SPN Fanfic--On My Knees Chapter 5 (Dean/Sam)
Sam’s first interaction with Ryan Omera had happened under somewhat strange circumstances:
“Sam, are you awake? Dammit, Sam, you better fucking stay awake.”
From across the room, Sam watched Dean do a quick concussion test on Sarah. Follow my finger and the like.
“Who’s president of the United States?” Dean asked.
“Barak Obama.”
“And the one before that?”
“George Bush. Oh God, I think I’m gonna throw up.”
“He has that effect on people,” Dean muttered, but he pulled a wastebasket over in time to shove under Sarah’s head.
Sam tuned out the noise of Sarah retching, letting his gaze slide over to the little girl sitting on the floor beside the couch where Sam was currently sprawled.
“It’s okay,” Sam said. “I know this is . . . a lot. But everything’s gonna be all right. I promise.” He meant it, damn it. He would make sure of it.
She mumbled something, and Sam had to ask her to repeat herself.
“Who are you?” she asked, louder this time.
“I’m Sam,” Sam said. “And that’s my . . . that’s Dean.”
There was any number of reasons he could have failed to mention Dean was his brother. He was still shaking with the aftereffects of possession. He was cold and feverish and possibly bleeding to death. But Sam knew exactly why he didn’t tell Ryan that one fact, and it wasn’t due to any of those things.
“Sam?” Dean called, his voice growing closer along with the sound of his bootsteps on Sarah’s hardwood floors. “Tell me you’re awake and breathing so I don’t have to kill you.”
“Quit your whining, I’m alive. Sarah have a concussion?”
“Yeah. I don’t know why I bothered with that president crap; she’s got a bruise on her forehead the size of Texas.” Dean knocked Sam’s hands out of the way, resumed holding pressure on the wound himself. “Help’s on the way. Hold on, okay?”
“Jerk,” Sam said, eyes sliding closed and mouth curving into a smile.
“Bitch,” Dean said, and squeezed Sam’s hand.
---
He slept a lot the first few days. He didn’t think it was just the stomach wound. Demon possession was surprisingly exhausting.
Dean hadn’t made him go to a hospital, though it was touch and go for a while. In the end, he only consented to home care when Sarah, clear-thinking despite the concussion, made a call to an old friend, who agreed to drive out in the middle of the night.
Martha was a pediatrician with big, no-nonsense hands and a bag of tricks. She might have known Sarah’s mother, but Sam wasn’t clear on this point. To be honest, he didn’t care beyond the fact that it would keep him out of the hospital-they didn’t need the attention a second emergency room trip would spawn, nor could they leave Ryan alone. More importantly, Sam had work to do, and a hospital visit would have delayed that. The demon had given him the tools but he still had to apply them to the task.
Even with Dean helping, it took Sam nine hours of research to find what he needed. The amulet was rare, only seventeen in existence, but Sam had a pretty good idea how to get their hands on one. That, combined with some fancy herbs and tricky Latin, might just be enough. Sam was praying they would be enough.
“And this’ll do it?” Dean asked three days after it happened.
Sam was propped up in bed, Dean reading over his shoulder while he scribbled a shopping list on the back of a receipt for gas.
“This’ll reverse what the demon did to her?”
“She fed Layla-Ryan-human and demon blood for over a year, Dean. That can’t be reversed, just . . . controlled.”
Sam turned to check something in a book he’d re-read twelve times to avoid looking at Dean’s face. He knew what Dean was thinking about right now. Sam as a baby, helpless in his nursery while that yellow-eyed son of a bitch fed Sam his blood.
“I should get a move on,” Dean said, straightening.
He shook the kinks out of his spine and issued an order for Sam to stay in bed or else before going.
Sam was dozing again when Dean got back and set a paper bag on top of the dresser.
“Hey,” Sam said yawning.
Dean glanced up, guilt sliding over his features.
“Go back to sleep,” he muttered.
“How was the library?” Sam asked, choosing to ignore that.
Dean sighed and sat down on the end of the bed.
“Titillating, Sam. On the plus side, I think I found what we need so I shouldn’t have to go back there anytime soon. How ‘bout you, huh? You get a hold of Bela?”
Sam nodded, struggling to sit up. Heaving a sigh, Dean went to help him.
“She thinks she can get what we want by the end of the week,” he said.
“And how much is that gonna cost us?” Dean asked, shoving an extra pillow behind Sam’s back.
“Amazingly enough, no charge. Though she did say this makes us even.”
Dean laughed.
“We pull her ass outta Hell, she gives us scrap metal. Sounds about right.”
“She sounded kind of funny,” Sam said as Dean rounded the bed to stretch out beside him.
