FIC: Underground Wires (1/2)
Title: Underground Wires
Pairing: Sam/Dean, mild Sam/OFC
Rating: NC-17
Word count: ~15,900
Warnings: Genderswap (always-a-girl!Sam), underage sexuality (Sam is 17)
Artist: clex_monkie89
Notes: This was written for the Sam&Dean 2012 Mini-Bang 2012, hosted by the wonderful people at samdean_otp. Thanks to the mods for all your hard work! Big thanks to the_reverand who held my hand the whole way and even wrote me Dean POV ficlets set in this verse because she is awesome that way. <3 I am super grateful to clex_monkie89 for saving the day at the very last minute with an art pinch-hit, you're my hero! Title from The Past is a Grotesque Animal by Of Montreal. It's a 12 minute epic and you should listen to it (you know, if you want, I'm not your boss).
Summary: It’s hard enough being a teenage girl even without all the extra crap: they move around all the time, her family is as far removed from normal as it’s possible to get, and she’s in love with her older brother. Sam has no control on any of it, she’s just trying to stay afloat.
Part One | Part Two | Read on AO3
Art post (Check it out even if you don't read the fic because it's wonderful.)
*
do you know, no matter where we are
we're always touching by underground wires
*
They say that every little girl's first love is her daddy, but that isn't true for Sam. Sam’s first love is her brother.
When Dean wants to embarrass Sam, he’ll remind her that when she was four years old, she used to say that when they were all grown up, she and Dean would get married. She doesn’t think that anymore, she’s not an idiot, but she thinks that it just goes to show that she never had a chance, that she was screwed up from the very start.
*
Sam’s senior year starts in Clinton County, New York, in a small town near the Canadian border.
There’s a hunt somewhere nearby, that’s the only reason they’re here (the only reason they’re ever anywhere), but the good news is that with school starting up again, Dad can’t force them to live out of the car anymore, at least not for a little while. After a summer on the road and a different state every two days, Sam’s grateful for the small luxury of the house on the edge of town. It doesn’t even really matter what part of the country it’s in.
It’s more of a cottage than a house, really, and it’s old, but in good shape compared to some other houses they’ve rented or squatted in over the years. Sam likes it from the moment she sees it from the passenger seat of the Impala, the square little blue thing with the white porch that spans the whole width of the house, the two square windows with lace curtains that make them look like sleepy eyes on each side of the red door. The lawn is overgrown but there’s a flower bed under each window, and it looks familiar and comforting, like a child’s drawing of what a house should look like. It’s houses like these that Sam used to draw in school when she was little, with stick figures of her and Dean and of Mom and Dad standing in front of it, like all of the other children in school did. The first time she brought one home to show to her father, his face twisted and he picked her up and held her so tight that it scared her a little. She kept very still while Dad held her in shaky arms for a long time, breathing heavy like when he was hurt, the drawing half-crumpled in her hand and Dean watching them with big sad eyes from the kitchen table. Sam stopped drawing houses after that.
Dean smiles when they pull up in the driveway. He’s tired from the long drive but he looks quietly pleased, like the house is a gift he knew she would like. “Look, Sammy, it even has a picket fence.”
Sam can’t help grinning in return. “If it has a decent bathtub too, then I’m never leaving.”
It does have a bathtub, an old footed one that will be amazing once she scrubs it clean. Sam has her own room, too, and she doesn’t even mind that it’s in the attic and that she has to use an ancient narrow staircase to reach it. The roof is too low for her to stand fully upright and it’s pretty dark in there, with just a small round window to let in the sunlight and nothing but a bare lightbulb above the bed for lighting, but it’s hers. The double mattress (propped up on some crates rather than a boxspring) takes up most of the small space and it’s a huge improvement over fighting with Dean over who has to sleep on the rollout bed in each new motel room. In here she can read as late as she wants without anyone bitching about the light and she doesn’t have to put up with her father’s snoring.
The next best thing about the house is the kitchen. It’s nothing special, just a small room with outdated decor and ancient noisy appliances, but it signifies the end of a two month long stretch of nothing but take-out pizza and roadside diner food. Dean isn’t a cook by any stretch of the imagination but he makes the best mac and cheese. The macaroni is always perfectly cooked, with just the right amount of butter blended in and a bunch of chopped up hot dogs thrown in (“It’s not the same without the hot dogs”, Dean says). It’s stupid, but she’s been craving it for weeks.
There’s musty crocheted doilies on the end tables and some frankly appalling wallpaper in every room: dead-eyed, sinister-looking ducklings in the bathroom, something that’s probably supposed to be cornucopias in the kitchen, and faded sunflowers in living room. The house is reasonably clean, though, and Sam is immediately taken with it.
Sam’s sitting on the ancient floral-patterned couch and watching the local news broadcast when Dean emerges from the kitchen and hands her a bowl of macaroni. They’d barely finished bringing in their bags when Dad left with his truck to scope out the area, leaving Sam and Dean to unpack, buy food, and settle in.
“We’ll stay until Christmas,” Dad had said. Sam knows better than to put stock in that by now, but if Dad bothered with renting a house then that means they’ll be around for at least a couple of weeks.
Dean drops down at the other end of the sofa, his back against the armrest, and puts his feet up. He prods the outside of Sam’s thigh with his socked toes just to be annoying. Sam’s starving and too grateful for the food to complain.
“You need a ride tomorrow morning?” he says around a mouthful of macaroni.
“Nah. I can just take the school bus. I asked Mrs Barcomb from across the street and she said it stops just two houses down, in front of that red brick house with all the ivy.”
Dean frowns, and Sam thinks he’ll object to her taking the bus, but what he says instead is, “Mrs Barcomb? When did you go ‘round talking to the neighbors?”
“She came by when you were out buying food. She just wanted to say hi.”
“And you just let her in, with no one else in the house? With all the arsenal still in the kitchen?”
“We just talked on the front porch, Dean, relax. Anyway she’s like 80 and she’s really sweet.”
“Doesn’t mean she can’t call the cops. And doesn’t mean she isn’t a witch, Sammy.”
“Yes, Dad.” Dean hates it when she calls him that, especially when she accompanies it with her best teenager eyeroll. His jaw clenches and he sits up straighter, taking his feet off of the couch and shifting to turn towards the television.
“You know what I’m saying. Don’t be such a brat.”
Sam’s stomach growls, and she shovels a spoonful of macaroni in her mouth. It really is amazing. It shouldn’t be, with the neon orange food coloring and the hot dogs that are made of god knows what (certainly not anything recognizable as meat) that do nothing to improve its nutritional value, but it doesn’t matter. She’d never tell Dean this, but if she was allowed one last meal before dying, she’d probably choose Dean’s mac and cheese over anything else.
“She brought a pie, too. I put it in the oven so it would stay warm.”
Dean glances at her from the corners of his eyes. “Did she?”
“Yeah. Blueberry.”
Dean doesn’t say anything but the tension in his shoulder eases a bit. Sam smiles around her mouthful of food, twists around on the sofa and shoves her feet in Dean’s lap. “I told you she was sweet. She’s not a witch.”
“Shut up and eat,” Dean says, making a half-hearted attempt to push her feet off. “I’m testing the pie first, just to be sure.”
Sam laughs. “Sure.”
“And I’m driving you to school tomorrow. Screw the school bus.”
“Okay.”
