Leaving Cold - new S/D fic
Okay, finally I'm finished with this one. This is not exactly the fic I've started writing about a month ago. It has grown three times...and definitely added on the fucked-upness level and the angst. Enjoy!
Leaving Cold
Wordcount: ca 7,500
Pairing: Sam/Dean, mention of Sam/Jess, mention of Dean/OMC
Timeline: pre-series.
Note: This is not a linear narration. Also, my first attempt at 2nd person narration. Beware of flashbacks throughout.
Summary: Sam’s in Standford, with a fucked up pretty brother and fucked up past left behind… before it catches up with him.
Rating: R
Warnings: Thick hints at dysfunctional relationship, mention of substance abuse. Character death. The Undead/Dean. DistancedObssessedJohn. Eeh. BottomSam (at some point).
!!! First time mention of sex between characters that might be considered below age of consent in some states.
Huge thanks for siberian_skys for the beta and to LID for compliments! /wink/
All the rest of mistakes are mine.
// // - mark Dean’s voice in Sam’s head.
****
You sit beneath the always swaying naked bulb. A staccato almost-strobe of yellow light flickers over your hands when you sharpen the wood you get from chairs and tables. Easier to convert, Dean always said, and he was right.
You went from floor to floor with cans of gasoline, locking all the doors just like Dad had taught you. Bloody sheets were strewn across the floor like cheap throw rugs. The outline of lumps underneath didn't require any imagination. You don’t bother to cover those two laid out next to their victims, stakes pinning them to the floor, dark lumps of hearts carved out of bloodless chests.
You walked into them while they were having their midnight snack. You’d put them down, an action that you wished hadn't come quite so naturally after all this time. These two must have been new to the breed--too starved, too sloppy to expect a floppy-haired, blue-collar, college drop-out be a threat.
He wasn't there, you knew that, or you couldn't have done what you did: lit the match, dropped it and watched it burn--the three-story sagging brownstone at the dead end of River Oak Avenue.
There are dark smears on the gray wall spelled out in Dean's jagged scrawl,
You know what you need to do. 129 Hardan Road.
You go back to the car to check the map, bringing your hand to your face to inhale the scent of lacquered wood and gasoline.
You recall his hands on cold oiled metal, fingers working on the intricacies of the Impala’ s fuel injectors. Just gonna clean the jets and check the float boat level and that should do it. The old girl will be purring again in no time.
“Careful there, Sammy,” he says low next to your ear.
You jump, pulling back, your stabbing arm up for protection before realizing that it's your paranoia talking and not your brother.
You have no illusions about your own mortality. Everything dies eventually, and anything that doesn’t, should. You know this.
Your brother is the proverbial exception to prove this rule.
****
Four days ago, you were in the back alley behind Ruby’s Rib bar, the half-broken, crumbling wall gouging your back with Dean’s hand shoved down your pants, a piercing whisper in the back of your head,
// Next time...you’d better stake me...or you might not see another dawn…//
Cold, so cold, you were shivering at his touch, like frozen metal in deep winter, burning across your skin like he'd leave fingerprints pressed into every space he touched. You groaned, hips pushing into his hand, eyes straight ahead and staring into hazel lightened almost to cool amber, you could drown there and never want to stop.
//You want?// rang in your ear, and you felt like you did the night you snorted your first line of coke in Lockdown 811’s back room, three months before your eighteenth birthday and stupid as shit, blissing out on the toilet and Dean finding you, though he'll never admit he was looking. Pulling you out and calling you a stupid cunt and throwing you into the Impala. Taking you home to ride out your high, to ride you, and you thought it would feel like that, when he does it, when he pushes in, when he draws more than a thin line on your skin and then pulls away, licking the taste of your blood from his lips, vivid color slashed against his teeth, Christ, Dean--
Fucking tease, toying with you like a cat with a mouse, always had, and you wouldn’t do a fucking thing about it, couldn’t bring yourself to say "no" even the first time because you told yourself that you knew what you were getting into.
You’d thought about slow and tender and most of all, gentle, because…yeah, you’d thought about it.
***
You hurry back to the car from the Eat-Rite Diner, March sludge seeping through your sneakers, because Dean just had to have another slice of pie. You find your brother plastered all over some chick wearing a waitress cap, her coat open and short skirt hiked up, seated on the hood of the Impala, rubbing against each other like they wanted to start a fire. You couldn’t see where Dean’s hands were, but some place close to the hot spot, because the girl's demanding noises were getting smothered by Dean’s possessive mouth.
They break apart when you get inside the car and slam the door as hard as you can.
“Be careful,” Dean warns, drawing his brows together, shifting on the seat. “Slam that door any harder and you’ll chip her paint.”
You manage to keep your face straight at his discomfort.
“Do they always make those funny noises before they get off?” you ask a few minutes later, between bites.
Dean grins in reply, still a little unfocused, but that only leaves you feeling more uneasy than before. “No. But if you go slow, then slip them some tongue…, you’d have to chase them off with a stick,” he counsels, pushes the AC/DC tape in the deck and reaches out for more pie.
Your motel is only a five minute walk from the diner, but Dean refuses to walk on principle since Dad gave him the car. It’s been two months since Dean turned eighteen, but he’d still celebrate in every town, as if it had owed him a toll of a girl. He would sneak away, leaving you to have another night with way too much energy and nothing to do with it, except keeping regular company of the frayed Latin schoolbook. Or he'd dump Dad’s notes onto you to sort out. Sometimes he’d pay extra for Cinemax to keep you “effectively entertained”.
Switching back and forth between Goldfinger and The Crawling Hand you pause at Ghost. Demi Moore is lovable and grieving and you wonder if indeed making pottery could really get a girl so horny. You make a mental note to ask Dean. Next thing that comes to mind is Dean’s clay-slippery hand in Demi’s knickers and his mouth on her breasts, getting rid of that demure white top, quickly.
Dean had a mouth fuller and redder than any of the women that splayed their bronzed, smooth legs and pouted provocatively from the covers of the skin magazines Dean keeps stashed in the trunk. He doesn't flaunt them, but he never hides them too well either.
Something gooey like cookie dough melts inside you when Demi blurs into Jennifer Connelly and Dean’s ten times hotter, stepping into Don Johnson’s shoes to make out with her. Things begin to blur, things begin to heat up as you switch to Girls Unbutton.
Then things begin to go south.
****
And it's not... when things between you and Dean had gone that far, it just.... It wasn't like that with Dean. Dean made it easy despite the wrongness, made one thing make sense, he was everything you knew how to want. Want him so bad it made your legs shake slightly every time you finished, when you zipped up and you couldn't seem to get your shirt’s buttons done up right, your head soft and still spinning slightly from the memory of his thumb drawing circles on your cheek or his teeth behind your ear, just on the right soft spot.
It was lots of things, but not gentle.
You were not a virgin by then, it was kinda hard to stay one around a brother who glared at you like you were the last virginity holdout in the universe and he was going to get a Medal of Honor for helping it fall. Dean always had girls hanging on his arms and he would grin at you over his beer, the chicks would sip Coke and roll straws on their pink tongues and giggle and Dean’d wink, as if you had a neon sign on your forehead saying “Still Not Getting Any”.
When you finally got some, and then some more, Dean would quirk his brow “You dig me now?”, as if an honor badge was pinned to your chest that said “welcome to Dean’s league”, same as when you’d tackled Dean down to the ground with that knee undercut or planted your first silver bullet in a snarling werewolf’ s muzzle.
You’d roll your eyes in reply - “I do, I do, dude,” although you did not dig him, not exactly. You’d have liked to ask Dean, hadn’t he ever felt that random sex was more like a cheap thrill, half of which was more imagined than real? But Dean would already be looking elsewhere: to the never ending stretch of the highway in front of them as he put another ten miles behind. Or he’d be staring up into the boundless blue sky, the Impala parked amidst Iowa’s endless corn fields, you both lounging on the hot hood.
It went uphill from the first sweaty-fingered tumbles that you’d owed to Dean’s persistent generosity. A quick learner, you’d pick up girls without sporting killer good looks or acting like a mysterious six-gun street samurai; they were thrilled by fucking a smart loner, a bit on the shy side- better girls, cleaner and sober girls, some even with the obvious frontal lobe capacity; but there were few offers of your type in their line of work.
Under a single pale street lamp of a trailer park diner or in dive bars with buzzing signs for PBR, broken urinals and a motley crew of all trades; their dolled up, inviting faces blurred, holding each other or anyone to stand up. Like back then when you wandered in, hardly twelve because it was taking Dean too damn long to ask for directions around the road construction block, and it was at least 15F to pee outside. You couldn’t hold it back any more.
Dean dragged you out, pulling you by the sleeve of your jacket so hard you heard the fabric tear, just like Dean’s voice, Never drink anything a stranger offers you, do you copy, Sam? I told you, *told* you.
It was just a Coke, the can hadn't even been opened, what’s the harm in that, you let those dudes treat you, Dean…
It was the first time you remembered Dean using his fist to make his point, at least with you.
