It’s okay, they’re gone, you’re out of there now. It’s all over.”
“They got me, we’re in the woods, you have to come save me! Tell Dad, please, tell Dad ....”
Dean tried to breathe around the sudden stab of pain in his belly. It was like the thirteen years that had created a seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two of them had never happened. Sam was back there right now, plainly, but so was Dean. Here, in the dark, it was like they were two little boys again whose whole world was each other, like nothing had ever come along to change that ... only it had, it had changed everything. He and Dad never had found Sam; he had to get out on his own. Dean could hear in Sam’s voice the way the hope slowly bled out of him over all those years, until his belief that the father and brother he loved and trusted to come along and make everything all right had ever even existed shriveled along with it, leaving this empty husk Sam had become, who didn’t believe in anything anymore. “God, Sam, I’m sorry,” Dean wept. “I’m so sorry.”
“Did you at least try to find me?” Sam sounded so small, like the little boy he had been. His voice was different now, oddly gruff, but for the first time, Dean heard proof this really was the same person he knew so long ago in a different form, because right now the voice--the voice sounded just the same.
“That’s all we did, Sammy.” Dean managed to force out. “We just looked for you. We never stopped.”
It seemed so paltry, to Dean. What was Sam’s stolen childhood compared to Dean’s weak assurance that they’d tried to find him--tried and obviously failed? Yet he felt Sam relax perceptibly in his arms, like it meant everything to him, just to know that they tried, that they cared, that they’d never forgotten him. “They got me,” Sam said, even as he drifted back into sleep.
“Not anymore,” Dean said. “Not anymore. Now I’ve got you, and you’re going to be okay. I promise.”
In the morning when Sam woke up to see Dean in his bed with him, he looked confused at first--then he remembered; Dean saw it in his eyes. Sam looked down and could no longer meet his eyes. He only politely crawled out of the bed at its foot so as not to disturb Dean by crawling over him, and went into the bathroom like any other morning. Dean had believed that if nothing else, a sense of brotherly connection had been rekindled by the events of the previous night. Was he wrong?
“Dad’s dead?” Sam asked noncommittally over breakfast, like he was asking about the weather. It must have been something he’d cultivated, to eradicate any hint of emotion from his tone of voice. Dean shuddered to think what might have made that necessary. Dean sighed and nodded.
“But he ... but he remembered me?” Sam said, and his careful stoicism formed a perceptible crack when his voice quavered and he looked down quickly, to hide tears.
“Sam,” Dean said, staring at him heavily, “a man doesn’t forget his son. He just doesn’t. Here.” Dean got up and got Dad’s journal, setting it in front of Sam on his little formica kitchen table where they ate. He opened to the first page, which had always been, for as long as Dean could remember, the most recent photo of Sam Dad had when he was taken. Every time he or Dad opened that journal, that was what they saw: Sam. At Sam’s blank stare, Dean said, “That’s you, Sam, when you were six.” Sam looked back at his food, unmoved, like ... like he didn’t believe him. “You don’t believe me?” Dean went into his room and nabbed the collection of photos from Sam’s time with the hunters, quickly sifting through them to find the one where he looked the youngest, and set it next to the photo in Dad’s journal. “See?”
Sam leaned forward, looking with mild interest, then suddenly leaned close to the pictures, picking them up and comparing them. Dean could tell by the time he set them down again by the shaken look in his eyes that he was convinced.
“You were the most important thing in our lives, even when you weren’t there,” Dean said. He was pretty sure he saw a few tears fall before Sam abruptly got up and went into the bathroom. Sam was good at smothering the sound, but Dean still heard the occasional sob through the door. He figured Sam wanted a little privacy to process the news, so he let him be for now. Bad as it was to hear him cry, it was better than the way he didn’t seem to feel anything the rest of the time.
Dean picked up the journal and paged through it, as he had a thousand times in the last year, since their dad died. Dean had gotten all his dad’s stuff, what little there was of it, when he died, but this was the only thing of real value among it: every wisp of a lead he’d ever found on Sam’s whereabouts, potential sightings, theories, similar news stories, anything. Dean was about halfway through the familiar pages, thinking maybe it was about time to go see if he could help Sam somehow, when something caught his attention: a lead in Minnesota, where Sam now lived. It stood to reason that Sam probably hadn’t gone far when he escaped his captors, not knowing much about the world around him; if he’d hitched a ride, whoever it was probably dropped him in the nearest city and Sam just made a life where he landed. Plus, there were tons of backwoods properties up here, miles upon miles of them that got almost no attention, especially on the Canadian border, a sort of no man’s land. Dean had a vague memory of them driving down tiny dirt roads up here when he was twelve, but it got so muddy, they had to turn back. Dad thought it was a weak lead, anyhow. But they might have been right at Sam’s door. If they had gone just another mile or two, could they have found him? Dean was sick with the thought.
That night, after Sam recovered and they’d spent the day at the shop, Dean asked him about it. “So they had you out in the woods up here?” The only time Sam didn’t answer was when he didn’t understand the purpose of his question well enough to, which happened now. “I mean, uh ... how’d you get here, when you left them?”
“Hitched.”
“How long did you ride?”
Sam seemed uncomfortable with the line of questioning, but then he always did, like he’d been interrogated many times in his life, and it often hadn’t ended well. “About four hours.”
Dean nodded. That would be about right. “They kept you out in the woods?” Sam nodded. “What kind of property?”
Sam didn’t seem to know what kind of answer he wanted, so he answered with everything he could think of. “Um ... wood ... wood cabin and outbuildings, only ... some of them were made of corrugated steel.”
“’Dja have your own building?”
“Sometimes.” Dean eyed him to try to decipher whether this was a good or a bad thing, but could glean nothing from Sam’s non-expression.
“Pretty far off the road?”
Sam nodded definitively. “There was a dirt road about half a mile away, then you had to go another two miles to a bigger dirt road, then it was many miles to a paved road.” So precise. That must have been a requirement.
“Did anyone ever come around, other hunters or anything?”
“Sometimes, but usually they took me to them.”
“What? What for?”
“For ... if they needed a tattoo.” At Dean’s stare, Sam said, “I told you I’ve been doing this for eight years.”
Dean nodded slowly. He had told him that, back before it had ever occurred to him he’d stumbled upon his brother. “So that was your job.”
“One of them.”
“What else?”
“Cooking. Cleaning, keeping house. Pouring bullets, like you said, making salt rounds, grinding sigils and runes into weapons--like, like tattooing weapons so you could use them to kill the unkillable, because they thought I was good at tattooing things. Stuff like that.” At least they told him he was good at something, Dean thought. He spent a lot of time trying not to think about the kind of things that had been done to Sam at their hands, but it seemed like he might be about to find out.
“So they kept you there most of the time?” Sam nodded. “And ... and did you like doing that stuff?”
“It was all right.” Again, nothing discernable from his expression.
“So how’d you get away? You, um ....” Dean made a sound while he mimed cutting his own throat, stopping when he saw Sam frown.
“No! No, I just ... I ... escaped when I found out their plans for me. I ... I went to the road and walked along it until someone came by, and I asked for a ride, that was it. I didn’t kill them until they came for me here. They would have kept coming, Dean! I knew they would, and I knew what they were planning, and I just couldn’t let it happen--”
“Which was what?”
Sam’s expression darkened. He looked down for a long minute before answering, and when he finally did, it was like he had to force himself to. “I’m Lucifer’s vessel,” he said flatly. “They were preparing me .... I thought they wanted me to say no, but--but it turned out they meant to make me say yes so they could trap him in my body and try to kill him, but you can’t, you can’t! You can’t kill the devil! Every piece of lore and every demon and angel, everyone said so, and I can feel it, and I guess I would know, wouldn’t I?” he said bitterly. “But they didn’t believe me. I’d always planned to say no, and their plan, it was madness; it would turn him loose in the world, it would wreak havoc--”
“Waitwaitwait--what? What what? Vessel, what?”
“His vessel. He’s an angel, remember? Fallen, but still an angel, so you have to consent, before he can possess you ....” At Dean’s blank stare, Sam went on uncertainly, like it would never occur to him that Dean’s lack of comprehension could be due to ignorance, like Sam assumed everyone must know and believe all the same things he did on the subject, “But I never planned to say yes. If I just never did, then he couldn’t make me his vessel like I was supposed to be, and maybe he would never become powerful enough to do whatever he was planning. I felt like it was kind of all up to me, to choose, to do the right thing. Maybe they did the right thing with the demon blood, but this--I’m his vessel, so I know things. I just know.”
Dean laughed mirthlessly, shaking his head. “What? No, you’re not. Man, those hunters must have been batshit, if they believed ....” Dean stopped. The way Sam was looking at him, it was like ... like Dean had lost him, like they’d begun rekindling their brotherhood, and something about Dean’s disbelief had sent him back inside that unresponsive shell again, undoing all the good Dean had managed to forge today and last night. Wouldn’t Sam be glad to have someone tell him all this garbage wasn’t true? Or to get him over his brainwashing, did Dean have to pretend to believe it for a while? Faking was not Dean’s forte. They looked at each other, at an impasse, and finally Sam just got up, threw away the rest of his breakfast, and went to work, like any other of the hundreds of days he’d gone to work sincerely believing he was the devil. Dean thought, not for the first time, that if those hunters weren’t already dead, now would be a good time to go get the job done.