*
Sam gets called freak and giraffe and dyke and yeti, all within the first week of school. She’s tall, and not just for her age. She’s nearly as tall as Dean, taller than all the boys at school, and no one ever lets her forget it. It’s been the same in every school ever since she shot up above everyone else when she was thirteen. She hunches her shoulders in her too-big hoodie (her favorite, stolen from Dean) and pretends not to notice when five-foot tall twerp boys try to trip her in the hallway. Dean would tell her to break some noses and make those boys eat dirt - no, actually, Dean would barge into the school and break some noses himself if she told him what was going on, but either way, it wouldn’t make the name-calling stop. Sam knows that from experience.
Everywhere she goes people remark on her height. “You could model!” random strangers tell her in diners and gas stations, usually well-intentioned ladies old enough to be her mother, because they feel bad for exclaiming about her freakish height in the first place. When Sam looks in the mirror she doesn’t see a model, she just sees an awkward flat-chested girl with knobby knees and too-big hands. There’s strength in her limbs, the product of forced morning swims in cold motel pools and hours of hand-to-hand combat training, but what muscles she has only serve to make her look more boyish. Sam may be tall and skinny but she’s not pretty. She’s not cute. She hasn’t been cute since before she hit puberty, when she would wear her brother’s hand-me-downs and Dean would braid her hair with ribbons just so people would stop mistaking her for a little boy.
Sometimes Sam looks at old photos of her mom, so pretty and blonde and feminine, and she thinks that maybe she could have been more like that if she’d had a mother to show her how. If she’d had the chance at a normal life, maybe she’d know how to be a real girl, a girl like the ones that grab Dean’s attention, the ones he flirts with in diners and truck stops all across the country.
*
With Sam back in school and with them staying put for a while, they can’t live on pool hustling and credit card scams alone. Dean gets a part-time job pumping gas at the Mobil right off the I-87, a 3-in-1 gas station, convenience store and Dunkin’ Donuts that’s mainly populated by Canadians who are filling up their tanks with cheaper American gas before heading back north of the border.
The rest of his time he spends helping Dad out on the job. There’s been a string of disappearances around Lake Champlain, spread out over the past ten years. A water spirit, maybe, but it’s hard to say with so little to go on. It could be anything, a ghost or a creature roaming the woods nearby. Dad and Dean interview witnesses and Sam does research in between her homework, going through old obituaries and news stories. It’s tedious work but she doesn’t mind, prefers this to digging up graves or stitching up wounds.
The first weeks of school are brutal, but for once her home life is strangely ordinary. Calculus books and yellowed newspapers crowd together on the wobbly table that she's appropriated in the public library. The librarian is a tiny, round lady named Ruth who takes a shine to Sam and brings her homemade peanut butter cookies and tells Sam about her grandchildren. She asks Sam about her plans for college.
“I’ve applied all over the country,” Sam tells her conspiratorially. Her heart beats loud and guiltily; it’s the first time she’s told anyone. “But I can’t go anywhere without a full scholarship.”
Ruth smiles. “A smart girl like you, I bet all the schools will be fighting to have you. Just you wait.”
*
Sam’s new school has a girl’s volleyball team. They went to state last year, came in third, and they take their team very seriously. She knows this from when she looked up the school online when they first moved here but she’d forgotten about it until the coach (Mr. Carey, who doubles as her new math teacher) corners her in the library over lunch.
“Hey, Samantha. Mind if I sit down for a sec?”
She drops her half-eaten egg sandwich back into its crumpled paper bag and hopes she doesn’t have any crumbs or bits of egg stuck to her face. “I... sorry, I know I’m not supposed to bring food in here, but-”
“Oh, no, don’t worry about that. You know I coach the girl’s volleyball team, right?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, we lost our two best hitters when they graduated last year so I’m on a recruiting mission. You like volleyball?”
“I... I don’t know. I guess. I’ve never really played much.”
“No harm in trying, though, right? Tryouts for the team are Monday next week, after class, but there’s gonna be practice games all week over lunch break. You should come by.”
*
She feels stupid, standing there in her oversized Metallica t-shirt (Dean’s), her third-hand thrift-store shorts (Dean’s, from when he was around twelve years old), her scuffed sneakers (always hers, but they’re more brown than white now, from that time she ended up waist-deep in the mud with Dean, pushing Dad’s truck out of a river), and her yellowing knee pads (the school’s).
A couple of girls give her odd looks from the moment she walks into the gym, and she’s already thinking about turning around and walking right back out when a pretty redhead walks in from behind her and says, “Whoah, you’re tall!”, familiar words but in a tone Sam’s never heard before, impressed and appreciative. “Steph from last year was tall too, but not like you! She got a full ride to Texas State to play on their team.”
Her name is Melissa, and either she takes pity on Sam or she wants to see what Sam’s worth, because she immediately offers to pair up with her.
They barely have to touch volleyballs on the first day, for which Sam’s grateful -- running laps and doing push-ups, that she can do, and she finds herself holding back during the sprints because she doesn’t want to stand out too much. She’s barely winded at the end but Melissa’s still red-faced from the effort when they walk into the changing rooms.
“Coach Carey’s such a jerk,” she whines in an easy-going sort of way, and Sam likes her already. “He used to be in the reserves like twenty years ago so he thinks that means he can yell at us like a drill sergeant.”
“I don’t know, he doesn’t seem that bad.” Sam is used to worse. Just a day with John Winchester as a coach would make all of these girls have nervous breakdowns. Hell, Dad would probably give Coach Carey himself a nervous breakdown.
Sam goes to practice all week. Melissa helps her a bit with her technique, and once she stops over-thinking it, it becomes pretty easy. She can catch a machete by the hilt in mid-air, she can strip a rifle and put it back together with her eyes closed, she can kick doors down and pick locks (faster than Dean, even) and set broken bones - passing a volleyball around doesn’t seem like such a big deal when she remembers that. You’re a Winchester, Dean would say, you can do anything.
“You’ll make the team for sure,” Melissa says on Friday, pulling a clean t-shirt over her head in the changing room, and that’s when Sam realizes that she actually cares, that she wants to make the team.
“You think?”
“Yeah. You’re a natural.” She grins at Sam, combing her messy curls into a loose ponytail. “Coach would be a moron not to pick you.”
When Sam sits down in her history class after lunch, one of the girls who’d given her strange looks at practice at the beginning of the week smiles at her from across the room. Sam smiles back, awkward and stilted. Maybe this school won’t be so bad after all.
*
Sam waits until the next Monday morning to talk to Dad about the team. He’s been up since the crack of dawn, packing his truck with weapons and supplies. He’ll be gone for a couple of days, and Sam knows from experience that moments like these are the best times to ask for a favor. Dad’s nearly always in a good mood when he’s about to hit the road with a monster in his sights, and she knows that he feels just enough guilt over leaving Dean and Sam alone yet again that he’s more likely to bend.
She sits on a kitchen chair with her knees pulled up and gulps down coffee while Dean stands behind her and brushes her hair, then ties it back in a neat braid that goes just past her shoulders like he does nearly every morning. He’d probably die of embarrassment if anyone saw him do this, but he’s done it since she was a kid, and whenever she tries to braid her hair herself she always makes a mess of it. She could learn to do it right, she thinks, if she really tried, but she likes this better, the gentle pull of Dean’s hands and the way he hums under his breath, the same way he does when he’s cleaning his gun or washing his car. When he’s finished, he rubs his thumb affectionately over the knob of her spine, then gives her braid a little tug.