When Dean spent his last couple of bucks to buy you a bag of Twizzlers, you knew he was sorry, even though he'd never say so.
****
You looked for him in this godforsaken city, hunted him down a hundred streets on more nights than you knew how to count, drew him out. You could have offed him right there and look at you…
// Sammy, what fuckin' twisted thing have you done? I keep coming back. Stop me! Dad couldn’t. How many people have to die before you do something? Make up your friggin’ mind! //
Although his lips didn't move, his voice is raging hoarse in your head. Touch me, you wanted to say, but you bit your tongue because it wasn’t like that any more.
// I’m bad. Been from the start. Didn’t know when to stop, always got the damn itch to scratch. This…is what I deserved. Not your fault, never has been.//
You shudder at his cold breath against the scratch on your neck. The inner voice pipes in, mocking your hunter’s hunch, self-protective instinct gone to the dogs, Bravo, Sam, you fucking ass, standing there with a stake and that look of hurt surety, oh look how fucking pathetic you are, because what you truly wanted, him, coming after you again…
//Do me the last fucking favor! Put me *down*. Do it! What’s…stopping you?//
Dean's fingertips brushed your hairline, feeling you, almost cautious, apologetic.
// Didn’t you want me gone for good?//
The howl of the siren pierced your ears. He was gone with a nip to your cheek, and you were slumping on the dead body of a faceless man - limp, sucked dry, bled to death… There were gashes in his face, bites of many mouths on his throat and arms and his side - munched through - the McSunday special for the whole brood…
“Hey kid. You okay?”
The policeman frowns, eyes fixed on the dirty ground. He picks up your stake and looks at it, the ornately carved mahogany that used to be someone's table leg. You catch your breath and lean your head back into the wall, pants loose at your hips, cock hard and aching.
You could be crazy. Anyone would be, you reason.
"I'm fine."
You leave a fake number and your current alias, promising to call if you remember anything else.
You skid on the sidewalk, grasping for rough brick that almost steals skin before you pull away.
You can still taste him in your mouth, on your tongue, cold skin and dirt, ash and metal-sharp blood, someone else he had tonight, someone that wasn't you.
****
“What the hell are we doing, Dean?” you whispered one night, frowning at the familiar fingers tracing new lines across your skin. Dean never answered until the next day, during a different conversation, when he said, “There is nothing to freak out about as long as it makes you feel good,” his voice was resolute, his grip tightened around the blade in his hand.
”Is this going to change things?” you asked next. You rubbed your hand at your jean-covered knees, felt the material burn into your sweaty palms.
“Change what?” His knee nudged yours under the table. “Don’t make it harder than it already is!”
Dean smirked at his own joke, wrenched his palm out from under yours and twice blinked his thick-lashed, changeable eyes. You heard steps behind your back as your father came up with a map and two loaded shotguns, and you didn't talk about it any more.
Nothing changes really, but everything’s different.
****
Tonight, you went down three alleys before you saw him, leaning against a car hood and watching the sky. You stopped, because you hadn't expected it, even though you must have.
You must have.
// Where’re you headed?//
He was there one second, beside you the next, and you hadn’t seen him move. This time there was no upturned collar to hide the bitemarks on his neck, and a deep slash on the front, right below where his Adam’s apple had been. A clean cut that had his vocal cords severed. Your mind blocks the image of your brother chocking on six quarts of his own blood.
You were waiting for this, for him, for this touch, for this feeling, his hands pushing you into the sticky wall under blue moonlight, sharp tongue tracing your mouth, and he reached down and threw away the stake caught between your fingers and for the life of you, you couldn't understand why you still had it.
He was close enough to feel the cool of his skin when he touched the air around your face.
//Watch out. There are others. Can’t keep them off your track forever.//
He held you up against the wall and kissed you, held you so you couldn't fight him off, then bit your lip, and you felt it, those tiny, pinpricks of shock that ran through your body like ice. He looked at you with knowing eyes, licking your blood from his mouth, and you stared back.
One more bite, deeper and more brutal, and that would be it, accept the invitation to the afterlife. It made sense. However much you searched, others couldn’t make you feel the same.
“Dean," you say, softly, and close your eyes and imagine forever. He's stronger than you are. He must be. “I should never have left you alone, no matter how much of a prick you were.” You couldn’t make the tone bite.
You tug at the collar of your shirt, baring the side of your throat. You wait. You offer.
You almost don’t care about what could happen next.
// This is not going to happen, Sammy.//
He sounds confused. You don't really understand why. Of all people, he should understand.
Dean’s pale lips thin out with regret as he watches you slide your consecrated knife blade first into the sheath concealed in your pocket.
****
Five days had passed when you'd finally bothered to listen to Dad's voicemail message. You call again, again, again, and again… Dad picks up on your seventeenth try. It’s 2 am; you don’t say hello or sorry, you ask if it’s true. There is a slurred *yes* at the other end of the line, and Dad hangs up before you can ask where Dean's buried. It shouldn't have surprised you, the way Dean drove.
Dad leaves your text inquiry of the accident’s location unanswered. You’d have laughed bitterly if your chest didn’t feel stuffed with barbwire. He could have tried harder to put you off the trail.
When Dad didn't have a ready lie, he chose to not talk at all. He had called to your sense of duty, to the blood ties and the promise of revenge. He called you single minded, selfish and a changeling. The last one could have been true, at least it explained Dad's logic behind why he couldn’t keep you in the family.
He thought Dean would. Dean didn’t think in terms of right or wrong when it came to load, aim, shoot for the sake of family business, he only said yes Sir or no Sir.
You can mark the day, when it became yes Sam and come on, Sam.
Dad says he's going to be gone for two weeks, at least. He hoists a black duffel over his shoulder and orders Dean to watch out for you like it was something your big brother needed to be told. Dean'd still be watching after you when you were thirty and had kids of your own.
Dean leaves the uneaten sandwich on the table and storms out onto the porch in time to see Dad's truck pull out, someone unfamiliar riding shotgun. Dirt splashes onto the road, and you know that pinched face Dean makes when his stomach drops out.
You can’t choose your family. But sooner or later Dean would need to choose a side. You believe that had been the day when Dean finally did.
He never did handle rejection well.
****
During the next few days, you realized Dean was everywhere, always near, always finding you in doorways and corners of the kitchen. He'd watch you from across the diner as you picked up the orders, bump into you when you walked, linger too close to pat your knee or shoulder when you did nothing in particular, just shared the same square of floor or couch with you. Whatever number he was doing on you, you were not backing down, those times were past. Touch after touch and you couldn't go for an hour without it. You needed more, needed to drive Dean as crazy as Dean was driving you.
Evenings were spent out on the porch steps, calves pressed together. Dean always had a beer in his hand. He shared a six pack with you when Dad wasn't home. You faced the field, out toward the horizon and a grazing white-tail, but all you did was watch each other.
Dean lay behind you in the dark that night, hips pressed just close enough that you could feel him hard in his shorts, fingers curled around your hips, tongue lapping at your neck.
"Sam." A hand on your shoulder, warm fingers brushing the pulse in your neck, and you're so aware of what will be coming. You know all the places blood rushes--your inner wrists and the backs of your knees, your throat, in the scar near the bend of your right elbow, the thick throb on the bottom of your tongue, your dick. You feel them all, as you had felt them all the times before with a girl.
“I’ve got you, Sam. I’ve always got you,” before you came to think that there was nothing really you’d recently done or said to make him doubt, Dean shoved you on your back, hands frantic over your skin, yours pulling his face closer. Dean’s mouth touched yours, a fast, sharp kiss, with a bite to your lower lip that made you gasp and bring your knee close enough to mash his balls.
Fingers twisted in your hair as teeth grazed your throat. The rough hand on your cock that's like sandpaper and silk and the rush of sensation that starts everywhere and nowhere.
You take it because he needs you, all of you, and the nights that follow are never easy, never slow. You don’t push him away, kiss him back even when it's bruising. You want to hold back, even if it hurts, make it last, feel this for days after.
You don’t call things by their name, at best Dean would smirk at you for girling out, at worst his deep frown and teeth sunk into his bottom lip would imply he could go to jail for this, at least while you are in the Big Bend State.
You don’t spell it out, you don’t need to because you know that Dean had never slept with anyone he loved before.
****
You’d slept in the same bed even after Dad got back, a tangle of limbs and sheets, your back to the wall. Dean would steal the covers, you’d wake with his arm under your pillow. At night, yes, you both kepy it very quiet, but Dean still was touching you like you always wanted, wanting you as much as you wanted him, casual and demanding. You could feel the storm gathering in the air, knew that their time was running out, that your Dad wasn’t dumb or blind, they’d get caught, and part of you wanted…to get caught.
You would have thought that Dad would have fought more, would have done something, would have tried. Any other parent would have crashed in, pulled you apart and demanded answers, because you’re far older now than when you were still afraid of the dark and Dean in your bed was more comforting than a loaded gun.
Not your Dad. The only sign that he'd been there was the solid thunk of a closing door when he walked in, but Dean was already snoring softly into the back of your neck and you lay, trying to sound and snore as sleepy.
