you've only had to come so far, so good
preceded
They make it back to the motel in a weary, soul-depleting silence. What could Dean say, what could he do? He made his big play and all, drew the curtain back on his finally-offered heart, and he got shot down. It would have been incredibly awkward even without the incest part.
Dean watches the road. He’s not unaware that Sam is watching him. Motionless and almost without blinking, Sam is watching Dean.
Dean is trying not to drive them off the side of the road and he is trying to get them somewhere, away, into the future where he will be better able to cope. Back there in the church parking lot looked an awful lot like the worst moment of his life; so away, away, he’s heading west and he doesn’t want to stop until he hits the Pacific.
He gets to the motel and slots in right next to Sam’s car. Nobody’s staying here but them. It’s getting late, all the stores closing, Mexican waiters in white shirts smoking out back of the lone restaurant, and still the heat hangs thick in the air.
Once they get in the room, Sam stops looking at Dean. Dean is picking at his shirt, sweat-stuck to his shoulders as the air conditioning in the room coughs bronchially, sputtering. Sam roots around in his bag and gets a pair of guns and his journal, sits cross-legged on the bed, letting his hair slant in front of his eyes.
Dean stands there for longer than can be considered normal. He sees from the flush crawling up Sam’s neck, the pretty color on his face, that Sam thinks Dean is staring at him, and Dean is, always. He wonders, what should I do? and not a goddamn thing comes to him and he thinks tiredly that the social taboo against sleeping with your siblings almost assuredly arose from the unrelenting drama that ensues from the same (and two-headed babies, hardly a concern at the moment). Dean knows just about everything there is to know about Sam, all except this one last thing.
Dean moves like he’s coming to Sam’s side of the bed, and Sam’s back hitches abruptly, but Dean veers off into the bathroom, closing the door hard. He blinks as if awaking from a blackout, wondering what the hell he’s doing in here, but he goes with it.
Wash your face, Dad’s voice set on repeat, the kind of thing that has Dean moving on autopilot. He’d be panicked, twelve or fourteen and usually because something had happened to Sammy, a broken arm from falling out of a hayloft, blue-lipped and gray-skinned and half-drowned on the riverbank, the bloodied claw marks under Sam’s ribs. Their dad would say sharply, Dean, go wash your face and then come back here and help me.
It always worked and it works now. Thirty seconds to fall apart in a small room where no one could see, no idea if he was crying or how hard because the water was pouring as fast as it would go and hot as he could stand, and then he could go back out and do whatever needed to be done.
He comes back out and obligingly doesn’t try to meet Sam’s eyes. He sits down a couple feet away and reaches for one of the guns, taking it apart without a thought.
Sam lets Dean clean both his weapons, then raises his head and announces what the general plan of attack should be. Dean wants to roll his eyes, because obviously he knows how to foil a necromancer gone bad, but he lets Sam go into the pedantic detail he loves so well.
They’ll go back out at midnight, of course. Most of the important events in Dean’s life have happened at midnight.
They have a while to kill and Dean doesn’t think they’ll make it if they stay in the room, not with the angled looks Sam keeps giving him, the brief minute depression that appears when he sucks on the inside of his lip. He suggests a beer and Sam agrees right away.
It’s just Dean’s luck that they find a bar where it’s actually possible to have a conversation with someone. He hoped for the typical blasting jukebox, a fiver stuffed in his pocket to be sacrificed for quarters, but instead he and Sam sit across from each other in a booth and gaze out at the sparse crowd, the silence conspicuous and oppressive.
It all feels very anticlimactic. They’ve become every other quasi-relationship Dean has ever had, stiltedly sharing that last beer, that final cup of coffee in the overbright morning before parting ways forever. It’s godawful, seeing the blank expression on Sam’s face and listening to the other people laughing, and Dean finishes his first beer too quickly, hiding his mouth. He shoots the waitress a signal and a wink, knowing that Sam won’t let him have more than two.
“Are we gonna kill him?” Sam asks.
Dean’s surprised, his head jerking. Sam’s staring down at his hands. “Dude-”
“I said it quiet.”