“You ready to go, kiddo?”
“Yeah.” But she doesn’t move to get up yet, watching Dean as he moves away to put the coffee mugs and cereal bowls in the sink. She glances out the window, where Dad is loading heavy fuel cans into the back of his pick up. “Hey, Dean.”
“Hmm?”
“Would it be okay if you picked me up at 6 tonight, instead of right after school?”
Dean turns back to raise a questioning eyebrow, but it’s Dad’s voice asking, “Why?” over her shoulder that makes her jump. She didn’t even hear him come in.
“I have a thing after school.”
“A thing? Like what, like a date?” Dean this time, sounding equal parts concerned and amused, probably aware that even if it were true, she’d never admit to that with Dad in the room. “Do I need to get my shotgun ready, Sammy?”
“No!”
“What, then?”
She’d meant to talk to them separately, get Dean on her side before she talked to Dad. She sighs. “Volleyball tryouts.”
“Say that again?”
“Volleyball tryouts. For the school team. I mean, I probably won’t even make it, those other girls have all been playing for years, but...” She trails off, then shrugs. “I thought I’d try, that’s all.”
Dad and Dean look at each other from across opposite ends of the room, having some kind of silent conversation as though she’s not even there. What they’re saying is clear enough, she doesn’t know why they can’t speak out loud like normal human beings instead of using shrugs and grimaces. They always do this, it’s infuriating.
I’m not sure about this, Dad says with a frown.
You know you’re in for another fight if you say no, Dean replies with an arched eyebrow and a half-shrug.
Well, I suppose there’s no harm. At least sports is a more worthy pursuit for a hunter than the debate team she wanted to join last year. (And okay, maybe that’s not precisely what Dad’s saying with that sigh, but Sam is sure it’s not too far off the mark.) You’ll keep an eye on her?
Of course, Dad.
“You know, there’s a reason our ancestors invented spoken language,” Sam says with an eyeroll, pushing herself to her feet and grabbing her school bag.
Dad just smiles, and it’s hard to stay annoyed when she’s pretty sure she’s going to get her way. Sam smiles back, tentatively.
“Alright, Sammy. But you know that doesn’t get you out of your physical training.”
“I know.”
“Okay. You show those girls what Winchesters are made of.”
Sam grins. “Yes, sir.”
*
Dean’s fiddling with the box of cassette tapes when Sam gets in the car. He knows them by heart now, can tell at a glance what’s on each tape, he doesn’t need to be squinting at the labels with this much concentration, but he’s careful not to look at her.
“So?” His attempt to sound casual is a total failure but she appreciates the effort.
“I made it. The team, I mean. I’m on the team.” She doesn’t know why she’s grinning so wide because it’s stupid, it’s just a high school volleyball team, but it doesn’t matter because Dean’s grinning too, that beautiful, crinkled-eyed proud smile that he saves just for her.
“‘Course you did, Sammy.”
Dean reaches out to tug her braid but she grabs his hand in mid-air before he can complete the gesture. She wants to press her lips to his knuckles, but she settles for holding his hand in her lap. Dean’s smile only flickers for half a second, but then he smirks, says, “Grabby little brat,” and doesn’t pull away, even though that means he has to drive one-handed all of the way back home.
He makes her mac and cheese for dinner, and that night he shoves enough money in her hands for her to buy new sneakers and her own knee pads.
“That’s your money, from the gas station,” Sam says, looking at all the crumpled bills in her hands. He’s been talking about new tires for the Impala for weeks.
Dean shrugs, uncomfortable, and turns his back on her. “It’s fine. You get dishes duty for the next year, though.”
She can’t resist this time - she lunges at his back, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her face against his shoulder blade. He stiffens only for a second.
“Thanks, Dean. I love you.”
“Yeah,” he says after a moment, clearing his throat. “You too, kiddo.”
*
Sam thinks that she’s been in love with Dean her entire life, or at least for as long as she can remember. She doesn’t know when she started wanting him this way, when she began to crave something more than his hugs or his careless affectionate touches, or when she began to wonder what his lips would feel like against hers. But she knows that from the very first moment she began noticing boys at school, she was already comparing them to her big brother. Every time, they are weighed and found wanting. They’re not tall enough, too scrawny or too soft, whereas Dean is strong and confident and competent. They’re less infuriating than Dean, maybe, and less likely to laugh at their own dorky puns, but they’re also less funny, less clever, a million times less charming. They’re pimply and boring and dumb and predictable. It’s not fair that she should be expected to be interested in those boys, not when Dean eclipses them all without even trying.
And Dean loves her. And yeah, he loves her like a little sister, but his love is absolute and unconditional and so fierce that it frightens her sometimes because even in her half-assed fantasies of wedding dresses and church aisles, the handsome strangers she dreams up never look at her with even half of the warmth she finds in Dean’s gaze. Sam’s always known that there’s nothing Dean wouldn’t do for her, and how can anyone else even begin to compete with that?
*
Sam likes volleyball. Her height gives her an obvious advantage over most girls, and she’s good at it. She was trained from a young age to have good reflexes and she’s strong. Not as strong as Dad or Dean (that’ll never happen, not a chance, no matter how many sets of push-ups Dad makes her do every morning) but strong enough to smash the ball hard in the middle of the opposing team’s court, a missile that makes the other girls scramble like headless chickens to catch it. There’s satisfaction in finding something that she’s good at so effortlessly, without having to work at it, without her dad looming over her shoulder always pushing her to be better.
But above all that, she likes the camaraderie. She’s never been good at making friends with girls her own age, she doesn’t know how to speak to them. She’s fluent in Latin, knows some Spanish, can decipher all the nuances of Winchester Men body language, but Teenage Girl is like a code that she’s never managed to break. But her teammates welcome her in immediately, and it’s like being accepted into a secret society. All of a sudden she has a table of friends to sit with at lunch, people who greet her by name when she walks into a room. She does her math homework with Julia Finley, lets Helen Mason talk to her about her boy troubles for hours and hours, and gets kicked out of English with Melissa for making her laugh so hard she gets the hiccups. Melissa’s her favorite, with her green eyes and her freckles and her loud, boisterous laugh. She and Dean would get along great, she thinks, but she has no intention of introducing them, glad to have them both for herself.
Dean picks her up after practice and comes along to each away game, the Impala trailing the team’s minivan like a shadow. He sits in the bleachers, and it wouldn’t be so bad if he’d keep quiet and try to blend in with the crowd, but instead he insists on behaving like the world’s worst soccer mom, shouting advice, heckling the opposing team, and trying to start arguments with the referee. Sam would find it embarrassing if most of her teammates weren’t in love with him.
“Is that your boyfriend?” Helen Mason asks her in an awed undertone, on the very first day she sees him.
“No.” She should be used to that question by now. She and Dean don’t look much alike and she knows it’s an easy conclusion to jump to out of context when you see them together, when you see how close they are. It doesn’t have to mean anything. She knows that, yet it always makes her tense up, the idea that maybe strangers are seeing these things about her that shouldn’t be out there in plain sight. “He’s my brother.”
“Damn, girl. Your brother is hot,” Helen says, sing-songing the last word, and Sam smiles ruefully.
“Keep it down. He already thinks he’s hot stuff, he doesn’t need to keep hearing it.”
Helen’s the first to say it, but she isn’t the only one. What’s his name? How old is he? Does he have a girlfriend? Do you live with him? Can I come over to your place after school? Will he be there?