There was only a pregnant silence when Dean started using some of his pool and poker winnings to get you both a room of your own when you were on the road, hunting.
****
Jess had watched you through wide eyes, stray hair slithering round her face like Medusa's snakes, pale skin powdered white with your hissing breath, as you lost it, smashing the phone with your fist, pieces of plastic biting your skin. You kept driving your fist into the bathroom wall, into the mirror and no sound came out of your mouth.
She was more special than you’d ever scored. She had her head on straight, smart and determined but never adamant. Feisty when she flashed that full-lipped smile or the pale triangle of supple flesh in her cleavage. To her you could make love all night long, catch her whispers with your lips, that you were gentle and thorough and she loved when you played with her hair.
She didn’t pry when you told her your family was peculiar, didn’t poke about why you didn’t go home for Christmas and Easter. She didn’t ask awkward questions about Rhory Sykes from the Engineering School who’d plastered himself all over you at the Halloween masquerade, and about the traces of white powder you wiped hastily off your face when you wriggled out of his grasp, stepped up to her under the dancing lights and first thing that she asked was, Is there something on your face?
*You* began with Less Talk More Action pounding in your head and you gave serious thought of ending it by taking a day-long drive to Las Vegas during Spring Break and tying the knot.
Her sweet tight pussy was so much like Dean’s ass, when he’d finally got tanked enough to start kissing your throat like he was expecting it to kiss back, taunting you with the nasty rasp in his voice that drove you mean and bold and harder.
Resolved and slow, you’d gripped his shoulders too hard when you pushed in, just the way he did, the pressure and slide and man, there. Yeah, yeah, Sam, right there...- then Dean said other things that even you didn’t say like this, in the dark. His cheek was squished against your lips, tasting of spit and tongue. You grunted raw, you bodies went up and down. You didn’t know Dean could move like that, not beneath you.
He came before you did, and it made you angry, made you hold him down when he’d butted you in the chin, tried to throw you off. Just take it, Dean. Like I do. Do a lil’ favor …for your lil’ brother. You wrestled him flat, the advantage of being almost four inches taller and sober and knowing instinctively how much manhandling he can take before giving in. "Didn’t you…see it coming? Didn’t you…want me to want you like you want me?”
He panted against your hand on his face, the heat of his breath bouncing back at you as your thrusts got sharper. He bit your fingers - I’ve gotten worse, Dean. He’d hardened again on the count of three when you licked into his mouth, holding one wrist above his head, Dean's other hand braced on your hip, gripping tight, pulling you into every stroke. You so gotta pay for this, you sneaky bitch, Sam, now, oh like right fucking there… I’ll punch your balls in if you dare to fuckin’ stop, now…
You hid your face in the pillow in guilty contentment after you both exploded in breathless gasps. Dean punched you in the side halfheartedly as you shifted away to let him slither from beneath yourself. You were almost shaking in your skin, it was so fucking easy. And you believed Dean never made anything easy for anyone.
You thought you just had changed something.
****
The belief lasted about five minutes, when Dean staggered out of bed, buttoning up his - your? -flannel shirt and you heard him bump into the doorframe, then something was falling off the shelf in the bathroom, and, Dean, what the fuck's up? Sleep it off, get the fuck back to bed…
He still looked punch drunk when he returned, breathing heavily, staring at you with clenched fists, shirt stretched up one side and jeans laid open.
Don’t you look so proud, no, don’t get used to this, cause I’m the older brother and you wear your hair down and cry when you come, so you’re the bitch and you want me again, you’ve gotta grow another inch before I bend over.
You remember how lightning played in the puddle on the cracked window sill, how it danced outside, brighter than a sky full of stars on the clearest night when you stood up, took the half empty bottle from the nightstand and splashed stale beer in his face. Dean sputtered and looked even more shocked and...guilty, as much as Dean ever looked guilty and you gave him the finger and stormed out of the door.
Sometimes Dean was too pushy and almost always - cocky. Sometimes he wasn’t as brave as he wanted to seem, sometimes he got mean when he was tired. And when he got real pissy, he could punch the wall or kick through the screen door. He said things that hurt, and he had almost never talked about what really mattered to him. But he’d never stooped to bringing you down to cover his exposure.
And his eyes changed color when he lied, you of all people knew that.
****
Standing on the warped porch, you let the drizzle soak your hastily pulled-on clothes. Resentment is choking you, nursed like a cancerous growth during this year of no-thing-fucking-changing. You are fed up with taking this shit, spending the entire time giving and never being allowed to take.
The time for a decision was drawing near. Yesterday Dean told you Dad had mentioned you'd be able to split up soon. Dean was good on his own, and you were getting nearly as good as your big brother, and you realize this time it's the truth, not just a motivation speech Dad used to make Dean aim better and you learn faster.
Other than that, Dad hardly talks almost at all anymore, even to Dean.
There are moments when you want to hate him - hate them both, - but you don’t know how. Few people do: it's all part of that trademark Winchester charm.
Maybe deep down, you have more in common with them than you'd ever want to admit.
****
Dean comes up behind you and pulls you back into the room, and you fight it out of habit, but you end up pushed against the wall inside because you let him.
“Listen. I was being a dick. Didn’t mean it. About…” Dean said, gesturing toward your groin. Dark, soberer eyes held yours, glassy and brilliant as the stars. When you don’t react to the apology, he slumps against the doorframe and wraps his arms around himself.
There's blue light shining through the window and the boards are growing damp beneath you as the water keeps sipping through a crack between the porch and the door. You remember a ten year old who loved storms and how you'd sit in the window of your room and try to capture the feeling of it. Restless and endless and unpredictable. It called to the tightness in your chest now, you felt it swelling, stirring, not quite an anger, neither a yearning, rather like another *you* growing out of your old skin, shifting.
“I’m going to change things, Dean. Don’t care what Dad says. Don’t care what you say,” you make four heavy steps to the messed-up bed, sit down and bury your face in your palms. The smell of your brother’s sweat and come lingers in the skin between your fingers.
“All this drama…because I don’t wanna be your bitch?” Dean hooks fingers in his belt loops as he reclines next to you, one leg folded under himself, “Cause if it is, then fuck that, we can switch now and then, that’s not a big deal.”
You look up at the petty irritation in his voice, clenching your fists so you don't grab him by the neck and shake him until he finally gets what the big deal is.
The fabric is stretched taut over his crotch. He pauses, drags his eyes to your face, quirked brow a signal for your instruction.
"It is… for me," you say finally, hoarsely, like you've reached the end of something. "You. Since when -"
“Since then.” Dean grits, gives you the stone-faced silent treatment, then rolls away onto his side. "Since whenever."
Suddenly there's not a single second of what just happened that you particularly want to talk about.
***
You think about that bad deal that must have made Dean someone else's bitch. There is no way otherwise he’d take your cock as if he was born butt-sex smart.
2000, the worst winter ever. Dad’s got his leg and two ribs broken, having been thrown off the roof by a poltergeist. He’d been staying with Bobby, who couldn’t sort out his divorce, going on another bender instead of finally going to his ex and settling it already.
You’re out of Chicago when Dean fucks the wrong chick and pisses the wrong guy off. Not a gun-shy guy. Dean’s lucky to get away with a bullet crack in the Impala’s rear windshield and another having grazed his hip. Dean claims he’d never touched her, it was just a bit of innocent flirting and fun, passing on the issue about where’d lost his wallet with the dozen of credit cards if he has never taken his pants off. You jab the forceps needle too hard into his flesh when you patch him up and harden in your jeans, burning with shame as Dean goes pastier than the frayed towel under his thigh, his white nailed grip marking your forearm for a week to come. He writes off your small cruelty to the unsteady hands, to the slight fever you seem not to be able to get rid of for the second week already.
You drive south-east for almost six hours just in case, and Dean lets you because there's no question of him driving, with a fresh wound and four good gulps of malt liquor in him that shut him up and out.
You’re stuck in the City that Saved Itself, a heavy snowfall locking you up in a Red Roof Inn. A light fever and cough you (and Dean) usually ignore or treat with swigging cough syrup or DayQuil, strikes back at you as pneumonia.
You face the 21st century with ten bucks you find shrunk in your old jeans and a stabbing pain in your chest.
Dad wires you two hundred, and commands Dean to drive up north at once. One of the few times you fully agree with Dad. Dean goes to hustle some pool. No, we can’t drive with a bullet hole in the rear window, he says. I’m awesome and tonight’s the night... and he returns with a twenty.
“Why can’t you listen to me? Just once? Would it fucking kill you? Or do you want us both to get killed so that I can keep you company downstairs?” You don’t care if he calls you a sissy or a brat, unbalanced or an egomaniac; you yell into Dean’s dazed face and it takes the air out of your lungs, you lose your voice in another bout of coughing. Dean staggers a step back, swallowing hard and trying to lean on something, trying to regain his confident pose, but he hits the sharp edge of the table and flinches with surprise, pain, or both.
