Fic: Take Me Under (Supernatural)
Happy birthday, deirdre_c!! In honor of this magnificent occasion, I wrote a thing. But first, a picture, to set the mood.
This story is a throwback to the days before angels and the apocalypse, before betrayals between the brothers were the norm. Back then, it was just Sam, Dean, and their delicious codependency. I have ignored all canon past season 3. (Actually, I pretty much ignored everything past season 2.)
Take Me Under
Sam/Dean, adult, 7500 words
Notes: for Dei on her birthday, with all my love. Many thanks to harrigan for a very speedy beta!
Take Me Under
by Destina
They stayed on the road because they didn't know what else to do.
Dean came to this brilliant conclusion in a motel somewhere outside of Pittsburgh. Sam was asleep in the other bed - blissful sleep, unmarred by nightmares - and Dean was watching a cockroach scale the wall like he had in a hundred dives before. Every old injury was aching, every cut and scar and cracked healed bone, every torn piece of his body now mended, and the bed was too hard to give much comfort.
Sam was the one who slept easier these days, and Dean was the one watching motel wildlife.
They hadn't expected there to be an end, and now there was, but they were still moving, their lives so knotted and gnarled they would never untangle the threads and find their way back to a center place of smooth unbroken lines. They were what they had become: demon killers, hunters who were hunted, the winners, the losers, the guys who used to be Winchesters but now were nameless, placeless composites of a hundred lies.
Sometimes Dean could swear the Impala was slowing down of her own accord, her engine humming out messages Dean didn't want to hear. Like maybe it was time for a rest. Like maybe she knew his needs better than he understood his own.
Killing the roach would have been a waste of his effort, and these days it felt like he had little to spare. He switched off the light and went to sleep.
The conversation took six months from beginning to end, and when it started, Dean was ready for it - had been ready, since that night in Pittsburgh. It began somewhere around Boise, when Sam said, "Things have calmed down a lot. We haven't had as many hunts, lately."
"Uh-huh," Dean answered.
They didn't speak again for 300 miles, until they reached a motel and were lugging in their junk. When Sam started talking, it was to bitch about the fact that there was no hot water in the shower. Between those words Dean thought he heard Sam queue up the next few sentences of the conversation, placed on hold between the now, and the need for normal.
Sam's head bent low over the laptop while he searched out their next job. His skin was painted a ghostly grey, as if he were only a part of the background, one of the room's vacant shadows.
Three weeks went by before they moved on to the next phase. Sam emerged from a gas station restroom with his hands still dripping and said, as he wiped them on his jeans, "If we put away even ten percent of what you earn hustling pool and poker, we'd have a good start at saving something up."
Dean didn't ask what for. He just snorted and got in the car, and let Sam get the coffee, like they weren't easing toward the thing he'd always dreaded.
It was another 22 days of hard hunting and a couple wounds - Dean was nursing an infected hand, swollen up to twice its size and violently bruised - before it came up again. Sam kept looking at Dean's hand, and his face was closed, his posture shouting all sorts of things Dean pretended not to understand.
When Sam finally said, "We could make it a home base," Dean played deaf. Infections could migrate. Eardrums could explode. But this time, Sam was looking right at him, and it was a prelude, not a dropped crumb of bait.
Fifty-four miles and a lot of swallowed fear down the road, Dean said, "Maybe."
After that, Sam took it as a foregone conclusion. He put a shoebox in the trunk with a big black X on the top, and just like a henpecking wife, he snatched a portion of Dean's take from every good game, every hustle, every scam. He looked too fucking happy when he did it, like he'd finally found some productive use for Dean's criminal tendencies.
Once, Dean sneaked out to the Impala and prepared to raid that box. They were hungry; they were in a flea-infested rathole in the middle of Montana, and Dean was through with pipe dreams. But Sam stood in the doorway, arms folded, watching him, not objecting. Just looking.
Dean put the box back where it was, between two just-oiled handguns and a pouch of fetishes, and weighted it down with the shotgun.
They got caught up in a messy hunt in Hawkville, New Mexico, the recently-dead raised from the embalmer's table by a bunch of dumb kids messing around with spells off the internet. The desert at night was cold, the rocks sharp, full moon drifting overhead. Sam emerged from a rounded well of rock coated in coagulated blood, axe in hand. Dean read the words of ancient instructions for neutralizing the dead, the words raw and brilliant on his tongue, like captured moonlight.
Sam sat down beside him on the sloping rock at the cusp of dawn, and they looked out over the glittering sand, the squat brush, stretching vast to the edges of the world. Just one more thing they'd seen, one more thing they didn't photograph for the family album that had never existed.
That night Dean stuffed the pillows behind his back and made a show of watching a movie on the late show: detective, trench coat, beautiful woman, a world painted black and white and grey.
When Sam's breathing slowed and deepened into sleep, Dean switched off the TV. He pulled the curtains open and looked out into the deserted parking lot, so close to the highway they were practically on the center line. Passing headlights made low sweeps through the room, illuminating the bed in slanted bursts of white.
Sam was a curled-up heap beneath an ugly purple bedspread in a bed that was too short for him. Hair had fallen across his eyes, and the curve of his shoulder pushed up against his chin.
It had been eight months, give or take, since Sam had casually dropped the name of friends or told him a funny story about this or that crazy thing at college. It had been longer than that since Sam had redefined normal, narrowed his needs to Dean and the hunt and the road. He hadn't mentioned Jess for almost two years, and there hadn't been anyone else for him. No one serious, anyway. Sarah and Madison, or even that Ava girl - they were hard imprints of the road, scars Sam had learned not to touch.
Around September, five months since the start of the conversation, Dean knew without counting that there was over $5000 in the box. Those crumpled fives, tens, twenties represented long nights filled with familiar things, comfortable things. Beautiful women in too-tight clothes, and their angry boyfriends, dumb jocks spoiling for a fight. Cheap domestic beer, the sour-bitter taste of it in his mouth, and the stink of it on him, mingled with cigarette smoke and strong perfume. The perfect high of winning.
There was more to it, though. There was Sam's quiet amusement as he stood by for backup in the corners or at the tables, flash-grin quick on his lips when Dean sent a glance his way. Or the way Sam always smelled warm and clean no matter how long they sat in the dingy smoke, as though the dark and the cold refused to take to him, even after all this time. There was the way Dean tried to imagine the absence of Sam in the space around him and couldn't do it, and the way he caught Sam looking at him, as though his definitions were shifting again.
Dean had never been good at normal, but he did have a talent for adapting the word to his needs.
In the car on the way to rural Oklahoma to check out a possible ritual sacrifice, Dean was the one to open his mouth. It was as though he couldn't help himself, couldn't make the words stop tumbling forward into the air. "We don't have any credit."
Sam examined the hole in his jeans, picked at it for about ten miles. Then he said, "I did once."
"What?" Dean glanced sideways at him, because sometimes he forgot Sam had been on his own for four years. But it had been a long time between that stretch of independence and now.
"Back then," Sam said, referencing the long-ago life Dean had dragged him past without stopping to look back. "In my sophomore year." Sam turned his head, looked out the window. "I thought maybe...someday. You know."
Dean knew exactly; Sam thought someday he'd pay bills, be a responsible citizen. Be normal.
Normal. The word Sam used to fling in Dad's face like an accusation every time the resentment and anger bubbled up too close to the surface. That might have been what made Dean start to hate the sound of it, but that was a long time ago, and it was just a word.
"We'll start over," Dean said. "Make it up from scratch." They'd had so many names, but none of them permanent. They didn't do permanent. Keeping a name too long was like wearing someone else's skin, and the blood would begin to rot Dean's soul, eating away the self beneath. They were Winchesters.
Except when they weren't.
Sam smiled. "John Smith?"
Dean shifted his eyes sideways, smirked a little. "Perry Malmsteen."
**
The eaves hung over the front bay window, and a walkway wound through overgrown grass and lopsided marigolds, leading down to the street. In general, the house Sam chose was old and comfortable and just right.
It took a few false starts - up on the porch, circling the yard, sitting outside at the curb with his hands on the wheel - before Dean could make himself go inside.
He stood in the middle of the street with his hands stuffed in his pockets, watching the house as though it might suddenly come to life and attack. Which of course it wouldn't; he'd gone over every inch of it himself, every rotted board and crawlspace. He opened up the attic and prowled around, tossing abandoned items into sacks for proper disposal and muttering about packrats under his breath.
Dad had never put much faith in possessions, aside from the ones he needed to get by. He'd told his sons the reasons, and they had believed: too easy to depend on things to be there forever, to become attached and see things as permanent. A stockpile of weapons, a pile of holey socks and a few leftover granola bars didn't count, couldn't lead to disappointment, and Dean did his best to remember that always.