“Funny like SWAT team on our asses?” Dean asked. He bumped Sam’s shoulder companionably.
“No. Just . . . smug.” Sam turned his head to look at his brother. “You didn’t . . . sleep with her?”
“What? No. Course not.” A beat. “You?”
“No.”
“Well, that was awkward,” Dean said, and Sam laughed for real.
---
The herbs were easy. They claimed they were medicine-a not-quite lie-and fed them to Ryan with dinner.
The amulet was harder because they had to tell her something. Ryan not remembering what happened was a blessing, and they both wanted to tell her as little as possible.
“The stone means protection,” was what Sam finally settled on. He nudged Ryan’s ponytail out of the way before working the clasp of the necklace. “As long as you always wear it, you’ll be safe.”
She fingered the amulet dangling from the chain, frowning slightly. Sam wondered if she believed him. Dean still doubted whether she believed them about her parents, but Sam thought she did. Ryan might not want to listen to them, two virtual strangers, but the feeling in the pit of the stomach was tougher to shake. Sam remembered that feeling well from after Meg had gotten inside him.
“Is it a present?” she asked finally. She glanced between Sam and Dean, uncertain.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “It’s a present. From Dean and me.”
Ryan nodded seriously.
“Maybe you should have given it to me before I broke my arm,” she said, and Sam had to smile.
“Maybe you’re right,” he agreed.
Sarah was great with Ryan. And she wasn’t the one to tell her her parents were dead, which meant Ryan was far more willing to climb into Sarah’s lap when she woke up from a bad dream. Sometimes Sam watched Sarah soothing Ryan back to sleep, and felt a pull a nostalgia for something that was never really his to begin with.
Sam kept meaning to talk to Sarah, thank her, but he was still sleeping an insane number of hours, and she had to go back to work eventually.
Dean sent him a few knowing looks before finally confronting Sam before bed one night.
“What are you gonna do, dude?” he asked without preamble. “No, don’t give me that clueless puppy look. What are you gonna do about Sarah, Sam?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sam said even though he kind of did.
“You could have that, you know.” Dean stepped out of his jeans and tugged on a pair of pajama pants.
“Have what?” Sam asked.
But he laid down his book, knowing Dean wasn’t just going to let this go. Dean didn’t disappoint.
“A normal life. A pretty girl with a hell of a lot of backbone who for some reason . . . some good reasons . . . is willing to put up with your bony ass. You could marry her, have some geek babies. The whole shebang.”
Sam smiled.
“Did you just say shebang?” he asked as Dean got into bed beside him.
Dean made a face and flopped over onto his stomach.
“Go to sleep, Sam.”
---
It could have been worse. That’s what Dean said. Like it was a consolation.
From his perch on the bed, Sam watched Dean pace the room. The attempt was kind of pathetic. Three of Dean’s long strides were all it took to cross the small space, and when he reached the wall he rested against it a moment before pushing off like an Olympic swimmer and beginning another lap. Sam was getting nauseous from all the back and forth.
“I mean it. At least we were only . . . ” Dean trailed off with a tiny shrug that didn’t come close to expressing the enormity of what he and Sam had been doing when Sarah saw them.
What Dean meant was, at least they weren’t fucking. Fuck, they weren’t even kissing. No, it was more intimate than that, Dean’s hand curled around Sam’s jaw, Dean’s thumbnail scratching a line of possession down Sam’s still-bruised cheek. It was the moment before a kiss, the time-stop-pause when you know it’s coming.
“Sorry, sorry,” Sam had said, even though it was his cheek flaming with pain, stinging under the heat of Dean’s hand. Even though it was Dean’s fist that inflicted this damage in the first.
“Sam,” Dean had said, pressing Sam into the wall between the guest bedroom and the hall bathroom, close enough that Sam could taste two days’ worth of sour coffee on his breath. “Sammy.”
Sam knew this script, these lines. Bitch was I love you. Sammy: I’d die for you.
Not again, you won’t, Sam had thought. He clamped a hand on the bone of Dean’s shoulder. You’re not going anywhere.
And that was when Sarah had come out of her room, her hair still wet from her shower, her face paling, going weirdly, unnaturally white.
It might have been better if she’d walked in on them sucking each other’s faces, cocks. At least that could be explained away by exhaustion, perversion, obsession. Too many days, weeks, months on the job. Too many stale-smelling motel rooms with stiff impersonal pillowcases, the same unwashed felt blankets. Too many scalding showers with thin slicks of soap that left a sticky residue behind, like a memory on the skin.