Dean spent the morning at Sam’s shop ruminating on all he’d learned. That Lucifer stuff, wow. They really did a number on poor Sam’s head. To convince a kid he was actually destined to be Satan .... Maybe these hunters meant to try to raise Lucifer and offer Sam to him? Maybe he had to have a special kind of vessel or something, and they’d made Sam into that with all the tattoos and religious ceremonies? Dean still hadn’t gotten a gander at all of Sam’s tattoos, but he didn’t have a single tattoo that appeared to be voluntary, an image of something that meant something to him personally; it was all plainly lore stuff.
But that was all just garbage. Dean was more troubled by Sam’s description of his life with these hunters, and his implication that he would have stayed with them forever if he hadn’t found out about this plan he couldn’t bring himself to take part in. Kind of sounded like he could have walked out to the road and hitched a ride away from there any old time. “Sam?” he heard himself say into the empty shop, where Sam sat reading a book about physics and astronomy. Sam looked up. “Did you ... did you ... think of those hunters as your family?” Dean couldn’t help it; the possibility that he had killed him.
Sam set down his book and considered the question. “That’s what they called themselves in relation to me.”
“But did you believe it?” Dean persisted. “I can’t get a bead on how they treated you. They told you you were good at something, and you did work for them, you took care of them. Maybe you even liked it. I mean, did you ....” Dean could hardly make himself say it. “... Love them?”
Dean wished he didn’t feel so much better to hear Sam’s brief, bitter chuckle. It would be better if Sam had been happy, with a family he loved, right? But Dean couldn’t bear the thought. “No,” Sam said bluntly, and went back to reading.
Of course Sam hadn’t tried to leave them before; they’d obviously brainwashed him into believing he had to stay with them, that it was the right thing. Maybe they kept him locked up in the beginning, but you spend so many years with people, no matter who they are, they become your whole world, the only thing you know. Out there in the woods, maybe Sam didn’t even realize there was a way out until he became desperate enough to start seeking one. “Did you ever try to run away?” Dean couldn’t help but ask. Dean would have tried to run away daily, although maybe not if he’d been taken when he was six. Still, Dean could hardly believe a Winchester could help it.
“At first,” Sam replied emotionlessly.
Dean smiled. That was his Sam. “They always found you and dragged you back?”
“Always.”
“So how’d you get away the last time?”
Sam got one of those looks that made Dean usually decide not to ask so many questions, pain he couldn’t comprehend, etched all the way through him. “I didn’t,” Sam said quietly, and Dean remembered: they came for him, all right. So Sam had to solve the issue permanently. Dean got it then: he could have gotten away at any time. He just had to be willing to kill. It seemed he was willing to suffer just about anything to avoid it. He would only do it when he thought it was the only way to save everyone else.
The next day, in the shop, Sam--who was usually able to sit perfectly silent all day long--cleared his throat hesitantly. Dean looked up. Sam was standing in front of him, not looking him in the eye, which was generally how it was. “Um, I, uh ... I was thinking ... there’s a tattoo I’d like to give you. For free, I mean.”
Huh, this was new. Dean wasn’t in the market for any new tattoos, only ever getting the ones he thought were really important, but on the other hand, he was willing to do anything he could to bridge this vast distance and silence between him and his brother. This was the first thing Sam had ever asked him for. “Um ... sure,” Dean said reluctantly, praying it wasn’t going to be something really ugly or freaky. Lord, what if he planned to put a giant crucifix on him or something?
Sam almost smiled, looking greatly ... relieved? ... and started cleaning his equipment. Dean sank back in the chair, already regretting this. “It’s a unicorn, isn’t it?” Dean joked, to relieve his own anxiety, since he knew Sam wouldn’t laugh. “Because actually, a pretty flower right on my chest would be--”
“No,” Sam cut him off, “someplace hidden, like maybe under your arm.” Oh, good, this just got better. Wasn’t that supposed to be one of the most painful places to get a tattoo? “Take off your shirt,” Sam ordered.
Dean eased off his shirt, willing a customer to walk through the door right now and rescue him long enough to think of a good excuse, but no; it was a Thursday, and as dead as it ever got, which was really saying something.
Sam was as efficient as ever, disinfecting the area practically as soon as his shirt was off and grabbing the tattoo gun. At least judging by the size of the area he swabbed, it would probably be a small tattoo. Sam got to work, and sure enough, it hurt like a son of a bitch. Dean tried to keep his groans to a minimum. He’d been in tattoo parlors where they teased customers about complaining about the pain, and Sam wasn’t like that. Just the other day, this hunter came in who carried on the whole time like it was the worst torture anyone experienced, and Sam didn’t bat an eye ... although Dean had to admit it was pretty funny when Sam helpfully offered to tie him down so he would stop squirming so much and making it hard to finish the tattoo. Still, Dean would lay a lot of money on Sam never making a peep no matter what kind of tattoo he got, and he couldn’t let his little brother make him look like a pussy, so he did his best to keep quiet.
Someone did come in then. Dean tried to get Sam to stop and attend to a paying customer, but now he apparently was single-mindedly fixated on finishing this tattoo come hell or high water; he didn’t even look up at the guy. Dean had to assure him Sam would get to him as soon as he was done working on Dean. As if this couldn’t get more perfect, now he had twice the reason to stifle his groans.
For all that, it was done in half an hour. Dean looked at it as Sam went to get plastic to wrap it: a small rune Dean had never seen the like of before. If the other guy was a hunter, he didn’t seem to recognize it, either. Sam wrapped Dean’s tattoo, even handed him the “how to take care of your new tattoo” sheet, and turned to the customer, getting to work immediately.
On the couch that night, Dean felt at the bandage. Sam had hardly looked at him for the whole rest of the day, and was even more monosyllabic at dinner than usual. What the hell? The problem with spending all your time with crazy people was that shit like this happened. Oh, well. Between Dad and all the other hunters Dean had ever known, he was used to it. Not like tattoos were permanent, right? Dean sighed.
Dean had been trying to figure out Sam’s schedule so he could put some hours on the door, but as far as he could tell, Sam worked from whenever he got to the shop to whenever he felt like leaving. Somehow, it had never been a problem, except maybe today, when for the first time, someone was waiting as they walked up--a woman in her twenties. She stood beaming expectantly as Sam unlocked the door. Dean eyed Sam, who hadn’t looked at her even once, though she was smokin’ hot and dressed to prove it. Sam walked to the chair and starting cleaning his equipment. “Cash first,” he said emotionlessly.
“I know, I know,” she said, grinning, leaned over the money she placed on the counter, not-so-subtly squeezing her breasts together with her upper arms. She caught Dean’s eye where he was smirking at her. “Hey.”
“How you doin’?” Dean nodded, grinning.
“Sam’s given me lots of tattoos,” she informed Dean proudly, spinning around to show off some of them--although there really weren’t all that many--visible under her scanty clothing, bending over to simultaneously show Dean one on the back of her thigh and give Sam a look down her shirt.
Sam looked at her like he hadn’t even noticed all the boob maneuvers (which continued as she did a little hop to make them bounce impressively and then folded her arms beneath them to lift them up--she knew all the tricks, Dean noted with admiration), gesturing to the tattoo chair, which she now ran to and climbed onto eagerly.
The woman glanced at Dean, decided he wasn’t worth worrying about, and proceeded with her shameless flirtation as if he wasn’t there. Dean sat back and watched with delight. So chicks did dig Sammy! Maybe there was some hope for him after all. Maybe he had even had a girlfriend of some kind--someone who was presumably very fond of time to herself.
“I was thinking a little something right here ...,” she said, pointing directly between her breasts. Sam glanced at her only long enough to see where she was pointing before turning back to his tattoo equipment.
“’Kay. Unbutton your shirt.”
Yeah, that’s what she’d wanted to hear. She did a nice slow striptease Sam missed entirely, before easing back on the chair like it was a bed with silk sheets. Sam finally got the tattoo gun ready, then started selecting colors. “What do you want? And how big?”
“What do you think would look pretty there?” she asked sensually, fondling the area temptingly.
Sam looked at it scientifically, plainly contemplating nothing more than the question she’d asked. Dean stifled a laugh. “You could do a flower or a hummingbird or something,” Sam said affectlessly, suggesting the kinds of tattoos he knew most ladies generally wanted there, “but it might be cool to utilize the, uh, nature of the area and make it like an origami or something, that opens up to reveal more of a shape depending on, uh ... whether you’re, uh ... wearing a ....” Sam started to blush furiously and turned away, finally grunting almost inaudibly, “... bra.”
Dean couldn’t keep it in. Several snorts and chortles came out of him despite his best efforts. Sam glanced back at him, alarmed, like he thought Dean was choking, and the girl shot Dean a nervous glare, but she clearly only had eyes for Sam. “Okay, yeah, whatever you think,” she said, and suddenly Dean saw a vulnerability in her eyes that reminded him of Sam’s that first night when all his walls crumbled, before he managed to put them all back up in the space of a few hours.
Sam unceremoniously put one giant hand on one of her boobs (clearly what she came here for; her eyes rolled back in her head and a dizzy grin came over her), thumb on the other, spreading them apart, and poised the needle above the spot.