“Well, maybe, but you still, you shouldn’t just, like, ask like that.”
“It’s kinda relevant, and only getting more so.” Sam pauses, then says, “Four little kids. Burned them alive.”
“You don’t think we put the actual fear of God in him? Scare him straight?”
“You met him. You don’t talk sense to the insane.”
“Not with that attitude.”
Sam rolls his eyes. He’s got both hands curled around his bottle and his long fingers are intertwined, dotted with condensation and Dean imagines Sam’s big hands open on his chest, latched on his hips and leaving invisible fingerprints. It’s just an idle thought, a way to keep warm; it hurts pretty bad.
“Four little kids,” Sam repeats. Dean manages not to roll his eyes right back, but it’s an effort.
“You’ve been on the case too long to be objective.”
Sam’s eyes flash and his mouth tightens; he doesn’t like his professionalism called into question. “You haven’t been on it long enough to talk.”
Dean sneers. “Nice.”
There are two spots of color high on Sam’s cheeks. His knuckles stand out well-defined, his hands and the bottle welded together as solid as a stone.
“Your plan is basically to put him on the fucking honor system,” Sam says. “Make him promise never to do it again, I’m so sure that’ll work.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Dean says, sharper than he intends because it irritates the fuck out of him when Sam plays dumb. “I didn’t say that. And since when did you get all fucking bloodthirsty?”
That hits harder than Dean meant it to, a full-body flinch from Sam, his beer skidding on the table. His face falls, anger gone like a thrown switch and the look that replaces it is naked and betrayed, cuts Dean clean down to the bone.
Sam shakes his head a few times, his mouth moving uselessly. “I’m not,” he manages eventually.
Dean doesn’t really want to take it back, but he says, “I know,” because he didn’t know it would make Sam look like this.
Sam looks like he’s gonna say something more, but he takes a drink instead. The waitress delivers Dean’s second beer and they drink in slow measured silence for the next few minutes. Dean rubs at his forehead distractedly and tries not to look at Sam, tracing his fingers around the initials carved in the table and experiencing the distinct feeling that he’s lived this moment before.
“Where’s next?” he hears himself asking, his eyes fastened on a matched set of girls at the bar.
“I haven’t had time to look for anything,” Sam says. “Been a little preoccupied.”
“So I’ve heard.” Dean scratches at the label of his beer. “But you’ve got to head in a direction when you leave this place, right?” Sam doesn’t answer long enough for Dean to give in to the dumb joke impulse. “Lemme guess: Atlantic City.”
“That’s exactly it.”
Dean smirks without looking over at him. He might never look at Sam again; it’s just easier. “I’ve got this haunted Boy Scout camp in Wyoming. Trying to get to it before the first big snow.”
“Wait, outside Green River?” Sam asks.
“Yeah.”
“Did it already.”
“What?”
Sam nods, his hands folded neatly in a way that manages to irritate Dean in spite of everything. “Six weeks, maybe two months back. Not too challenging, but I had to buy a tent. You know how expensive that shit has gotten?”
Dean nods automatically. He’s slightly aghast at how everything seems to be an omen of one thing or another, all the strange constellations of a portentous summer, but that’s only because he’s shit at interpreting them.
“What was it?” he asks Sam, who shrugs and pushes his hair back with the side of his hand.
“Typical, these pioneers who went cannibal. Only took a couple of days.” Sam takes a drink, eyes slit and focused on Dean. “You were following a bit of a weak lead, it would seem.”
It’s Dean turn to shrug. “Not really. Good lead, just not updated.”
“You heard a rumor. You were following a rumor.” Sam spits it out like it tastes bad.
“Yeah, and?”
“You were gonna hike five miles into the wilderness to confront something you’d heard a rumor about. A badly outdated rumor, I think we can agree on that if nothing else. Just walk right out there without any concrete idea what it could be or what it might do.”
“I was gonna be well-armed, Sam.”
Sam’s eyes narrow. “That’s less than comforting.”