What Sarah witnessed couldn’t be explained away by hard hunts and no sleep and the memory of two beautiful golden-haired women, faded and newspaper-thin, so dry and brittle they could burn up in flames. There was no excuse, nothing but Sam and Dean.
Sam stood up, halting Dean mid pace.
“I’m gonna go talk to her.”
“Yeah,” Dean breathed out. “You should do that.”
---
He found Sarah sitting up on the couch, knees folded to one side, elbow bent and resting on the sofa arm and chin cradled in her hand.
Moving further into the room, he could hear the song playing on the speaker system. Garth Brooks Unanswered Prayers. Sam smiled. Dean hated that song, thought it presumptuous that God would choose what prayers to answer and ignore. Sam had always found it oddly soothing.
He didn’t know what to open with so he decided just to go with, “Hi.”
Sarah patted the couch cushion beside her, and after a beat Sam sat down. She was quiet for a long time; he didn’t try to rush her.
“I’ve spent the last two hours,” she said finally, “trying to decide what to say to you. I also listened to a hell of a lot of country music.”
He wasn’t sure whether to chuckle at that, settled for smiling faintly.
“What, uh. What’d you come up with?”
“I was going to start by telling you it’s not normal.” She held up a hand before he could reply. “Dumb, I know. You’re a bright guy, Sam. Stanford right?”
“Yeah, but I never actually graduated. So I don’t know if we can hold the university responsible.” He tried to smile, relieved when Sarah’s lips moved in response.
“And then I thought, their lives haven’t exactly been normal either.”
No, they really haven’t, Sam thought, but he merely tilted his head in acknowledgment.
“I don’t have a brother. Or a sister. It’s always just been me. When I was younger I didn’t care much. I was a pretty independent kid anyway. But, later, and especially after I lost my mother, I wished I had someone. Someone who knew how it felt, how lonely it was.”
“Sarah-”
“I don’t know what it’s like to have a sibling, Sam, but I imagine it makes things less lonely.”
“Yeah,” Sam breathed out. “Yeah, it does.”
“You don’t owe me explanations, Sam-”
“I owe you everything.”
“-but I can’t help wondering about before. When I met you guys, when you and I kissed. Were you and Dean already-?”
“No! No, believe me, Sarah. That-this-didn’t happen until later. Until after . . . ”
“After Dean almost died, you mean.”
“He did die, Sarah.” Eight minutes of Dean’s body lying on the ground, his skin growing cold under Sam’s hands while he wondered if, somewhere, Dean was screaming while his flesh burned. “But actually, if I’m being honest, it happened just before.”
That last night, a motel off the interstate in Aurora. Sam wanted to stay someplace nicer, but Dean had just laughed and gunned the engine into the gravel-bitten parking lot of the One Moose Lodge.
“I plan on goin’ out in style, Sammy.”
While Dean showered, sang Ring of Fire at the top of his lungs, Sam ordered pizza and burgers and the crab rangoons Dean loved. He turned up the thermostat because he could not get warm and waited for the food to come or for Dean to use up all the hot water, whichever came first.
Dean outlasted the first two delivery guys and was just coming out of the bathroom, gray sweatpants slung loose on his hips, as Sam was paying the third.
“Jesus, Sam,” Dean had commented, pulling on a shirt while he took in the spread. “I’d say you planned on inviting friends, if, you know, we had any.”
Dean loaded a plate with every kind of food Sam had ordered but didn’t do more than pick at a few fries. Neither of them was the least bit hungry.
They sat on one of the beds together, shoulders bumping, and watched TV. Sam tried to flick past Dead Man Walking but Dean mumbled, “Leave it.”
They watched for maybe twenty minutes before Dean slid off the bed and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Seconds later, Sam heard the sound of retching. He switched off the TV and got under the covers. He was so fucking cold; it didn’t matter how many layers he put on, he wasn’t getting warm.
When Dean emerged from the bathroom minutes later he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Sam wondered if he’d gotten puke on it. Don’t, he told himself, don’t you dare cry. He had to bite down on inside of his lip hard enough to pierce the skin, and still he could feel the telltale tremble of his jaw. He held it together until Dean sat down on the edge of the bed, and stroked a rough hand through Sam’s hair. Dean’s voice was grainy, his breath warm and slightly acidic from throwing up.
“I’m sorry, Sammy.”
Sam lost it. Furious at Dean, Dad, maybe himself most of all, Sam started to sob. Even as he cursed Dean-selfish prick, noble son of a bitch-he mashed his face into his brother’s neck, fingers digging into Dean’s bicep.
Dean let him go until he was all cried out, empty like a wrung washcloth, exhausted. When Sam finally quit shaking, Dean pulled back a little, rested his palms flat against Sam’s shoulders, and pressed a kiss against the sweat-slick skin of Sam’s forehead.
