SPN Fic: All the Things You See (girl!Sam/Dean), pg-13
Title:All the Things You See
Author: downjune
Characters/Pairing: girl!Sam/Dean
Rating: pg-13 for a dirty word
Word count: 2700
Summary: 'Watch out for Sammy.' 'Look out for your sister while I'm gone.' 'Keep an eye on Sam.' His whole friggin' life had been one giant sight metaphor.
Notes: For curtain!fic week at hoodie_time ! Also, the third in my genderswap verse, after What Comes Is Better and That Girl with the Face. You don't need to have read them to enjoy this. :)
Edit: Fixed my dates! I'm not sure when canon is anymore, so I'm just putting it a year ahead of the present, based on how long Dean's supposed to have been in Purgatory. So, the flashbacks are supposed to be roughly set in S8 --2013. Right?
All the Things You See
Fall 2014
Dean heard the rumble of the Impala well before the tires crunched up the gravel driveway and he closed his book in anticipation. The porch rocker creaked and a few crows made a racket when they took off from the tree in the yard. Dean turned to the west, felt the weakening late September sun warm his face, and grinned at the slam of the door and the clump of Sam's boots up the steps.
"Heya, Sammy," he called, taking a step toward his sister.
"Hey, Dean," she answered, meeting him there, putting one hand on his arm and letting him go through what had become their greeting ritual. First he took her hand off him and slid his fingers between hers, felt the grit of soil and mulch. Then he worked both hands up her arms, over the rough sleeves of her coveralls. His fingers stuck on some sticky patches and he caught the harsh scent of tree sap. She'd been trimming today. He sniffed again and smelled peanut butter and honey - her new favorite sandwich - just under the tree and dirt smells. Finally, he put one hand in her hair, felt it gathered back in a short tail with ends like a paintbrush tickling his palm.
"You have a good day, breadwinner?"
She snorted a laugh - always, no matter how many time's he's said it - and pressed her lips to his forehead, nose cold against his hairline. "Good enough. Worked up quite an appetite, winning all that bread. You make me somethin' to eat?"
They walked into the house, the smell of pot-roast filling the whole first floor. "You bet. They call me king of the crock-pot round these parts," Dean said, letting a little swagger into his step. "You best recognize and respect the skill it takes to put meat and potatoes in a pot and flip the 'on' switch."
Finding his way easily around the small kitchen, Dean got down two big bowls from the cupboard and spoons from the drawer. He went still when he felt Sam come up behind him and reach around to grab a glass from the shelf.
"Oh, I respect," she said, leaning briefly against his back and tucking her chin over his shoulder. "You want a drink, my liege?"
"Yeah, what're you havin'-whiskey?"
"You know me so well, Dean."
They ate out on the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table, and watched Jeopardy-one of the few shows that Dean could get as much out of as Sam. And he was getting better, though he usually let Sam call out the answers because she needed to feel smart after working with her hands all day.
After dinner and cleanup, they flopped back on the couch, Sam put her head in his lap and pulled out their old bent up copy of Ender's Game to read aloud. And even though Dean had picked up Braille as easy has he'd understood an engine or an EMF reader by looking at it, he still liked the sound of Sammy's voice.
*
Fall 2013
'Watch out for Sammy.' 'Look out for your sister while I'm gone.' 'Keep an eye on Sam.' His whole friggin' life had been one giant sight metaphor. So long as he could see that Sam was okay, he was doing his job.
Take away Dean's eyes - literally steal them out of his skull - and just like that, the thing that defined him, his single purpose in life, was gone. Slam on the brakes, pull the plug, stick a fork in him-whatever new metaphor you wanted, Dean was done. Boom. Retired.
They went where Sam wanted, and Sam wanted quiet. She wanted big open spaces, no traffic, and winters that threatened to blow the town right off the map. So they landed in Montana, and Dean hadn't been blind so long that he couldn't picture the place they settled-a sky bluer than blue, crazy big mountains, and flowers that bloomed with only rock to grow in.
He shut himself in the house, in his room, in the pitch black of his own head, and let her come and go as she pleased. What the hell else was he supposed to do? A clean break was the best kind. It didn't matter where she went-he couldn't drive her, couldn't stay half a step in front of her, couldn't watch for sleazy guys or oncoming cars or angry spirits or even the edge of the fucking sidewalk. He couldn't follow her, couldn't even really ask about her day because he didn't know the places she went to or the people she talked to.
