fic: His Most Excellent Wardrobe

May 11, 2011 01:15

title: His Most Excellent Wardrobe: A Tale Concerning Laundry
pairing: Sam/Dean
words: 2.7k
summary: robo!Sam's ruffly pants are the stuff of fairytale.
a/n: for de-nugis, who didn't ask for this. I would say this is complete crack. I made a manip for reference.





The empty boy had ruffly pockets.

It was strange and wondrous to all who looked upon him from behind, but seeing as this sartorial choice was OOC, it gave his brother cause to worry. Who was this shade of the boy-nay, the man-who was so present in face but not in action?

i. Soulless!Sam's soulless laundry habits. I wonder if he adds Bounce?

To all outside parties, it would appear that the elder brother did his fair share of griping, while the younger brother did the washing up and laundered their collection of large clothing.

And it was so at 3AM in an atmospheric laundromat in Tennessee. Their clothing was dried with the blood of their foes and the dirt of desecrated graves. The tall brother bent over to shove it into the industrial sized washing machine for a full load with too little soap; he was soulless and therefor did not quite care enough to measure properly. It was thusly that the eldest was afforded a look at the startling perfection of the pants pockets in all of their bevel-hemmed wonder, and it was thusly that, yet again, their laundry came out only partially cleansed at the end of the cycle.

The mood was indeed sinister. Upon the walls and obscuring all the windows of the modest laundromat was graffitied the wisdom of ages in red and black spray paints. Under the eerie, neon tube lighting, these messages read like warnings. Dean considered his own dirty nails, the soulless state of his brother, and the apparently homophobic slurs on the walls in turn. Had he looked closer, he might have discerned his venial future in the crude language like a portent, but he did not and so the future came as it usually did: subtle and with great force.

It was probably for the best.

ii. On the one hand, he has no use for the inefficiency of soft, fluffy clothes

When Sam returned to consciousness with the year and a half's worth of memories walled off, he felt fine. He was starved half to death and kind of scarily emotional about the smallest of details, and he was zapping under his skin with the firefly mania of finally being awake, but he was fine.

He made his way upstairs and grabbed Dean into a huge hug, because he felt like it was seconds after he'd thrown himself into the Cage with Lucifer, and he was still experiencing vertigo.

"Never have I been so happy to wake up in the panic room," he said, the scratch of Dean's neck beneath his mouth.

Dean felt stiff against him. Not only that, but everything felt more itchy than he was used to, kind of smelly. It didn't matter though, because it was Dean.

Dean put his arms tentatively around Sam's back and Sam held on tight.

"Dude," Sam said later, while Dean was sitting kind of awkwardly at the end of the bed upstairs just watching him. Sam picked up yet another flannel shirt that was unusually crunchy. "Has there been something wrong with the laundry lately? I mean, I know we didn't have much time over the past few weeks, what with Lucifer and Michael and all, but these shirts smell like someone left them to dry in a pile. Kind of moldy, you know?"

Dean just smiled kind of weird and said, "Beats me."

Then, the next day Sam was going through his duffel and found a ton of dirty socks. He never kept dirty socks in the bottom of his bag, because it was plain gross, it was something that Dean would do. Minutes after that, he pulled on a pair of jeans and they were tight in all the wrong places, molding to his thighs like jeggings, and when he turned in a circle in the bathroom to get a good look, he saw that the jeans flared at the knee and the back pockets were kind of...feminine...

"Dean?" he hollered.

There was an immediate thundering of feet on the stairs, and Dean jogged down the hall and burst into the bathroom, breathing hard.

"What? Sammy, you okay?"

Sam frowned, squinted at him. "Yeah, I'm...I'm fine, Dean. You didn't have to-"

"Oh, I know, I just..." Dean waved in a faux casual gesture, breathing hard. "What's up?"

Dean was acting really jumpy. It really must have scared him, Sam thought, his having been passed out like that for three days.

"It's just, whose jeans are these?" Sam asked. He turned around so Dean could observe the weirdness going on. He also tugged at his collar uncomfortably. "And this shirt, this black button-down with the embroidered roses on the pocket? And the crocodile skin boots." He ran his hand up the unfamiliar scaliness of his calf. "They're kind of...snazzy."

"Oh, uh," Dean said, going uncomfortable in the face again. Sam really felt like there was something he was missing, something just at the tip of his tongue or at the back of his mind trying to resurface.