Sam stood on the porch, hands in his pockets and one shoulder against the wall while Dean took the last of their junk inside, but he didn't check the trunk, didn't realize Dean left one or two things there. Nothing important. Just some old clothes, some clips for his favorite .45, a few knives. He closed the lid and put one hand on the cold metal, a promise of sorts: not to forget, not to abandon, not to get sucked in to this new thing. "Nothing can replace you, baby," he told her, but he was sure she didn't believe him.
They bedded down on the floor in front of the fireplace, sleeping bags pushed together head to foot, like when they were kids. Dean stared at the ceiling, the door, the fire, and Sam. He got up, prowled the space, marking its shadows, pinpointing each strange noise. Each time, he came back around to where Sam was and found Sam in the same place, one arm beneath his head, watching Dean's slow progress through the house. Always watching, like Dean was some kind of predictable event, like a cuckoo popping out on the hour.
"What?" Dean asked him, but Sam just shook his head and closed his eyes, and let the illusion of sleep pull Dean back down to the ground.
Once, Sam stirred in his sleep and Dean woke from a dream of being chased across an open field. His hand came up from under the pillow without the knife and he waited for Sam to flinch to consciousness, gasping out some prediction of disaster. It never happened. Sam rolled to his side and slept on, quietly.
For a while, Dean couldn't tell if he was disappointed, or relieved.
**
Within a few days, Sam hired on full-time as a reading and math tutor at the local community center. Dean cracked wise about the blind leading the blind, just to watch Sam's pissy expression morph through a hundred different fantastic mutations, and then he got off his ass and found work of his own, as a bouncer. His specialty was rescuing plastered women from guys much like Dean, guys with avarice shining in their eyes and a spectacular ability to decide which girl in the bar was the most drunk at any given time. He didn't judge. Didn't care, really. Just propped the girls up and gave the guys friendly warnings, and counted on their inability to withdraw to give him a daily fight.
"It's the job," he said to Sam that first night, when he dragged in at 3AM. Sam was still awake, sprawled in the middle of the living room floor surrounded by books. Old books; books from the life they were leaving, not the one they were headed toward. Dean pretended not to notice.
Sam closed the book in his lap, place marked with a pencil jammed between the pages. "That's pretty ironic, don't you think?" he asked.
Dean didn't ask him which of the many slivers of painful irony he was referring to. He kicked off his boots and slid his jacket off, and fell asleep there on the rough blue carpet. If a little of his life's blood bled out of him and into the house as he slept, so be it.
On a grey Tuesday, clouds spread across the sky in a sinister effort to obscure the blue, Dean drove to the local community college and picked his way across campus to the student center. The wall of prospective colleges loomed before him, opportunity splashed across the pages of every brochure. He plucked cards from their holders, everything that said paralegal and pre-law, and stuffed them in his pocket.
Later, in the bar's one-man bathroom with loud music shaking the walls like brass knuckles on the back of his head, he filled them all out. One or two aborted tries, at first; the name Sam Winchester sliding naturally out of the pen, his memories of natural life reasserting themselves over this fake one they'd created from thin air. But he grunted and scribbled them out, flushed the evidence away in shreds, and started over, got the right wrong name on there.
He mailed them all in a batch, watched with a clenched belly as they fluttered down into the slot. Then he hunched his shoulders, pulled up his collar and went home, where Sam had put their one pan to good use making macaroni and cheese.
Sam had some tales to tell about the kids he was helping, stories that made the smile lines around Sam's eyes deepen with pleasure. Dean drank a cup of hot coffee and listened; outside, crickets hummed in the twilight, wrapping the house in a soft cocoon of sound.
The information packets started arriving a month later, stuffed fat with future potential offered for a price. Sam opened the first one with the rest of their meager mail, glanced at it, then said, "Dean." Not the first time he'd made Dean's name sound like an accusation.
Dean took a swig of beer, propped his feet up on the coffee table - a yard-sale acquisition, along with two saggy blue camp chairs - and raised his eyebrows. "Hm?"
Sam held up the packet, lips pursed. "Did you have something to do with this?"
"What would I know about your junk mail?" Dean dismissed the notion with a snort and went back to flipping through a motor sports magazine.
Sam eyed him, but he dropped the subject. He crammed the packet in the trash, dumped coffee grounds on top of it for good measure. Dean fished it out late that night, brushed detritus delicately from its glossy cover, and put it in a plastic grocery sack to stow it safely under the kitchen sink. He rescued five more from the trash the next three days, and put them in a neat stack beside Sam's chair, weighted down unsubtly with Sam's pocket legal aid guide.
Maybe Sam would consider it, if Dean pushed the right direction; maybe it'd occur to him that his new fake life could make it possible. There'd be no discussion of what 'on my own merits' meant, anymore. Not like Sam Winchester could submit an admissions essay detailing that crazy hunt that one time in the Mississippi bayou.
On a chilly Friday evening, Dean came home to the smell of a wood fire in the fireplace. Sam was sprawled on his stomach in front of the hearth, cup of coffee on the brick beside him. He sat up when Dean dropped his jacket, smiled. "Was wondering when you'd get home," he said.
"Fuckin' vandals," Dean said promptly. He sat down on the floor and yanked his boots off, right first, then left. "Painted up the side of the bar again."
"That sucks," Sam said. He reached to his left, lifted some papers out of a plastic bag, and threw them on the crackling fire. Flames licked up over the side of a glossy cover, devouring the solid brick façade of an Ivy League college. Wisps of smoke puffed out from the edges and disappeared up the chimney, much like Dean's vision of Sam's future.
A memory flashed into Dean's mind: nine-year-old Sam holding a pan over a camp stove, doing his level best to melt the car keys on the heels of John's latest relocation announcement.
Sam fed brochures to the fire for half an hour in silence, then turned to Dean. Firelight erased the harshness of exhaustion from his face. "There's leftover pot roast," he said, levering himself up from the floor in pursuit of the proof.
The silent conversation was over, its last words punctuated by a burst of sparks from the dwindling fire. Warm smells, good smells, drifted through the house, beef and fresh coffee. Sam clattered around in the kitchen for a while, and returned to hand Dean a pile of pot roast and carrots on a chipped white plate covered in pink and grey roses. It was Dean's plate, just like the red mug with the Union Jack on it was Dean's mug.
Sam settled on the couch beside Dean, plate in hand, and tucked in to his meal with quiet enthusiasm. His eyes never strayed back to the fireplace.
**
Dean cataloged the space in the house like it was weapons inventory: three bedrooms, two baths, kitchen, living room, garage. He could see it all unfold before they even moved in, and he had spent a few nights awake in the motel, thinking it over.
The weapons went into a hidden space between the back of the third bedroom closet and the rear wall of the house, in the room Dean had proclaimed the 'office', in a tone that made Sam snort. Dean built the cabinet with his own hands when Sam was busy banging together bookshelves. Not that they had many books. At least, not the kind meant for pleasure reading.
It didn't matter much to Sam, though, and so it didn't matter to Dean. The look of anticipation on Sam's face when he stood in front of those shelves made Dean go out and buy him two cheap paperback romance novels the very next night, torrid romances blazing off their lurid fuchsia covers, no mistaking the sneer in the message. Sam took them out of the paper bag and looked up at Dean, eyes shining in a way that was not at all what Dean intended.
When Sam loaded them onto the shelves, Dean's chest ached so hard he had to leave the room.
Dean wasn't sure if he minded that it was so easy; he had always had to fight and struggle to claim a little piece of anything for his own, and now it was all right here, and it made him twitchy.
He spent more than one night sitting in the living room, back against the far wall and facing the door, shotgun nearby. Old habits died hard. He didn't want them to die; it was too convenient, and when the edges disappeared, he could feel himself dissolving into these new spaces of his life. Their life.
He hated that, too. Almost as much as he liked it.
They needed furniture - everything, from forks and spoons to chairs and sheets - but they had no money for it. A dozen trips to Goodwill yielded cheap pots and pans and lamps and blankets, which they put to good use, but something about it didn't set well with Dean. Since they were kids, they'd been foraging for acceptable hand-me-downs, fitting themselves into the cast-off skins of others' lives. Dean wanted something more. Something of their own.
"We can't afford it," Sam would say, and Dean would feel that impatient itch at the back of his neck. He choked back words he was dying to say and instead he found a local bar, a game of poker, winner take all. Six hours of smoky rooms and serious faces, penny-ante players out of their league. Dean knocked back a few beers and breathed in the smoke and he was high, flying out of control on the beautiful simplicity of taking their money. He missed it so much he'd forced himself to forget, but now his heart was beating slow and regular, his radar was functioning again, eyes flicking over the marks, looking for tells.
The red-haired girl in the corner watched him, color rising on her pale cheeks like a slow burn, and he spent the slow moments at the table thinking about how tight her pussy would be when he bent her over the Impala's hood and tested it out.