The job she got at a landscaping business barely paid the rent, so after good old Charlie Bradbury hooked them up with new clean identities, Dean brought in a paycheck, too-disability insurance.
He celebrated the arrival of his first check by drinking himself into the emergency room.
*
Fall 2014
When Sam started to doze on the couch, Dean didn't let her fall asleep. She was impossible to wake back up and turned into a cranky pouting child for the required trip to the bathroom before bed.
"Up you go, Sammich. No sleepin' on the couch."
"Mm, come on, Dean, just for a little bit. Aren't you sleepy?"
"Nah. Didn't even leave the house today. I burned maybe eight calories going from the kitchen to the porch."
"Are you goin' to bed, then?"
"I'll be up in a bit. Come on, Sam." He bounced his knees up and down under her shoulders until she finally groaned, swore at him, and pushed herself to her feet. Dean stood with her, taking her hand and leading the way up the stairs to the bathroom just off the landing. He liked that he could still drag Sam half-asleep around the house, just like when they were kids and she hadn't wanted to get off the couch to brush her teeth. He didn't even need to put a hand out to make sure they didn't run into the door frame.
"Oh, hey," she started, once she had a mouth full of toothbrush and toothpaste, "I was thinkin' a lot at work today. There's some stuff we should talk about in the morning."
At least, he was pretty sure that's what she said. "Yeah, all right," he answered a bit warily. Serious talks with Sam were not something he'd ever gotten good at, despite her near-constant need to have them. Dad had never been big on feelings, and there were periods when Sam went through similar phases - angry phases - but she always came out of them, always came back to Dean with whatever incredibly private and personal thing she was dealing with. By and large, Sam was an over-sharer.
But not tonight. Tonight, at least, she was too tired. So, after she'd kissed him goodnight - a chaste child's kiss on the cheek - Dean went back downstairs, threw on his jacket, grabbed the laptop and a beer, and headed out to the porch.
The computer had a reading program that let him use the internet and word processing. He kept the volume low and opened the hunting database he'd been building over the past year, starting a new sub-directory for monsters that specifically went after children.
In the absolute silence of the Montana wilderness, Dean listened for coyotes and grizzlies, stood guard over the house, and tried to keep saving people the only way he still could.
*
Winter 2013
After the hospital incident, Sam didn't talk to him for two weeks. He could feel the anger coming off her in waves. It turned to depression about halfway through the campaign, the whole house cold and dead feeling. But there was nothing he could do, no way for him to be anything other than a burden, a helpless piece of shit that couldn't protect her. The only thing he could offer was a check from the government that was entirely contingent upon the fact that he could not contribute anything else.
Sam's silence left him entirely isolated, his only company the sound of her feet and her breath when she passed close enough. The world narrowed to the sounds of an old house and the drone of the TV that he sometimes turned on just to keep his brain quiet.
The standoff ended when Sam dropped down onto the couch and slumped against his shoulder, as if the last weeks hadn't even happened.
"I'm an asshole," she said. "I shoulda known what this would be like for you, and I'm sorry I didn't give it more thought. But I was worried about keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table and I thought we could really use the extra help from the insurance. I wasn't thinking, Dean; I'm sorry. I don't know how you looked after me for so many years without losing your mind over every little thing. It's exhausting. So I'm gonna be better. I'll be better for you, I promise. But you have to promise me something, too."
She stopped, waiting for Dean to answer.
"Yeah, Sam?" he finally managed, too busy soaking in her voice and her smell and the texture of her hair against his cheek, too busy reacquainting himself with the shape of the world to remember that he was part of it.
"You have to be here for that and tell me what you need. You have to stop trying to tell me stuff with whiskey-just yell at me to pay attention. I'll pay attention, I swear."
Dean twisted on the couch and reached for her, put both his hands on her face and found her cheeks wet. It'd been since before he fell into Purgatory that he'd seen his sister and now he never would, and the tragedy of that about choked him. He felt for the length of her hair, the sharpness of her collarbone and shoulders, the roughness of her palms from working outside all day, and finally he kissed her, said, "Missed you, Sammy. Tired'a missin' you."
For Christmas that year, she got him reading software for the laptop and a whole bunch of books in Braille. At that point, he was on anti-depressants but it was the books that saved his life, finally got him out of his own head long enough to remember that everyone had a story. Everyone had their own shit to accomplish.