Sam would rather die than have friends over, not when there’s the chance they could stumble upon sawed-off shotguns or curse boxes or machetes (plus there’s the fact that Dad would kill her if he walked in to find a stranger in the house, whether or not said stranger was an inoffensive teenage girl), so Sam finds excuses. It doesn’t deter any of them, not when Dean’s always there after each practice, unfairly gorgeous and so goddamn cool, leaning against the driver’s side of his shiny classic car and rewarding their stares with flirty smiles. Sam can’t even blame the girls for trying.
By the third game he’s attended, Dean’s already compiled a list of the order in which he’d do her teammates. Sam’s pretty sure he’s just doing it to piss her off. Dean’s 21, old enough to use his real ID in bars, and he can pick up whomever he wants (and does, as much as he tries to be discreet about it when Sam’s around). It’s not like he needs to be leering at a bunch of high schoolers, even if he clearly enjoys their attention. He makes up dumb names for them, like Tall Blonde and Short Blonde and Braces and The Hot Redhead and Poor Man’s Winona Ryder.
“Her name is Julia, not Poor Man’s Winona Ryder. And you’re gross. They’re minors, Dean.”
“Not for long,” he says with a waggle of eyebrows, so she punches him in the arm.
*
Dad comes and goes from the house at unpredictable hours, his moods as fluctuating as the weather. Weeks of digging yield few leads on the Lake Champlain case, so in the meantime he takes care of a black dog in Vermont, then takes off again to hunt a witch in Jefferson County. He takes Dean along for that one, leaving Sam home alone for an entire week. She doesn’t mind because she knows how bored Dean’s been, pumping gas and babysitting his little sister. Dad doesn’t ask Sam if she wants to come along, and she’s grateful for that, too.
When neither Dad or Dean are around, Sam can pretend that she’s just another normal teenage girl. She splits her evenings between volleyball practice and her homework. She skips her morning workouts just because she can and revels in the extra hour of sleep, wears her hair in messy ponytails while Dean’s not there to braid it for her. She lives on peanut butter and banana sandwiches and spends a lot of her free time on the phone with Melissa because there’s no one around to berate her for it.
“You wanna come sleep over? My mom won’t mind.”
“I dunno.” Sam thinks of the shitstorm that would ensue if Dad and Dean came home and found the house empty in the middle of the night. They’d probably kick down every door in the town looking for her. “Might not be a good idea, my dad’s pretty strict.”
“Come watch a movie, then? I can drive you back home before you turn into a pumpkin.”
Melissa’s house is tastefully decorated and welcoming and smells like freshly baked cookies, and her mom is really nice. They watch American Beauty in Melissa’s bed with Sully, the family’s cocker spaniel, sprawled out between them. Melissa’s mom brings them popcorn and orange soda, and by the time the movie’s over, Sully has migrated to Sam’s lap and Melissa has pulled Sam’s feet over her knees so she can paint her toenails purple, the same shade as her own. Dean always gives her foot massages when they watch movies on the couch together, even though he grouches about it, and Sam smiles at the thought of it. She wonders what he’s up to, and what stories he’ll have to tell when he comes back.
When Melissa’s mom finds out that she’s home alone for a couple of days, she invites Sam herself. “You sure you don’t want to spend the night? If your dad’s not home, it can be our little secret.”
Sam thinks of the empty house that awaits her, of how drafty her room in the attic has become now that the weather’s starting to turn cold. Here there’s a soft, friendly dog and a doting mother to feed her, a friend to talk with through the night, a bedroom full of teddy bears and sports trophies and Radiohead posters on the wall, and maybe even pancakes in the morning.
“No, I’d better go home. But thanks.”
Sam goes home, but not before Melissa’s mom gives her a grocery bag loaded with food - a fresh loaf of bread, half a dozen muffins, and half a lasagna - and just smiles kindly at Sam when she politely tries to refuse. There’s something like pity in the look she gives her, and in the way she insists that Sam is welcome to dinner whenever she wants. Like Sam is some street urchin that could use the charity. Sam smiles back, tight-lipped and only a little bitter. It’s nothing she isn’t used to, and besides, that lasagna was really good.
*
Sam wakes up shivering at two in the morning, with the rain and the autumn wind beating against the old walls of the house, the room cold enough to fog her breath. She gets up to check the salt lines at the windowsills and the doorways, her blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a cape. She makes herself a cup of lemon tea to warm up and drinks it alone on the sofa, listening to the whistle of the wind coming down the chimney.
She tiptoes into Dean’s room, quiet even though there’s no one to wake up. She steps over the piles of clothes strewn about the small room and crawls into Dean’s creaky double bed, burying her nose in the pillow that still smells like him. She falls asleep almost instantly.
*
“What you doin’ there, Sammy?”
Dean’s voice, heavy with exhaustion, coming from somewhere above her head. It takes her a moment to make sense of the question, to remember where she is.
“S’cold in my room.” She rolls over without opening her eyes, shifting closer to the wall to leave room for him. Dean grunts something unintelligible, probably too tired to protest. A few moments later there’s the sound of clothes being shucked and boots hitting the floor, then the bed dips with Dean’s weight, and she’s asleep again.
She wakes up some time later with her nose pressed in Dean’s t-shirt, just below his armpit. He smells like sweat and gunpowder and, inexplicably, like something sweet and cloying, a smell like rotting flowers. Witches, she remembers sleepily, Dean hates them. Dean’s snoring lightly and his hand is tangled in her hair. It’s nice. Dean is so warm, radiating heat like a furnace, all sleep heavy and familiar. Sam shifts closer, her palm open over Dean’s heart, pounding steady and comforting.
When she wakes up again it’s morning, the bed is empty, and she can hear the shower running. Dean’s in there, probably, washing off yesterday’s dust and sweat and whatever it was that left him smelling vaguely like dead roses. Maybe he’s jerking off in there. Helen said that guys jerk off like five times a day. Sam rolls into Dean’s side of the bed, still warm from his body, and pulls the blanket over her head like a cocoon.
She thinks of his big, clever hands, what they would look like wrapped around his own dick as he jerked off and it makes her face heat up, her thighs squeezing together at the warmth pooling low in her belly. She slides her hand down her stomach, her fingers slipping just under the waistband of her panties and into her coarse, wiry hair, just resting there. She wonders if Dean would be able to tell if she got herself off in his bed, whether he’d be able to smell her on the sheets when he went to sleep. Sam bites her lip, her hand sliding lower, pressing down. She turns her face into Dean’s pillow, inhaling deeply.
That’s when Dad’s voice calls her name from the kitchen. Sam flushes all over, hot with shame, scrambling out of bed so fast she nearly trips over her own feet.
She comes out of Dean’s room with her blanket wrapped around her like armor, red-faced, angry at herself and already spoiling for a fight. Dad’s got a fresh wound all along the length of his forearm, and the sight of all that blood seeping through the bandage incenses her instantly, like a flame to dry kindling.
“What happened to you?” Sam demands at exactly the moment that Dad says, “Why the hell are your toenails purple?” and somehow that degenerates into a venomous screaming match that ends when Dad storms out into the back yard and slams the door behind him.
“So nice to be back home,” Dean says wryly from the bathroom doorway, his hair still wet from his shower, and Sam rushes up the stairs to her room before she bursts out crying or punches him in his stupid, too-pretty face.