He came back smelling like latex and sin, $2400 in his front pocket. More than those rubes could afford to lose, and still not enough for what they needed. Sam brought him a cup of coffee, handed through the cracked bathroom door, but he wouldn't meet Dean's eyes; he just took the money and closed the door quietly behind him, Dean's clothes still a stinking heap on the floor.
Sam tore twenty strips of paper, listed every item and put them into a coffee mug stolen outright from the diner two blocks away. Dean drew 'couch' and 'dishes' and put them back, drawing over and over until he had finally picked 'beds' and 'TV' and Sam was laughing his ass off in the corner. Then he flipped over 'TV' and wrote 'microwave' and lifted it in the air between two fingers, waving it like a flag. "Am I right?" he said, eyebrows raised, grinning when Sam couldn't even stop laughing long enough to answer.
Dean had never shopped for a bed before, but he was determined to do it right, for a certain value of right, which involved flopping down on his back, and then his belly, and then scooting sideways like a crab until he was diagonal across the bed. "Ohhhhh, yeah," he moaned, when he found one that was soft enough for stomach sleeping without leaving him with a crick in his neck. "Yeah, yeah, Sammy, this is it. This is the one. Fucking awesome."
"Would you shut up?" Sam hissed, but Dean reached out for him and yanked hard enough to force Sam into a sprawl beside him.
"Seriously, dude, you see what I mean? Come on," Dean told him, rolling around a little. "Give it a try. Really feel it. Bet it's easy on the knees, too."
"Oh my god," Sam said, mortification clear in his face, and he scrambled to get up, but Dean kicked at his shins and he flopped back down again. He pretended not to notice how the sales associate was gawking at them. Apparently he'd never seen anyone really enjoying a bare mattress before.
And that was another selling point: "No stains, dude," Dean said. He patted the mattress fondly. "We'll take two."
"No we won't," Sam said. He'd given up and was on his stomach, head tipped over the edge, the better to see the price tag. "Dean, one of these is half our money."
"So? We'll earn more."
"We can only afford one," Sam said loudly, prompting the salesman to wince and Dean to stare, since Sam hadn't used that voice in a long time.
"Okay, okay." Dean sat up, a little wistful. He'd really been looking forward to sleeping on something soft for the first time in, well, ever. But he could wait a little longer. Sam was bitching about something, and it took Dean's brain a second to catch up. "Wait, what?"
"I can get a second-hand mattress from-"
"What did I tell you about that?" Dean bounced to the edge of the bed and propelled himself up. "We're done with that."
"Fine." Sam bounced up beside him, pissy from head to toe. "Then I'll just stay in the sleeping bag for now."
"Hell no." Dean pointed. "This is yours."
"No, it's not."
"Yes, it is."
"No." Sam crossed his arms. "We are done with you giving me the best stuff, Dean. I'm over it. I'm a big boy now."
"Oh, you think?" Dean scoffed, but his cheeks were burning a little. Fucking salesman and his staring problem. "So help me, I will tie you to the mattress."
"You and what army?" There was the patented Sammy-stubborn look, set jaw and thinned lips, and all.
Dean stared at him; Sam stared back.
They'd each claimed a bedroom, but they bought one queen-sized extra-long bed frame and mattress set, the result of compromise: Dean insisted that Sam could sleep in it too, for now. The thing was certainly big enough for two. And Sam caved, because Dean guilted him into it and Sam wasn't going to deny him the only thing Dean had said he wanted out of this whole damn deal.
Sam put 'bed' back on the list of stuff they still needed to get, but at the end. Dean was good with that.
They put navy blue 200 thread count sheets on the bed, and four pillows, and the first night Sam stole every inch of the top sheet and the blanket and kicked Dean at least eleven times, and tried to tuck the ice cubes at the ends of his legs under Dean's calves.
Dean slept better than he'd slept in years.
**
The days took on a certain cadence, after a while - school, work, and the occasional hunt, though Dean was the one tracking down new cases. Dean began responding to his new name without conscious thought, which gave him a quiet sense of place. Ordinary adjustments were required of them every day: the first time Dean paid a credit card bill for an account he intended to keep open; the first time Sam climbed up on the roof to fix an antennae instead of re-tracing the wards which guarded their sleep. Dean was constantly surprised by the incremental thrills brought on by everyday life.
They had friends, or Sam did; Dean tried to keep up. It was oddly as it had been when they were very young, when Sam had brought home the strays and Dean endured it for Sam's sake. It was a long-buried secret that sometimes, Dean loved the strays more than Sammy did, though he made a point of not letting it show. Love had never brought the Winchesters anything good; it was dangerous and impermanent, and they had no time for it at all.
Sam's friends were Dean's friends, and then Dean had a few stragglers of his own. One of them, a beautiful college girl named Jordan, bartended on weekends, and she wasn't interested in Dean's brand of motel-bed romance.
"You'd like her," Dean told Sam, as Sam's shoulders tightened under his oversized flannel. "She's constantly spewing nerd crap absolutely nobody cares about. You two would get along great." It was in the back of his mind, still, that Sam should have kids, get married, maybe not in that order, and Jordan looked like the key to a rusted lock.
"Maybe we will," Sam said, as though Dean couldn't detect the sound of fire doors clanging down a mile away. Sam was an inaccessible fortress; Sam was a barrier to the outside world, and only Dean knew how to find his way past the gates.
A kernel of fear sparked in his heart, and refused to be drowned by whiskey-flavored coffee.
Dean stopped by the rec center on a Tuesday night to pick Sam up after work, and Sam's friends swarmed him like hungry bees in a flowerless desert. They seemed to know every detail of his life, from his struggles with the crabgrass in the backyard to his repairs on the car the Saturday before. Their interest in him was like being trapped beneath a large, warm blanket; there was no air to breathe, no way to tunnel out. All the things Sam had told them echoed back to him, a tight binding of normalcy to hold him in place.
When Sam finally emerged from the back office, Dean heard a soft voice at his ear: "You two should really take more evenings off. Make time for each other." A hug around the waist from a relative stranger; a gentle push in the wrong direction. An inference he'd heard before.
He'd grown used to it on the road, because it was inevitable, even useful at times. Two men who were so close. Closer than brothers. He'd laughed it off, twisted it to serve his own purposes, even found ways to use it to yank Sam's chain, but this. This was. Something different.
The fear in his heart caught fire, finally, as he gave Sam's friends a false smile and turned toward the car, Sam at his shoulder, words flowing forth about his day and his world and this life they'd made, this life Dean had helped Sam create out of whole cloth where nothing was as it seemed and yet all was as it was supposed to be, and Dean discovered there was no air in his lungs at all.
They were nearly home when Dean found his voice. "I found a hunt. Just a loup-garou, hanging around in some woods near the Wabash in southern Indiana. Bit a couple kids there."
"I have Friday night off, and I can call in tomorrow too," Sam said, reaching for the glove compartment, as if there were any map in the world which would show the territory Dean had just crossed into.
"Nah." He gripped the steering wheel tight, his knuckles aching. "I can do it alone."
"Dean. We don't hunt alone."
"No reason for you to take off, Sammy. It's an in and out. Done these a thousand times. Hell, I took you on your first werewolf hunt." Dean shrugged away the weight of Sam's stare with one shoulder. "I'll be back in two days, tops."
The cassettes were hidden under Sam's seat, and he made no move to pull them out. Silence stretched between them, thick as expectations, until Dean pulled into the driveway.
"No," Sam said. "We agreed, Dean. We don't hunt alone. You wait for me, or you don't go. That's the deal."
They'd never bound themselves to any promises that didn't come written in the blood they shared. So it was easy for Dean to say, "Sure, Sammy," and pretend to agree, easy to pack a bag while Sam showered and throw it in the trunk. Easy to lie awake, listening to Sam's slow, even breaths beside him; easy to ignore the aching desire to stay.
Easy to drive away alone before dawn, leaving behind the complications he had never planned for.
**
It took two days as predicted, but the loup-garou was a wily old man when he wasn't eating children, and he took a chunk out of Dean's arm with his claws. The wound oozed through the gauze Dean wrapped around it, but the thought of stopping to stitch himself up made him wince. There were eleven messages on his cell, each of them oozing blood the same as the bite on his shoulder, and regret was eating away Dean's resolve to ignore them.
Sam met him at the door, jaw tight and fists shoved in his pocket. His eyes went to the bloodstain at Dean's shoulder first, then to his face, before his hands were roving Dean's body like hounds on the scent. "Where else?"
"Nowhere, knock it off," Dean said, but Sam was already moving him deeper into their space, into the house which smelled of salt and coffee, and the sulfurous light from an ancient lamp with a smoke-yellowed shade. The startling vibration of familiarity rang through Dean's bones, a feeling he had only recently learned to recognize, and to miss when it was not there.
"Stay put," Sam said, as he shoved Dean into a chair. Dean turned his face toward the TV, where black and white cowboys were riding herd in silence, muted in service to the sounds of the real world.