You hate the stink of stale sweat on yourself, because you’re either burning with fever or shaking with cold; you hate Dean’s clothes because they smell the same. Hate the same processed shit as the pretense of food twice a day, hate the cheap liquid soap that dribbles like snot; hate Motorhead and hate Jackie Chan; hate saving people and not getting anything in return; hate the hunting, hate this life, hate him.
The only exit is the door that Dean backs off to slowly as you keep yelling.
You’re so sick afterwards you cant tell day from night. Must have spent two or three days in oblivion, the sprouting scruff on your chin the only way you can mark time.
Dean drives you to get an xray, learns a new word there - sputum - as you spit in the test tube, lies to the doctor that your brother can be assured of the best homecare treatment ever. The doctor prescribes you the meds containng fluoroquiono-something that leaves Dean with a tough choice of buying the meds or sleeping in the cold car for a few nights.
While they take another blood test, Dean tells you to wait up, he needs to settle something.
He picks you up from the ER with a two hour delay, but he brings you to a better room, with heater that works all the time and no mold stains on the walls and fresh smelling towels. In a few days you liven up a little. The ache in your joints that made you feel like a tin man walking, recedes, and you stop coughing phlegm. You pass the motel manager in the hall and he winks at Dean like he owns him, and Dean doesn't hand him his front teeth back. Instead he presses the room key in your hand, Everything’s settled, Sam, we have another weekend here paid for…
On Monday Dean says he’s got a two week job at the local car shop to patch up *the girl* and then you can drive back to Dad, he’s got it all worked out.
You go to the car shop just once, and the slithering look Mr Schewick gives you makes you want to spray disinfectant when his eyes have lingered. He is built like a linebacker, has a scar on his forehead and he looks at Dean like those countless women who wanna get him naked. Except that you weren’t born yesterday, you know the look some guys give Dean - they too want to see him naked and hurt, not necessairly in this order.
Dean has red marks on his face (as if he had been slapped, that's how it must had been happening) and he smells ... kinda funny when he returns after the shifts. He’s also out every night for about an hour before midnight when he thinks you’re asleep. He’s not gone very far because you see the glint of the Impala by the window….
All the time you stay there, as January melts away slowly - Dean’s doing his own laundry and sleeps in his long-sleeved sweatshirt. He is snarky and says it's all right, Sam, my shift ends at six pm, but i might be a lill' late, but you buy me some tacos and pie, 'kay? And he puts a couple of bills on the table. But again, his eyes as he looks away quickly betrays something is so not all right but he would not tell, you know and cowardly don't dare to ask.
When you finally make it to Bobby’s, Dean gets his hair cropped so short you can see the skin of his skull. He never let it grow more than an inch in the front or in the back since then.
You'd tried not to think about it then. You didn't want to think about it now. The idea that Dean would sell himself; the knowledge that he'd done it for you, and never said a word about it, made you feel sick. Angry at yourself and angrier at him for never giving you a chance to share the care.
****
“You could’ve told me…” You twist the sheet in your fist to stall another impulse to smash something. The Past is weighting upon your Present like a giant's dead body. You are so tired of taking Dean’s crap, his denial, his fear. His maddening desire to shoulder everything alone till he drops in his tracks. You are his fucking job, and everything else, whatever they had been, were just occupational hazards.
“Could have told you what?” The last word is a sound of pain so deep it could only come out as a choking moan.
You lie side by side in silence for long minutes, breathing in unison, and then Dean pushes himself against you, presses his forehead to your shoulder.
You prepare to hear something like “Are we having a Hallmark moment, Sammy?". Instead Dean mutters,
“Look ahead, Sam. Not back. Digging in past shit won’t get us anywhere.” The last part whispered fast, guiltily, as if just speaking the words made him vulnerable.
You feel Dean wiggle out of his jeans without rising and you do the same. Your feet are wet as you rub them against each other to get warmer, and the ache in your back is a dull residue of the pleasure wasted too fast. Dean’s hand is ice cold along your side. You throw the coverlet over you both without looking at him.
“Can you?” says Dean weakly, and when you kiss, it makes your toes curl and your eyes sting, but it also makes you feel sort of livid, because you know that every guess you’ve just made is right.
Can you let me be the one to protect you? Once in a while? Can’t you see me changing? Can you let me grow up finally? is dancing on the tip of your tongue. You fold your arms behind your head, you won't be getting any sleep for the rest of the night. You memorize the measured minutes of Dean falling asleep, his arm across your chest.
What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want. Now, when you can have anything you want from him, you want something else entirely.
To be your own man.
****
"Dean," you say, and you feel him behind you, hands on your shoulders, leaning close. So *warm*, you'd know him anywhere. “Thank God.”
You pull him into your lap and hold his face between your hands and kiss him again, taste him, a familiar shape to wrap your arms around. He tries to turn the tables, he always wants to be in charge, but you can hold him off, you know how, with your hands beneath his shirt, with your tongue in his mouth. He cusses and leans into you when you slide your fingers up his chest, nails across his nipples, palms over his back.
You held him all night, humming because that's what he used to like, your voice close by his ear. He told you about strangers with bottomless dark eyes and teeth that drew blood, and about sudden fine razors behind their sleeves and ragged rank scars under smart clothes and slippery, filthy sex on wet floors. He tells you how it tasted and smelled, and then he shuddered and said he'd never be warm again.
You thought he just might be right…
****
You wake up with a shudder. Your fingers come off sticky and red when you wipe your chin and face. You must have torn off a nail while punching the tiles. The side of your neck aches, like after a hickey, lots of them… you press your fingers into the skin and are startled with the beat of life that wasn’t supposed to be there.
Jess is there, feeling your forehead, a whiter shade of pale, trying to pull you upright, "Sam…you have to eat something. It’s been two days. You can’t change what happened."
You just nod and wrap the blanket closer when you curl into the wall. The next time you wake she’d put ice on your shattered knuckles, wiped the blood off your neck, and is now spoon-feeding you some spicy stew, her voice soft, soothing and it's not helping at all.
It is after midnight when you finally kiss her lemongrass and honey scented hair. She smiles in her sleep, before you dress noiselessly and slide out of the room.
"I love you," you told her, and you did, you do. You loved her and you wouldn't have left her like this, if only you could have been sure you wouldn’t lead your old life back to her.
****
You’d always been a self-starter.
Dad’d taught you everything, when he’d been drilling it into Dean, but your brother was better with other things. Dean could regurgitate the material Dad had taught him from books, but you had written your own book, well not exactly a book, more like a very precise page. You never got to test it, before now.
You look up into the bottomless sky one last time, return to the chilly dimness of a neglected family crypt and strike the match to start the invocation ritual.
“Wherever you are now, Dean, you’d better start packing,” you take a deep breath, taste moldy air on your tongue. Then start to chant in a mixture of Latin, Aramaic and several other ancient languages long forgotten, easily, like you’d whistle a familiar tune.
The warm blood smells thick and metallic as you draw the symbols. You just don't *care*. It doesn’t seem to be working with calf’s blood, so you prick the skin on your forearm with your knife and watch as it dribbles into the venerable chalice.
You press your hand to the pulsing thick wall of blurred air, thick candles flicker and you think you can feel something waiting, just on the other side.
"Sam."
It's low, from inside the rippling wall. Like it's the only word in the universe... You falter turn to look back, at the boarded door. The nails are loose, two boards are gone. You could swear you had locked it from the inside before you began.
"Dean," you say, softly, and you close your eyes. There’s that familiar tight squeeze around your heart. Rushing from and toward catastrophe at once. You try but you can’t stop it.
Fuck, someone says *inside* your head, and you nearly jump out of your skin. You whirl around, grasping the handle of the knife tucked behind your belt. When you focus, slowly exhale, Dean’s looking at you with wide, dark eyes, as he used to, standing as always, too close. You’re good..
He looks unlike anything you had prepared yourself to meet. There is no stink of decay. Must have died freshly shaved, no scruff on his face. You stifle a shaky giggle.
There are dark smudges under his eyes, the angle of his jaw is sharper, his hair is longer than you recall when you’d seen him last time, and it’s been a while since then. Other than that, not a scratch or a single hair unlike Dean's. He wears a biker’s black leather jacket with metallic clips over the breast pockets. The jacket smells like he’d just dropped from somewhere east, somewhere colder. The collar is turned up, his face is the only pale shape in the rest of the mass of blackness that is his clothes. You realize these are somebody else’s clothes he’s died in.
“I was afraid, that it had gone wrong, and. God, I didn't mean to, I couldn't…Dad didn’t tell me….
Instead you say, the words hardly making it past the lump in your throat, “Long time no see, bro.”
He is stuffing his hands in the pockets, and you wish you could stuff your eyes in your pockets too because the dead - or the undead - or whatever Dean is - were not supposed to give you that look, that smile … as if he was thinking of you naked, squirming for him. Like he always looked at you, like you always wanted him to.
Icy fingers brush your skin, cup your jaw, and you close your eyes when he kisses you.
Christo, you say when he releases your mouth. He'd bitten your lip bloody and raw.