Dean shows his hands, once again at a loss as to what Sam wants from him. “I’m not much for the research stuff, you know that.”
“I thought that was only when you had me around to scut the work.”
“No, that’s pretty much all the time. Think back. Try to remember if you once saw me studying in high school.”
“That’s no kind of excuse. This isn’t some class you don’t give a shit about.”
“It’s not? Hard to tell from all the lecturing.”
Sam sits back, crossing his arms over his chest. The expression on his face is a fluid mix of exasperation and frustration and the immovable fondness that is the cause of all their troubles. He’s set his gaze in a darkly impressive scowl, and Dean half-cocks an eyebrow, a mad urge to grin bubbling up because he loves it when Sam gets like this.
“The great Dean Winchester, can’t even tell you the name of what he’s trying to kill.”
Dean waves it away. “I kill ‘em, that’s what counts.”
“Yeah, until you kill one and then its brother kills you because hey! You didn’t even know there were two of them.”
Something about how he says it riles Dean more than he expected, half a snarl warping Sam’s mouth, jerking his head to the side to get his hair out of his eyes. He can tell from the tense muscles in Sam’s forearms that he’s got both hands in fists, hidden against his chest. It’s all suddenly unbelievably obnoxious, nothing more so than Sam acting like he has the right to be pissed at Dean right now.
“Unless you’re planning to resume watching my back sometime soon, I guess that’s just the way it goes,” Dean says, trying for cold and detached but he sounds kinda numb to his own ears.
It’s a direct hit, and Sam’s the first to look away. Dean watches Sam’s throat swallowing and hates himself a little bit for not looking away too.
“Probably my least favorite thing about you,” Sam says after a moment. He sounds dull and weird. “Your willingness to put your life in danger just to spite me.”
“This is not spite.”
They fall into a fast silence, the air between them dense and shimmery, anticipatory. Sam is blinking fast, staring at the table. His lips move but he doesn’t say anything, praying some mysterious rosary, and Dean tries to reconcile the tired young man before him with the picture of Sam that scowled and laughed in his mind for four years, four months, the various lifetimes Dean has lived without him. Sam was once all light and spark and he loved Dean without pause, without conditions or restrictions, and now he’s like a mirror’s reflection in an unlit room. His love for Dean has become a photo negative, an articulation of empty space.
It occurs to Dean, not for the first time, that he is the worst thing that’s ever happened to Sam.
Dean picks at the label of his beer, little curls of paper sticking under his fingernails, and keeps an eye on the pool table in case he feels like making some money. He’s trying to fight this sinking feeling in his chest, tiny pieces of fear coalescing in his heart like lead shot drawn to a magnet. Somewhere there’s a giant clock with blood-red numbers, counting down the minutes he has left with Sam.
“West,” Sam says, and Dean jumps, sending a white napkin fluttering down like a flag. Sam looks at him, faint lines bracketing his mouth, hollow-eyed and clear, every inch the broken man that Dean’s little brother has grown up to be. “I think after this one’s done I’m gonna go west.”
*
By the time they get back to Kelly’s place, the moon is directly overhead, caught in the narrow alley between the trees like a pearl in a net. They’re not talking anymore, perhaps finally out of accusations to hurl, but that’s doubtful. It’s more pent-up, feels more like they’re both physically suffering to get through these last few hours, no energy to spare for words.
Dean parks a few hundred yards from the Airstream and shed and desiccated truck. Behind a curve in the road, under a thick stand of trees, they’re five miles from a streetlamp and Dean has to roll in with the headlights off to avoid giving warning. Sam is mostly an outline, traced out by the dashboard lights, and when Dean turns off the car he disappears.
They get out and move to the front, feeling their way through the true black, and Sam surprises Dean by taking hold of his wrist, saying below a whisper, “Just until our eyes adjust.”
Dean nods even though Sam can’t see it, his mouth suddenly desert-dry. Sam’s fingertips are on his pulse, his thumb a slash of pressure on the back of Dean’s hand. They go up the road like that, listening to the soft crunch of each step.