"And why do all of my clothes feel like this." He rubbed fabric between his fingers, and then swooped a hand over Dean's chest, ascertaining that yes, his clothes felt disgusting as well, and tried not to feel hurt at how Dean shied away. "It's like we haven't been using fabric softener."

"Other hunters don't have time for fabric softener," Dean told him, which wasn't an answer, nor was it necessarily true, but Sam let it go for now.

iii. But then, he also had his bouncy side.

Sam soon found out that Death himself had poured a flimsy dry-wall solution into his ear. He'd melded Sam's memories into something the size of a pea and then left it pressurized and tucked away in a flimsy origami box-type situation in Sam's head. Holy fuck.

Having finally come clean, Dean was on tenterhooks for weeks, feeling sorry and scared for Sam about things he couldn't imagine Sam to have been capable of. Sam spent the time whole again and tentatively euphoric, with afternoons devoted entirely to feeling paralyzed and wracked with guilt for things he couldn't remember but which he could totally imagine himself doing.

They went on hunts, getting back into the swing of things. There was that one time Sam accidentally tipped a trip wire and remembered, so that now whenever Sam was at all quiet or looked pensive Dean would do something physically distracting like wave a hand in front of Sam's face or throw his wallet at him from across the room like he did when Sam finally was about to fix this issue with their clothes.

"Dean!" Sam picked up the wallet at his feet. He opened it and took out all the cash.

"Hey!" Dean said. He started forward at the distraction but Sam said his name again like a warning and pointed at him, effectively stopping Dean in his tracks.

Sam shoved the money in his front pocket and then he raised his eyebrows meaningfully at the plastic bench. Dean sat back down.

The washer dinged to alert them that the load was done. Sam opened it and started pulling out clothing.

"So you know how I've got my soul back?" he said carefully, because he had to lead Dean to what he was about to tell him, not just state it.

"Yeah," Dean said. Dean obviously fucking did not want to talk about this. It had been hard enough to get the truth out of him in the first place and Sam was still pissed Castiel was the one who told him.

He took giant, moist handfuls of the clothing, which he shoved into the dryer, saying, "I've got my soul back...and I'm still me, yeah?"

"More than you have been for the past year and a half."

"Exactly," Sam said. "Very me. Which means, of course, the things I like and dislike haven't changed."

"Right," Dean said."That's what was so fucking weird about that robo-version of you. You stopped liking my jokes and bought a new wardrobe."

"Hence the pants," Sam said. He was still wearing them. They fitted to him like a second skin and felt right and familiar, physically if not cerebrally.

He threw in a dryer sheet before he closed the machine door so that their clothing would smell nice and not like the iron of blood and the smoke that wasn't from burning wood. He wound the knob to 'cool heat' and pressed start.

"And?" Dean prompted from the bench.

Sam turned and said, "So, it stands to reason that you waving your arms in front of my face and singing the Jeopardy song to distract me would still be annoying as hell. Also, if you throw your wallet at me, I'm still going to react like I would have before. I don't know what other me would have done, but me-me is going to take all of your money and sell your driver's license on e-bay."

"Should've thrown my shoe at you," Dean muttered.

"I would've sold that, too, and I know how much you hate shoe shopping. Now stop bugging me about the wall. I can handle it."

Dean scoffed, and gestured in the direction of Sam's head. "But you're scrat-"

"Quit it." Sam crossed his arms over his chest and tried to look serious and imposing while he leaned back against the dryers.

His arm muscles bulged, but Dean appeared more fond than rebuked. He looked all shyly up through his eyelashes, a small smile on his mouth and said, "Aw, Sammy, you know how I feel about you taking control like that."

It was a weird thing for Dean to have turned into a sort of one-sided inside joke, but there you have it.

"You're not as cute as you think you are," Sam told him.

"I think I'm adorable," Dean said, not for the first time.

Sam rolled his eyes, even though Dean was the most adorable person ever, in a very objective sort of way. It gave Sam weird urges. For instance, inexplicably, he wanted to boop Dean on the nose and ruffle his overly gelled hair near constantly, and Dean goading him like this didn't help.

Sam had spaced out, thinking about this, and so it was a surprise when Dean suddenly stood and spread his arms. Sam took a little half-step back, suspicious. The heat of the dryer machine seeped in through the ridiculous ass of his jeans where he was pressed against it, and the thunk-thunk of the clothes beat into the back of his thighs.

"Kiss and make up?" Dean offered, advancing.