The look Dean gives you makes you realize just how very hungry your brother is.
*end
Umm. Ok. I hope some of you have enjoyed it.
Leaving Cold
Wordcount: ca 7,500
Pairing: Sam/Dean, mention of Sam/Jess, mention of Dean/OMC
Timeline: pre-series.
Note: This is not a linear narration. Also, my first attempt at 2nd person narration. Beware of flashbacks throughout.
Summary: Sam’s in Standford, with a fucked up pretty brother and fucked up past left behind… before it catches up with him.
Rating: R
Warnings: Thick hints at dysfunctional relationship, mention of substance abuse. Character death. The Undead/Dean. DistancedObssessedJohn. Eeh. BottomSam (at some point).
!!! First time mention of sex between characters that might be considered below age of consent in some states.
Huge thanks for siberian_skys for the beta and to LID for compliments! /wink/
All the rest of mistakes are mine.
// // - mark Dean’s voice in Sam’s head.
****
You sit beneath the always swaying naked bulb. A staccato almost-strobe of yellow light flickers over your hands when you sharpen the wood you get from chairs and tables. Easier to convert, Dean always said, and he was right.
You went from floor to floor with cans of gasoline, locking all the doors just like Dad had taught you. Bloody sheets were strewn across the floor like cheap throw rugs. The outline of lumps underneath didn't require any imagination. You don’t bother to cover those two laid out next to their victims, stakes pinning them to the floor, dark lumps of hearts carved out of bloodless chests.
You walked into them while they were having their midnight snack. You’d put them down, an action that you wished hadn't come quite so naturally after all this time. These two must have been new to the breed--too starved, too sloppy to expect a floppy-haired, blue-collar, college drop-out be a threat.
He wasn't there, you knew that, or you couldn't have done what you did: lit the match, dropped it and watched it burn--the three-story sagging brownstone at the dead end of River Oak Avenue.
There are dark smears on the gray wall spelled out in Dean's jagged scrawl,
You know what you need to do. 129 Hardan Road.
You go back to the car to check the map, bringing your hand to your face to inhale the scent of lacquered wood and gasoline.
You recall his hands on cold oiled metal, fingers working on the intricacies of the Impala’ s fuel injectors. Just gonna clean the jets and check the float boat level and that should do it. The old girl will be purring again in no time.
“Careful there, Sammy,” he says low next to your ear.
You jump, pulling back, your stabbing arm up for protection before realizing that it's your paranoia talking and not your brother.
You have no illusions about your own mortality. Everything dies eventually, and anything that doesn’t, should. You know this.
Your brother is the proverbial exception to prove this rule.
****
Four days ago, you were in the back alley behind Ruby’s Rib bar, the half-broken, crumbling wall gouging your back with Dean’s hand shoved down your pants, a piercing whisper in the back of your head,
// Next time...you’d better stake me...or you might not see another dawn…//
Cold, so cold, you were shivering at his touch, like frozen metal in deep winter, burning across your skin like he'd leave fingerprints pressed into every space he touched. You groaned, hips pushing into his hand, eyes straight ahead and staring into hazel lightened almost to cool amber, you could drown there and never want to stop.
//You want?// rang in your ear, and you felt like you did the night you snorted your first line of coke in Lockdown 811’s back room, three months before your eighteenth birthday and stupid as shit, blissing out on the toilet and Dean finding you, though he'll never admit he was looking. Pulling you out and calling you a stupid cunt and throwing you into the Impala. Taking you home to ride out your high, to ride you, and you thought it would feel like that, when he does it, when he pushes in, when he draws more than a thin line on your skin and then pulls away, licking the taste of your blood from his lips, vivid color slashed against his teeth, Christ, Dean--
Fucking tease, toying with you like a cat with a mouse, always had, and you wouldn’t do a fucking thing about it, couldn’t bring yourself to say "no" even the first time because you told yourself that you knew what you were getting into.
You’d thought about slow and tender and most of all, gentle, because…yeah, you’d thought about it.
***
You hurry back to the car from the Eat-Rite Diner, March sludge seeping through your sneakers, because Dean just had to have another slice of pie. You find your brother plastered all over some chick wearing a waitress cap, her coat open and short skirt hiked up, seated on the hood of the Impala, rubbing against each other like they wanted to start a fire. You couldn’t see where Dean’s hands were, but some place close to the hot spot, because the girl's demanding noises were getting smothered by Dean’s possessive mouth.
They break apart when you get inside the car and slam the door as hard as you can.
“Be careful,” Dean warns, drawing his brows together, shifting on the seat. “Slam that door any harder and you’ll chip her paint.”
You manage to keep your face straight at his discomfort.
“Do they always make those funny noises before they get off?” you ask a few minutes later, between bites.
Dean grins in reply, still a little unfocused, but that only leaves you feeling more uneasy than before. “No. But if you go slow, then slip them some tongue…, you’d have to chase them off with a stick,” he counsels, pushes the AC/DC tape in the deck and reaches out for more pie.
Your motel is only a five minute walk from the diner, but Dean refuses to walk on principle since Dad gave him the car. It’s been two months since Dean turned eighteen, but he’d still celebrate in every town, as if it had owed him a toll of a girl. He would sneak away, leaving you to have another night with way too much energy and nothing to do with it, except keeping regular company of the frayed Latin schoolbook. Or he'd dump Dad’s notes onto you to sort out. Sometimes he’d pay extra for Cinemax to keep you “effectively entertained”.
Switching back and forth between Goldfinger and The Crawling Hand you pause at Ghost. Demi Moore is lovable and grieving and you wonder if indeed making pottery could really get a girl so horny. You make a mental note to ask Dean. Next thing that comes to mind is Dean’s clay-slippery hand in Demi’s knickers and his mouth on her breasts, getting rid of that demure white top, quickly.
Dean had a mouth fuller and redder than any of the women that splayed their bronzed, smooth legs and pouted provocatively from the covers of the skin magazines Dean keeps stashed in the trunk. He doesn't flaunt them, but he never hides them too well either.
Something gooey like cookie dough melts inside you when Demi blurs into Jennifer Connelly and Dean’s ten times hotter, stepping into Don Johnson’s shoes to make out with her. Things begin to blur, things begin to heat up as you switch to Girls Unbutton.
Then things begin to go south.
****
And it's not... when things between you and Dean had gone that far, it just.... It wasn't like that with Dean. Dean made it easy despite the wrongness, made one thing make sense, he was everything you knew how to want. Want him so bad it made your legs shake slightly every time you finished, when you zipped up and you couldn't seem to get your shirt’s buttons done up right, your head soft and still spinning slightly from the memory of his thumb drawing circles on your cheek or his teeth behind your ear, just on the right soft spot.
It was lots of things, but not gentle.
You were not a virgin by then, it was kinda hard to stay one around a brother who glared at you like you were the last virginity holdout in the universe and he was going to get a Medal of Honor for helping it fall. Dean always had girls hanging on his arms and he would grin at you over his beer, the chicks would sip Coke and roll straws on their pink tongues and giggle and Dean’d wink, as if you had a neon sign on your forehead saying “Still Not Getting Any”.
When you finally got some, and then some more, Dean would quirk his brow “You dig me now?”, as if an honor badge was pinned to your chest that said “welcome to Dean’s league”, same as when you’d tackled Dean down to the ground with that knee undercut or planted your first silver bullet in a snarling werewolf’ s muzzle.
You’d roll your eyes in reply - “I do, I do, dude,” although you did not dig him, not exactly. You’d have liked to ask Dean, hadn’t he ever felt that random sex was more like a cheap thrill, half of which was more imagined than real? But Dean would already be looking elsewhere: to the never ending stretch of the highway in front of them as he put another ten miles behind. Or he’d be staring up into the boundless blue sky, the Impala parked amidst Iowa’s endless corn fields, you both lounging on the hot hood.
It went uphill from the first sweaty-fingered tumbles that you’d owed to Dean’s persistent generosity. A quick learner, you’d pick up girls without sporting killer good looks or acting like a mysterious six-gun street samurai; they were thrilled by fucking a smart loner, a bit on the shy side- better girls, cleaner and sober girls, some even with the obvious frontal lobe capacity; but there were few offers of your type in their line of work.
Under a single pale street lamp of a trailer park diner or in dive bars with buzzing signs for PBR, broken urinals and a motley crew of all trades; their dolled up, inviting faces blurred, holding each other or anyone to stand up. Like back then when you wandered in, hardly twelve because it was taking Dean too damn long to ask for directions around the road construction block, and it was at least 15F to pee outside. You couldn’t hold it back any more.
Dean dragged you out, pulling you by the sleeve of your jacket so hard you heard the fabric tear, just like Dean’s voice, Never drink anything a stranger offers you, do you copy, Sam? I told you, *told* you.
It was just a Coke, the can hadn't even been opened, what’s the harm in that, you let those dudes treat you, Dean…
It was the first time you remembered Dean using his fist to make his point, at least with you.
When Dean spent his last couple of bucks to buy you a bag of Twizzlers, you knew he was sorry, even though he'd never say so.