The moonlight breaks through the trees and Dean is able to distinguish earth from sky, sniff out the slope of the road’s curve. Shapes are coming into focus, but he doesn’t say anything to Sam, who doesn’t let him go until they’re standing in the shadows at the edge of the clearing.
The Airstream sits dark and shuttered, lifeless as a spent bullet casing, but the cracks in the patchwork shed are glowing halloween orange, little papercuts of color in the gloom. Dean points at the shed, glancing at Sam and Sam is already staring at it, the planes of his face turning to stone. He takes a deep breath and Dean watches him straighten and line up his shoulders, two or three inches taller all of a sudden and radiating a disciplined kind of violence.
They move faster, unshouldering their packs and getting the necessary supplies, stashing the rest behind a tree. Dean checks his clip as they run softly across the flattened crabgrass, checks on Sam, who is leeched of color by the moonlight, made into a black-and-white movie.
Each taking a side of the crooked door, Sam meets Dean’s eyes, his head cocked. The shed is pulsing heat, and Dean can hear Kelly’s rocks-and-glue voice chanting in a language he doesn’t recognize, words that sound slippery and infectious, and there’s an inhuman howl rising under the old man’s voice, a rush like the ocean.
Sam signals three and points at himself and Dean nods, steps back with his gun raised in both hands. Sam kicks in the door and he does it literally, punching the rickety scrap of plywood off its hinges and clear into the room.
The howl of the demon becomes suddenly deafening.
Sam goes first into the room, and Dean curses himself for the slip: oldest goes first, oldest always goes first. He’s hot on Sam’s heels, straight into hell.
The ifrit is above them, a slithering twist of flame, black-hole eyes and mouth dripping fire and gnashing. Kelly has been knocked off his feet by the flying door, half-curled and dazed near the wall, and that’s the only reason the demon hasn't killed them yet.
“Get him!” Sam shouts, and Dean starts to move towards Kelly, realizing belatedly that that leaves Sam to deal with the ifrit alone. He looks back, sweat burning in his eyes, and Sam is holding one hand up, his palm pale and empty, and reciting Latin verses. The ifrit writhes and shoots grasping tendrils of smoke and flame out towards Sam, but it can’t break Sam’s protective incantation without Kelly.
Dean grabs the old man and hauls him to his feet. The man’s glasses have been cracked, a splinter of glass bisecting one unearthly blue eye.
“Call it off,” Dean orders. Kelly sneers, his corroded teeth showing yellow and foul, and Dean slams him hard into the wall, the whole shed shuddering. “Call that fucking thing off my brother!”
Kelly laughs, cruel laugh rotted all the way through, and shouts at the ceiling, “O morning star, o son of the dawn, take up this fight.”
Dean slams him again, and something snaps, either Kelly’s rib or a piece of the wall. Dean is sucking down black smoke, feeling like he’s bleeding from the eyes. The unholy shriek of the demon shatters through his skull, and Dean looks back to see Sam kicking over the candles, destroying the pentagram drawn in salt. Guttering tapers roll crazily across the floor.
“Send that thing back to hell, man, or you’re going with it.”
“Eye for an eye,” Kelly rasps. “Child for a child.”
“You’ve killed four!”
“They killed first.”
And Kelly surges forward, manic power rushing through him, just able to dislodge Dean and get a clear line on the ifrit. Kelly raises both hands, arthritic and knotted into claws and drawing upwards, gutturally voicing the dead man’s language again, and Dean sees the ifrit swell and flare impossibly bright, bearing down on Sam, who all at once looks so small.
Dean moves without thinking, crashing the butt of his gun right between Kelly’s eyes. His glasses snap in half, gashing his forehead open, and he collapses in a pile at Dean’s feet.
Dean whirls back to Sam, who’s still holding the demon back, but only barely. Sam has both his hands raised, his face red and drenched with sweat and smeared with soot, and he’s shouting at Dean, his mouth is moving and his throat straining, but the demon is so loud it takes Dean a minute to understand.