Part Two
Pairing: Sam/Dean, mild Sam/OFC
Rating: NC-17
Word count: ~15,900
Warnings: Genderswap (always-a-girl!Sam), underage sexuality (Sam is 17)
Artist: clex_monkie89
Notes: This was written for the Sam&Dean 2012 Mini-Bang 2012, hosted by the wonderful people at samdean_otp. Thanks to the mods for all your hard work! Big thanks to the_reverand who held my hand the whole way and even wrote me Dean POV ficlets set in this verse because she is awesome that way. <3 I am super grateful to clex_monkie89 for saving the day at the very last minute with an art pinch-hit, you're my hero! Title from The Past is a Grotesque Animal by Of Montreal. It's a 12 minute epic and you should listen to it (you know, if you want, I'm not your boss).
Summary: It’s hard enough being a teenage girl even without all the extra crap: they move around all the time, her family is as far removed from normal as it’s possible to get, and she’s in love with her older brother. Sam has no control on any of it, she’s just trying to stay afloat.
Part One | Part Two | Read on AO3
Art post (Check it out even if you don't read the fic because it's wonderful.)
*
do you know, no matter where we are
we're always touching by underground wires
*
They say that every little girl's first love is her daddy, but that isn't true for Sam. Sam’s first love is her brother.
When Dean wants to embarrass Sam, he’ll remind her that when she was four years old, she used to say that when they were all grown up, she and Dean would get married. She doesn’t think that anymore, she’s not an idiot, but she thinks that it just goes to show that she never had a chance, that she was screwed up from the very start.
*
Sam’s senior year starts in Clinton County, New York, in a small town near the Canadian border.
There’s a hunt somewhere nearby, that’s the only reason they’re here (the only reason they’re ever anywhere), but the good news is that with school starting up again, Dad can’t force them to live out of the car anymore, at least not for a little while. After a summer on the road and a different state every two days, Sam’s grateful for the small luxury of the house on the edge of town. It doesn’t even really matter what part of the country it’s in.
It’s more of a cottage than a house, really, and it’s old, but in good shape compared to some other houses they’ve rented or squatted in over the years. Sam likes it from the moment she sees it from the passenger seat of the Impala, the square little blue thing with the white porch that spans the whole width of the house, the two square windows with lace curtains that make them look like sleepy eyes on each side of the red door. The lawn is overgrown but there’s a flower bed under each window, and it looks familiar and comforting, like a child’s drawing of what a house should look like. It’s houses like these that Sam used to draw in school when she was little, with stick figures of her and Dean and of Mom and Dad standing in front of it, like all of the other children in school did. The first time she brought one home to show to her father, his face twisted and he picked her up and held her so tight that it scared her a little. She kept very still while Dad held her in shaky arms for a long time, breathing heavy like when he was hurt, the drawing half-crumpled in her hand and Dean watching them with big sad eyes from the kitchen table. Sam stopped drawing houses after that.
Dean smiles when they pull up in the driveway. He’s tired from the long drive but he looks quietly pleased, like the house is a gift he knew she would like. “Look, Sammy, it even has a picket fence.”
Sam can’t help grinning in return. “If it has a decent bathtub too, then I’m never leaving.”
It does have a bathtub, an old footed one that will be amazing once she scrubs it clean. Sam has her own room, too, and she doesn’t even mind that it’s in the attic and that she has to use an ancient narrow staircase to reach it. The roof is too low for her to stand fully upright and it’s pretty dark in there, with just a small round window to let in the sunlight and nothing but a bare lightbulb above the bed for lighting, but it’s hers. The double mattress (propped up on some crates rather than a boxspring) takes up most of the small space and it’s a huge improvement over fighting with Dean over who has to sleep on the rollout bed in each new motel room. In here she can read as late as she wants without anyone bitching about the light and she doesn’t have to put up with her father’s snoring.
The next best thing about the house is the kitchen. It’s nothing special, just a small room with outdated decor and ancient noisy appliances, but it signifies the end of a two month long stretch of nothing but take-out pizza and roadside diner food. Dean isn’t a cook by any stretch of the imagination but he makes the best mac and cheese. The macaroni is always perfectly cooked, with just the right amount of butter blended in and a bunch of chopped up hot dogs thrown in (“It’s not the same without the hot dogs”, Dean says). It’s stupid, but she’s been craving it for weeks.
There’s musty crocheted doilies on the end tables and some frankly appalling wallpaper in every room: dead-eyed, sinister-looking ducklings in the bathroom, something that’s probably supposed to be cornucopias in the kitchen, and faded sunflowers in living room. The house is reasonably clean, though, and Sam is immediately taken with it.
Sam’s sitting on the ancient floral-patterned couch and watching the local news broadcast when Dean emerges from the kitchen and hands her a bowl of macaroni. They’d barely finished bringing in their bags when Dad left with his truck to scope out the area, leaving Sam and Dean to unpack, buy food, and settle in.
“We’ll stay until Christmas,” Dad had said. Sam knows better than to put stock in that by now, but if Dad bothered with renting a house then that means they’ll be around for at least a couple of weeks.
Dean drops down at the other end of the sofa, his back against the armrest, and puts his feet up. He prods the outside of Sam’s thigh with his socked toes just to be annoying. Sam’s starving and too grateful for the food to complain.
“You need a ride tomorrow morning?” he says around a mouthful of macaroni.
“Nah. I can just take the school bus. I asked Mrs Barcomb from across the street and she said it stops just two houses down, in front of that red brick house with all the ivy.”
Dean frowns, and Sam thinks he’ll object to her taking the bus, but what he says instead is, “Mrs Barcomb? When did you go ‘round talking to the neighbors?”
“She came by when you were out buying food. She just wanted to say hi.”
“And you just let her in, with no one else in the house? With all the arsenal still in the kitchen?”
“We just talked on the front porch, Dean, relax. Anyway she’s like 80 and she’s really sweet.”
“Doesn’t mean she can’t call the cops. And doesn’t mean she isn’t a witch, Sammy.”
“Yes, Dad.” Dean hates it when she calls him that, especially when she accompanies it with her best teenager eyeroll. His jaw clenches and he sits up straighter, taking his feet off of the couch and shifting to turn towards the television.
“You know what I’m saying. Don’t be such a brat.”
Sam’s stomach growls, and she shovels a spoonful of macaroni in her mouth. It really is amazing. It shouldn’t be, with the neon orange food coloring and the hot dogs that are made of god knows what (certainly not anything recognizable as meat) that do nothing to improve its nutritional value, but it doesn’t matter. She’d never tell Dean this, but if she was allowed one last meal before dying, she’d probably choose Dean’s mac and cheese over anything else.
“She brought a pie, too. I put it in the oven so it would stay warm.”
Dean glances at her from the corners of his eyes. “Did she?”
“Yeah. Blueberry.”
Dean doesn’t say anything but the tension in his shoulder eases a bit. Sam smiles around her mouthful of food, twists around on the sofa and shoves her feet in Dean’s lap. “I told you she was sweet. She’s not a witch.”
“Shut up and eat,” Dean says, making a half-hearted attempt to push her feet off. “I’m testing the pie first, just to be sure.”
Sam laughs. “Sure.”
“And I’m driving you to school tomorrow. Screw the school bus.”
“Okay.”