Dean jumped out of his folding chair with a scrape. Sam, startled, pulled the needle quickly away from her skin, looking back at him, wide-eyed. “Hey, Sam, can I talk to you for a sec?” Dean said, taking the tattoo gun out of his hand, setting it down, and nodding at the girl.
He took Sam outside. Sam looked freaked out, and--Dean could see it in his eyes--scared. “It’s nothing, no big deal, I just thought you should know--Sam, she’s not here for a tattoo; you know that, right?” Sam glanced askance at the front of his tattoo shop, at the girl in the chair, barely visible through the grungy windows. To Sam’s eyes, plainly, all he could see was a customer waiting to be tattooed. “Dude, she digs you! Girl is willing to get a tattoo just to have your hands on her! But a tattoo between your boobs--not a good look, okay? That’s not right.”
“I just do whatever anyone asks me to--”
“Yeah, okay, but do this girl a favor and just, I dunno, talk to her or something. Don’t poke her with the little needle when what she really wants is the big one, you know what I’m sayin’?” No, Sam did not know what he was saying. Tattoo-shop groupies. Even Sam had one. Dean shook his head. “Okay, Sam. Look, you want to get laid?” Sam was looking more confused by the second. Anything outside his usual routine freaked him out good, and Dean was beginning to gather this was way, waaay outside of his routine. “I’m pretty sure you can take her into the back room right now and have sexy times--just, man, for God’s sake, you better wear a condom with this one--and if you’re not interested in that, tell her so, ’cos it’s just cruel, man, to keep giving her tattoos when all she really wants is you. Okay?”
Sam was frozen, uncomprehending. Dean pulled him back inside the shop. “Hey, uh--what’s your name?”
“Cammy,” she and Sam said at the same time.
“Great, Cammy, so you like my brother Sam. He’s a great guy, not much of a conversationalist, but anyway, why don’t you two go back in the back room and get to know each other? Don’t worry, Sam, I’ll hold down the shop.”
Cammy’s eyes lit up--she wasn’t looking forward to getting inked; that was plain--and she got up and led Sam shyly into the back room. After the door had been shut maybe two seconds, Dean remembered, fumbled madly in his wallet for a condom, opened the door just long enough to hand it to her and tell her firmly to use it, then shut the door again. He could hear them talking in there. When it started sounding like more than talking, Dean went outside and watched the shop from there. He took the opportunity to survey the impression the shop gave and come up with some ideas for how to improve it--then, not ten minutes later, Cammy was leaving, flushed and looking very happy, giving a lingering goodbye to an also flushed but freaked-out looking Sam.
Cammy gave one last wave to Dean as she pranced down the street, and Dean went back in the shop, thumping Sam on the back. “First time doin’ something like that?” Sam kept his head down, and finally nodded. “Awesome! Maybe not the most romantic first time ever, but mine wasn’t, either. And I was even here for it! I never would have thought you wouldn’t have already--” He stopped himself in the middle of that thought. Of course Sam hadn’t done it before. Dean didn’t know exactly what Sam’s life with the hunters had been like, but if it was full of religious rituals and efforts to keep Sam away from everyone else, dates wouldn’t have been an option, and who knew how long he’d been out in the world on his own. “So how was it? Was it good? Did you have a nice time?”
Sam nodded uncertainly, then turned to his tattooing equipment and started cleaning up again slowly, his back to Dean. He dropped what he was doing in the middle, turned, grabbed the keys even though it was the middle of the day, and headed for the door. “Hold up!” Dean said when he saw his intention. “I’m coming with.” Sam locked up behind them and started heading home at an unusually brisk pace. He hit the steps of his building at a run; Dean almost couldn’t keep up. When they got inside, Sam ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.
Dean crept up to it, listening, only to hear Sam weeping. Shit. He was willing to bet Sam hadn’t cried half as often until Dean came into his life and started poking holes in all the ways he’d kept himself together. He opened the door, which didn’t lock except with a key that was probably lost years before Sam moved in here, just like Sam’s bedroom. “Sammy?” Dean said softly as he came in. Sam looked up at Dean, startled, perpetually baffled that there was someone living with him now, or maybe unable to believe someone would care that he cried. Sam tried to go back out of the bathroom, as if he thought Dean had come in to take it over and he meant to get out of Dean’s way, but Dean caught him and sat him on the toilet. “Sam, what’s wrong?”
“Did I just do ... something bad?” Sam asked wonderingly, looking, shell-shocked, at his hands. “What just happened?”
Dean couldn’t help but smile, patting Sam’s cheek. “No, Sam, judging by the look on Cammy’s face when she left, you definitely didn’t do anything bad. It wasn’t bad, Sam. No matter what your--uh--your ‘family’ told you.” Meanwhile, Dean berated himself. What the fuck, he just throws this girl on top of Sam before he was ready? Dean thought Sam would have enough experience to know what was going on, or at the very least he thought that something would only happen if it was really what Sam wanted--which kind of seemed anatomically inevitable. Maybe Cammy was that good, or Sam was just that horny, but even if he could do it, Dean figured he’d say no if he didn’t want to ... but that’s right, Sam couldn’t say no. Even to that? Dean kicked himself. Idiot.
Dean bent down to look in Sam’s eyes. He could not help but ask, “Sam ... did you even want to?” Sam had no response, only staring. Dean was getting more anxious by the second. He was such a crappy brother. “Well did it at least feel good?” This got a little reaction; Sam nodded uncertainly. “Good!” Dean said, vastly relieved. It wasn’t everything, but it was a lot. “Good, well then, it’s cool, right? It’s good, right? You’re okay, right? You’re okay.” He patted Sam repeatedly, trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince Sam.
“It ... wasn’t bad?” Sam’s eyes traveled up to Dean’s, and the trust and vulnerability in them was crushing. Sam would believe anything Dean told him; he could see it. Why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t like he had anyone else to ask, and he’d never had anyone trustworthy around, anyway. Dean wasn’t just his best option, he was his only option.
“It wasn’t bad, Sammy,” Dean whispered, choking up--even more when Sam nodded then, accepting his word for it, and looked like he felt somewhat better. Dean got him up, washed Sam’s face with his one washcloth (Dean would have to buy himself a set of towels sometime), hugged him (Sam didn’t return the gesture, but then, he never did, as if he didn’t know you were supposed to--for that matter, maybe he didn’t), then led him out of the bathroom and made him an early dinner. Sam sat on the couch the whole time, staring, thinking, coming to heaven only knew what conclusions, so after they ate, Dean spent the rest of the evening telling him everything there was to know about sex. Good thing Dean was an expert on the subject.
Sam absorbed the information wordlessly, soberly. Only when Dean seemed to be winding down would he hesitantly ask a question, and, eager to know what Sam needed to know, he would launch into a thorough explanation. Only, man, the kid knew nothing about sex, nothing at all. This was probably for the best, Dean decided--better than if he’d been given lots of freaky beliefs about its being ‘sinful’ or something, but as far as he could tell, whoever raised Sam hadn’t believed sex would ever even enter into the equation, so they had apparently never brought it up. Maybe Sam had beat off now and again--Dean sure hoped so--but maybe not; it was impossible to tell from the things he asked. It was almost as if he’d gone his whole life having no idea sex existed. Dean wondered how many other such things there were that Sam was equally ignorant about.
His reward came at the end when Dean dared to mention Cammy again, and Sam smiled, just a little, but enough that Dean could tell the afternoon’s liaison had become a happy memory for Sam. Dean grinned, slapping Sam lightly on the shoulder as he got up. Sam flinched; Dean ignored it. “Well, at least I got to do something for you that a big brother’s supposed to do, huh? Teach you all about sex, help you through your first time. That’s somethin’, isn’t it?” Dean couldn’t help feeling unaccountably happy ... and strangely enough, Sam couldn’t seem to, either.
It wasn’t actually the only brotherly thing Dean was able to do for Sam. Since Sam hadn’t grown up like a normal person, there was a lot he didn’t know about life and the world that Dean was able to teach him. Sam had done a lot of the cooking for his captors, so he was pretty good at that. Dean wasn’t sure how Sam figured out about paying rent and such, but that was all he did: he paid rent on his apartment and his shop, paid utilities, paid for his cell phone and wifi, and he paid for food; he didn’t have transportation or insurance or anything. In fact, Dean wasn’t 100% sure Sam even knew anything about the city he lived in beyond the few blocks he walked to the grocery store and a couple of other local shops; anything he needed that he couldn’t get someplace he could walk to, he ordered online, like his tattoo equipment.
He didn’t know how to drive, so Dean taught him that. (Only three years after he would have if they’d been able to stay together all this time; not too shabby, or so Dean told himself.) Sam had gotten himself some kind of an education, but it had big, weird gaps that Dean was able to fill in for him somewhat--important gaps, gaps John would never have allowed in one of his children, like how laws differed from state to state and the importance of getting across the state line under certain circumstances. Dean wasn’t exactly convinced Sam knew what state he lived in, or what a state was. An address seemed to be just a series of letters and numbers to him. He even seemed a little unclear on whether he lived in the United States or Canada, but Dean could see how he got that idea, all the Canadians around here. At the same time, Sam had vast, extremely specific knowledge about other things, like for instance, astronomy, the latest theories on the formation and structure of the universe, and savanna-dwelling animals, their diet, habits, and migration patterns, which Sam brought up one evening as if it was something everyone must know.