The altar, Sam is shouting, the altar, the altar, and Dean spots it in the far corner, unlit candles narrow as fingers, sigils and hieroglyphs written in crimson on a mirror. At the foot of it there are the remains of an animal sacrifice, the blood still glistening.
Dean snatches up the one straight-backed wooden chair and demolishes the altar, swinging for the fences and exploding the glass and thin wood. The constant ocean-roar of noise becomes unbearable for a second, pressure thundering against Dean’s ears and he cries out without being aware of it, hunching over.
The demon roar recedes, and Sam’s voice rises in its place. Torn-up and scoured by smoke, Sam’s voice gets stronger, building like a wave. He’s not holding the ifrit back anymore; he’s banishing it, one last time now that the altar has been destroyed. Sam throws each word like a knife:
“Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti.”
The ifrit spins in a furious whirlwind, faster and faster until it’s suddenly sucked under the floorboards and disappears.
It’s quiet all of a sudden. Dean can hear the crackle of the few small fires chewing at the walls, and the strangled wheeze of his own breath, and Kelly’s faint unconscious moans, and Sam coughing violently, sounding like he’s coming to pieces.
Sam falls out into the yard and Dean stumbles through the smoke to find him sprawled on the crabgrass, hauling in great sheafs of air. He’s crying, tear tracks eaten through the soot on his face.
Dean’s legs are shaky, and he lowers himself gingerly to sit next to Sam. His hand locks onto Sam’s shoulder, fisted around a scrap of shirt. He doesn’t say anything for a very long time, and then:
“You were good, Sammy.”
Sam has stopped crying (maybe he never really was; maybe it was only the smoke), but his chest is still juddering faintly. He looks up at Dean, his face grimed and dark.
“Did you kill him?”
Dean shakes his head, but looks back at the shed, where smoke is weaving up from the splintered cracks. “I don’t think so.”
“Are you gonna?”
Dean looks down at Sam. Sam’s eyes bleed so cleanly out of his dirty face, diamonds in coal. Dean shakes his head.
Sam sighs, but doesn’t look upset. It’s hard to say what he looks like, kinda broken open and scraped out. “He had a book. When I first kicked the door in, I saw him get knocked over and a book came out of his hand.”
“Wait here.” Dean leaves Sam to duck back into the shed. Kelly’s still unconscious, slack-mouthed with his forehead against the ground, half his face covered in blood, and Dean binds his hands behind his back quickly with a hank of rope before searching out the book. He finds it under some debris, bound in ancient brown leather with the edges of the pages singed by a stray candle.
Dean returns to his spot at Sam’s side, hands him the book and watches as Sam sits up and flips through it, squinting and running his fingers over the words, the macabre illustrations that Dean sees in shards and glimpses.
Sam says, “This is it. This is how he did it.” He skims through it for a few more seconds, then closes it with a dim thud, hands it off to Dean. “Burn that, will you.”
Dean obliges. They sit side by side on the old grass, bearing witness to the evolution of book into ash. Slowly Dean catches his breath, thinking disjointedly that if his hands were clean, he could wipe the dirt off Sam’s face.
*
It’s over.
Sam jimmies the door of the Airstream and they do a quick sweep to make sure Kelly doesn’t have any back-up altars or anything. In the storage compartment under the single bunk, Dean finds the mother lode, an arsenal to put any god-fearing survivalist to shame. Guy like Kelly, Sam notes, isn’t likely to have purchased his weaponry legally, and so they leave an anonymous tip with the cops before hightailing it out of there.
Dean gets them out of the woods, out from under the vast psychological weight of pure dark, and it’s only in the washes of the streetlight through the car that he sees that Sam’s trembling.
It’s not much, and Sam is hiding it well with his hands clasped tight. He’s staring straight forward, the muscle in his jaw flexing every few seconds. It’s too bad for Dean that he can read Sam as well as he can, that he has to see all of this in such pinpoint detail.
“Are you okay?” Dean asks.
Sam shakes his head slowly once, twice. “No.”
Dean nods, pressing his teeth to the inside of his lip and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. His mind is in kaleidoscopic pieces, his heart still pounding for some reason. Sam’s not okay, but Sam’s not alone.