Standing down would only make Dean feel like he'd won and would encouraged future behavior. They had at least half an hour until their clothing was dry, and Dean was obviously in one of those roughhousing moods, the ones that ended in bruises and broken furniture.

Sam had to end it before it began. He held up a staying hand and said, "Dean, no. I know you want your wallet back, so if you ask nicely I'll give it to you like an adult. This is not going to work, whatever you're about to-"

"But you're just so-" Dean made a grabby motion for Sam's cheeks, and almost before Sam had batted the hands away Dean had changed tact and was tugging at Sam's shoulder and his belt loop. Half a second later and Dean had his fingers twined in Sam's hair.

He tugged hard for a second and Sam yelped and stepped on his foot, upon which move Dean let go but shoved Sam back against the dryer rather amiably, with a good-natured smirk. Yeah, he only had two hands, but the bastard was quick. He had no qualms about biting, either.

"Augh, Dean, gross, get off me," Sam laughed in pain, pushing Dean's face away from his neck with the flat of his palm and then rubbing at his other elbow where it had jerked back against the metal handle of the dryer. In this pause, Dean grabbed liquid tight to Sam's forearms and scabbled against his resistance and held him against the machine, using all of his body weight.

Sam was struggling like he was sixteen and Dean had just jumped on him in some motel pool-that is to say, pretending and ineffectually. Dean was trying to wrestle away a floaty noodle and Sam was just writhing against him in the water, the skin of their chests and arms slipping together. Sam always spent half the time spitting out mouthfuls of chlorine, and he allowed himself to be dunked under deep just so he could then run his hands up Dean's legs and pull him down by the backs of his knees.

Right then, in the open-plan laundromat with more graffiti visible than plain wall, he could have slipped away sideways if he really didn't want to be manhandled, but instead he kicked uselessly. He felt Dean's mouth hot against his ear, and a hard hand at his stomach. He said, low, "If you tickle me, Dean, I swear-"

Dean bit his ear but then yelled, "Fuck!" directly into it, and "Indian burns! You fucking fourth grader! Get off-" He tried to pull his arm away, but Sam turned them and shoved him hard so that the dryer top was digging into Dean's lower back and Dean's blunt fingernails were digging half-moons into Sam's bicep.

Dean's skin was pale and sickly under the neon lights as he violently half-struggled to gain the upper hand. All of his freckles just popped, and his eyes were this translucent green under a dark fringe of eyelashes. Sam watched him bite at his red bottom lip and suck it kind of viciously, and Dean watched him watching.

Dean's struggling had stopped now, and instead he leaned back on his elbows a bit and arched an eyebrow. There was no space between them, none, so Sam felt it all. Dean might as well have said I double dog dare you, because it had Sam grabbing him bodily and hoisting him up onto the top of the machine without a second thought. Dean made an affronted noise but it passed so quick that he was pretty much instantly urging Sam between his splayed legs and winding hands into Sam's hair to pull him in for something hard and hot against his mouth, kissing him and holding him in place.

Things got real after that. Sam felt present and charged with Dean's tongue against his and his knees pressed hard and unforgiving against the machine.

"Oh fuck yes," Dean said and wrapped a leg around Sam's back, the vibration of the dryer a jerky constant against them.

"Bossy," Sam tried to say but Dean got his hands pushed up the sleeves of Sam's t-shirt and gripped his shoulder blades, tugging him in. Best thing in Sam's life.

He did experience a moment's hesitation, specifically when he was moving tight up against Dean's ass at roughly the same tempo as the dryer cycle and it had Dean moaning appreciatively into his mouth. Sam thought if anything felt this good, something had to be wrong with it. He pulled Dean in slow by the hips, and breathed in deep against his neck.

"It's the middle of the night," he said.

"Boy genius," Dean managed a minute later, a staggered response. He gave him a look that was all-around disbelieving, though, when Sam kept on.

"It's late so no one will-I mean, you know, no one will see, right?" He looked at the windows. "Although I guess it can't be worse than whatever else I've-"

"I don't even care," Dean said. "Christ, just stop thinking about it." He reached between them and popped the button of his pants.

Sam's hand flew to brace himself against the dryer because he wasn't sure if he could stand up on his own any more. He managed out, "I see you trying to distract me."

"I am your best distraction," Dean said through cotton as Sam helped him out of his shirt. And it was completely true.

Once upon a time there was a dude whose fancy jeans smelled like Spring fabric softener. They lay balled up and forgotten in the corner where Dean had thrown them.

fic, spn

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