*
Sam gets called freak and giraffe and dyke and yeti, all within the first week of school. She’s tall, and not just for her age. She’s nearly as tall as Dean, taller than all the boys at school, and no one ever lets her forget it. It’s been the same in every school ever since she shot up above everyone else when she was thirteen. She hunches her shoulders in her too-big hoodie (her favorite, stolen from Dean) and pretends not to notice when five-foot tall twerp boys try to trip her in the hallway. Dean would tell her to break some noses and make those boys eat dirt - no, actually, Dean would barge into the school and break some noses himself if she told him what was going on, but either way, it wouldn’t make the name-calling stop. Sam knows that from experience.
Everywhere she goes people remark on her height. “You could model!” random strangers tell her in diners and gas stations, usually well-intentioned ladies old enough to be her mother, because they feel bad for exclaiming about her freakish height in the first place. When Sam looks in the mirror she doesn’t see a model, she just sees an awkward flat-chested girl with knobby knees and too-big hands. There’s strength in her limbs, the product of forced morning swims in cold motel pools and hours of hand-to-hand combat training, but what muscles she has only serve to make her look more boyish. Sam may be tall and skinny but she’s not pretty. She’s not cute. She hasn’t been cute since before she hit puberty, when she would wear her brother’s hand-me-downs and Dean would braid her hair with ribbons just so people would stop mistaking her for a little boy.
Sometimes Sam looks at old photos of her mom, so pretty and blonde and feminine, and she thinks that maybe she could have been more like that if she’d had a mother to show her how. If she’d had the chance at a normal life, maybe she’d know how to be a real girl, a girl like the ones that grab Dean’s attention, the ones he flirts with in diners and truck stops all across the country.
*
With Sam back in school and with them staying put for a while, they can’t live on pool hustling and credit card scams alone. Dean gets a part-time job pumping gas at the Mobil right off the I-87, a 3-in-1 gas station, convenience store and Dunkin’ Donuts that’s mainly populated by Canadians who are filling up their tanks with cheaper American gas before heading back north of the border.
The rest of his time he spends helping Dad out on the job. There’s been a string of disappearances around Lake Champlain, spread out over the past ten years. A water spirit, maybe, but it’s hard to say with so little to go on. It could be anything, a ghost or a creature roaming the woods nearby. Dad and Dean interview witnesses and Sam does research in between her homework, going through old obituaries and news stories. It’s tedious work but she doesn’t mind, prefers this to digging up graves or stitching up wounds.
The first weeks of school are brutal, but for once her home life is strangely ordinary. Calculus books and yellowed newspapers crowd together on the wobbly table that she's appropriated in the public library. The librarian is a tiny, round lady named Ruth who takes a shine to Sam and brings her homemade peanut butter cookies and tells Sam about her grandchildren. She asks Sam about her plans for college.
“I’ve applied all over the country,” Sam tells her conspiratorially. Her heart beats loud and guiltily; it’s the first time she’s told anyone. “But I can’t go anywhere without a full scholarship.”
Ruth smiles. “A smart girl like you, I bet all the schools will be fighting to have you. Just you wait.”
*
Sam’s new school has a girl’s volleyball team. They went to state last year, came in third, and they take their team very seriously. She knows this from when she looked up the school online when they first moved here but she’d forgotten about it until the coach (Mr. Carey, who doubles as her new math teacher) corners her in the library over lunch.
“Hey, Samantha. Mind if I sit down for a sec?”
She drops her half-eaten egg sandwich back into its crumpled paper bag and hopes she doesn’t have any crumbs or bits of egg stuck to her face. “I... sorry, I know I’m not supposed to bring food in here, but-”
“Oh, no, don’t worry about that. You know I coach the girl’s volleyball team, right?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, we lost our two best hitters when they graduated last year so I’m on a recruiting mission. You like volleyball?”
“I... I don’t know. I guess. I’ve never really played much.”
“No harm in trying, though, right? Tryouts for the team are Monday next week, after class, but there’s gonna be practice games all week over lunch break. You should come by.”
*
She feels stupid, standing there in her oversized Metallica t-shirt (Dean’s), her third-hand thrift-store shorts (Dean’s, from when he was around twelve years old), her scuffed sneakers (always hers, but they’re more brown than white now, from that time she ended up waist-deep in the mud with Dean, pushing Dad’s truck out of a river), and her yellowing knee pads (the school’s).
A couple of girls give her odd looks from the moment she walks into the gym, and she’s already thinking about turning around and walking right back out when a pretty redhead walks in from behind her and says, “Whoah, you’re tall!”, familiar words but in a tone Sam’s never heard before, impressed and appreciative. “Steph from last year was tall too, but not like you! She got a full ride to Texas State to play on their team.”
Her name is Melissa, and either she takes pity on Sam or she wants to see what Sam’s worth, because she immediately offers to pair up with her.
They barely have to touch volleyballs on the first day, for which Sam’s grateful -- running laps and doing push-ups, that she can do, and she finds herself holding back during the sprints because she doesn’t want to stand out too much. She’s barely winded at the end but Melissa’s still red-faced from the effort when they walk into the changing rooms.
“Coach Carey’s such a jerk,” she whines in an easy-going sort of way, and Sam likes her already. “He used to be in the reserves like twenty years ago so he thinks that means he can yell at us like a drill sergeant.”
“I don’t know, he doesn’t seem that bad.” Sam is used to worse. Just a day with John Winchester as a coach would make all of these girls have nervous breakdowns. Hell, Dad would probably give Coach Carey himself a nervous breakdown.
Sam goes to practice all week. Melissa helps her a bit with her technique, and once she stops over-thinking it, it becomes pretty easy. She can catch a machete by the hilt in mid-air, she can strip a rifle and put it back together with her eyes closed, she can kick doors down and pick locks (faster than Dean, even) and set broken bones - passing a volleyball around doesn’t seem like such a big deal when she remembers that. You’re a Winchester, Dean would say, you can do anything.
“You’ll make the team for sure,” Melissa says on Friday, pulling a clean t-shirt over her head in the changing room, and that’s when Sam realizes that she actually cares, that she wants to make the team.
“You think?”
“Yeah. You’re a natural.” She grins at Sam, combing her messy curls into a loose ponytail. “Coach would be a moron not to pick you.”
When Sam sits down in her history class after lunch, one of the girls who’d given her strange looks at practice at the beginning of the week smiles at her from across the room. Sam smiles back, awkward and stilted. Maybe this school won’t be so bad after all.
*
Sam waits until the next Monday morning to talk to Dad about the team. He’s been up since the crack of dawn, packing his truck with weapons and supplies. He’ll be gone for a couple of days, and Sam knows from experience that moments like these are the best times to ask for a favor. Dad’s nearly always in a good mood when he’s about to hit the road with a monster in his sights, and she knows that he feels just enough guilt over leaving Dean and Sam alone yet again that he’s more likely to bend.
She sits on a kitchen chair with her knees pulled up and gulps down coffee while Dean stands behind her and brushes her hair, then ties it back in a neat braid that goes just past her shoulders like he does nearly every morning. He’d probably die of embarrassment if anyone saw him do this, but he’s done it since she was a kid, and whenever she tries to braid her hair herself she always makes a mess of it. She could learn to do it right, she thinks, if she really tried, but she likes this better, the gentle pull of Dean’s hands and the way he hums under his breath, the same way he does when he’s cleaning his gun or washing his car. When he’s finished, he rubs his thumb affectionately over the knob of her spine, then gives her braid a little tug.