He read Lord of the Rings with his fingers and thought, at least he wouldn't have to take some ring to the top of Mount Doom to save all of Middle Earth. At least that kind of pressure was behind him.
For Dean's birthday, Sam put on silk underwear and slipped into his bed after he'd thought she was asleep in her own room. For his birthday, he relearned her by smell, taste, and touch. He'd always thought he knew his sister better than he knew anyone - probably even himself - but that night, he learned that the softest skin on her body was just below her ankle bone, sweat tasted sweeter on her stomach than it did at her temple, and nothing in the world smelled as good as her cunt when she was all wet and slick for him, so turned on she couldn't talk right.
He couldn't see her, but he built a new image of Sam for himself, made of different pieces-an image that he didn't have to share with anyone. He surrounded himself with her, got her all over him and made that promise she'd asked of him when things were still really bad. Dean was ready to follow through on it, now.
*
Fall 2014
Sometime in the middle of the night, after he'd finally gone to bed, Dean came awake to the sound of bare feet on the floorboards-Sam's feet. A moment later the bed lurched and creaked in its frame as she landed next to him. He didn't need to have seen it to know the kind of leap she'd taken from the edge of his room-the one meant to avoid any monsters waiting for her under the bed.
Which meant that she'd had a nightmare.
"Dean," she started, voice strangled and thick with fear.
"Yeah, Sammy," he answered.
She scrambled under the blankets with him and before the cold air that'd come in with her even had the chance to warm up, she wrapped herself around him, long and bony-an arm across his chest, a leg shoved between his, and her face pressed tight up against his neck. Her fingers felt along his chest, first on the outside of his shirt, then underneath. "I had a dream," she said, voice still slurred with sleep. "I dreamed Alistair had you again and that he was making you-you were pulling off your own skin and-" She stopped herself, choking, and Dean shuddered in reaction, and because he remembered.
"It's okay," he said automatically, instinctively. "It's okay; Alistair's dead, he's gone. He can't hurt me or you." But he shivered again, knowing just how vulnerable they were out here in the middle of nowhere. The doors and windows were salted, devil's traps all over the house, Enochian carved into the walls, borax within reach-and Dean still sometimes felt like their house was at the center of some cosmic bulls-eye, that it was only a matter of time until something came looking.
Sam was shaking, clutching at him with trembling fingers and pushing her forehead hard against his jaw. "Shit," she exhaled, taking a slow breath after. "Shit. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have told you that-are you okay?" Sounding more awake, she started to draw back from him, but he kept an arm tight around her.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Takes more'n one'a your dreams to freak me out. Though that one sounded like a doozy." He would never say it to her in a million years but keeping Sam safe from her own head was about the only way he could still look out for her, the only time he felt like he really had a purpose. This felt like it mattered. So he ignored the cold sweat that had prickled down his neck at the mention of Alistair and said, "Hey, wasn't there somethin' you wanted to talk to me about? You said before...."
Sam sniffed and nodded against his shoulder. "Yeah. Yeah, I was thinkin' at work about some stuff."
"What kinda stuff?"
"About, you know, whether it was a good idea for us to settle here, so far from everything." She touched his face, ghosted her fingers over his eyelids. He blinked around the synthetic eyeballs-white like Pamela's had been, according to Sam. "I wonder if it was right for you. There's a lot you could still be doing, now you've got a handle on...."
"Bein' blind as a bat?"
"Yeah, and you don't have access to the resources available, say, in a city. I was thinkin'... if you wanted, we could start doing some research about your options. You picked up Braille like it was nothin'; maybe you should start thinking about what you'd like to do."
Dean also sincerely enjoyed it when Sam told him he was smart.
"For starters, sleep would be nice-you sure are chatty in the middle of the night," he grumbled, trying and failing to keep a fond grin off his face.
And she must have heard it because she laughed and dug her fingers into his ribs, finding where he was ticklish like a heat-seeking missile. "You asked, jerk," she said, getting his earlobe between her teeth and nipping hard enough that he jumped. "Just think about it, all right?" she said, refusing to be distracted. "I don't wanna be that selfish kid anymore. I wanna know what you want."
I already got what I want sat right on the tip of his tongue, but he didn't say it, instead swallowed it down and mumbled, "Yeah, all right, Sammy."
Her breathing had returned to normal and she'd stopped shaking, but Dean had a feeling that bedrooms across the hall from each other weren't going to cut it tonight. She didn't show any signs of letting go, so he didn't either.