Sam threw the med kit on Dean's lap. "Get that shirt off," he said, crouching down with a hot towel. An old routine, one so true it was written in the Winchester DNA: hunt, bleed, stitch, and hunt again. The rhythm was broken, though, and Sam's hands shook as they drew the needle through Dean's skin, writing another scar into his personal history.
"It caught me off guard, and I-"
"Don't," Sam said through gritted teeth, though the path of the needle continued on through. The moment he finished, he sat back on his heels and said, "What the fuck, Dean? Why did you leave without me?"
There were lies that would do. Dean had been rehearsing them in his mind for miles, picturing the way Sam would react to each. He was a practiced liar; he should have been able to carry any of them off. But here in their living room, he found he could not remember why a lie was better than the truth. The smell of blood was in his nose, trickling down his throat.
"What the fuck are we doing here?" he said, watching Sam's earnest face for signs that any part of his fear was understood. "What are we playing at?"
"I'm not playing," Sam said quietly. "This is who we are, now. We built this life, Dean. We built it, and I want this."
"Good for you," Dean said, spitting the words like broken glass. He looked down at the dried blood on his hands, thinking of Sam's strays, and what it had been like when they disappeared into the night.
"You don't get it," Sam said. His big hand cupped the side of Dean's face, and Dean's head snapped up, that fear inside him now a raging furnace of guilt and need and love. "This isn't until something better comes along. You can't make me leave, Dean."
"Well, I can't promise I'll stay." Dean shoved up from the chair, knocking Sam's hand away.
"Things have changed," Sam said, rising from his crouch. He moved into Dean's space as if it had been carved out for him, the shape of it bent to accommodate Sam, always. "This isn't temporary, Dean. This is real."
Impermanency had defined Dean's life. It was the cornerstone of everything he had come to understand about family, about love, about the world. Nothing good ever lasted. They wouldn't be alive long enough to care. Dean's shoulder throbbed with a fast, irregular pulse.
Sam was so close. Too close.
Dean's hand trembled where his fingers touched Sam's shirt. Sam stepped closer, but Dean didn't move, didn't move his hand, didn't stop resisting; his fingers bent back, ready to break. "Dean," Sam said, lifting his chin. The smell of him, sweat and cheap laundry soap and dollar-store shampoo, filled the space around Dean, smothering him. Sam licked his lips, tried to press closer; the wall at Dean's back was an inch away, held off only by his rigid arm shaking against Sam's belly, and he was trapped there, no way forward, no way back.
The snap inside him was a tension-pull, a leash breaking, and he put his other hand on Sam's chest, shoving him so hard Sam staggered back and crashed into the cheap-ass coffee table. It gave under his weight like a wet paper towel, splintering down the middle to let Sam fall through. Dean fell on top of Sam, unable to see anything but Sam's wide eyes. He reached out his hand and clutched Sam's throat, fingers and thumb over the racing heartbeat at the sides of his neck, and pressed down. He was hard, and a bitter acid-mix of guilt and need rose in his throat, catching there to choke him.
"This is what you want?" he shouted, leaning into Sam, shoving his hard-on into the crease of Sam's thigh. He ground down, as if he could provoke Sam into changing his mind, backing out, but Sam's eyes fluttered closed, and he swallowed, Adam's apple hard against the palm of Dean's restraining hand. "Is it?"
Sam's hands were free, and he pushed one between them to rub the heel of his hand over Dean's hard, aching cock, his eyes never leaving Dean's, his calm certainty absorbing all Dean's fury, all his guilt.
Dean launched himself backwards, falling hard to the floor and scrabbling back, one shoulder bumping the couch hard enough to knock it out of his way. Sam was up on his knees by then, reaching for him, but he swatted Sam's hand away and lurched up to one knee. His fist connected with Sam's face at the corner of Sam's lips, splitting them beneath Dean's bones. Sam grunted when his head snapped back, but he countered with a head-butt that forced Dean's eyes back in his head, and left his mind blank for a second. He grabbed the bridge of his nose and staggered to his feet, the backs of his knees braced against the couch.
"Don't do this," Sam gasped. "Don't make it like this."
"Like it can be anything else," Dean snarled, the pit of his stomach dark and hollow with want, and sick for it. Blood ran down Sam's chin, dripped on the blue stripes over his chest where Dean twisted his shirt up into his fist and pulled Sam forward, only to draw him into the second punch.
Sam's fist drove into his solar plexus. Dean let him go and doubled over, one hand on the couch to keep him from falling face-first into the stained brown carpet. "Fucker," he gasped, flailing up until he caught a piece of Sam's sleeve. He swung wild, but connected with the side of Sam's ear; Sam's grunting whoosh of breath only made Dean harder, and turned his stomach.
Dean lost his balance and took two steps sideways, Sam right there with him, hands on his shoulders to pull him back or shove him over the edge, Dean couldn't tell which. They grappled for a minute, clutching at shirts and skin, buttons popping, open palms smashed to sweaty faces, until Dean got his hand into Sam's hair and pulled.
"Fuck!" Sam roared, and Dean had a moment of vicious triumph before Sam's fist connected solidly with the side of his face. For a moment it felt like his left eye had exploded in the socket, and he tightened his grip in Sam's hair, yanking him closer. They wavered there, then fell to the floor again, a crashing heap of tangled limbs.
Sam maneuvered his body over Dean's, pinning him to the floor with his height advantage. Dean pushed the soles of his feet in the floor, prepared to push him off, to keep fighting, until Sam's mouth closed over his and Dean tasted blood and salt, all the truths of their fucked up lives on his lips. A sound of protest started deep in his throat and keened out when Sam caught first Dean's left wrist, then his right, and pinned them to the carpet.
Dean bucked up against Sam, but it just brought his cock into contact with Sam's hard hipbone, and Sam pressed him down into the floor with intent, forcing a burn on his wrists. Sam deepened the kiss, and then his warmth was gone, just long enough for Sam to pull Dean toward him and flip him, right onto his belly.
Dean got a hand on the floor and dug in, driving an elbow back toward Sam, and it connected hard with Sam's chest. In answer, Sam splayed his arms out over Dean's body, holding him down.
"Sam," Dean cried, that sick feeling twisting through him and colliding with lust and need and oh god, want, so much want that he couldn't hold it back any longer.
"Dean," Sam said, low, his knees on either side of Dean's legs. His hand pushed under Dean's body, not gently, and he ripped at Dean's belt buckle, at the buttons of his fly. Palm flat against Dean's skin, he shoved down under denim, his dick pressed into Dean's ass as if there were no layers of clothes between them. Dean growled and clutched at the carpet, Sam's body so warm and solid over him, and Sam's face at the curve of his neck, panting breaths against his skin.
"God, Sam, oh Christ," he whispered, and then Sam bit him, teeth sinking into his skin and tongue worrying behind them, just as Sam's fingers brushed Dean's cock. Dean's world imploded as he came against the barest touch of Sam's hand, one long sob of breath drowning out Sam's soft moan.
No more control; no more fight. Dean's body went limp, trapping Sam's hand there against his stomach, wet with Dean's come. Dean gathered a shaky breath, and then another, Sam's chin a sharp weight against his shoulder blade, his brother's body an anchor, sinking him into the sea. "Get," Dean tried, and the sound of his voice was so weak, he stopped. "Get off me," he breathed, and Sam rolled away, slowly, the absence of his body leaving Dean cold.
He closed his eyes and fought to get hold of himself, but Sam's hands were on him again, and he shivered under the touch. He sat up and looped one arm around Sam's neck, drawing him close enough to seal their mouths together, and there was still the taste of blood on Sam's lips, but it wasn't a secret now, and the shame was burning away.
"You opened your stitches," Sam said, one big hand covering his shoulder. For a moment, Dean imagined the wound pulling apart until every bit of him seeped out, nothing left to hold him together but Sam's fingertips.
"Doesn't hurt," he said, as Sam pressed him back down, sealing the broken edges one bit at a time.
**
Sometime in the middle of the night, Dean's shoulder woke him up with an unreasonable demand for more heat and maybe some nice pain pills to take the edge off. He contemplated getting up, but when he moved to slide out of the heaped blankets, Sam's arm tightened around his waist. Sam's nose was pressed into his back, just between his shoulder blades; Sam's knuckles rested lightly on Dean's belly.
Maybe there had been shame once, in another life, where Dean Winchester spent his days chasing his father's demons. Maybe in that life, there would have been something more precious than Sam; maybe he could have persuaded himself that Sam was better off without him.
But this was the life they had built, he and Sam, with their victories and their scars, and the lines of the roads they had traveled etched into their spines. This was their house; this was their bed, with its scratchy sheets and lumpy pillows.
I want this, Sam had said, with his mouth and his eyes and his hands. Sam, who had tried to tell him that the house and the chairs and the beds were not home, that home was not made of the things which surrounded them.