Dean kind of got the picture that Sam had internet access the whole time and had taken it upon himself to educate himself with the information he found there, which ... if he’d only known Dad’s e-mail address, if he’d been old enough to memorize something like that, if it had ever occurred to Dad to teach it to him ... they could have found him forever ago. He was right there, all the time, within reach, if they’d only known where to look.
If he had learned everything he knew via the internet, then it made sense that his knowledge of local, immediate, timely things was hazy. They didn’t call it the world wide web for nothing. Sam could probably more easily find out about littering laws in Hong Kong than he could the bus schedule out of wherever he was--and if they were out in the boonies, so much worse. The news--whether local, national, or international--probably all seemed equally irrelevant to his day-to-day life, a mess of noise. He wouldn’t have any way of knowing how to sift the important from the frivolous. When he evidenced some gap in his knowledge, Dean smoothly covered over it like it was nothing, because Sam tended to display extreme shame when there was something he felt like he was supposed to know that he didn’t. Then, later, Dean would conveniently leave a website on the subject open on his laptop (which he didn’t seem to feel he had a right to refuse Dean the use of), and he’d see Sam later reading it with interest. Dad taught Sam to read at four. At least he’d had that to go on, when they couldn’t do anything else for him.
The funnest part of Sam’s education was teaching him all about pop culture: movies and music and t.v. shows. Sam didn’t have a t.v. and kind of freaked when Dean suggested they get one, but Dean was able to convince Sam to let him show him some stuff on his laptop. Dean felt like they really bonded sometimes, when it happened to be something both of them liked, which happened more often than Dean would have expected, having been apart for so long. They didn’t even have the same taste a lot of the time when they were kids, but maybe that was because Sam was enough younger that he couldn’t appreciate older-kid stuff Dean liked. Some things really were genetic, Dean thought as he happily settled deeper into the couch next to a riveted Sam, watching Jurassic Park on his laptop, sharing a bag of chips.
So their reunion wasn’t exactly what he’d pictured, but it was getting closer. They’d even both been raised by hunters, so they had that in common, too. Dean had had awkward moments with civilians, at school, on dates, when he accidentally let slip something about his life growing up as a hunter or he didn’t realize something that was everyday to him wasn’t to everyone else, but there was never a moment like that for Dean with Sam, and there never would be, because Sam would always be the more awkward and ignorant one. He was an easy, accomodating, polite, undemanding roommate. He accepted Dean totally, and--better yet--seemed grateful for every new thing he learned about him, as if Dean just being Dean was way better than what he was used to out of people. He didn’t act that different from how he had at the beginning, so it was hard to tell, but Dean thought he felt a bond forming. He really thought so. He hoped so, because he was doing everything he could think of to forge a connection, and if this wasn’t working, he’d already used up everything in his bag of tricks. He was out.
On to Part 2.
Author: brightly_lit
Rating: PG-13
Genre: gen, intense angst, h/c (mainly hurt!Sam, some emotionally hurt!Dean), brother feels, heroics and badassery, pathetic first time
Characters: Sam, Dean, OCs
Word Count: 16,000
Warnings: language, horrific concepts, mentions of child abuse and torture, PTSD
Summary: Dean spent his whole life searching for the little brother who was taken from him at age 6. He thought once he finally found him, everything would be perfect, but Sam is more broken than Dean could have imagined someone could be and still function. Worse yet, Dean can't even tell if Sam wants his brother back in his life ...
This is a sequel to " Kintsugi." It picks up directly after the last fic leaves off.
Now that Dean had finally found his lost brother, he discovered it wasn’t just easy to keep his promise that he would stay by his side; it was impossible not to. The idea of letting him out of his sight was unthinkable, especially as fragile as Sam had revealed himself to be. When Sam went to work, Dean followed. When he went to the store, Dean tagged along. Maybe he was getting on Sam’s nerves; it was hard to tell, since Sam showed no visible reaction to almost anything after that first night. Sam emerged from his room the next morning and blinked owlishly at him, as if he must be a mirage, then simply went into the bathroom without a word, ate breakfast without looking at him, and headed out the door, Dean on his heels.
At Sam’s tattoo shop, Dean managed to dig up a folding chair from the junk-filled back room while Sam sat at the counter on the only real chair in the joint, working on a laptop, and they sat there together all morning, silent. No customers came in, but that wasn’t surprising, Dean decided, since the shop looked like nothing from outside, no hours on the door, no sign, no advertising, nothing, just the numbers of the address on the window. Sam sat there expressionless, typing, while Dean twiddled his thumbs, but inaction was not his forte. He finally jumped to his feet (Sam flinched and glanced at him for the first time all day), muttering, “May as well make myself useful,” grabbed a broom, and started sweeping up some of the stray needles on the floor. Maybe it was good that Sam didn’t advertise; the health department would have a field day with this place.
The whole day passed with no customers. At dusk, Sam closed up shop, stopped by the little grocery store he’d mentioned, and went home. Sam looked a bit bewildered when Dean followed him back through his apartment door, but seemed helpless to object, allowing it as he’d allowed all Dean’s trespasses on his routine today. Dean had picked up a few things at the store while they were there, too. As Sam got out a pan, Dean stopped him. “No one ever took care of you your whole life, Sam. I wasn’t there. So let me start now. I can cook a few things.”
Sam’s eyes crept up to meet his for a split second. Dean could only describe what he saw there as confusion, but he stepped back and let Dean cook. They ate dinner in silence. Dean asked if he could shower; Sam nodded with a grunt, Dean showered. When he emerged, Sam had already gone to bed. Thus passed his first day back with his brother.
Back on the couch that night, Dean wondered why he hadn’t tried to say more, but he knew why; Sam’s frigid presence froze the words in your throat. It wasn’t that Dean found him intimidating anymore; rather, it was that everything about his demeanor discouraged casual conversation--or any kind of conversation. As Dean drifted off, he realized it was even more something else: It was that any move, any word, even his very presence, frightened Sam. Sam had an impressive poker face, but after his breakdown the night before, Dean could see it there all the time, just beneath the surface. Sam was like a wounded animal. It was better to let him get used to Dean’s presence before trying to advance the development of their relationship. Sam wasn’t doing too bad, all things considered. This new guy pops into his life, turns it on its ear, and he didn’t freak out, just went on as before. It was okay. Just as long as he had Sam back, it was more than okay. It was perfect.
No customers came in the second day, either, or the third. Dean was deciding it was a good thing tattoos cost an arm and a leg and Sam’s rent on his apartment and his shop must be dirt cheap, when on the fourth day, a customer finally arrived--a hunter, getting the same sigil Dean had. Dean cringed inwardly--it was like being a girl at the prom seeing someone else wearing her dress. News of any recently uncovered valuable weapon in the fight against the wicked spread quickly through the hunting community, evidently.
Sam greeted the guy exactly as he’d greeted Dean, with a gruff statement about paying up front, and got to work, only this guy didn’t fuss about the fact that Sam worked freehand and he didn’t try to engage Sam in conversation; they just sat there in silence as Sam worked, which Dean guessed must be the way it usually went with Sam’s customers. Sam barely ever glanced up from what he was doing, like skin was nothing more than a bloody canvas to him.
It was only when the guy was leaving and Dean struck up a conversation that he learned this guy knew how to deal with Sam because he’d gotten other tattoos from him. Dean asked if he could see them, then if he could photograph the more impressive ones, and the guy reluctantly let him--only the non-hunting-related ones, and only if his face wasn’t visible.
“Sweet,” said Dean, waving his phone at Sam with the pictures on it. “I can get these printed up and put ’em in the window so people know this is a tattoo shop and that you’re really good.” He spent the afternoon at that, then made a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read “TATTOOS” and put that in the window, too. He’d try to get Sam a real sign at some point, but for now, it was better than nothing. Sam seemed baffled by his efforts, but as usual, either untroubled or too afraid to say anything, and let Dean do as he pleased.
In fact, he let Dean make all kinds of changes to the shop over the next several days, scraping the filth off the front windows, cleaning out the back room, generally making the place seem more welcoming ... or at least less off-putting. There was nothing he could do about Sam’s surly attitude, but Dean was there now to greet potential customers with some friendly, encouraging words and to talk up Sam’s talents. Sam allowed it all without comment, letting Dean give his spiel before starting in with his usual statement about money.
They were getting more customers now, but still, long days passed with no one coming through the door. If Dean saw someone outside looking at the pictures, he went out to chat them up, but this crappy part of the city was practically abandoned. “You know,” Dean said one day when it was just the two of them there, eyeing the scuffed walls, plaster peeling off, “most tattoo shops have pictures on the wall, ideas for tattoos you could get. Maybe we should put up some stuff like that.”
Sam looked uncomfortable, out of his depth ... which, for some reason, he usually did whenever Dean tried to talk to him. “I just give them whatever they ask for.”
“I know, you can do that because you’re really good, but most tattoo artists can’t do that, know what I’m saying? They can’t work freehand like you; they have stencils, that print the image on their skin for you to copy. It’s easier.”
Sam got up from his chair, frowning. “No. I can’t work like that. I don’t know how to do that.”
“It’s easy--”
“No!”