They make it back to the motel and Dean’s out of the car before he realizes Sam hasn’t moved. He ducks his head back in and asks if Sam is coming or what.
Sam looks over and the stricken expression on his face lances through Dean, and he breathes out his brother’s name in reflex. Sam flinches like it hurts to hear, and turns away, pushing and stumbling out of the car. Dean stays hunched over for a second, staring at the empty shotgun seat.
He follows Sam into the room and Sam hasn’t bothered to turn on the light so Dean doesn’t either. The curtains are open for the faded gold of the parking lot lights, and it’s just enough. Sepia-toned, Sam’s face is stark and unlined, reduced to the essentials.
Sam tosses his bag on the bed and then paces to the wall, paces back, almost goes into the bathroom but then doesn’t, runs his hands through his hair and turns his back on Dean.
Dean leans back against the door, watching Sam carefully. Sam’s shoulders are pulled up high, his back tense. Dean’s throat is closing up a millimeter at a time, the air squeezed out of his lungs.
“I was somewhere in upstate New York,” Sam says without turning around. “Right after I left, when I was still hitching. This trucker had picked me up and he’d already drunk half a flask of Jack and he made me finish it because he said if I didn’t he would have to, and then bam, right off the road. And so I got drunk and you know how I get. Telling tales and all that. I told him, told him everything. All these jobs we’d been on, all the stuff we’ve killed. The wendigos and vampires and werewolves and I don’t know what else, and he thought I was kidding, he kept laughing, saying, you kill me, kid.”
Sam pauses, and then echoes himself, “You kill me, kid.”
He’s quiet, and Dean searches for something to say but what could he possibly, and anyway, Sam is continuing:
“And I was so drunk. So messed up back then, you wouldn’t believe. He asked me why I was hitching around and I, I’d already told him so much that was true and he hadn’t believed any of it. I thought it was okay. I thought he would only laugh. So I said, I’m in love with my older brother.”
Time stops inside Dean for a second, a skipped heartbeat, a missed breath. He stares at Sam’s back and thinks that he would give his right arm if Sam would just show his face.
“You should have seen him. Stopped laughing so fast it was like somebody had cut his throat. It was like the world had dropped out from under me. He left me on the side of the road and I, um. I nearly froze.”
“Sam,” Dean manages.
Sam shakes his head, and his voice is distant and lost as he says, “It. It’s such an odd feeling. It’s so strange what you do to me. It’s been like this for years and I, I, I don’t think I can take much more.”
Dean can’t hear any more, and he pushes off the door, crosses the room and stands at Sam’s back, hovering his hand and not daring to touch.
“Listen,” Dean tells him, swallowing back a taste like iron. “We can still fix this. We can still go back to like it was.”
And Sam turns, takes Dean’s face in his hands and kisses him hard on the mouth.
A bolt of heat wracks Dean’s body, Sam’s tongue against his for a split second as he grabs Sam’s shirt to stay on his feet, hangs on when Sam pulls away and says shortly:
“No. We can’t.”
Dean stares at his brother, struck dumb and breathless. His mouth feels blistered, Sam’s hands heavy and smoothing over his shoulders. Sam’s eyes are dark as pitch and hooded, his face twisted with terrible desire. Sam looks like he wants Dean so much he’s honestly scared of what he might do. Dean can sympathize; he’s never wanted anybody in his life like he wants Sam at this moment.
“Sam,” he breathes out, and hooks the collar of Sam’s shirt, pulls Sam’s mouth down to his.
It gets out of control so quickly. Both of Dean’s hands are in Sam’s hair and he can’t get enough of kissing him, licking the inside of his mouth and feeling the vibration of his moan. Dean goes kinda crazy, silver stars exploding on the backs of his eyelids because god knows when he last took a breath, and Sam grins against his mouth, shoves him backwards onto the bed.