****
You looked for him in this godforsaken city, hunted him down a hundred streets on more nights than you knew how to count, drew him out. You could have offed him right there and look at you…
// Sammy, what fuckin' twisted thing have you done? I keep coming back. Stop me! Dad couldn’t. How many people have to die before you do something? Make up your friggin’ mind! //
Although his lips didn't move, his voice is raging hoarse in your head. Touch me, you wanted to say, but you bit your tongue because it wasn’t like that any more.
// I’m bad. Been from the start. Didn’t know when to stop, always got the damn itch to scratch. This…is what I deserved. Not your fault, never has been.//
You shudder at his cold breath against the scratch on your neck. The inner voice pipes in, mocking your hunter’s hunch, self-protective instinct gone to the dogs, Bravo, Sam, you fucking ass, standing there with a stake and that look of hurt surety, oh look how fucking pathetic you are, because what you truly wanted, him, coming after you again…
//Do me the last fucking favor! Put me *down*. Do it! What’s…stopping you?//
Dean's fingertips brushed your hairline, feeling you, almost cautious, apologetic.
// Didn’t you want me gone for good?//
The howl of the siren pierced your ears. He was gone with a nip to your cheek, and you were slumping on the dead body of a faceless man - limp, sucked dry, bled to death… There were gashes in his face, bites of many mouths on his throat and arms and his side - munched through - the McSunday special for the whole brood…
“Hey kid. You okay?”
The policeman frowns, eyes fixed on the dirty ground. He picks up your stake and looks at it, the ornately carved mahogany that used to be someone's table leg. You catch your breath and lean your head back into the wall, pants loose at your hips, cock hard and aching.
You could be crazy. Anyone would be, you reason.
"I'm fine."
You leave a fake number and your current alias, promising to call if you remember anything else.
You skid on the sidewalk, grasping for rough brick that almost steals skin before you pull away.
You can still taste him in your mouth, on your tongue, cold skin and dirt, ash and metal-sharp blood, someone else he had tonight, someone that wasn't you.
****
“What the hell are we doing, Dean?” you whispered one night, frowning at the familiar fingers tracing new lines across your skin. Dean never answered until the next day, during a different conversation, when he said, “There is nothing to freak out about as long as it makes you feel good,” his voice was resolute, his grip tightened around the blade in his hand.
”Is this going to change things?” you asked next. You rubbed your hand at your jean-covered knees, felt the material burn into your sweaty palms.
“Change what?” His knee nudged yours under the table. “Don’t make it harder than it already is!”
Dean smirked at his own joke, wrenched his palm out from under yours and twice blinked his thick-lashed, changeable eyes. You heard steps behind your back as your father came up with a map and two loaded shotguns, and you didn't talk about it any more.
Nothing changes really, but everything’s different.
****
Tonight, you went down three alleys before you saw him, leaning against a car hood and watching the sky. You stopped, because you hadn't expected it, even though you must have.
You must have.
// Where’re you headed?//
He was there one second, beside you the next, and you hadn’t seen him move. This time there was no upturned collar to hide the bitemarks on his neck, and a deep slash on the front, right below where his Adam’s apple had been. A clean cut that had his vocal cords severed. Your mind blocks the image of your brother chocking on six quarts of his own blood.
You were waiting for this, for him, for this touch, for this feeling, his hands pushing you into the sticky wall under blue moonlight, sharp tongue tracing your mouth, and he reached down and threw away the stake caught between your fingers and for the life of you, you couldn't understand why you still had it.
He was close enough to feel the cool of his skin when he touched the air around your face.
//Watch out. There are others. Can’t keep them off your track forever.//
He held you up against the wall and kissed you, held you so you couldn't fight him off, then bit your lip, and you felt it, those tiny, pinpricks of shock that ran through your body like ice. He looked at you with knowing eyes, licking your blood from his mouth, and you stared back.
One more bite, deeper and more brutal, and that would be it, accept the invitation to the afterlife. It made sense. However much you searched, others couldn’t make you feel the same.
“Dean," you say, softly, and close your eyes and imagine forever. He's stronger than you are. He must be. “I should never have left you alone, no matter how much of a prick you were.” You couldn’t make the tone bite.
You tug at the collar of your shirt, baring the side of your throat. You wait. You offer.
You almost don’t care about what could happen next.
// This is not going to happen, Sammy.//
He sounds confused. You don't really understand why. Of all people, he should understand.
Dean’s pale lips thin out with regret as he watches you slide your consecrated knife blade first into the sheath concealed in your pocket.
****
Five days had passed when you'd finally bothered to listen to Dad's voicemail message. You call again, again, again, and again… Dad picks up on your seventeenth try. It’s 2 am; you don’t say hello or sorry, you ask if it’s true. There is a slurred *yes* at the other end of the line, and Dad hangs up before you can ask where Dean's buried. It shouldn't have surprised you, the way Dean drove.
Dad leaves your text inquiry of the accident’s location unanswered. You’d have laughed bitterly if your chest didn’t feel stuffed with barbwire. He could have tried harder to put you off the trail.
When Dad didn't have a ready lie, he chose to not talk at all. He had called to your sense of duty, to the blood ties and the promise of revenge. He called you single minded, selfish and a changeling. The last one could have been true, at least it explained Dad's logic behind why he couldn’t keep you in the family.
He thought Dean would. Dean didn’t think in terms of right or wrong when it came to load, aim, shoot for the sake of family business, he only said yes Sir or no Sir.
You can mark the day, when it became yes Sam and come on, Sam.
Dad says he's going to be gone for two weeks, at least. He hoists a black duffel over his shoulder and orders Dean to watch out for you like it was something your big brother needed to be told. Dean'd still be watching after you when you were thirty and had kids of your own.
Dean leaves the uneaten sandwich on the table and storms out onto the porch in time to see Dad's truck pull out, someone unfamiliar riding shotgun. Dirt splashes onto the road, and you know that pinched face Dean makes when his stomach drops out.
You can’t choose your family. But sooner or later Dean would need to choose a side. You believe that had been the day when Dean finally did.
He never did handle rejection well.
****
During the next few days, you realized Dean was everywhere, always near, always finding you in doorways and corners of the kitchen. He'd watch you from across the diner as you picked up the orders, bump into you when you walked, linger too close to pat your knee or shoulder when you did nothing in particular, just shared the same square of floor or couch with you. Whatever number he was doing on you, you were not backing down, those times were past. Touch after touch and you couldn't go for an hour without it. You needed more, needed to drive Dean as crazy as Dean was driving you.
Evenings were spent out on the porch steps, calves pressed together. Dean always had a beer in his hand. He shared a six pack with you when Dad wasn't home. You faced the field, out toward the horizon and a grazing white-tail, but all you did was watch each other.
Dean lay behind you in the dark that night, hips pressed just close enough that you could feel him hard in his shorts, fingers curled around your hips, tongue lapping at your neck.
"Sam." A hand on your shoulder, warm fingers brushing the pulse in your neck, and you're so aware of what will be coming. You know all the places blood rushes--your inner wrists and the backs of your knees, your throat, in the scar near the bend of your right elbow, the thick throb on the bottom of your tongue, your dick. You feel them all, as you had felt them all the times before with a girl.
“I’ve got you, Sam. I’ve always got you,” before you came to think that there was nothing really you’d recently done or said to make him doubt, Dean shoved you on your back, hands frantic over your skin, yours pulling his face closer. Dean’s mouth touched yours, a fast, sharp kiss, with a bite to your lower lip that made you gasp and bring your knee close enough to mash his balls.
Fingers twisted in your hair as teeth grazed your throat. The rough hand on your cock that's like sandpaper and silk and the rush of sensation that starts everywhere and nowhere.
You take it because he needs you, all of you, and the nights that follow are never easy, never slow. You don’t push him away, kiss him back even when it's bruising. You want to hold back, even if it hurts, make it last, feel this for days after.
You don’t call things by their name, at best Dean would smirk at you for girling out, at worst his deep frown and teeth sunk into his bottom lip would imply he could go to jail for this, at least while you are in the Big Bend State.
You don’t spell it out, you don’t need to because you know that Dean had never slept with anyone he loved before.
****
You’d slept in the same bed even after Dad got back, a tangle of limbs and sheets, your back to the wall. Dean would steal the covers, you’d wake with his arm under your pillow. At night, yes, you both kepy it very quiet, but Dean still was touching you like you always wanted, wanting you as much as you wanted him, casual and demanding. You could feel the storm gathering in the air, knew that their time was running out, that your Dad wasn’t dumb or blind, they’d get caught, and part of you wanted…to get caught.
You would have thought that Dad would have fought more, would have done something, would have tried. Any other parent would have crashed in, pulled you apart and demanded answers, because you’re far older now than when you were still afraid of the dark and Dean in your bed was more comforting than a loaded gun.
Not your Dad. The only sign that he'd been there was the solid thunk of a closing door when he walked in, but Dean was already snoring softly into the back of your neck and you lay, trying to sound and snore as sleepy.