I want this.
For the first time, Dean allowed himself to want it, too.
This story is a throwback to the days before angels and the apocalypse, before betrayals between the brothers were the norm. Back then, it was just Sam, Dean, and their delicious codependency. I have ignored all canon past season 3. (Actually, I pretty much ignored everything past season 2.)
Take Me Under
Sam/Dean, adult, 7500 words
Notes: for Dei on her birthday, with all my love. Many thanks to harrigan for a very speedy beta!
Take Me Under
by Destina
They stayed on the road because they didn't know what else to do.
Dean came to this brilliant conclusion in a motel somewhere outside of Pittsburgh. Sam was asleep in the other bed - blissful sleep, unmarred by nightmares - and Dean was watching a cockroach scale the wall like he had in a hundred dives before. Every old injury was aching, every cut and scar and cracked healed bone, every torn piece of his body now mended, and the bed was too hard to give much comfort.
Sam was the one who slept easier these days, and Dean was the one watching motel wildlife.
They hadn't expected there to be an end, and now there was, but they were still moving, their lives so knotted and gnarled they would never untangle the threads and find their way back to a center place of smooth unbroken lines. They were what they had become: demon killers, hunters who were hunted, the winners, the losers, the guys who used to be Winchesters but now were nameless, placeless composites of a hundred lies.
Sometimes Dean could swear the Impala was slowing down of her own accord, her engine humming out messages Dean didn't want to hear. Like maybe it was time for a rest. Like maybe she knew his needs better than he understood his own.
Killing the roach would have been a waste of his effort, and these days it felt like he had little to spare. He switched off the light and went to sleep.
The conversation took six months from beginning to end, and when it started, Dean was ready for it - had been ready, since that night in Pittsburgh. It began somewhere around Boise, when Sam said, "Things have calmed down a lot. We haven't had as many hunts, lately."
"Uh-huh," Dean answered.
They didn't speak again for 300 miles, until they reached a motel and were lugging in their junk. When Sam started talking, it was to bitch about the fact that there was no hot water in the shower. Between those words Dean thought he heard Sam queue up the next few sentences of the conversation, placed on hold between the now, and the need for normal.
Sam's head bent low over the laptop while he searched out their next job. His skin was painted a ghostly grey, as if he were only a part of the background, one of the room's vacant shadows.
Three weeks went by before they moved on to the next phase. Sam emerged from a gas station restroom with his hands still dripping and said, as he wiped them on his jeans, "If we put away even ten percent of what you earn hustling pool and poker, we'd have a good start at saving something up."
Dean didn't ask what for. He just snorted and got in the car, and let Sam get the coffee, like they weren't easing toward the thing he'd always dreaded.
It was another 22 days of hard hunting and a couple wounds - Dean was nursing an infected hand, swollen up to twice its size and violently bruised - before it came up again. Sam kept looking at Dean's hand, and his face was closed, his posture shouting all sorts of things Dean pretended not to understand.
When Sam finally said, "We could make it a home base," Dean played deaf. Infections could migrate. Eardrums could explode. But this time, Sam was looking right at him, and it was a prelude, not a dropped crumb of bait.
Fifty-four miles and a lot of swallowed fear down the road, Dean said, "Maybe."
After that, Sam took it as a foregone conclusion. He put a shoebox in the trunk with a big black X on the top, and just like a henpecking wife, he snatched a portion of Dean's take from every good game, every hustle, every scam. He looked too fucking happy when he did it, like he'd finally found some productive use for Dean's criminal tendencies.
Once, Dean sneaked out to the Impala and prepared to raid that box. They were hungry; they were in a flea-infested rathole in the middle of Montana, and Dean was through with pipe dreams. But Sam stood in the doorway, arms folded, watching him, not objecting. Just looking.
Dean put the box back where it was, between two just-oiled handguns and a pouch of fetishes, and weighted it down with the shotgun.
They got caught up in a messy hunt in Hawkville, New Mexico, the recently-dead raised from the embalmer's table by a bunch of dumb kids messing around with spells off the internet. The desert at night was cold, the rocks sharp, full moon drifting overhead. Sam emerged from a rounded well of rock coated in coagulated blood, axe in hand. Dean read the words of ancient instructions for neutralizing the dead, the words raw and brilliant on his tongue, like captured moonlight.
Sam sat down beside him on the sloping rock at the cusp of dawn, and they looked out over the glittering sand, the squat brush, stretching vast to the edges of the world. Just one more thing they'd seen, one more thing they didn't photograph for the family album that had never existed.
That night Dean stuffed the pillows behind his back and made a show of watching a movie on the late show: detective, trench coat, beautiful woman, a world painted black and white and grey.
When Sam's breathing slowed and deepened into sleep, Dean switched off the TV. He pulled the curtains open and looked out into the deserted parking lot, so close to the highway they were practically on the center line. Passing headlights made low sweeps through the room, illuminating the bed in slanted bursts of white.
Sam was a curled-up heap beneath an ugly purple bedspread in a bed that was too short for him. Hair had fallen across his eyes, and the curve of his shoulder pushed up against his chin.
It had been eight months, give or take, since Sam had casually dropped the name of friends or told him a funny story about this or that crazy thing at college. It had been longer than that since Sam had redefined normal, narrowed his needs to Dean and the hunt and the road. He hadn't mentioned Jess for almost two years, and there hadn't been anyone else for him. No one serious, anyway. Sarah and Madison, or even that Ava girl - they were hard imprints of the road, scars Sam had learned not to touch.
Around September, five months since the start of the conversation, Dean knew without counting that there was over $5000 in the box. Those crumpled fives, tens, twenties represented long nights filled with familiar things, comfortable things. Beautiful women in too-tight clothes, and their angry boyfriends, dumb jocks spoiling for a fight. Cheap domestic beer, the sour-bitter taste of it in his mouth, and the stink of it on him, mingled with cigarette smoke and strong perfume. The perfect high of winning.
There was more to it, though. There was Sam's quiet amusement as he stood by for backup in the corners or at the tables, flash-grin quick on his lips when Dean sent a glance his way. Or the way Sam always smelled warm and clean no matter how long they sat in the dingy smoke, as though the dark and the cold refused to take to him, even after all this time. There was the way Dean tried to imagine the absence of Sam in the space around him and couldn't do it, and the way he caught Sam looking at him, as though his definitions were shifting again.
Dean had never been good at normal, but he did have a talent for adapting the word to his needs.
In the car on the way to rural Oklahoma to check out a possible ritual sacrifice, Dean was the one to open his mouth. It was as though he couldn't help himself, couldn't make the words stop tumbling forward into the air. "We don't have any credit."
Sam examined the hole in his jeans, picked at it for about ten miles. Then he said, "I did once."
"What?" Dean glanced sideways at him, because sometimes he forgot Sam had been on his own for four years. But it had been a long time between that stretch of independence and now.
"Back then," Sam said, referencing the long-ago life Dean had dragged him past without stopping to look back. "In my sophomore year." Sam turned his head, looked out the window. "I thought maybe...someday. You know."
Dean knew exactly; Sam thought someday he'd pay bills, be a responsible citizen. Be normal.
Normal. The word Sam used to fling in Dad's face like an accusation every time the resentment and anger bubbled up too close to the surface. That might have been what made Dean start to hate the sound of it, but that was a long time ago, and it was just a word.
"We'll start over," Dean said. "Make it up from scratch." They'd had so many names, but none of them permanent. They didn't do permanent. Keeping a name too long was like wearing someone else's skin, and the blood would begin to rot Dean's soul, eating away the self beneath. They were Winchesters.
Except when they weren't.
Sam smiled. "John Smith?"
Dean shifted his eyes sideways, smirked a little. "Perry Malmsteen."
**
The eaves hung over the front bay window, and a walkway wound through overgrown grass and lopsided marigolds, leading down to the street. In general, the house Sam chose was old and comfortable and just right.
It took a few false starts - up on the porch, circling the yard, sitting outside at the curb with his hands on the wheel - before Dean could make himself go inside.
He stood in the middle of the street with his hands stuffed in his pockets, watching the house as though it might suddenly come to life and attack. Which of course it wouldn't; he'd gone over every inch of it himself, every rotted board and crawlspace. He opened up the attic and prowled around, tossing abandoned items into sacks for proper disposal and muttering about packrats under his breath.
Dad had never put much faith in possessions, aside from the ones he needed to get by. He'd told his sons the reasons, and they had believed: too easy to depend on things to be there forever, to become attached and see things as permanent. A stockpile of weapons, a pile of holey socks and a few leftover granola bars didn't count, couldn't lead to disappointment, and Dean did his best to remember that always.