Sam blinked rapidly, grateful there was nothing left to cry.
“I love you, Sam,” Dean said, simple as anything.
He pulled back, making to stand. Sam’s hand shot out and grabbed his wrist.
“Dean?” He couldn’t have formed a complete sentence, was glad he didn’t have to try.
Dean said nothing but, like always, he knew what Sam needed. He dragged down one side of the bedclothes and slid in beside Sam. He shifted until they were close, their breaths tangling in the dark.
“I’m so cold, Sam,” Dean whispered. “Fucking freezing.”
He could make excuses, blame it on stress, fear, temporary insanity. But Sam knew exactly what he was doing when he stretched his neck out and kissed Dean on the mouth.
“Sam,” Dean said hoarsely. “You . . . ”
Sam just prodded Dean onto his side, wriggled up behind him. He tucked his knees into the hollows of Dean’s, and pressed his hand flat over Dean’s heart, counting beats until morning.
The next day, they met Lilith in a field the sun had seared to a crisp gold. She was stronger, faster, and it was eight minutes before Sam could kill her. Eight minutes during which Dean was in Hell, and Sam felt like his lungs were burning through every single one.
Dean passed out almost as soon as Sam dragged him back into his body, and Sam laid on the ground for what seemed like hours, body siphoning heat from the earth as the morning sun warmed the dirt. Beside him, Dean slept like the dead.
Sam had spread his arms and laughed till his sides ached. He remembered thinking that evil felt oddly like falling in love, and then he realized he had fallen in love, had fallen so fucking hard a long time ago, and he rolled onto his knees and vomited into the ashy dirt.
It hadn’t been anything like falling in love with Jess.
With Jess, he’d been terrified and elated, unable to think beyond the next time he could kiss her, be with her. Now, sprawled face-down on the sun-caked earth, Dean sleeping the sleep of the dead five feet away, Sam shook with laughter as he realized he and Dean were stuck with each other, stuck until one of them wound up so dead the other couldn’t bring him back. In that moment, Sam wanted to kill Dean, tear him apart with his bare hands or else use his hands for entirely other means, and so he had left Dean lying there in the dirt. And ran.
Sam wished he didn’t remember what happened in the five months that followed but figured it was only right that he did.
It wasn’t like being possessed. There was no one inside Sam but Sam, and all that blood rightfully belonged on his hands. Sam had no doubt that it was Dean who brought him back. He didn’t know how Dean had done it, but somehow, someway he had.
After, he kept catching Dean watching him. Staring like he half expected Sam to suffer a mental breakdown. At least break down and cry on his shoulder a few times. Sam didn’t do any of that. He knew he couldn’t make up for what he had done, and that the only thing that came close was to keep on fighting. Keep saving people.
There was no point in regretting what was past when he would have made the same choices over again. When it came to Dean, there was no choice.
“I wish you hadn’t told me that, Sam,” Sarah said when he was done.
Sam felt exhausted, his neck limp and unable to support his head.
“Not because I think it’s disgusting or wrong,” she explained. “But because it almost makes me understand, and I really, really didn’t want to understand it, Sam.”
“I don’t know that I totally understand it, either,” he admitted, smiling.
Sarah angled her head, lips pursed as she studied Sam through dark eyes that saw too much.
“Tell me something, Sam. Are you happy? Does he make you happy?”
Sam laughed, low in his throat.
“We drive each other crazy. But we can live with that.”
---
They needed time, space to rest and recuperate, and while Sarah claimed otherwise, Sam figured she could use some time to herself. Though none of them said it, there was another good reason to leave. It was best that Ryan not get attached to another person she was going to lose.
Sam and Dean discussed the situation for approximately two minutes before getting on the phone. Bobby was holed up in some Podunk in Montana, taking care of a ghoul infestation, but assured Dean they were more than welcome at his place. Only he didn’t put it quite like that. (You idjits really need to ask?)
They argued about it for a while and, even though it was out of the way, they wound up driving back to Maine so Ryan could see the house. They were afraid she wouldn’t ever really believe it otherwise. In as un-terrifying a manner as they could manage, they sat her down and explained about demons and the bad things lurking in the dark and, with some significant revisions, what had happened to her parents. They told her they’d keep her safe, and though they half-expected her to run screaming to the next cop she saw, she never did. She didn’t remember those first few weeks she spent with Sam and Dean, but she seemed instinctively to trust them. Dean thought it was dumb luck but Sam sort of knew better. He felt connected to her, in a way that might have started with Lilith but had become so much bigger than that.