Fallen back on his hands, panting, Dean’s eyes go wide when Sam strips off his shirt, simple as anything, and moves to stand between his legs. He stares at the taper of Sam’s chest and the narrowly defined muscles of his stomach and Dean swears under his breath, kinda dazed by how turned on he is. Sam’s huge hand curls around the back of his neck, steadying him completely.
“When I was a kid, I worshipped you,” Sam tells him, almost conversationally except for the harsh drag of breath between words. “You knew how to fix stuff and you could make Dad laugh and you were never afraid of anything.”
Dean shakes his head, not sure if it’s false modesty or just a general wish for the conversation to cease. He slips his arms around Sam’s waist and opens his mouth on his stomach, overcome at once by the salt and smoke taste of Sam’s skin, the rough noise that Sam makes and how his hand tightens on Dean’s neck.
“Then,” Sam continues, his voice ever-so-slightly higher as Dean tugs Sam’s jeans as low as they’ll go and marks his teeth on the softly indented skin there. “When I was about thirteen you started to piss me off all the time.”
Dean snorts half a laugh, rolls his eyes upwards to give Sam a look. “I think I remember that.”
Sam grins and it almost stops Dean’s heart how fucking gorgeous the kid is. He presses his forearm down flat and hard and warm on Sam’s back, thumbs open Sam’s fly. He watches Sam shiver for a long moment, his eyes screwed shut.
“It took. Took me the longest time to, to figure that out. You.” Sam cards his fingers through Dean’s short hair. “Because see, I thought I wanted to hit you every time you said something smartass. Ah.”
Sam trails off because Dean has worked his jeans off his hips and without thinking crossed some final line, because he’s got his hand wrapped around his brother’s dick and Sam is looking down at him with frank astonishment, like he somehow never expected that. Dean’s finding it difficult to bear how young Sam looks in this light, so he closes his eyes and presses his face into Sam’s hip.
Sam’s voice is breaking up now, coming and going like a foreign radio station on a particularly clear night. He stutters and groans and moves his hips restlessly into Dean’s hand, and Dean could get off on this alone, honest to god.
“Then I realized. I, I was sixteen, m-maybe less, and you. You were just, just trying to hold us all together. All you could do. And I knew then.”
Dean takes his hand off him and Sam whimpers some automatic protest, but Dean shifts and swings him down onto the bed, flat on his back and the air whooshes out of him. Sam doesn’t let go of the back of Dean’s neck and the move feels balletic and beautifully timed, and now Sam is spread out underneath him and this is all Dean has ever wanted.
He licks up the line of Sam’s throat, deeply undone by what it feels like when Sam speaks against his mouth.
“Dean. Dean. I was terrified.” Sam fists both hands in Dean’s shirt, pulling it away from his back. “I pr-pretended it didn’t happen. Convinced myself I wasn’t like that.”
Dean sits up enough to let Sam pull his shirt off him, then folds back down, feeling drunk as his hands move on smooth heated skin. Sam cranes up and bites at his mouth and Dean kisses him for a long time, down and down with Sam’s arms so heavy and warm around him.
“I ran away,” Sam whispers directly in his ear, and Dean buries his face in Sam’s throat, gripping his hip. He wants to leave a mark, wants to leave a hundred.
“And then you were so, so far away. I, god, I wasn’t even the same person.” Sam writhes faintly, sliding his knee up Dean’s side. “California was like a dream and I. I could do crazy things. Even f-fall in love. With someone who wasn’t you.”
Dean presses his shut eyes tight as he can against Sam’s neck. His hands are open, spanning Sam’s ribs. “I never could,” he admits, and feels Sam’s hand latch back onto the nape of his neck.
“You never left,” Sam tells him softly. He pulls Dean’s head up and kisses him, rolls them both on their sides so he can get Dean’s jeans open. Dean is shuddering, skidding his hands across his brother’s body, trying to stay something like calm.
“After.” Sam stops, rests his forehead on Dean’s, his breath hesitant on Dean’s lips. “After Jess. I didn’t think I’d ever feel like smiling again. Much less anything else. It’s not possible to imagine that kind of misery going away when you’re in the middle of it.”