Sam stood on the porch, hands in his pockets and one shoulder against the wall while Dean took the last of their junk inside, but he didn't check the trunk, didn't realize Dean left one or two things there. Nothing important. Just some old clothes, some clips for his favorite .45, a few knives. He closed the lid and put one hand on the cold metal, a promise of sorts: not to forget, not to abandon, not to get sucked in to this new thing. "Nothing can replace you, baby," he told her, but he was sure she didn't believe him.
They bedded down on the floor in front of the fireplace, sleeping bags pushed together head to foot, like when they were kids. Dean stared at the ceiling, the door, the fire, and Sam. He got up, prowled the space, marking its shadows, pinpointing each strange noise. Each time, he came back around to where Sam was and found Sam in the same place, one arm beneath his head, watching Dean's slow progress through the house. Always watching, like Dean was some kind of predictable event, like a cuckoo popping out on the hour.
"What?" Dean asked him, but Sam just shook his head and closed his eyes, and let the illusion of sleep pull Dean back down to the ground.
Once, Sam stirred in his sleep and Dean woke from a dream of being chased across an open field. His hand came up from under the pillow without the knife and he waited for Sam to flinch to consciousness, gasping out some prediction of disaster. It never happened. Sam rolled to his side and slept on, quietly.
For a while, Dean couldn't tell if he was disappointed, or relieved.
**
Within a few days, Sam hired on full-time as a reading and math tutor at the local community center. Dean cracked wise about the blind leading the blind, just to watch Sam's pissy expression morph through a hundred different fantastic mutations, and then he got off his ass and found work of his own, as a bouncer. His specialty was rescuing plastered women from guys much like Dean, guys with avarice shining in their eyes and a spectacular ability to decide which girl in the bar was the most drunk at any given time. He didn't judge. Didn't care, really. Just propped the girls up and gave the guys friendly warnings, and counted on their inability to withdraw to give him a daily fight.
"It's the job," he said to Sam that first night, when he dragged in at 3AM. Sam was still awake, sprawled in the middle of the living room floor surrounded by books. Old books; books from the life they were leaving, not the one they were headed toward. Dean pretended not to notice.
Sam closed the book in his lap, place marked with a pencil jammed between the pages. "That's pretty ironic, don't you think?" he asked.
Dean didn't ask him which of the many slivers of painful irony he was referring to. He kicked off his boots and slid his jacket off, and fell asleep there on the rough blue carpet. If a little of his life's blood bled out of him and into the house as he slept, so be it.
On a grey Tuesday, clouds spread across the sky in a sinister effort to obscure the blue, Dean drove to the local community college and picked his way across campus to the student center. The wall of prospective colleges loomed before him, opportunity splashed across the pages of every brochure. He plucked cards from their holders, everything that said paralegal and pre-law, and stuffed them in his pocket.
Later, in the bar's one-man bathroom with loud music shaking the walls like brass knuckles on the back of his head, he filled them all out. One or two aborted tries, at first; the name Sam Winchester sliding naturally out of the pen, his memories of natural life reasserting themselves over this fake one they'd created from thin air. But he grunted and scribbled them out, flushed the evidence away in shreds, and started over, got the right wrong name on there.
He mailed them all in a batch, watched with a clenched belly as they fluttered down into the slot. Then he hunched his shoulders, pulled up his collar and went home, where Sam had put their one pan to good use making macaroni and cheese.
Sam had some tales to tell about the kids he was helping, stories that made the smile lines around Sam's eyes deepen with pleasure. Dean drank a cup of hot coffee and listened; outside, crickets hummed in the twilight, wrapping the house in a soft cocoon of sound.
The information packets started arriving a month later, stuffed fat with future potential offered for a price. Sam opened the first one with the rest of their meager mail, glanced at it, then said, "Dean." Not the first time he'd made Dean's name sound like an accusation.
Dean took a swig of beer, propped his feet up on the coffee table - a yard-sale acquisition, along with two saggy blue camp chairs - and raised his eyebrows. "Hm?"
Sam held up the packet, lips pursed. "Did you have something to do with this?"
"What would I know about your junk mail?" Dean dismissed the notion with a snort and went back to flipping through a motor sports magazine.
Sam eyed him, but he dropped the subject. He crammed the packet in the trash, dumped coffee grounds on top of it for good measure. Dean fished it out late that night, brushed detritus delicately from its glossy cover, and put it in a plastic grocery sack to stow it safely under the kitchen sink. He rescued five more from the trash the next three days, and put them in a neat stack beside Sam's chair, weighted down unsubtly with Sam's pocket legal aid guide.
Maybe Sam would consider it, if Dean pushed the right direction; maybe it'd occur to him that his new fake life could make it possible. There'd be no discussion of what 'on my own merits' meant, anymore. Not like Sam Winchester could submit an admissions essay detailing that crazy hunt that one time in the Mississippi bayou.
On a chilly Friday evening, Dean came home to the smell of a wood fire in the fireplace. Sam was sprawled on his stomach in front of the hearth, cup of coffee on the brick beside him. He sat up when Dean dropped his jacket, smiled. "Was wondering when you'd get home," he said.
"Fuckin' vandals," Dean said promptly. He sat down on the floor and yanked his boots off, right first, then left. "Painted up the side of the bar again."
"That sucks," Sam said. He reached to his left, lifted some papers out of a plastic bag, and threw them on the crackling fire. Flames licked up over the side of a glossy cover, devouring the solid brick façade of an Ivy League college. Wisps of smoke puffed out from the edges and disappeared up the chimney, much like Dean's vision of Sam's future.
A memory flashed into Dean's mind: nine-year-old Sam holding a pan over a camp stove, doing his level best to melt the car keys on the heels of John's latest relocation announcement.
Sam fed brochures to the fire for half an hour in silence, then turned to Dean. Firelight erased the harshness of exhaustion from his face. "There's leftover pot roast," he said, levering himself up from the floor in pursuit of the proof.
The silent conversation was over, its last words punctuated by a burst of sparks from the dwindling fire. Warm smells, good smells, drifted through the house, beef and fresh coffee. Sam clattered around in the kitchen for a while, and returned to hand Dean a pile of pot roast and carrots on a chipped white plate covered in pink and grey roses. It was Dean's plate, just like the red mug with the Union Jack on it was Dean's mug.
Sam settled on the couch beside Dean, plate in hand, and tucked in to his meal with quiet enthusiasm. His eyes never strayed back to the fireplace.
**
Dean cataloged the space in the house like it was weapons inventory: three bedrooms, two baths, kitchen, living room, garage. He could see it all unfold before they even moved in, and he had spent a few nights awake in the motel, thinking it over.
The weapons went into a hidden space between the back of the third bedroom closet and the rear wall of the house, in the room Dean had proclaimed the 'office', in a tone that made Sam snort. Dean built the cabinet with his own hands when Sam was busy banging together bookshelves. Not that they had many books. At least, not the kind meant for pleasure reading.
It didn't matter much to Sam, though, and so it didn't matter to Dean. The look of anticipation on Sam's face when he stood in front of those shelves made Dean go out and buy him two cheap paperback romance novels the very next night, torrid romances blazing off their lurid fuchsia covers, no mistaking the sneer in the message. Sam took them out of the paper bag and looked up at Dean, eyes shining in a way that was not at all what Dean intended.
When Sam loaded them onto the shelves, Dean's chest ached so hard he had to leave the room.
Dean wasn't sure if he minded that it was so easy; he had always had to fight and struggle to claim a little piece of anything for his own, and now it was all right here, and it made him twitchy.
He spent more than one night sitting in the living room, back against the far wall and facing the door, shotgun nearby. Old habits died hard. He didn't want them to die; it was too convenient, and when the edges disappeared, he could feel himself dissolving into these new spaces of his life. Their life.
He hated that, too. Almost as much as he liked it.
They needed furniture - everything, from forks and spoons to chairs and sheets - but they had no money for it. A dozen trips to Goodwill yielded cheap pots and pans and lamps and blankets, which they put to good use, but something about it didn't set well with Dean. Since they were kids, they'd been foraging for acceptable hand-me-downs, fitting themselves into the cast-off skins of others' lives. Dean wanted something more. Something of their own.
"We can't afford it," Sam would say, and Dean would feel that impatient itch at the back of his neck. He choked back words he was dying to say and instead he found a local bar, a game of poker, winner take all. Six hours of smoky rooms and serious faces, penny-ante players out of their league. Dean knocked back a few beers and breathed in the smoke and he was high, flying out of control on the beautiful simplicity of taking their money. He missed it so much he'd forced himself to forget, but now his heart was beating slow and regular, his radar was functioning again, eyes flicking over the marks, looking for tells.
The red-haired girl in the corner watched him, color rising on her pale cheeks like a slow burn, and he spent the slow moments at the table thinking about how tight her pussy would be when he bent her over the Impala's hood and tested it out.
He came back smelling like latex and sin, $2400 in his front pocket. More than those rubes could afford to lose, and still not enough for what they needed. Sam brought him a cup of coffee, handed through the cracked bathroom door, but he wouldn't meet Dean's eyes; he just took the money and closed the door quietly behind him, Dean's clothes still a stinking heap on the floor.