There was only a pregnant silence when Dean started using some of his pool and poker winnings to get you both a room of your own when you were on the road, hunting.
****
Jess had watched you through wide eyes, stray hair slithering round her face like Medusa's snakes, pale skin powdered white with your hissing breath, as you lost it, smashing the phone with your fist, pieces of plastic biting your skin. You kept driving your fist into the bathroom wall, into the mirror and no sound came out of your mouth.
She was more special than you’d ever scored. She had her head on straight, smart and determined but never adamant. Feisty when she flashed that full-lipped smile or the pale triangle of supple flesh in her cleavage. To her you could make love all night long, catch her whispers with your lips, that you were gentle and thorough and she loved when you played with her hair.
She didn’t pry when you told her your family was peculiar, didn’t poke about why you didn’t go home for Christmas and Easter. She didn’t ask awkward questions about Rhory Sykes from the Engineering School who’d plastered himself all over you at the Halloween masquerade, and about the traces of white powder you wiped hastily off your face when you wriggled out of his grasp, stepped up to her under the dancing lights and first thing that she asked was, Is there something on your face?
*You* began with Less Talk More Action pounding in your head and you gave serious thought of ending it by taking a day-long drive to Las Vegas during Spring Break and tying the knot.
Her sweet tight pussy was so much like Dean’s ass, when he’d finally got tanked enough to start kissing your throat like he was expecting it to kiss back, taunting you with the nasty rasp in his voice that drove you mean and bold and harder.
Resolved and slow, you’d gripped his shoulders too hard when you pushed in, just the way he did, the pressure and slide and man, there. Yeah, yeah, Sam, right there...- then Dean said other things that even you didn’t say like this, in the dark. His cheek was squished against your lips, tasting of spit and tongue. You grunted raw, you bodies went up and down. You didn’t know Dean could move like that, not beneath you.
He came before you did, and it made you angry, made you hold him down when he’d butted you in the chin, tried to throw you off. Just take it, Dean. Like I do. Do a lil’ favor …for your lil’ brother. You wrestled him flat, the advantage of being almost four inches taller and sober and knowing instinctively how much manhandling he can take before giving in. "Didn’t you…see it coming? Didn’t you…want me to want you like you want me?”
He panted against your hand on his face, the heat of his breath bouncing back at you as your thrusts got sharper. He bit your fingers - I’ve gotten worse, Dean. He’d hardened again on the count of three when you licked into his mouth, holding one wrist above his head, Dean's other hand braced on your hip, gripping tight, pulling you into every stroke. You so gotta pay for this, you sneaky bitch, Sam, now, oh like right fucking there… I’ll punch your balls in if you dare to fuckin’ stop, now…
You hid your face in the pillow in guilty contentment after you both exploded in breathless gasps. Dean punched you in the side halfheartedly as you shifted away to let him slither from beneath yourself. You were almost shaking in your skin, it was so fucking easy. And you believed Dean never made anything easy for anyone.
You thought you just had changed something.
****
The belief lasted about five minutes, when Dean staggered out of bed, buttoning up his - your? -flannel shirt and you heard him bump into the doorframe, then something was falling off the shelf in the bathroom, and, Dean, what the fuck's up? Sleep it off, get the fuck back to bed…
He still looked punch drunk when he returned, breathing heavily, staring at you with clenched fists, shirt stretched up one side and jeans laid open.
Don’t you look so proud, no, don’t get used to this, cause I’m the older brother and you wear your hair down and cry when you come, so you’re the bitch and you want me again, you’ve gotta grow another inch before I bend over.
You remember how lightning played in the puddle on the cracked window sill, how it danced outside, brighter than a sky full of stars on the clearest night when you stood up, took the half empty bottle from the nightstand and splashed stale beer in his face. Dean sputtered and looked even more shocked and...guilty, as much as Dean ever looked guilty and you gave him the finger and stormed out of the door.
Sometimes Dean was too pushy and almost always - cocky. Sometimes he wasn’t as brave as he wanted to seem, sometimes he got mean when he was tired. And when he got real pissy, he could punch the wall or kick through the screen door. He said things that hurt, and he had almost never talked about what really mattered to him. But he’d never stooped to bringing you down to cover his exposure.
And his eyes changed color when he lied, you of all people knew that.
****
Standing on the warped porch, you let the drizzle soak your hastily pulled-on clothes. Resentment is choking you, nursed like a cancerous growth during this year of no-thing-fucking-changing. You are fed up with taking this shit, spending the entire time giving and never being allowed to take.
The time for a decision was drawing near. Yesterday Dean told you Dad had mentioned you'd be able to split up soon. Dean was good on his own, and you were getting nearly as good as your big brother, and you realize this time it's the truth, not just a motivation speech Dad used to make Dean aim better and you learn faster.
Other than that, Dad hardly talks almost at all anymore, even to Dean.
There are moments when you want to hate him - hate them both, - but you don’t know how. Few people do: it's all part of that trademark Winchester charm.
Maybe deep down, you have more in common with them than you'd ever want to admit.
****
Dean comes up behind you and pulls you back into the room, and you fight it out of habit, but you end up pushed against the wall inside because you let him.
“Listen. I was being a dick. Didn’t mean it. About…” Dean said, gesturing toward your groin. Dark, soberer eyes held yours, glassy and brilliant as the stars. When you don’t react to the apology, he slumps against the doorframe and wraps his arms around himself.
There's blue light shining through the window and the boards are growing damp beneath you as the water keeps sipping through a crack between the porch and the door. You remember a ten year old who loved storms and how you'd sit in the window of your room and try to capture the feeling of it. Restless and endless and unpredictable. It called to the tightness in your chest now, you felt it swelling, stirring, not quite an anger, neither a yearning, rather like another *you* growing out of your old skin, shifting.
“I’m going to change things, Dean. Don’t care what Dad says. Don’t care what you say,” you make four heavy steps to the messed-up bed, sit down and bury your face in your palms. The smell of your brother’s sweat and come lingers in the skin between your fingers.
“All this drama…because I don’t wanna be your bitch?” Dean hooks fingers in his belt loops as he reclines next to you, one leg folded under himself, “Cause if it is, then fuck that, we can switch now and then, that’s not a big deal.”
You look up at the petty irritation in his voice, clenching your fists so you don't grab him by the neck and shake him until he finally gets what the big deal is.
The fabric is stretched taut over his crotch. He pauses, drags his eyes to your face, quirked brow a signal for your instruction.
"It is… for me," you say finally, hoarsely, like you've reached the end of something. "You. Since when -"
“Since then.” Dean grits, gives you the stone-faced silent treatment, then rolls away onto his side. "Since whenever."
Suddenly there's not a single second of what just happened that you particularly want to talk about.
***
You think about that bad deal that must have made Dean someone else's bitch. There is no way otherwise he’d take your cock as if he was born butt-sex smart.
2000, the worst winter ever. Dad’s got his leg and two ribs broken, having been thrown off the roof by a poltergeist. He’d been staying with Bobby, who couldn’t sort out his divorce, going on another bender instead of finally going to his ex and settling it already.
You’re out of Chicago when Dean fucks the wrong chick and pisses the wrong guy off. Not a gun-shy guy. Dean’s lucky to get away with a bullet crack in the Impala’s rear windshield and another having grazed his hip. Dean claims he’d never touched her, it was just a bit of innocent flirting and fun, passing on the issue about where’d lost his wallet with the dozen of credit cards if he has never taken his pants off. You jab the forceps needle too hard into his flesh when you patch him up and harden in your jeans, burning with shame as Dean goes pastier than the frayed towel under his thigh, his white nailed grip marking your forearm for a week to come. He writes off your small cruelty to the unsteady hands, to the slight fever you seem not to be able to get rid of for the second week already.
You drive south-east for almost six hours just in case, and Dean lets you because there's no question of him driving, with a fresh wound and four good gulps of malt liquor in him that shut him up and out.
You’re stuck in the City that Saved Itself, a heavy snowfall locking you up in a Red Roof Inn. A light fever and cough you (and Dean) usually ignore or treat with swigging cough syrup or DayQuil, strikes back at you as pneumonia.
You face the 21st century with ten bucks you find shrunk in your old jeans and a stabbing pain in your chest.
Dad wires you two hundred, and commands Dean to drive up north at once. One of the few times you fully agree with Dad. Dean goes to hustle some pool. No, we can’t drive with a bullet hole in the rear window, he says. I’m awesome and tonight’s the night... and he returns with a twenty.
“Why can’t you listen to me? Just once? Would it fucking kill you? Or do you want us both to get killed so that I can keep you company downstairs?” You don’t care if he calls you a sissy or a brat, unbalanced or an egomaniac; you yell into Dean’s dazed face and it takes the air out of your lungs, you lose your voice in another bout of coughing. Dean staggers a step back, swallowing hard and trying to lean on something, trying to regain his confident pose, but he hits the sharp edge of the table and flinches with surprise, pain, or both.