Bobby was in Idaho when they arrived-apparently he’d detoured to Boise to handle some killer bats-so the three of them settled in.
Sam had never seen a seven-year old mourn before.
Ryan spent hours in her room, coloring with an old box of Crayolas they found in a drawer in the kitchen. At night, she stayed up with them watching TV, preferring Bobby’s huge old armchair to a spot on the couch. They watched VHS tapes on his ancient player-Pete’s Dragon and The Cat from Outer Space; a copy of Flight of the Navigator that Dean had played so many times when they were kids that there were five minutes of blue screen in the middle.
When she had bad dreams, they took turns sitting in the chair beside her bed. Once, Sam caught Dean singing to her in a low tuneful voice; he had crept back to their room before Dean heard him.
About a week after they arrived, Sam and Dean were sitting at the table one morning, drinking coffee and reading the paper when Ryan came into the kitchen.
She stood in front of their chairs, holding a hairbrush in one hand, a pair of thick elastic bands in the other. She was wearing the necklace they gave her, the amulet dangling over the collar of her t-shirt.
“Can you do pigtails?” she asked, glancing from one to the other, and Dean had grinned and reached out for the brush and Ryan.
Sam figured things were going to work out okay after that. Not every kid could survive what she did, but Ryan was anything but ordinary. She was theirs, and okay, maybe that was sappy, but Sam felt like they were due for a little sappiness. They had a right to it after everything they’d suffered and lost, paid out in flesh-pounds and blood-quarts, bodies salted and burned. The way Sam perceived it, the world owed him and Dean and payday was long overdue.
His stomach wound was healing cleanly, if a little slowly for his taste. Especially when Dean kept insisting that Sam not over-exert himself. He put up with it for the first couple weeks, knowing it couldn’t have been a picnic for Dean to watch him take that knife to the gut. But seriously, enough was enough.
Two weeks after they arrived at Bobby’s, Sam woke to the sound of rain driving down on the roof of the house. He levered himself up onto his elbows to peer through the window. Beyond the water-glazed glass, the sky was just turning, the black of the previous night fading to a cold, gunmetal gray. Sam guessed it was five or five-thirty.
They had fallen asleep sometime after two, staying up far too late watching the awful horror flicks Dean loved. But they didn’t have to do anything today besides putter around the house making small repairs, and later muster the energy to cook dinner. Sam figured a little pre-dawn fooling-around wouldn’t hurt too much. In fact, he was hoping it would do some good.
“I can hear freaking birds chirping,” Dean muttered, the words mostly mushed into the pillow.
He was sprawled on his belly, naked to the waist where Sam had dragged the sheet and arms flung at either side so he took up almost the entire bed. Sam straddled Dean’s hips, fingers splaying his back in search of sore patches.
“So?” Sam asked after a while.
Dean seemed to have lost the thread of conversation around the time Sam found a particularly vicious knot in his right shoulder. It was several seconds before he replied.
“So, if the birds are just getting up, I sure as hell shouldn’t be,” he said finally.
Sam laughed and after a few more minutes rolled off Dean and to the side, tugging Dean with him. He knew better than to use the word spooning, which didn’t make it any less accurate a description for what they were doing.
“Go ‘way,” Dean said, arching his neck to give Sam better access. “Ugh, hate when you do that.”
He rolled his hips, grinding his ass into Sam’s erection.
“I know you do,” Sam apologized, delivering another sucking kiss to the warm curve of Dean’s shoulder.
Dean rolled over to glare through a single eye, the other squeezed tight against the faint glimmer that passed for sunlight.
“I’m not into morning sex at all, dude.”
“I guess I forgot,” Sam said, and leaned in to kiss the corner of Dean’s mouth.
Dean’s lips were soft, probably from the little tube of chapstick he kept in the pocket of his jeans, rubbed on when he thought Sam wasn’t looking. Sam wondered if Hell was particularly drying, because Dean had never done that before. Of course, if Sam wanted to keep his own lips in their current state-i.e. not bruised and bleeding-he would never be posing that particular question to Dean. So he wouldn’t break out into a grin, he darted forward and sucked Dean’s sex-swollen lower lip into his mouth. He let go, shoving the curve of his mouth against Dean’s ear.
“We can stop if you want, man,” he breathed hot and wet into Dean’s ear canal.
He started to roll away, and that was when Dean snorted, pushed Sam over onto his back.
“Well I’m already up now.”
Dean kissed down Sam’s chest and belly, alternating hard bruising ones with the feather-light kind, barely a touch. He got as far as the white bandage above Sam’s left hip and stopped, fingers tracing around its edges.