Sam tore twenty strips of paper, listed every item and put them into a coffee mug stolen outright from the diner two blocks away. Dean drew 'couch' and 'dishes' and put them back, drawing over and over until he had finally picked 'beds' and 'TV' and Sam was laughing his ass off in the corner. Then he flipped over 'TV' and wrote 'microwave' and lifted it in the air between two fingers, waving it like a flag. "Am I right?" he said, eyebrows raised, grinning when Sam couldn't even stop laughing long enough to answer.
Dean had never shopped for a bed before, but he was determined to do it right, for a certain value of right, which involved flopping down on his back, and then his belly, and then scooting sideways like a crab until he was diagonal across the bed. "Ohhhhh, yeah," he moaned, when he found one that was soft enough for stomach sleeping without leaving him with a crick in his neck. "Yeah, yeah, Sammy, this is it. This is the one. Fucking awesome."
"Would you shut up?" Sam hissed, but Dean reached out for him and yanked hard enough to force Sam into a sprawl beside him.
"Seriously, dude, you see what I mean? Come on," Dean told him, rolling around a little. "Give it a try. Really feel it. Bet it's easy on the knees, too."
"Oh my god," Sam said, mortification clear in his face, and he scrambled to get up, but Dean kicked at his shins and he flopped back down again. He pretended not to notice how the sales associate was gawking at them. Apparently he'd never seen anyone really enjoying a bare mattress before.
And that was another selling point: "No stains, dude," Dean said. He patted the mattress fondly. "We'll take two."
"No we won't," Sam said. He'd given up and was on his stomach, head tipped over the edge, the better to see the price tag. "Dean, one of these is half our money."
"So? We'll earn more."
"We can only afford one," Sam said loudly, prompting the salesman to wince and Dean to stare, since Sam hadn't used that voice in a long time.
"Okay, okay." Dean sat up, a little wistful. He'd really been looking forward to sleeping on something soft for the first time in, well, ever. But he could wait a little longer. Sam was bitching about something, and it took Dean's brain a second to catch up. "Wait, what?"
"I can get a second-hand mattress from-"
"What did I tell you about that?" Dean bounced to the edge of the bed and propelled himself up. "We're done with that."
"Fine." Sam bounced up beside him, pissy from head to toe. "Then I'll just stay in the sleeping bag for now."
"Hell no." Dean pointed. "This is yours."
"No, it's not."
"Yes, it is."
"No." Sam crossed his arms. "We are done with you giving me the best stuff, Dean. I'm over it. I'm a big boy now."
"Oh, you think?" Dean scoffed, but his cheeks were burning a little. Fucking salesman and his staring problem. "So help me, I will tie you to the mattress."
"You and what army?" There was the patented Sammy-stubborn look, set jaw and thinned lips, and all.
Dean stared at him; Sam stared back.
They'd each claimed a bedroom, but they bought one queen-sized extra-long bed frame and mattress set, the result of compromise: Dean insisted that Sam could sleep in it too, for now. The thing was certainly big enough for two. And Sam caved, because Dean guilted him into it and Sam wasn't going to deny him the only thing Dean had said he wanted out of this whole damn deal.
Sam put 'bed' back on the list of stuff they still needed to get, but at the end. Dean was good with that.
They put navy blue 200 thread count sheets on the bed, and four pillows, and the first night Sam stole every inch of the top sheet and the blanket and kicked Dean at least eleven times, and tried to tuck the ice cubes at the ends of his legs under Dean's calves.
Dean slept better than he'd slept in years.
**
The days took on a certain cadence, after a while - school, work, and the occasional hunt, though Dean was the one tracking down new cases. Dean began responding to his new name without conscious thought, which gave him a quiet sense of place. Ordinary adjustments were required of them every day: the first time Dean paid a credit card bill for an account he intended to keep open; the first time Sam climbed up on the roof to fix an antennae instead of re-tracing the wards which guarded their sleep. Dean was constantly surprised by the incremental thrills brought on by everyday life.
They had friends, or Sam did; Dean tried to keep up. It was oddly as it had been when they were very young, when Sam had brought home the strays and Dean endured it for Sam's sake. It was a long-buried secret that sometimes, Dean loved the strays more than Sammy did, though he made a point of not letting it show. Love had never brought the Winchesters anything good; it was dangerous and impermanent, and they had no time for it at all.
Sam's friends were Dean's friends, and then Dean had a few stragglers of his own. One of them, a beautiful college girl named Jordan, bartended on weekends, and she wasn't interested in Dean's brand of motel-bed romance.
"You'd like her," Dean told Sam, as Sam's shoulders tightened under his oversized flannel. "She's constantly spewing nerd crap absolutely nobody cares about. You two would get along great." It was in the back of his mind, still, that Sam should have kids, get married, maybe not in that order, and Jordan looked like the key to a rusted lock.
"Maybe we will," Sam said, as though Dean couldn't detect the sound of fire doors clanging down a mile away. Sam was an inaccessible fortress; Sam was a barrier to the outside world, and only Dean knew how to find his way past the gates.
A kernel of fear sparked in his heart, and refused to be drowned by whiskey-flavored coffee.
Dean stopped by the rec center on a Tuesday night to pick Sam up after work, and Sam's friends swarmed him like hungry bees in a flowerless desert. They seemed to know every detail of his life, from his struggles with the crabgrass in the backyard to his repairs on the car the Saturday before. Their interest in him was like being trapped beneath a large, warm blanket; there was no air to breathe, no way to tunnel out. All the things Sam had told them echoed back to him, a tight binding of normalcy to hold him in place.
When Sam finally emerged from the back office, Dean heard a soft voice at his ear: "You two should really take more evenings off. Make time for each other." A hug around the waist from a relative stranger; a gentle push in the wrong direction. An inference he'd heard before.
He'd grown used to it on the road, because it was inevitable, even useful at times. Two men who were so close. Closer than brothers. He'd laughed it off, twisted it to serve his own purposes, even found ways to use it to yank Sam's chain, but this. This was. Something different.
The fear in his heart caught fire, finally, as he gave Sam's friends a false smile and turned toward the car, Sam at his shoulder, words flowing forth about his day and his world and this life they'd made, this life Dean had helped Sam create out of whole cloth where nothing was as it seemed and yet all was as it was supposed to be, and Dean discovered there was no air in his lungs at all.
They were nearly home when Dean found his voice. "I found a hunt. Just a loup-garou, hanging around in some woods near the Wabash in southern Indiana. Bit a couple kids there."
"I have Friday night off, and I can call in tomorrow too," Sam said, reaching for the glove compartment, as if there were any map in the world which would show the territory Dean had just crossed into.
"Nah." He gripped the steering wheel tight, his knuckles aching. "I can do it alone."
"Dean. We don't hunt alone."
"No reason for you to take off, Sammy. It's an in and out. Done these a thousand times. Hell, I took you on your first werewolf hunt." Dean shrugged away the weight of Sam's stare with one shoulder. "I'll be back in two days, tops."
The cassettes were hidden under Sam's seat, and he made no move to pull them out. Silence stretched between them, thick as expectations, until Dean pulled into the driveway.
"No," Sam said. "We agreed, Dean. We don't hunt alone. You wait for me, or you don't go. That's the deal."
They'd never bound themselves to any promises that didn't come written in the blood they shared. So it was easy for Dean to say, "Sure, Sammy," and pretend to agree, easy to pack a bag while Sam showered and throw it in the trunk. Easy to lie awake, listening to Sam's slow, even breaths beside him; easy to ignore the aching desire to stay.
Easy to drive away alone before dawn, leaving behind the complications he had never planned for.
**
It took two days as predicted, but the loup-garou was a wily old man when he wasn't eating children, and he took a chunk out of Dean's arm with his claws. The wound oozed through the gauze Dean wrapped around it, but the thought of stopping to stitch himself up made him wince. There were eleven messages on his cell, each of them oozing blood the same as the bite on his shoulder, and regret was eating away Dean's resolve to ignore them.
Sam met him at the door, jaw tight and fists shoved in his pocket. His eyes went to the bloodstain at Dean's shoulder first, then to his face, before his hands were roving Dean's body like hounds on the scent. "Where else?"
"Nowhere, knock it off," Dean said, but Sam was already moving him deeper into their space, into the house which smelled of salt and coffee, and the sulfurous light from an ancient lamp with a smoke-yellowed shade. The startling vibration of familiarity rang through Dean's bones, a feeling he had only recently learned to recognize, and to miss when it was not there.
"Stay put," Sam said, as he shoved Dean into a chair. Dean turned his face toward the TV, where black and white cowboys were riding herd in silence, muted in service to the sounds of the real world.