Sam had retreated to the far corner of the little space behind the counter, and the way he was looking at Dean, outraged, betrayed ... Dean couldn’t understand it, but he knew for sure he never, ever wanted to give his brother any reason to look at him like that. “Okay, that’s great. I’ll just make this sign, then ....”
Dean cut another piece of cardboard off one of Sam’s supply boxes and wrote “CAN DO ANY TATTOO YOU WANT, JUST BRING PICTURE” on it, and hung it in the window, too. Sam watched the proceedings with sharp suspicion, as confused as ever, finally sinking slowly back into his chair once Dean had sat back in his folding chair and didn’t appear to have any other designs on changing the way Sam did things.
It was always like that. In fact, that little interlude freaked Sam out so much that for several days, he jumped up any time Dean did anything even slightly unusual in his shop and watched hauntedly from that far corner behind the counter, so Dean learned to space out the new ideas over time. Sam didn’t like change, that was plain.
Actually, he didn’t like much of anything. Dean worried he didn’t seem to much like Dean, either. There was no brotherly vibe, not even so much as a recognition on Sam’s part that Dean was someone he should know. There was no talk about their shared past or memories Sam might have of the six years of their lives they’d spent together. Dean decided that if Sam didn’t remember him, surely he would remember their dad, so he told him some stuff about him, but if it affected Sam in any way, he didn’t show it. It was for all the world like to Sam, a stranger had up and decided to move in with him and come to work with him, and he only allowed it because he didn’t know how to refuse. Another person might complain that for a stranger to horn in on his life was inappropriate, but Sam didn’t seem to even have a reference point for that, as if he thought maybe people had to let some dude move in with them all the time. He shared his food without a thought, tried to keep out of Dean’s way (as Dean kept out of his), and that was that.
It was a good thing Sam acted so intimidating and unfriendly, Dean decided, or someone else might have taken advantage of him like this a long time ago. Searching for Sam had been the only thing Dean had ever done, the only thing his father had ever asked of him. He wouldn’t know what else to do, so he stayed by the brother who didn’t remember him or care about him, even though it kind of hurt his feelings. Okay, more than ‘kind of.’ Dean had spent countless hours over the past decade thinking about Sam, remembering playing together, memorizing his face, collating the little quirks that made the boy the person he was. Had Sam never in all those years thought of Dean at all? Dean didn’t know much about Sam’s captors, but one thing he knew was that they’d brainwashed him into believing he never had any other family, and that explained it, it did. He had no right to expect more from Sam. How could he? Expecting him to be able to get up in the morning, pay the rent, and take care of himself seemed a bit much, given the challenges Sam had had to grapple with. So Dean stayed by his side, and burned with the agony of Sam’s indifference to him.
One night, lying on the couch, unable to sleep, Dean considered taking off. It wasn’t like he had to stay. He’d found Sam, and Sam was all right. Was that what their dad had planned, just to find him and make sure he was okay? Sam would have been eighteen when their dad died, and Dean often thought maybe that was why, because Sam was grown then, an adult, and any hope their dad had of getting to be a real dad to him was gone. If John had lived, though, and found Sam like this ... what would he have done? What could he do? Make sure he was doing all right, Dean guessed. What else really was there to do? It scared Dean how fragile Sam was under the surface, so he dreaded the idea of leaving him like that, alone in the world ... but was Dean just another person terrorizing Sam unwittingly, making his life harder than it had to be? Sam seemed to have everything pretty much figured out in terms of making a living and getting by--better than Dean did, having grown up outside the law, never having a permanent address or a real job.
Maybe in his heart, Sam wished Dean would just go away. Maybe Dean was a painful reminder of a past he lost long ago, a youth he could never recapture, a family he never got to have. The whole idea of having a brother seemed beyond Sam ... which only made sense, raised by a bunch of hostile adults who, from what little Dean had been able to gather, didn’t treat him as family in any sense of the word, more like a dangerous animal they kept locked up. Sam had no idea what it meant to have a family. He had no idea what it meant to be cared about by another human being. He asked nothing of Dean, expected nothing of him, and seemed simply to hope that Dean would never ask anything of him he really didn’t want to give.
He’d already given him food and a place to stay--not because Dean was his brother, Dean could tell; more because he seemed to believe you had to do whatever anyone asked you to ... which, come to think of it, must have been the rule where he grew up, contemplating other similar behaviors Sam engaged in--like feeling compelled to answer any question, no matter how much he didn’t want to; refusing certain things (like Dean’s idea for the flash images on the walls) while still believing he would be forced to comply. That must have been how it was, raised by strangers he had to obey, no matter what they demanded.
Dean cringed, wondering again what Sam had been put through. Even if Sam wanted him to leave ... how could he abandon Sam in this broken state, scarcely able to refuse anyone anything? Yet, what good was he really doing Sam, other than helping him bring in a little more business? Maybe it was time to think about moving on, getting his own place, figuring out what to do with his life now that the only goal he’d ever had had been realized. He could come through town to check on Sam now and then, tell him to call him if he needed anything, and leave the poor kid in peace. He’d talk to him about it tomorrow.
The idea seared him. He didn’t spend his life searching for his brother so he could be treated like an unwelcome invader in his life. He’d imagined a joyful reunion, relieved hugs, something--sure as hell not this. But this was what he got, and it was time to deal with reality instead of clinging to hopes that plainly were never going to pan out. There were no guarantees in this life. Just because you loved your brother didn’t mean he would love you back. Just because he’d been everything to you didn’t mean you meant anything to him. Just because all you’d ever wanted was to see him again didn’t mean he felt the same way. It didn’t seem fair, didn’t seem right ... but just because he’d hung so many hopes on it didn’t mean they would come true.
He heard a sound--unusual in this mostly empty building in this deserted area of town. He tilted his head to hear better, and heard nothing. When he finally decided it was an anomaly and rolled over, he heard it again, unmistakeable. The third time, he knew it was Sam, shouting. Dean flung off the ratty blanket he brought up from the Impala and ran into Sam’s room. Sam was thrashing in his bed, bashing parts of himself against the wall and still not waking himself up. Dean grabbed him. “Sam!” he shouted, shaking him. “Sam, wake up, it’s okay. It’s okay, it’s just a dream!”
He had to shake him several times, but at last Sam awoke with a flinch, his eyes huge in the dark, and shrieked, “Dean, Dean, they got me! Hunters, they got me!”
“I know, Sam, I know,” Dean said, holding him tight, “but I got you back, it’s over now. It’s okay, they’re gone, you’re out of there now. It’s all over.”
“They got me, we’re in the woods, you have to come save me! Tell Dad, please, tell Dad ....”
Dean tried to breathe around the sudden stab of pain in his belly. It was like the thirteen years that had created a seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two of them had never happened. Sam was back there right now, plainly, but so was Dean. Here, in the dark, it was like they were two little boys again whose whole world was each other, like nothing had ever come along to change that ... only it had, it had changed everything. He and Dad never had found Sam; he had to get out on his own. Dean could hear in Sam’s voice the way the hope slowly bled out of him over all those years, until his belief that the father and brother he loved and trusted to come along and make everything all right had ever even existed shriveled along with it, leaving this empty husk Sam had become, who didn’t believe in anything anymore. “God, Sam, I’m sorry,” Dean wept. “I’m so sorry.”
“Did you at least try to find me?” Sam sounded so small, like the little boy he had been. His voice was different now, oddly gruff, but for the first time, Dean heard proof this really was the same person he knew so long ago in a different form, because right now the voice--the voice sounded just the same.
“That’s all we did, Sammy.” Dean managed to force out. “We just looked for you. We never stopped.”
It seemed so paltry, to Dean. What was Sam’s stolen childhood compared to Dean’s weak assurance that they’d tried to find him--tried and obviously failed? Yet he felt Sam relax perceptibly in his arms, like it meant everything to him, just to know that they tried, that they cared, that they’d never forgotten him. “They got me,” Sam said, even as he drifted back into sleep.
“Not anymore,” Dean said. “Not anymore. Now I’ve got you, and you’re going to be okay. I promise.”
In the morning when Sam woke up to see Dean in his bed with him, he looked confused at first--then he remembered; Dean saw it in his eyes. Sam looked down and could no longer meet his eyes. He only politely crawled out of the bed at its foot so as not to disturb Dean by crawling over him, and went into the bathroom like any other morning. Dean had believed that if nothing else, a sense of brotherly connection had been rekindled by the events of the previous night. Was he wrong?
“Dad’s dead?” Sam asked noncommittally over breakfast, like he was asking about the weather. It must have been something he’d cultivated, to eradicate any hint of emotion from his tone of voice. Dean shuddered to think what might have made that necessary. Dean sighed and nodded.
“But he ... but he remembered me?” Sam said, and his careful stoicism formed a perceptible crack when his voice quavered and he looked down quickly, to hide tears.
“Sam,” Dean said, staring at him heavily, “a man doesn’t forget his son. He just doesn’t. Here.” Dean got up and got Dad’s journal, setting it in front of Sam on his little formica kitchen table where they ate. He opened to the first page, which had always been, for as long as Dean could remember, the most recent photo of Sam Dad had when he was taken. Every time he or Dad opened that journal, that was what they saw: Sam. At Sam’s blank stare, Dean said, “That’s you, Sam, when you were six.” Sam looked back at his food, unmoved, like ... like he didn’t believe him. “You don’t believe me?” Dean went into his room and nabbed the collection of photos from Sam’s time with the hunters, quickly sifting through them to find the one where he looked the youngest, and set it next to the photo in Dad’s journal. “See?”