You hate the stink of stale sweat on yourself, because you’re either burning with fever or shaking with cold; you hate Dean’s clothes because they smell the same. Hate the same processed shit as the pretense of food twice a day, hate the cheap liquid soap that dribbles like snot; hate Motorhead and hate Jackie Chan; hate saving people and not getting anything in return; hate the hunting, hate this life, hate him.
The only exit is the door that Dean backs off to slowly as you keep yelling.
You’re so sick afterwards you cant tell day from night. Must have spent two or three days in oblivion, the sprouting scruff on your chin the only way you can mark time.
Dean drives you to get an xray, learns a new word there - sputum - as you spit in the test tube, lies to the doctor that your brother can be assured of the best homecare treatment ever. The doctor prescribes you the meds containng fluoroquiono-something that leaves Dean with a tough choice of buying the meds or sleeping in the cold car for a few nights.
While they take another blood test, Dean tells you to wait up, he needs to settle something.
He picks you up from the ER with a two hour delay, but he brings you to a better room, with heater that works all the time and no mold stains on the walls and fresh smelling towels. In a few days you liven up a little. The ache in your joints that made you feel like a tin man walking, recedes, and you stop coughing phlegm. You pass the motel manager in the hall and he winks at Dean like he owns him, and Dean doesn't hand him his front teeth back. Instead he presses the room key in your hand, Everything’s settled, Sam, we have another weekend here paid for…
On Monday Dean says he’s got a two week job at the local car shop to patch up *the girl* and then you can drive back to Dad, he’s got it all worked out.
You go to the car shop just once, and the slithering look Mr Schewick gives you makes you want to spray disinfectant when his eyes have lingered. He is built like a linebacker, has a scar on his forehead and he looks at Dean like those countless women who wanna get him naked. Except that you weren’t born yesterday, you know the look some guys give Dean - they too want to see him naked and hurt, not necessairly in this order.
Dean has red marks on his face (as if he had been slapped, that's how it must had been happening) and he smells ... kinda funny when he returns after the shifts. He’s also out every night for about an hour before midnight when he thinks you’re asleep. He’s not gone very far because you see the glint of the Impala by the window….
All the time you stay there, as January melts away slowly - Dean’s doing his own laundry and sleeps in his long-sleeved sweatshirt. He is snarky and says it's all right, Sam, my shift ends at six pm, but i might be a lill' late, but you buy me some tacos and pie, 'kay? And he puts a couple of bills on the table. But again, his eyes as he looks away quickly betrays something is so not all right but he would not tell, you know and cowardly don't dare to ask.
When you finally make it to Bobby’s, Dean gets his hair cropped so short you can see the skin of his skull. He never let it grow more than an inch in the front or in the back since then.
You'd tried not to think about it then. You didn't want to think about it now. The idea that Dean would sell himself; the knowledge that he'd done it for you, and never said a word about it, made you feel sick. Angry at yourself and angrier at him for never giving you a chance to share the care.
****
“You could’ve told me…” You twist the sheet in your fist to stall another impulse to smash something. The Past is weighting upon your Present like a giant's dead body. You are so tired of taking Dean’s crap, his denial, his fear. His maddening desire to shoulder everything alone till he drops in his tracks. You are his fucking job, and everything else, whatever they had been, were just occupational hazards.
“Could have told you what?” The last word is a sound of pain so deep it could only come out as a choking moan.
You lie side by side in silence for long minutes, breathing in unison, and then Dean pushes himself against you, presses his forehead to your shoulder.
You prepare to hear something like “Are we having a Hallmark moment, Sammy?". Instead Dean mutters,
“Look ahead, Sam. Not back. Digging in past shit won’t get us anywhere.” The last part whispered fast, guiltily, as if just speaking the words made him vulnerable.
You feel Dean wiggle out of his jeans without rising and you do the same. Your feet are wet as you rub them against each other to get warmer, and the ache in your back is a dull residue of the pleasure wasted too fast. Dean’s hand is ice cold along your side. You throw the coverlet over you both without looking at him.
“Can you?” says Dean weakly, and when you kiss, it makes your toes curl and your eyes sting, but it also makes you feel sort of livid, because you know that every guess you’ve just made is right.
Can you let me be the one to protect you? Once in a while? Can’t you see me changing? Can you let me grow up finally? is dancing on the tip of your tongue. You fold your arms behind your head, you won't be getting any sleep for the rest of the night. You memorize the measured minutes of Dean falling asleep, his arm across your chest.
What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want. Now, when you can have anything you want from him, you want something else entirely.
To be your own man.
****
"Dean," you say, and you feel him behind you, hands on your shoulders, leaning close. So *warm*, you'd know him anywhere. “Thank God.”
You pull him into your lap and hold his face between your hands and kiss him again, taste him, a familiar shape to wrap your arms around. He tries to turn the tables, he always wants to be in charge, but you can hold him off, you know how, with your hands beneath his shirt, with your tongue in his mouth. He cusses and leans into you when you slide your fingers up his chest, nails across his nipples, palms over his back.
You held him all night, humming because that's what he used to like, your voice close by his ear. He told you about strangers with bottomless dark eyes and teeth that drew blood, and about sudden fine razors behind their sleeves and ragged rank scars under smart clothes and slippery, filthy sex on wet floors. He tells you how it tasted and smelled, and then he shuddered and said he'd never be warm again.
You thought he just might be right…
****
You wake up with a shudder. Your fingers come off sticky and red when you wipe your chin and face. You must have torn off a nail while punching the tiles. The side of your neck aches, like after a hickey, lots of them… you press your fingers into the skin and are startled with the beat of life that wasn’t supposed to be there.
Jess is there, feeling your forehead, a whiter shade of pale, trying to pull you upright, "Sam…you have to eat something. It’s been two days. You can’t change what happened."
You just nod and wrap the blanket closer when you curl into the wall. The next time you wake she’d put ice on your shattered knuckles, wiped the blood off your neck, and is now spoon-feeding you some spicy stew, her voice soft, soothing and it's not helping at all.
It is after midnight when you finally kiss her lemongrass and honey scented hair. She smiles in her sleep, before you dress noiselessly and slide out of the room.
"I love you," you told her, and you did, you do. You loved her and you wouldn't have left her like this, if only you could have been sure you wouldn’t lead your old life back to her.
****
You’d always been a self-starter.
Dad’d taught you everything, when he’d been drilling it into Dean, but your brother was better with other things. Dean could regurgitate the material Dad had taught him from books, but you had written your own book, well not exactly a book, more like a very precise page. You never got to test it, before now.
You look up into the bottomless sky one last time, return to the chilly dimness of a neglected family crypt and strike the match to start the invocation ritual.
“Wherever you are now, Dean, you’d better start packing,” you take a deep breath, taste moldy air on your tongue. Then start to chant in a mixture of Latin, Aramaic and several other ancient languages long forgotten, easily, like you’d whistle a familiar tune.
The warm blood smells thick and metallic as you draw the symbols. You just don't *care*. It doesn’t seem to be working with calf’s blood, so you prick the skin on your forearm with your knife and watch as it dribbles into the venerable chalice.
You press your hand to the pulsing thick wall of blurred air, thick candles flicker and you think you can feel something waiting, just on the other side.
"Sam."
It's low, from inside the rippling wall. Like it's the only word in the universe... You falter turn to look back, at the boarded door. The nails are loose, two boards are gone. You could swear you had locked it from the inside before you began.
"Dean," you say, softly, and you close your eyes. There’s that familiar tight squeeze around your heart. Rushing from and toward catastrophe at once. You try but you can’t stop it.
Fuck, someone says *inside* your head, and you nearly jump out of your skin. You whirl around, grasping the handle of the knife tucked behind your belt. When you focus, slowly exhale, Dean’s looking at you with wide, dark eyes, as he used to, standing as always, too close. You’re good..
He looks unlike anything you had prepared yourself to meet. There is no stink of decay. Must have died freshly shaved, no scruff on his face. You stifle a shaky giggle.
There are dark smudges under his eyes, the angle of his jaw is sharper, his hair is longer than you recall when you’d seen him last time, and it’s been a while since then. Other than that, not a scratch or a single hair unlike Dean's. He wears a biker’s black leather jacket with metallic clips over the breast pockets. The jacket smells like he’d just dropped from somewhere east, somewhere colder. The collar is turned up, his face is the only pale shape in the rest of the mass of blackness that is his clothes. You realize these are somebody else’s clothes he’s died in.
“I was afraid, that it had gone wrong, and. God, I didn't mean to, I couldn't…Dad didn’t tell me….
Instead you say, the words hardly making it past the lump in your throat, “Long time no see, bro.”
He is stuffing his hands in the pockets, and you wish you could stuff your eyes in your pockets too because the dead - or the undead - or whatever Dean is - were not supposed to give you that look, that smile … as if he was thinking of you naked, squirming for him. Like he always looked at you, like you always wanted him to.
Icy fingers brush your skin, cup your jaw, and you close your eyes when he kisses you.
Christo, you say when he releases your mouth. He'd bitten your lip bloody and raw.
The look Dean gives you makes you realize just how very hungry your brother is.
*end
Umm. Ok. I hope some of you have enjoyed it.