Sam threw the med kit on Dean's lap. "Get that shirt off," he said, crouching down with a hot towel. An old routine, one so true it was written in the Winchester DNA: hunt, bleed, stitch, and hunt again. The rhythm was broken, though, and Sam's hands shook as they drew the needle through Dean's skin, writing another scar into his personal history.
"It caught me off guard, and I-"
"Don't," Sam said through gritted teeth, though the path of the needle continued on through. The moment he finished, he sat back on his heels and said, "What the fuck, Dean? Why did you leave without me?"
There were lies that would do. Dean had been rehearsing them in his mind for miles, picturing the way Sam would react to each. He was a practiced liar; he should have been able to carry any of them off. But here in their living room, he found he could not remember why a lie was better than the truth. The smell of blood was in his nose, trickling down his throat.
"What the fuck are we doing here?" he said, watching Sam's earnest face for signs that any part of his fear was understood. "What are we playing at?"
"I'm not playing," Sam said quietly. "This is who we are, now. We built this life, Dean. We built it, and I want this."
"Good for you," Dean said, spitting the words like broken glass. He looked down at the dried blood on his hands, thinking of Sam's strays, and what it had been like when they disappeared into the night.
"You don't get it," Sam said. His big hand cupped the side of Dean's face, and Dean's head snapped up, that fear inside him now a raging furnace of guilt and need and love. "This isn't until something better comes along. You can't make me leave, Dean."
"Well, I can't promise I'll stay." Dean shoved up from the chair, knocking Sam's hand away.
"Things have changed," Sam said, rising from his crouch. He moved into Dean's space as if it had been carved out for him, the shape of it bent to accommodate Sam, always. "This isn't temporary, Dean. This is real."
Impermanency had defined Dean's life. It was the cornerstone of everything he had come to understand about family, about love, about the world. Nothing good ever lasted. They wouldn't be alive long enough to care. Dean's shoulder throbbed with a fast, irregular pulse.
Sam was so close. Too close.
Dean's hand trembled where his fingers touched Sam's shirt. Sam stepped closer, but Dean didn't move, didn't move his hand, didn't stop resisting; his fingers bent back, ready to break. "Dean," Sam said, lifting his chin. The smell of him, sweat and cheap laundry soap and dollar-store shampoo, filled the space around Dean, smothering him. Sam licked his lips, tried to press closer; the wall at Dean's back was an inch away, held off only by his rigid arm shaking against Sam's belly, and he was trapped there, no way forward, no way back.
The snap inside him was a tension-pull, a leash breaking, and he put his other hand on Sam's chest, shoving him so hard Sam staggered back and crashed into the cheap-ass coffee table. It gave under his weight like a wet paper towel, splintering down the middle to let Sam fall through. Dean fell on top of Sam, unable to see anything but Sam's wide eyes. He reached out his hand and clutched Sam's throat, fingers and thumb over the racing heartbeat at the sides of his neck, and pressed down. He was hard, and a bitter acid-mix of guilt and need rose in his throat, catching there to choke him.
"This is what you want?" he shouted, leaning into Sam, shoving his hard-on into the crease of Sam's thigh. He ground down, as if he could provoke Sam into changing his mind, backing out, but Sam's eyes fluttered closed, and he swallowed, Adam's apple hard against the palm of Dean's restraining hand. "Is it?"
Sam's hands were free, and he pushed one between them to rub the heel of his hand over Dean's hard, aching cock, his eyes never leaving Dean's, his calm certainty absorbing all Dean's fury, all his guilt.
Dean launched himself backwards, falling hard to the floor and scrabbling back, one shoulder bumping the couch hard enough to knock it out of his way. Sam was up on his knees by then, reaching for him, but he swatted Sam's hand away and lurched up to one knee. His fist connected with Sam's face at the corner of Sam's lips, splitting them beneath Dean's bones. Sam grunted when his head snapped back, but he countered with a head-butt that forced Dean's eyes back in his head, and left his mind blank for a second. He grabbed the bridge of his nose and staggered to his feet, the backs of his knees braced against the couch.
"Don't do this," Sam gasped. "Don't make it like this."
"Like it can be anything else," Dean snarled, the pit of his stomach dark and hollow with want, and sick for it. Blood ran down Sam's chin, dripped on the blue stripes over his chest where Dean twisted his shirt up into his fist and pulled Sam forward, only to draw him into the second punch.
Sam's fist drove into his solar plexus. Dean let him go and doubled over, one hand on the couch to keep him from falling face-first into the stained brown carpet. "Fucker," he gasped, flailing up until he caught a piece of Sam's sleeve. He swung wild, but connected with the side of Sam's ear; Sam's grunting whoosh of breath only made Dean harder, and turned his stomach.
Dean lost his balance and took two steps sideways, Sam right there with him, hands on his shoulders to pull him back or shove him over the edge, Dean couldn't tell which. They grappled for a minute, clutching at shirts and skin, buttons popping, open palms smashed to sweaty faces, until Dean got his hand into Sam's hair and pulled.
"Fuck!" Sam roared, and Dean had a moment of vicious triumph before Sam's fist connected solidly with the side of his face. For a moment it felt like his left eye had exploded in the socket, and he tightened his grip in Sam's hair, yanking him closer. They wavered there, then fell to the floor again, a crashing heap of tangled limbs.
Sam maneuvered his body over Dean's, pinning him to the floor with his height advantage. Dean pushed the soles of his feet in the floor, prepared to push him off, to keep fighting, until Sam's mouth closed over his and Dean tasted blood and salt, all the truths of their fucked up lives on his lips. A sound of protest started deep in his throat and keened out when Sam caught first Dean's left wrist, then his right, and pinned them to the carpet.
Dean bucked up against Sam, but it just brought his cock into contact with Sam's hard hipbone, and Sam pressed him down into the floor with intent, forcing a burn on his wrists. Sam deepened the kiss, and then his warmth was gone, just long enough for Sam to pull Dean toward him and flip him, right onto his belly.
Dean got a hand on the floor and dug in, driving an elbow back toward Sam, and it connected hard with Sam's chest. In answer, Sam splayed his arms out over Dean's body, holding him down.
"Sam," Dean cried, that sick feeling twisting through him and colliding with lust and need and oh god, want, so much want that he couldn't hold it back any longer.
"Dean," Sam said, low, his knees on either side of Dean's legs. His hand pushed under Dean's body, not gently, and he ripped at Dean's belt buckle, at the buttons of his fly. Palm flat against Dean's skin, he shoved down under denim, his dick pressed into Dean's ass as if there were no layers of clothes between them. Dean growled and clutched at the carpet, Sam's body so warm and solid over him, and Sam's face at the curve of his neck, panting breaths against his skin.
"God, Sam, oh Christ," he whispered, and then Sam bit him, teeth sinking into his skin and tongue worrying behind them, just as Sam's fingers brushed Dean's cock. Dean's world imploded as he came against the barest touch of Sam's hand, one long sob of breath drowning out Sam's soft moan.
No more control; no more fight. Dean's body went limp, trapping Sam's hand there against his stomach, wet with Dean's come. Dean gathered a shaky breath, and then another, Sam's chin a sharp weight against his shoulder blade, his brother's body an anchor, sinking him into the sea. "Get," Dean tried, and the sound of his voice was so weak, he stopped. "Get off me," he breathed, and Sam rolled away, slowly, the absence of his body leaving Dean cold.
He closed his eyes and fought to get hold of himself, but Sam's hands were on him again, and he shivered under the touch. He sat up and looped one arm around Sam's neck, drawing him close enough to seal their mouths together, and there was still the taste of blood on Sam's lips, but it wasn't a secret now, and the shame was burning away.
"You opened your stitches," Sam said, one big hand covering his shoulder. For a moment, Dean imagined the wound pulling apart until every bit of him seeped out, nothing left to hold him together but Sam's fingertips.
"Doesn't hurt," he said, as Sam pressed him back down, sealing the broken edges one bit at a time.
**
Sometime in the middle of the night, Dean's shoulder woke him up with an unreasonable demand for more heat and maybe some nice pain pills to take the edge off. He contemplated getting up, but when he moved to slide out of the heaped blankets, Sam's arm tightened around his waist. Sam's nose was pressed into his back, just between his shoulder blades; Sam's knuckles rested lightly on Dean's belly.
Maybe there had been shame once, in another life, where Dean Winchester spent his days chasing his father's demons. Maybe in that life, there would have been something more precious than Sam; maybe he could have persuaded himself that Sam was better off without him.
But this was the life they had built, he and Sam, with their victories and their scars, and the lines of the roads they had traveled etched into their spines. This was their house; this was their bed, with its scratchy sheets and lumpy pillows.
I want this, Sam had said, with his mouth and his eyes and his hands. Sam, who had tried to tell him that the house and the chairs and the beds were not home, that home was not made of the things which surrounded them.
I want this.
For the first time, Dean allowed himself to want it, too.