Sam leaned forward, looking with mild interest, then suddenly leaned close to the pictures, picking them up and comparing them. Dean could tell by the time he set them down again by the shaken look in his eyes that he was convinced.
“You were the most important thing in our lives, even when you weren’t there,” Dean said. He was pretty sure he saw a few tears fall before Sam abruptly got up and went into the bathroom. Sam was good at smothering the sound, but Dean still heard the occasional sob through the door. He figured Sam wanted a little privacy to process the news, so he let him be for now. Bad as it was to hear him cry, it was better than the way he didn’t seem to feel anything the rest of the time.
Dean picked up the journal and paged through it, as he had a thousand times in the last year, since their dad died. Dean had gotten all his dad’s stuff, what little there was of it, when he died, but this was the only thing of real value among it: every wisp of a lead he’d ever found on Sam’s whereabouts, potential sightings, theories, similar news stories, anything. Dean was about halfway through the familiar pages, thinking maybe it was about time to go see if he could help Sam somehow, when something caught his attention: a lead in Minnesota, where Sam now lived. It stood to reason that Sam probably hadn’t gone far when he escaped his captors, not knowing much about the world around him; if he’d hitched a ride, whoever it was probably dropped him in the nearest city and Sam just made a life where he landed. Plus, there were tons of backwoods properties up here, miles upon miles of them that got almost no attention, especially on the Canadian border, a sort of no man’s land. Dean had a vague memory of them driving down tiny dirt roads up here when he was twelve, but it got so muddy, they had to turn back. Dad thought it was a weak lead, anyhow. But they might have been right at Sam’s door. If they had gone just another mile or two, could they have found him? Dean was sick with the thought.
That night, after Sam recovered and they’d spent the day at the shop, Dean asked him about it. “So they had you out in the woods up here?” The only time Sam didn’t answer was when he didn’t understand the purpose of his question well enough to, which happened now. “I mean, uh ... how’d you get here, when you left them?”
“Hitched.”
“How long did you ride?”
Sam seemed uncomfortable with the line of questioning, but then he always did, like he’d been interrogated many times in his life, and it often hadn’t ended well. “About four hours.”
Dean nodded. That would be about right. “They kept you out in the woods?” Sam nodded. “What kind of property?”
Sam didn’t seem to know what kind of answer he wanted, so he answered with everything he could think of. “Um ... wood ... wood cabin and outbuildings, only ... some of them were made of corrugated steel.”
“’Dja have your own building?”
“Sometimes.” Dean eyed him to try to decipher whether this was a good or a bad thing, but could glean nothing from Sam’s non-expression.
“Pretty far off the road?”
Sam nodded definitively. “There was a dirt road about half a mile away, then you had to go another two miles to a bigger dirt road, then it was many miles to a paved road.” So precise. That must have been a requirement.
“Did anyone ever come around, other hunters or anything?”
“Sometimes, but usually they took me to them.”
“What? What for?”
“For ... if they needed a tattoo.” At Dean’s stare, Sam said, “I told you I’ve been doing this for eight years.”
Dean nodded slowly. He had told him that, back before it had ever occurred to him he’d stumbled upon his brother. “So that was your job.”
“One of them.”
“What else?”
“Cooking. Cleaning, keeping house. Pouring bullets, like you said, making salt rounds, grinding sigils and runes into weapons--like, like tattooing weapons so you could use them to kill the unkillable, because they thought I was good at tattooing things. Stuff like that.” At least they told him he was good at something, Dean thought. He spent a lot of time trying not to think about the kind of things that had been done to Sam at their hands, but it seemed like he might be about to find out.
“So they kept you there most of the time?” Sam nodded. “And ... and did you like doing that stuff?”
“It was all right.” Again, nothing discernable from his expression.
“So how’d you get away? You, um ....” Dean made a sound while he mimed cutting his own throat, stopping when he saw Sam frown.
“No! No, I just ... I ... escaped when I found out their plans for me. I ... I went to the road and walked along it until someone came by, and I asked for a ride, that was it. I didn’t kill them until they came for me here. They would have kept coming, Dean! I knew they would, and I knew what they were planning, and I just couldn’t let it happen--”
“Which was what?”
Sam’s expression darkened. He looked down for a long minute before answering, and when he finally did, it was like he had to force himself to. “I’m Lucifer’s vessel,” he said flatly. “They were preparing me .... I thought they wanted me to say no, but--but it turned out they meant to make me say yes so they could trap him in my body and try to kill him, but you can’t, you can’t! You can’t kill the devil! Every piece of lore and every demon and angel, everyone said so, and I can feel it, and I guess I would know, wouldn’t I?” he said bitterly. “But they didn’t believe me. I’d always planned to say no, and their plan, it was madness; it would turn him loose in the world, it would wreak havoc--”
“Waitwaitwait--what? What what? Vessel, what?”
“His vessel. He’s an angel, remember? Fallen, but still an angel, so you have to consent, before he can possess you ....” At Dean’s blank stare, Sam went on uncertainly, like it would never occur to him that Dean’s lack of comprehension could be due to ignorance, like Sam assumed everyone must know and believe all the same things he did on the subject, “But I never planned to say yes. If I just never did, then he couldn’t make me his vessel like I was supposed to be, and maybe he would never become powerful enough to do whatever he was planning. I felt like it was kind of all up to me, to choose, to do the right thing. Maybe they did the right thing with the demon blood, but this--I’m his vessel, so I know things. I just know.”
Dean laughed mirthlessly, shaking his head. “What? No, you’re not. Man, those hunters must have been batshit, if they believed ....” Dean stopped. The way Sam was looking at him, it was like ... like Dean had lost him, like they’d begun rekindling their brotherhood, and something about Dean’s disbelief had sent him back inside that unresponsive shell again, undoing all the good Dean had managed to forge today and last night. Wouldn’t Sam be glad to have someone tell him all this garbage wasn’t true? Or to get him over his brainwashing, did Dean have to pretend to believe it for a while? Faking was not Dean’s forte. They looked at each other, at an impasse, and finally Sam just got up, threw away the rest of his breakfast, and went to work, like any other of the hundreds of days he’d gone to work sincerely believing he was the devil. Dean thought, not for the first time, that if those hunters weren’t already dead, now would be a good time to go get the job done.
Dean spent the morning at Sam’s shop ruminating on all he’d learned. That Lucifer stuff, wow. They really did a number on poor Sam’s head. To convince a kid he was actually destined to be Satan .... Maybe these hunters meant to try to raise Lucifer and offer Sam to him? Maybe he had to have a special kind of vessel or something, and they’d made Sam into that with all the tattoos and religious ceremonies? Dean still hadn’t gotten a gander at all of Sam’s tattoos, but he didn’t have a single tattoo that appeared to be voluntary, an image of something that meant something to him personally; it was all plainly lore stuff.
But that was all just garbage. Dean was more troubled by Sam’s description of his life with these hunters, and his implication that he would have stayed with them forever if he hadn’t found out about this plan he couldn’t bring himself to take part in. Kind of sounded like he could have walked out to the road and hitched a ride away from there any old time. “Sam?” he heard himself say into the empty shop, where Sam sat reading a book about physics and astronomy. Sam looked up. “Did you ... did you ... think of those hunters as your family?” Dean couldn’t help it; the possibility that he had killed him.
Sam set down his book and considered the question. “That’s what they called themselves in relation to me.”
“But did you believe it?” Dean persisted. “I can’t get a bead on how they treated you. They told you you were good at something, and you did work for them, you took care of them. Maybe you even liked it. I mean, did you ....” Dean could hardly make himself say it. “... Love them?”
Dean wished he didn’t feel so much better to hear Sam’s brief, bitter chuckle. It would be better if Sam had been happy, with a family he loved, right? But Dean couldn’t bear the thought. “No,” Sam said bluntly, and went back to reading.
Of course Sam hadn’t tried to leave them before; they’d obviously brainwashed him into believing he had to stay with them, that it was the right thing. Maybe they kept him locked up in the beginning, but you spend so many years with people, no matter who they are, they become your whole world, the only thing you know. Out there in the woods, maybe Sam didn’t even realize there was a way out until he became desperate enough to start seeking one. “Did you ever try to run away?” Dean couldn’t help but ask. Dean would have tried to run away daily, although maybe not if he’d been taken when he was six. Still, Dean could hardly believe a Winchester could help it.
“At first,” Sam replied emotionlessly.
Dean smiled. That was his Sam. “They always found you and dragged you back?”
“Always.”
“So how’d you get away the last time?”
Sam got one of those looks that made Dean usually decide not to ask so many questions, pain he couldn’t comprehend, etched all the way through him. “I didn’t,” Sam said quietly, and Dean remembered: they came for him, all right. So Sam had to solve the issue permanently. Dean got it then: he could have gotten away at any time. He just had to be willing to kill. It seemed he was willing to suffer just about anything to avoid it. He would only do it when he thought it was the only way to save everyone else.