“I’m not that breakable,” Sam felt the need to assure him, arching up a little so Dean could feel just how weak he wasn’t.
Dean snorted, mumbled something that sounded like, “Quit molesting me,” before sliding his thumbs under the waist of Sam’s boxers and dragging them down.
Keeping up a steady downward path with his mouth, he spanned his hands over Sam’s chest. His fingers plucked at Sam’s nipple, which was really more Dean’s thing than Sam’s. Dean seemed distracted though, lost in his own thoughts. Sam opened his mouth to say something, snapped it shut again when he felt Dean’s lips wrap around the head of his dick.
“Fuck,” Sam hissed, trying not to thrust up.
Dean made a sound that would probably have been a snort if his mouth wasn’t, uh, full at that moment. Sam surrendered to wet suction and the knowing flick of Dean’s tongue. He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids felt weighted, his lashes coated with glue. When he pried them apart at last, he saw Dean watching him. Making sure, like always, that Sammy was all right.
It was several seconds before he could muster the strength to grab Dean’s shoulders, and several more before he could convince Dean he wanted him to stop and not go faster, harder, deeper.
Dean made a sound like, what the fuck, and Sam cringed.
“Sorry. Sorry, just. You enjoy this, don’t you?” he blurted out before he could censor himself. “I mean, you wanna be here, right?”
Dean gave him a look, then snagged Sam’s hand and moved it to cover his own dick through the taut fabric of his shorts.
“No, Sam, I don’t.” He rolled his eyes and moved to cover Sam again.
“Dean. Dean, I’m serious. I need to know that you feel good about this. And not just when you’re getting off, but after too. I need to know you’re okay with all this. Because this is it, man. This is us, and the next thirty years. So if you’re not okay about it, now’s the time to speak up.”
“Seriously?” Dean sat up and rubbed a hand over his hair, which was bed-rumpled and kind of sexy. “You’re seriously pulling this right now?”
“I have to know,” Sam said stubbornly, and Dean sighed.
Sam sat up, too. He felt a little ridiculous having this conversation naked but figured Dean had seen him in worse conditions. And, really, the conversation was long overdue.
“I’m okay, alright?” Dean said. “I’d be downright amazing if you shut up and let me get you off.”
“That’s another thing.”
“What?” Dean said, suspicious. “What’s another thing?”
“I’m not the only one in this relationship, man. You’re here too.”
Dean hesitated, mouth opening and closing like he got off to a few false starts.
“Where the hell is this coming from, Sam? Did I do something to make you think I don’t wanna be here? I’ve got your dick in my mouth, dude. What more do you want?”
“I wanna know it’s what you want, Dean! Did you do something that makes me wonder? How about selling your soul for me? It’s no secret that you’d do anything for me, and I love you for it, man, I do. But if this isn’t what you want too then it has to stop. I couldn’t live with this if you didn’t want it too.”
Dean said nothing for several seconds. Then he pushed back the blankets and got up. Sam watched him hop comically, struggling to yank on his jeans.
“Dean. Dean, where are you going?” he asked as Dean reached for a shirt.
Dean shot him a last glance as he yanked open the door.
“Leave me alone for a while, Sam.”
---
Sam brought him a cup of coffee and a baseball cap because, though the rain had slowed, it was still falling in fits and starts. Dean ignored the latter but accepted the former with a grunt. He took a tentative sip, as though Sam might try to poison him with weak coffee. Apparently satisfied, he drank again, deeper this time, and wrapped his hands around the mug.
Dean had spent the past hour sitting on the porch in the rain and was thoroughly soaked, jeans and t-shirt clinging to his skin. He must be freezing, but being Dean, he didn’t come inside.
Sam didn’t bother trying to speak to Dean until he’d drained half the coffee and was looking slightly less likely to commit a murder in the next five minutes.
“So,” Sam said at last, “are we going to talk about this?”
Dean turned slowly, and Sam wondered if he’d spoken too soon about Dean not being homicidal.
“Okay,” Dean said finally. Reaching out, he eased the ball cap free of Sam’s grasp, slapped it down on his head. “Let’s talk about you ruining perfectly good morning sex with all that touchy-feely bullshit.”
Sam nodded and fixed his eyes on the horizon. He thought the sun would break through by noon, dry everything out.
“You know what, Dean?” he said, voice even. “Bite me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you really wanna do this? Because we can have the conversation where you gripe about me acting like a girl and I say you’re a Neanderthal jackass, but honestly? I’m tired, and it’s raining, and we both know I’d win in the end. So how ‘bout we just skip all that and you tell me what you’re thinking, yeah?”