Dean gets kind of uncomfortable and starts to draw back, but Sam won’t have it, putting one leg over Dean’s and notching their hips together and Dean’s brain almost melts. He rocks against Sam mindlessly once, twice, rolling his head on Sam’s shoulder and muttering nonsense.
Sam keeps them tight together and ducks his head to suck at the pulse hammering in Dean’s throat.
“Then,” Sam says, his teeth sparking on Dean’s skin. “I don’t know when. My life was such a fucking, such a mess. And all of a sudden it was just you again.” He makes a sound that Dean thinks is supposed to be a laugh, but it doesn’t work at all, deformed and brittle. “Just you. Like I got hit by a train.”
Dean doesn’t like the sound of that, doesn’t like the sound of any of this, really, a recitation of the tolls he has taken on Sam. There is something frantic and almost unwilling about the press of Sam’s body against his own, the hard drag of his mouth. It forces Dean to remember that somewhere on the other side of tonight is the brutal light of morning.
He flips Sam onto his back and slips down, mouthing the solid curve of Sam’s collarbone and sliding his hand back between Sam’s legs. It amazes him, Sam thrashing and keening in the back of his throat, his eyes smudged and fierce, pupils blown and his working mouth swollen and slack. Look what I can do, he thinks giddily, and he can feel Sam’s legs shaking hard against his sides.
Sam isn’t supposed to be coherent anymore, but with his head tossed to the side and the length of his throat gleaming, he says brokenly, “Can’t bear it. Can’t, can’t look at you. Can’t be in the same room and I can’t. Can’t anymore. Got nothing left.”
Baring his teeth on Sam’s chest, Dean says with a sharp crack in his voice, “Shut up.”
Sam moans, “It’s my life, Dean, my whole life,” and Dean pins his shoulders down, holds his legs open and leans down close enough to taste Sam’s lips as he snarls, vicious and groundless and free:
“Not another fucking word,”
and then Sam crushes their mouths together and nothing else that gets said that night is worth writing down.
*
Dean dreams a new dream.
He and Sam are out back of the old Airstream, summer in Idaho that Dean recognizes by the gnarled shadow of the single tree, carved into the ground. Sam is fifteen again, stick-legged and narrow-chested, barefoot in the charred yellow grass. Dean’s shirt is plastered to him, two sizes too small and subtly choking off his air.
Sam grins brilliantly, and it sends a spike of pain through Dean’s head. “You’ve gotten awful slow.”
Dean rolls his eyes. “Some of us didn’t get freakish stork legs during puberty.”
Sam makes an outraged sound and shakes his head briskly, letting gold-colored dust cloud around him. He counts off, “One, two, three,” and then disappears for an instant, just winks out of existence with his outline remaining in the dust. He’s back before Dean has time to blink.
“Just ran to Jersey and back,” Sam announces, his face flushed, wind-burned and sand-scarred. He smirks at Dean and gracefully bends one leg to scratch at the back of the other with his toe. “You’re just scared to get beat by me.”
Dean scoffs, scratching at his palms and staring at the motes flickering in the light around Sam’s head. “In your dreams.”
“In yours,” Sam points out. Dean brushes that aside as easily as a piece of lint.
“Not scared of you, Sammy.”
Sam makes a smile that hangs warped, tortured and half-aborted, and he says, “Then catch me.”
He disappears again, poof, and rematerializes so close that Dean can smell the clean scent of sweat and chaff and subterranean lake water. Dean can feel him everywhere. Sam’s lips brush his ear as he says, “Catch me, Dean,” and then Sam is gone.
Dean wakes up.
And Sam is gone again.
THE END
Endnotes: Thanks, William Goldman, for naming that guy in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Flat Nose Curry. (Okay, really, thank you George Curry for joining the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang with your flat nose a hundred and ten years ago. William Goldman still rocks all socks.)
And just for the record, I have only seen the first season of this show, and I’ve only seen it once. I read enough fic to have a general idea of what's coming (and can I just say damn), but I am probably making canon mistakes left right and center and for that I apologize.