The next day, in the shop, Sam--who was usually able to sit perfectly silent all day long--cleared his throat hesitantly. Dean looked up. Sam was standing in front of him, not looking him in the eye, which was generally how it was. “Um, I, uh ... I was thinking ... there’s a tattoo I’d like to give you. For free, I mean.”
Huh, this was new. Dean wasn’t in the market for any new tattoos, only ever getting the ones he thought were really important, but on the other hand, he was willing to do anything he could to bridge this vast distance and silence between him and his brother. This was the first thing Sam had ever asked him for. “Um ... sure,” Dean said reluctantly, praying it wasn’t going to be something really ugly or freaky. Lord, what if he planned to put a giant crucifix on him or something?
Sam almost smiled, looking greatly ... relieved? ... and started cleaning his equipment. Dean sank back in the chair, already regretting this. “It’s a unicorn, isn’t it?” Dean joked, to relieve his own anxiety, since he knew Sam wouldn’t laugh. “Because actually, a pretty flower right on my chest would be--”
“No,” Sam cut him off, “someplace hidden, like maybe under your arm.” Oh, good, this just got better. Wasn’t that supposed to be one of the most painful places to get a tattoo? “Take off your shirt,” Sam ordered.
Dean eased off his shirt, willing a customer to walk through the door right now and rescue him long enough to think of a good excuse, but no; it was a Thursday, and as dead as it ever got, which was really saying something.
Sam was as efficient as ever, disinfecting the area practically as soon as his shirt was off and grabbing the tattoo gun. At least judging by the size of the area he swabbed, it would probably be a small tattoo. Sam got to work, and sure enough, it hurt like a son of a bitch. Dean tried to keep his groans to a minimum. He’d been in tattoo parlors where they teased customers about complaining about the pain, and Sam wasn’t like that. Just the other day, this hunter came in who carried on the whole time like it was the worst torture anyone experienced, and Sam didn’t bat an eye ... although Dean had to admit it was pretty funny when Sam helpfully offered to tie him down so he would stop squirming so much and making it hard to finish the tattoo. Still, Dean would lay a lot of money on Sam never making a peep no matter what kind of tattoo he got, and he couldn’t let his little brother make him look like a pussy, so he did his best to keep quiet.
Someone did come in then. Dean tried to get Sam to stop and attend to a paying customer, but now he apparently was single-mindedly fixated on finishing this tattoo come hell or high water; he didn’t even look up at the guy. Dean had to assure him Sam would get to him as soon as he was done working on Dean. As if this couldn’t get more perfect, now he had twice the reason to stifle his groans.
For all that, it was done in half an hour. Dean looked at it as Sam went to get plastic to wrap it: a small rune Dean had never seen the like of before. If the other guy was a hunter, he didn’t seem to recognize it, either. Sam wrapped Dean’s tattoo, even handed him the “how to take care of your new tattoo” sheet, and turned to the customer, getting to work immediately.
On the couch that night, Dean felt at the bandage. Sam had hardly looked at him for the whole rest of the day, and was even more monosyllabic at dinner than usual. What the hell? The problem with spending all your time with crazy people was that shit like this happened. Oh, well. Between Dad and all the other hunters Dean had ever known, he was used to it. Not like tattoos were permanent, right? Dean sighed.
Dean had been trying to figure out Sam’s schedule so he could put some hours on the door, but as far as he could tell, Sam worked from whenever he got to the shop to whenever he felt like leaving. Somehow, it had never been a problem, except maybe today, when for the first time, someone was waiting as they walked up--a woman in her twenties. She stood beaming expectantly as Sam unlocked the door. Dean eyed Sam, who hadn’t looked at her even once, though she was smokin’ hot and dressed to prove it. Sam walked to the chair and starting cleaning his equipment. “Cash first,” he said emotionlessly.
“I know, I know,” she said, grinning, leaned over the money she placed on the counter, not-so-subtly squeezing her breasts together with her upper arms. She caught Dean’s eye where he was smirking at her. “Hey.”
“How you doin’?” Dean nodded, grinning.
“Sam’s given me lots of tattoos,” she informed Dean proudly, spinning around to show off some of them--although there really weren’t all that many--visible under her scanty clothing, bending over to simultaneously show Dean one on the back of her thigh and give Sam a look down her shirt.
Sam looked at her like he hadn’t even noticed all the boob maneuvers (which continued as she did a little hop to make them bounce impressively and then folded her arms beneath them to lift them up--she knew all the tricks, Dean noted with admiration), gesturing to the tattoo chair, which she now ran to and climbed onto eagerly.
The woman glanced at Dean, decided he wasn’t worth worrying about, and proceeded with her shameless flirtation as if he wasn’t there. Dean sat back and watched with delight. So chicks did dig Sammy! Maybe there was some hope for him after all. Maybe he had even had a girlfriend of some kind--someone who was presumably very fond of time to herself.
“I was thinking a little something right here ...,” she said, pointing directly between her breasts. Sam glanced at her only long enough to see where she was pointing before turning back to his tattoo equipment.
“’Kay. Unbutton your shirt.”
Yeah, that’s what she’d wanted to hear. She did a nice slow striptease Sam missed entirely, before easing back on the chair like it was a bed with silk sheets. Sam finally got the tattoo gun ready, then started selecting colors. “What do you want? And how big?”
“What do you think would look pretty there?” she asked sensually, fondling the area temptingly.
Sam looked at it scientifically, plainly contemplating nothing more than the question she’d asked. Dean stifled a laugh. “You could do a flower or a hummingbird or something,” Sam said affectlessly, suggesting the kinds of tattoos he knew most ladies generally wanted there, “but it might be cool to utilize the, uh, nature of the area and make it like an origami or something, that opens up to reveal more of a shape depending on, uh ... whether you’re, uh ... wearing a ....” Sam started to blush furiously and turned away, finally grunting almost inaudibly, “... bra.”
Dean couldn’t keep it in. Several snorts and chortles came out of him despite his best efforts. Sam glanced back at him, alarmed, like he thought Dean was choking, and the girl shot Dean a nervous glare, but she clearly only had eyes for Sam. “Okay, yeah, whatever you think,” she said, and suddenly Dean saw a vulnerability in her eyes that reminded him of Sam’s that first night when all his walls crumbled, before he managed to put them all back up in the space of a few hours.
Sam unceremoniously put one giant hand on one of her boobs (clearly what she came here for; her eyes rolled back in her head and a dizzy grin came over her), thumb on the other, spreading them apart, and poised the needle above the spot.
Dean jumped out of his folding chair with a scrape. Sam, startled, pulled the needle quickly away from her skin, looking back at him, wide-eyed. “Hey, Sam, can I talk to you for a sec?” Dean said, taking the tattoo gun out of his hand, setting it down, and nodding at the girl.
He took Sam outside. Sam looked freaked out, and--Dean could see it in his eyes--scared. “It’s nothing, no big deal, I just thought you should know--Sam, she’s not here for a tattoo; you know that, right?” Sam glanced askance at the front of his tattoo shop, at the girl in the chair, barely visible through the grungy windows. To Sam’s eyes, plainly, all he could see was a customer waiting to be tattooed. “Dude, she digs you! Girl is willing to get a tattoo just to have your hands on her! But a tattoo between your boobs--not a good look, okay? That’s not right.”
“I just do whatever anyone asks me to--”
“Yeah, okay, but do this girl a favor and just, I dunno, talk to her or something. Don’t poke her with the little needle when what she really wants is the big one, you know what I’m sayin’?” No, Sam did not know what he was saying. Tattoo-shop groupies. Even Sam had one. Dean shook his head. “Okay, Sam. Look, you want to get laid?” Sam was looking more confused by the second. Anything outside his usual routine freaked him out good, and Dean was beginning to gather this was way, waaay outside of his routine. “I’m pretty sure you can take her into the back room right now and have sexy times--just, man, for God’s sake, you better wear a condom with this one--and if you’re not interested in that, tell her so, ’cos it’s just cruel, man, to keep giving her tattoos when all she really wants is you. Okay?”
Sam was frozen, uncomprehending. Dean pulled him back inside the shop. “Hey, uh--what’s your name?”
“Cammy,” she and Sam said at the same time.
“Great, Cammy, so you like my brother Sam. He’s a great guy, not much of a conversationalist, but anyway, why don’t you two go back in the back room and get to know each other? Don’t worry, Sam, I’ll hold down the shop.”
Cammy’s eyes lit up--she wasn’t looking forward to getting inked; that was plain--and she got up and led Sam shyly into the back room. After the door had been shut maybe two seconds, Dean remembered, fumbled madly in his wallet for a condom, opened the door just long enough to hand it to her and tell her firmly to use it, then shut the door again. He could hear them talking in there. When it started sounding like more than talking, Dean went outside and watched the shop from there. He took the opportunity to survey the impression the shop gave and come up with some ideas for how to improve it--then, not ten minutes later, Cammy was leaving, flushed and looking very happy, giving a lingering goodbye to an also flushed but freaked-out looking Sam.
Cammy gave one last wave to Dean as she pranced down the street, and Dean went back in the shop, thumping Sam on the back. “First time doin’ something like that?” Sam kept his head down, and finally nodded. “Awesome! Maybe not the most romantic first time ever, but mine wasn’t, either. And I was even here for it! I never would have thought you wouldn’t have already--” He stopped himself in the middle of that thought. Of course Sam hadn’t done it before. Dean didn’t know exactly what Sam’s life with the hunters had been like, but if it was full of religious rituals and efforts to keep Sam away from everyone else, dates wouldn’t have been an option, and who knew how long he’d been out in the world on his own. “So how was it? Was it good? Did you have a nice time?”