Dean didn’t hit Sam, though he looked like he might want to. He didn’t even seem all that surprised, just resigned and a little sad maybe.
“It’s wrong, Sam,” he said, tugging the brim of the ball cap lower so his eyes were half-hidden. “That’s just fact, plain and simple.”
Sam suddenly needed to be on his feet, to be moving, and he pushed off the porch step.
“Is it, Dean? I mean, who are we really hurting? It’s not like one of us is gonna give birth to babies with antlers or anything.”
Dean blinked at him.
“Dude, are you high again?”
Sam felt the raindrops skate down the sides of his face, and it felt good. Cleansing.
“I’m not saying it’s normal. But when have our lives ever been normal, Dean?”
Dean stood up too, stepped forward until he had Sam backed against the porch rail. Rain dripped off the brim of Dean’s ball cap, beneath which Dean’s face was pale and tight.
“We’ll be outcasts forever, Sammy. I don’t know what kind of fantasy world you’re living in, but people-they won’t ever be okay with this. With you and me. You’re never gonna get that regular life you’re always talking about. You ready to just give up on that?”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Sam said, “And there is a way. For us to have a, quote on quote, normal life. At least in other people’s eyes.”
Dean scoffed.
“Oh, yeah? What’s that, genius?”
“We stop being brothers.”
Dean looked like he’d just taken a punch in the gut, or someplace less pleasant. He released Sam, backing up. The rain was picking up now, drops falling faster and closer together.
“What the hell are you talking about, Sam?” he asked, voice hoarse, and even though Sam knew better he wondered if Dean was catching cold already.
“We stop telling people we’re brothers. It shouldn’t be that much of a stretch for us. Half the time we say we’re partners or coworkers or a dozen other lies anyway.”
Dean was quiet for a long while, and when he spoke there was something new in his voice. Something Sam couldn’t identify right away but might have been hope.
“You wanna talk about lying, Sam? We do this, we’ll be lying forever.”
Sam followed Dean out into the yard, careful to keep his distance.
“Is it even a lie, Dean? There’s not a word for what you are to me. Brother doesn’t begin to cover it. I don’t know of any brothers like us. Lover? That’s true, but not the half of it.”
“So, what, you’re gonna tell people I’m your boyfriend?” Dean scoffed. “Your domestic partner?”
“I don’t care what we call it, Dean. It’s nothing but a stupid label to make other people feel comfortable. All I care about is that we can live with it, man. I just want . . . I wanna get on with our lives, Dean. I wanna have one,” he added with something like a laugh.
“I want you to have one too, Sammy. All those things you’ve been wanting since we were kids--”
Sam reached out and grabbed Dean by the shoulders, shook him.
“No! You’re not listening to me. I need you to listen, Dean. I need you. Okay?”
“Jesus, I’m listening.”
“No. I need you. I can’t lose you again, man.”
“Like you could get rid of me,” Dean snorted. After a moment, his hands came up to rest on the sides of Sam’s face. “I’m not going anywhere, Sam. No matter what, I’ll always be there.”
“That’s not what I-fuck!” He pushed away. “Am I misreading you, Dean? I mean, I know you love me. But is this really what you want? Because if it’s not you gotta tell me, man.”
Dean huffed air through his nostrils and sighed, sighed again. He was quiet for so long that Sam started to worry.
“Dean-”
“I’m not gonna repeat myself so you better fucking listen.” He had one arm pressed over his eyes, blocking them from Sam’s gaze. “I-damn you, Sam, for making me say this. I fucking want it, all right? I like kissing you and touching you and sucking you. And I-I like when you do the same for me. Yeah, I love you, Sammy, like a goddamn part of me, my skin or something, but beyond that I like you. You’re . . . well, you’re a man now, one I can be proud of. So, yeah, I want you. Do I have moments, days, where I think I’m damning us both? Yeah. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting you so bad it hurts.”
Dean inhaled slowly through his nose, and Sam was amazed he made it that long without oxygen.
“I want you, Sam,” he said softly. “When I go to sleep at night and when I wake up in the morning. But right now? Right now what I really want is for you to shut the fuck up and not make eye contact when I take my arm away from my face, do you think you can do that?”
Sam’s brain had jammed up somewhere around ‘proud’ and he was having trouble shaping his mouth into words.
“Well, Jesus, Sam,” Dean breathed, the words tumbling out on an expulsion of air. “You gonna say something?” he demanded, apparently forgetting his request that Sam shut up.
“Wow,” Sam said finally. “I never realized you were such a girl.”
Dean blinked at him for a second before his mouth curved into a smirk.
“I take it back.”
“What? You can’t,” Sam protested.