“You ready to go, kiddo?”
“Yeah.” But she doesn’t move to get up yet, watching Dean as he moves away to put the coffee mugs and cereal bowls in the sink. She glances out the window, where Dad is loading heavy fuel cans into the back of his pick up. “Hey, Dean.”
“Hmm?”
“Would it be okay if you picked me up at 6 tonight, instead of right after school?”
Dean turns back to raise a questioning eyebrow, but it’s Dad’s voice asking, “Why?” over her shoulder that makes her jump. She didn’t even hear him come in.
“I have a thing after school.”
“A thing? Like what, like a date?” Dean this time, sounding equal parts concerned and amused, probably aware that even if it were true, she’d never admit to that with Dad in the room. “Do I need to get my shotgun ready, Sammy?”
“No!”
“What, then?”
She’d meant to talk to them separately, get Dean on her side before she talked to Dad. She sighs. “Volleyball tryouts.”
“Say that again?”
“Volleyball tryouts. For the school team. I mean, I probably won’t even make it, those other girls have all been playing for years, but...” She trails off, then shrugs. “I thought I’d try, that’s all.”
Dad and Dean look at each other from across opposite ends of the room, having some kind of silent conversation as though she’s not even there. What they’re saying is clear enough, she doesn’t know why they can’t speak out loud like normal human beings instead of using shrugs and grimaces. They always do this, it’s infuriating.
I’m not sure about this, Dad says with a frown.
You know you’re in for another fight if you say no, Dean replies with an arched eyebrow and a half-shrug.
Well, I suppose there’s no harm. At least sports is a more worthy pursuit for a hunter than the debate team she wanted to join last year. (And okay, maybe that’s not precisely what Dad’s saying with that sigh, but Sam is sure it’s not too far off the mark.) You’ll keep an eye on her?
Of course, Dad.
“You know, there’s a reason our ancestors invented spoken language,” Sam says with an eyeroll, pushing herself to her feet and grabbing her school bag.
Dad just smiles, and it’s hard to stay annoyed when she’s pretty sure she’s going to get her way. Sam smiles back, tentatively.
“Alright, Sammy. But you know that doesn’t get you out of your physical training.”
“I know.”
“Okay. You show those girls what Winchesters are made of.”
Sam grins. “Yes, sir.”
*
Dean’s fiddling with the box of cassette tapes when Sam gets in the car. He knows them by heart now, can tell at a glance what’s on each tape, he doesn’t need to be squinting at the labels with this much concentration, but he’s careful not to look at her.
“So?” His attempt to sound casual is a total failure but she appreciates the effort.
“I made it. The team, I mean. I’m on the team.” She doesn’t know why she’s grinning so wide because it’s stupid, it’s just a high school volleyball team, but it doesn’t matter because Dean’s grinning too, that beautiful, crinkled-eyed proud smile that he saves just for her.
“‘Course you did, Sammy.”
Dean reaches out to tug her braid but she grabs his hand in mid-air before he can complete the gesture. She wants to press her lips to his knuckles, but she settles for holding his hand in her lap. Dean’s smile only flickers for half a second, but then he smirks, says, “Grabby little brat,” and doesn’t pull away, even though that means he has to drive one-handed all of the way back home.
He makes her mac and cheese for dinner, and that night he shoves enough money in her hands for her to buy new sneakers and her own knee pads.
“That’s your money, from the gas station,” Sam says, looking at all the crumpled bills in her hands. He’s been talking about new tires for the Impala for weeks.
Dean shrugs, uncomfortable, and turns his back on her. “It’s fine. You get dishes duty for the next year, though.”
She can’t resist this time - she lunges at his back, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her face against his shoulder blade. He stiffens only for a second.
“Thanks, Dean. I love you.”
“Yeah,” he says after a moment, clearing his throat. “You too, kiddo.”
*
Sam thinks that she’s been in love with Dean her entire life, or at least for as long as she can remember. She doesn’t know when she started wanting him this way, when she began to crave something more than his hugs or his careless affectionate touches, or when she began to wonder what his lips would feel like against hers. But she knows that from the very first moment she began noticing boys at school, she was already comparing them to her big brother. Every time, they are weighed and found wanting. They’re not tall enough, too scrawny or too soft, whereas Dean is strong and confident and competent. They’re less infuriating than Dean, maybe, and less likely to laugh at their own dorky puns, but they’re also less funny, less clever, a million times less charming. They’re pimply and boring and dumb and predictable. It’s not fair that she should be expected to be interested in those boys, not when Dean eclipses them all without even trying.
And Dean loves her. And yeah, he loves her like a little sister, but his love is absolute and unconditional and so fierce that it frightens her sometimes because even in her half-assed fantasies of wedding dresses and church aisles, the handsome strangers she dreams up never look at her with even half of the warmth she finds in Dean’s gaze. Sam’s always known that there’s nothing Dean wouldn’t do for her, and how can anyone else even begin to compete with that?
*
Sam likes volleyball. Her height gives her an obvious advantage over most girls, and she’s good at it. She was trained from a young age to have good reflexes and she’s strong. Not as strong as Dad or Dean (that’ll never happen, not a chance, no matter how many sets of push-ups Dad makes her do every morning) but strong enough to smash the ball hard in the middle of the opposing team’s court, a missile that makes the other girls scramble like headless chickens to catch it. There’s satisfaction in finding something that she’s good at so effortlessly, without having to work at it, without her dad looming over her shoulder always pushing her to be better.
But above all that, she likes the camaraderie. She’s never been good at making friends with girls her own age, she doesn’t know how to speak to them. She’s fluent in Latin, knows some Spanish, can decipher all the nuances of Winchester Men body language, but Teenage Girl is like a code that she’s never managed to break. But her teammates welcome her in immediately, and it’s like being accepted into a secret society. All of a sudden she has a table of friends to sit with at lunch, people who greet her by name when she walks into a room. She does her math homework with Julia Finley, lets Helen Mason talk to her about her boy troubles for hours and hours, and gets kicked out of English with Melissa for making her laugh so hard she gets the hiccups. Melissa’s her favorite, with her green eyes and her freckles and her loud, boisterous laugh. She and Dean would get along great, she thinks, but she has no intention of introducing them, glad to have them both for herself.
Dean picks her up after practice and comes along to each away game, the Impala trailing the team’s minivan like a shadow. He sits in the bleachers, and it wouldn’t be so bad if he’d keep quiet and try to blend in with the crowd, but instead he insists on behaving like the world’s worst soccer mom, shouting advice, heckling the opposing team, and trying to start arguments with the referee. Sam would find it embarrassing if most of her teammates weren’t in love with him.
“Is that your boyfriend?” Helen Mason asks her in an awed undertone, on the very first day she sees him.
“No.” She should be used to that question by now. She and Dean don’t look much alike and she knows it’s an easy conclusion to jump to out of context when you see them together, when you see how close they are. It doesn’t have to mean anything. She knows that, yet it always makes her tense up, the idea that maybe strangers are seeing these things about her that shouldn’t be out there in plain sight. “He’s my brother.”
“Damn, girl. Your brother is hot,” Helen says, sing-songing the last word, and Sam smiles ruefully.
“Keep it down. He already thinks he’s hot stuff, he doesn’t need to keep hearing it.”
Helen’s the first to say it, but she isn’t the only one. What’s his name? How old is he? Does he have a girlfriend? Do you live with him? Can I come over to your place after school? Will he be there?