Sam nodded uncertainly, then turned to his tattooing equipment and started cleaning up again slowly, his back to Dean. He dropped what he was doing in the middle, turned, grabbed the keys even though it was the middle of the day, and headed for the door. “Hold up!” Dean said when he saw his intention. “I’m coming with.” Sam locked up behind them and started heading home at an unusually brisk pace. He hit the steps of his building at a run; Dean almost couldn’t keep up. When they got inside, Sam ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.
Dean crept up to it, listening, only to hear Sam weeping. Shit. He was willing to bet Sam hadn’t cried half as often until Dean came into his life and started poking holes in all the ways he’d kept himself together. He opened the door, which didn’t lock except with a key that was probably lost years before Sam moved in here, just like Sam’s bedroom. “Sammy?” Dean said softly as he came in. Sam looked up at Dean, startled, perpetually baffled that there was someone living with him now, or maybe unable to believe someone would care that he cried. Sam tried to go back out of the bathroom, as if he thought Dean had come in to take it over and he meant to get out of Dean’s way, but Dean caught him and sat him on the toilet. “Sam, what’s wrong?”
“Did I just do ... something bad?” Sam asked wonderingly, looking, shell-shocked, at his hands. “What just happened?”
Dean couldn’t help but smile, patting Sam’s cheek. “No, Sam, judging by the look on Cammy’s face when she left, you definitely didn’t do anything bad. It wasn’t bad, Sam. No matter what your--uh--your ‘family’ told you.” Meanwhile, Dean berated himself. What the fuck, he just throws this girl on top of Sam before he was ready? Dean thought Sam would have enough experience to know what was going on, or at the very least he thought that something would only happen if it was really what Sam wanted--which kind of seemed anatomically inevitable. Maybe Cammy was that good, or Sam was just that horny, but even if he could do it, Dean figured he’d say no if he didn’t want to ... but that’s right, Sam couldn’t say no. Even to that? Dean kicked himself. Idiot.
Dean bent down to look in Sam’s eyes. He could not help but ask, “Sam ... did you even want to?” Sam had no response, only staring. Dean was getting more anxious by the second. He was such a crappy brother. “Well did it at least feel good?” This got a little reaction; Sam nodded uncertainly. “Good!” Dean said, vastly relieved. It wasn’t everything, but it was a lot. “Good, well then, it’s cool, right? It’s good, right? You’re okay, right? You’re okay.” He patted Sam repeatedly, trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince Sam.
“It ... wasn’t bad?” Sam’s eyes traveled up to Dean’s, and the trust and vulnerability in them was crushing. Sam would believe anything Dean told him; he could see it. Why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t like he had anyone else to ask, and he’d never had anyone trustworthy around, anyway. Dean wasn’t just his best option, he was his only option.
“It wasn’t bad, Sammy,” Dean whispered, choking up--even more when Sam nodded then, accepting his word for it, and looked like he felt somewhat better. Dean got him up, washed Sam’s face with his one washcloth (Dean would have to buy himself a set of towels sometime), hugged him (Sam didn’t return the gesture, but then, he never did, as if he didn’t know you were supposed to--for that matter, maybe he didn’t), then led him out of the bathroom and made him an early dinner. Sam sat on the couch the whole time, staring, thinking, coming to heaven only knew what conclusions, so after they ate, Dean spent the rest of the evening telling him everything there was to know about sex. Good thing Dean was an expert on the subject.
Sam absorbed the information wordlessly, soberly. Only when Dean seemed to be winding down would he hesitantly ask a question, and, eager to know what Sam needed to know, he would launch into a thorough explanation. Only, man, the kid knew nothing about sex, nothing at all. This was probably for the best, Dean decided--better than if he’d been given lots of freaky beliefs about its being ‘sinful’ or something, but as far as he could tell, whoever raised Sam hadn’t believed sex would ever even enter into the equation, so they had apparently never brought it up. Maybe Sam had beat off now and again--Dean sure hoped so--but maybe not; it was impossible to tell from the things he asked. It was almost as if he’d gone his whole life having no idea sex existed. Dean wondered how many other such things there were that Sam was equally ignorant about.
His reward came at the end when Dean dared to mention Cammy again, and Sam smiled, just a little, but enough that Dean could tell the afternoon’s liaison had become a happy memory for Sam. Dean grinned, slapping Sam lightly on the shoulder as he got up. Sam flinched; Dean ignored it. “Well, at least I got to do something for you that a big brother’s supposed to do, huh? Teach you all about sex, help you through your first time. That’s somethin’, isn’t it?” Dean couldn’t help feeling unaccountably happy ... and strangely enough, Sam couldn’t seem to, either.
It wasn’t actually the only brotherly thing Dean was able to do for Sam. Since Sam hadn’t grown up like a normal person, there was a lot he didn’t know about life and the world that Dean was able to teach him. Sam had done a lot of the cooking for his captors, so he was pretty good at that. Dean wasn’t sure how Sam figured out about paying rent and such, but that was all he did: he paid rent on his apartment and his shop, paid utilities, paid for his cell phone and wifi, and he paid for food; he didn’t have transportation or insurance or anything. In fact, Dean wasn’t 100% sure Sam even knew anything about the city he lived in beyond the few blocks he walked to the grocery store and a couple of other local shops; anything he needed that he couldn’t get someplace he could walk to, he ordered online, like his tattoo equipment.
He didn’t know how to drive, so Dean taught him that. (Only three years after he would have if they’d been able to stay together all this time; not too shabby, or so Dean told himself.) Sam had gotten himself some kind of an education, but it had big, weird gaps that Dean was able to fill in for him somewhat--important gaps, gaps John would never have allowed in one of his children, like how laws differed from state to state and the importance of getting across the state line under certain circumstances. Dean wasn’t exactly convinced Sam knew what state he lived in, or what a state was. An address seemed to be just a series of letters and numbers to him. He even seemed a little unclear on whether he lived in the United States or Canada, but Dean could see how he got that idea, all the Canadians around here. At the same time, Sam had vast, extremely specific knowledge about other things, like for instance, astronomy, the latest theories on the formation and structure of the universe, and savanna-dwelling animals, their diet, habits, and migration patterns, which Sam brought up one evening as if it was something everyone must know.
Dean kind of got the picture that Sam had internet access the whole time and had taken it upon himself to educate himself with the information he found there, which ... if he’d only known Dad’s e-mail address, if he’d been old enough to memorize something like that, if it had ever occurred to Dad to teach it to him ... they could have found him forever ago. He was right there, all the time, within reach, if they’d only known where to look.
If he had learned everything he knew via the internet, then it made sense that his knowledge of local, immediate, timely things was hazy. They didn’t call it the world wide web for nothing. Sam could probably more easily find out about littering laws in Hong Kong than he could the bus schedule out of wherever he was--and if they were out in the boonies, so much worse. The news--whether local, national, or international--probably all seemed equally irrelevant to his day-to-day life, a mess of noise. He wouldn’t have any way of knowing how to sift the important from the frivolous. When he evidenced some gap in his knowledge, Dean smoothly covered over it like it was nothing, because Sam tended to display extreme shame when there was something he felt like he was supposed to know that he didn’t. Then, later, Dean would conveniently leave a website on the subject open on his laptop (which he didn’t seem to feel he had a right to refuse Dean the use of), and he’d see Sam later reading it with interest. Dad taught Sam to read at four. At least he’d had that to go on, when they couldn’t do anything else for him.
The funnest part of Sam’s education was teaching him all about pop culture: movies and music and t.v. shows. Sam didn’t have a t.v. and kind of freaked when Dean suggested they get one, but Dean was able to convince Sam to let him show him some stuff on his laptop. Dean felt like they really bonded sometimes, when it happened to be something both of them liked, which happened more often than Dean would have expected, having been apart for so long. They didn’t even have the same taste a lot of the time when they were kids, but maybe that was because Sam was enough younger that he couldn’t appreciate older-kid stuff Dean liked. Some things really were genetic, Dean thought as he happily settled deeper into the couch next to a riveted Sam, watching Jurassic Park on his laptop, sharing a bag of chips.
So their reunion wasn’t exactly what he’d pictured, but it was getting closer. They’d even both been raised by hunters, so they had that in common, too. Dean had had awkward moments with civilians, at school, on dates, when he accidentally let slip something about his life growing up as a hunter or he didn’t realize something that was everyday to him wasn’t to everyone else, but there was never a moment like that for Dean with Sam, and there never would be, because Sam would always be the more awkward and ignorant one. He was an easy, accomodating, polite, undemanding roommate. He accepted Dean totally, and--better yet--seemed grateful for every new thing he learned about him, as if Dean just being Dean was way better than what he was used to out of people. He didn’t act that different from how he had at the beginning, so it was hard to tell, but Dean thought he felt a bond forming. He really thought so. He hoped so, because he was doing everything he could think of to forge a connection, and if this wasn’t working, he’d already used up everything in his bag of tricks. He was out.
On to Part 2.