The rain was falling in sheets again, and he didn’t care. He wanted to grab Dean by the hair and kiss him, to hell with who happened to see.
“Yeah, I can,” Dean protested.
Sam shook his head, spraying water everywhere.
“You’re a romantic, Dean. Who’dve thought?”
“If you ever say that again, this is so off.”
---
Bobby showed up three days later with a shiner and tales of killer bats.
He told them while he made dinner, homemade lasagna, and Sam thought he might cry a little when he tasted it. Who knew Bobby could cook?
After supper, Dean and Ryan passed out on the couch in the middle of the second Indiana Jones. When the credits started to roll, Sam got up and stretched before wandering into the kitchen for a glass of water. He wasn’t all that surprised when Bobby followed him.
Bobby went for the coffeemaker, even though it was almost eleven. A box of cereal stood open on the counter, and Sam reached inside for a handful.
“You and Dean,” Bobby said, and Sam waited for Bobby to finish the thought before realizing with gut-clenching clarity that he already had.
His heart beat fast and hard against the walls of his ribcage. He swallowed, the dry cereal stabbing at the back of his throat.
“I’m not an idiot, Sam. I’m also not your daddy. Ain’t my job to tell you how to live your lives. ”
“This you giving us your blessing?” Sam said, and Bobby’s head snapped up so fast, eyes narrowed to angry slits, that he immediately regretted it.
“It sure as shit isn’t that, Sam.”
“Bobby. I know it’s hard to understand-”
“I’m not looking for explanations.”
“If you want us to go, we will. We’ll leave in the morning.”
“Dammit, Sam. All we’ve been through, you and your brother and your daddy and me, are you really gonna pull that? Just because families don’t agree, or understand each other always, doesn’t mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater. Jesus, Sam, I thought you were smarter’n that.”
Sam had to stare at the scuffed linoleum for several seconds before he could trust himself to meet Bobby’s gaze.
“How long have you known?”
“If I’m being honest? Probably since the day you died and your brother brought you back. But the easy answer is this afternoon when I caught you two playing footsie under the table.”
Sam flushed but forced himself to meet Bobby’s eye.
“And?”
“And what?” Bobby prompted.
“We’re gonna keep Ryan,” Sam said.
“I figured as much.”
“That’s it?” Sam pressed. “No comment?”
Bobby raised a brow over the rim of his coffee cup.
“If I had something to say, Sam,” he growled, “you can bet your ass I’d say it.”
They were quiet for several moments. Sam ate another handful of cereal.
“Dean and I aren’t sure where we’ll end up yet. But we’d like to come by now and then.” Sam shrugged and offered a smile. “I want her to have a Bobby.”
Bobby paused, face pink and coffee mug halted halfway to his lips.
“I, uh. Need to take a leak,” he muttered before walking out of the room.
Sam waited until his heart rate had dipped to more reasonable speeds before rinsing out his glass and going back into the den.
Ryan had fallen asleep on Dean’s chest, one of his arms draped loosely along her back. Sam took a moment to marvel at how fast she had become theirs the second time before reaching down to lift her. Dean stirred when the weight of her was off him, and Sam made a shushing sound.
“I’m gonna put her to bed. You can go back to sleep if you want, man.”
Sam slid Ryan into the cot they’d set up in one of Bobby’s infinite ‘spare’ rooms. He ran a hand over her head and murmured for her to sleep tight before drawing the door closed behind him.
When Sam got back to their room, Dean was waiting, seated on the end of the bed in his boxers, rubbing his eyes.
“Hey,” Sam said, and Dean jerked his head in what probably passed for hello in Dean’s world.
“Ryan out for the count?” he asked finally.
“Oh, yeah,” Sam said. He pulled his shirt over his head. “I probably could have brushed her teeth and she wouldn’t have stirred. Should I have brushed her teeth?”
Dean snorted.
“Uh. Speaking of Ryan?”
“Yeah?” Sam asked. He stripped off his jeans, figured it was warm enough he could skip the pajama pants.
“You’re not . . . I don’t know, sick of her following you around?”
Sam raised a brow.
“She’s a little girl, Dean. Not a Saint Bernard.”
Dean rolled his eyes.
“I know that, dude. Just . . . when I was twenty-six, last thing I’dve wanted was a seven-year-old dogging my every move. Cramping my style.”
Sam smiled, lowered himself down on the bed. His leg was warm where it pressed the length of his brother’s.
“You had a seven-year old dogging your every move when you were eleven,” Sam reminded him gently, and Dean shrugged.
“Yeah, well.”
“She needs us, Dean. And I . . . I want to do this.”
Dean nodded seriously.
“Yeah, I do too.”
Epilogue