Sam would rather die than have friends over, not when there’s the chance they could stumble upon sawed-off shotguns or curse boxes or machetes (plus there’s the fact that Dad would kill her if he walked in to find a stranger in the house, whether or not said stranger was an inoffensive teenage girl), so Sam finds excuses. It doesn’t deter any of them, not when Dean’s always there after each practice, unfairly gorgeous and so goddamn cool, leaning against the driver’s side of his shiny classic car and rewarding their stares with flirty smiles. Sam can’t even blame the girls for trying.
By the third game he’s attended, Dean’s already compiled a list of the order in which he’d do her teammates. Sam’s pretty sure he’s just doing it to piss her off. Dean’s 21, old enough to use his real ID in bars, and he can pick up whomever he wants (and does, as much as he tries to be discreet about it when Sam’s around). It’s not like he needs to be leering at a bunch of high schoolers, even if he clearly enjoys their attention. He makes up dumb names for them, like Tall Blonde and Short Blonde and Braces and The Hot Redhead and Poor Man’s Winona Ryder.
“Her name is Julia, not Poor Man’s Winona Ryder. And you’re gross. They’re minors, Dean.”
“Not for long,” he says with a waggle of eyebrows, so she punches him in the arm.
*
Dad comes and goes from the house at unpredictable hours, his moods as fluctuating as the weather. Weeks of digging yield few leads on the Lake Champlain case, so in the meantime he takes care of a black dog in Vermont, then takes off again to hunt a witch in Jefferson County. He takes Dean along for that one, leaving Sam home alone for an entire week. She doesn’t mind because she knows how bored Dean’s been, pumping gas and babysitting his little sister. Dad doesn’t ask Sam if she wants to come along, and she’s grateful for that, too.
When neither Dad or Dean are around, Sam can pretend that she’s just another normal teenage girl. She splits her evenings between volleyball practice and her homework. She skips her morning workouts just because she can and revels in the extra hour of sleep, wears her hair in messy ponytails while Dean’s not there to braid it for her. She lives on peanut butter and banana sandwiches and spends a lot of her free time on the phone with Melissa because there’s no one around to berate her for it.
“You wanna come sleep over? My mom won’t mind.”
“I dunno.” Sam thinks of the shitstorm that would ensue if Dad and Dean came home and found the house empty in the middle of the night. They’d probably kick down every door in the town looking for her. “Might not be a good idea, my dad’s pretty strict.”
“Come watch a movie, then? I can drive you back home before you turn into a pumpkin.”
Melissa’s house is tastefully decorated and welcoming and smells like freshly baked cookies, and her mom is really nice. They watch American Beauty in Melissa’s bed with Sully, the family’s cocker spaniel, sprawled out between them. Melissa’s mom brings them popcorn and orange soda, and by the time the movie’s over, Sully has migrated to Sam’s lap and Melissa has pulled Sam’s feet over her knees so she can paint her toenails purple, the same shade as her own. Dean always gives her foot massages when they watch movies on the couch together, even though he grouches about it, and Sam smiles at the thought of it. She wonders what he’s up to, and what stories he’ll have to tell when he comes back.
When Melissa’s mom finds out that she’s home alone for a couple of days, she invites Sam herself. “You sure you don’t want to spend the night? If your dad’s not home, it can be our little secret.”
Sam thinks of the empty house that awaits her, of how drafty her room in the attic has become now that the weather’s starting to turn cold. Here there’s a soft, friendly dog and a doting mother to feed her, a friend to talk with through the night, a bedroom full of teddy bears and sports trophies and Radiohead posters on the wall, and maybe even pancakes in the morning.
“No, I’d better go home. But thanks.”
Sam goes home, but not before Melissa’s mom gives her a grocery bag loaded with food - a fresh loaf of bread, half a dozen muffins, and half a lasagna - and just smiles kindly at Sam when she politely tries to refuse. There’s something like pity in the look she gives her, and in the way she insists that Sam is welcome to dinner whenever she wants. Like Sam is some street urchin that could use the charity. Sam smiles back, tight-lipped and only a little bitter. It’s nothing she isn’t used to, and besides, that lasagna was really good.
*
Sam wakes up shivering at two in the morning, with the rain and the autumn wind beating against the old walls of the house, the room cold enough to fog her breath. She gets up to check the salt lines at the windowsills and the doorways, her blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a cape. She makes herself a cup of lemon tea to warm up and drinks it alone on the sofa, listening to the whistle of the wind coming down the chimney.
She tiptoes into Dean’s room, quiet even though there’s no one to wake up. She steps over the piles of clothes strewn about the small room and crawls into Dean’s creaky double bed, burying her nose in the pillow that still smells like him. She falls asleep almost instantly.
*
“What you doin’ there, Sammy?”
Dean’s voice, heavy with exhaustion, coming from somewhere above her head. It takes her a moment to make sense of the question, to remember where she is.
“S’cold in my room.” She rolls over without opening her eyes, shifting closer to the wall to leave room for him. Dean grunts something unintelligible, probably too tired to protest. A few moments later there’s the sound of clothes being shucked and boots hitting the floor, then the bed dips with Dean’s weight, and she’s asleep again.
She wakes up some time later with her nose pressed in Dean’s t-shirt, just below his armpit. He smells like sweat and gunpowder and, inexplicably, like something sweet and cloying, a smell like rotting flowers. Witches, she remembers sleepily, Dean hates them. Dean’s snoring lightly and his hand is tangled in her hair. It’s nice. Dean is so warm, radiating heat like a furnace, all sleep heavy and familiar. Sam shifts closer, her palm open over Dean’s heart, pounding steady and comforting.
When she wakes up again it’s morning, the bed is empty, and she can hear the shower running. Dean’s in there, probably, washing off yesterday’s dust and sweat and whatever it was that left him smelling vaguely like dead roses. Maybe he’s jerking off in there. Helen said that guys jerk off like five times a day. Sam rolls into Dean’s side of the bed, still warm from his body, and pulls the blanket over her head like a cocoon.
She thinks of his big, clever hands, what they would look like wrapped around his own dick as he jerked off and it makes her face heat up, her thighs squeezing together at the warmth pooling low in her belly. She slides her hand down her stomach, her fingers slipping just under the waistband of her panties and into her coarse, wiry hair, just resting there. She wonders if Dean would be able to tell if she got herself off in his bed, whether he’d be able to smell her on the sheets when he went to sleep. Sam bites her lip, her hand sliding lower, pressing down. She turns her face into Dean’s pillow, inhaling deeply.
That’s when Dad’s voice calls her name from the kitchen. Sam flushes all over, hot with shame, scrambling out of bed so fast she nearly trips over her own feet.
She comes out of Dean’s room with her blanket wrapped around her like armor, red-faced, angry at herself and already spoiling for a fight. Dad’s got a fresh wound all along the length of his forearm, and the sight of all that blood seeping through the bandage incenses her instantly, like a flame to dry kindling.
“What happened to you?” Sam demands at exactly the moment that Dad says, “Why the hell are your toenails purple?” and somehow that degenerates into a venomous screaming match that ends when Dad storms out into the back yard and slams the door behind him.
“So nice to be back home,” Dean says wryly from the bathroom doorway, his hair still wet from his shower, and Sam rushes up the stairs to her room before she bursts out crying or punches him in his stupid, too-pretty face.
Part Two