Supernatural: The Bedroom by ion_bond
Title: The Bedroom
Author: ion_bond
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing/characters: Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester (with references to Dean/OMC, Sam/OMC and Sam/Jessica)
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~4200
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural.
Prompt: Dean has always thought of himself as a guy who has sex with other guys, he's not gay, he's not bi, he's not queer, thank you very much. Sam has always embraced his queer identity, and after attending Stanford being a part of the LGBTQQIA community is very important to him personally and socially. Something happens that forces the brothers to discuss and confront their difference of opinion and identity.
Summary: Sometimes, Sam and Dean have to be flexible to do their job.
Warnings: This story takes place sometime during season 3 and contains spoilers for canon events up to that point, as well as profanity, crude language and mention of consensual underage sex.
“Mrs. Coffin?” Dean asks the woman who opens the door. She is tiny and severe-looking in her black clothes, her hair pulled back so tight it must hurt. She has something in her hands, a folded tablecloth printed with daisies. The service was this morning.
“Yes?” Sometimes they're cops in situations like these. Today, they're dressed as civilians, and she regards them not with open mistrust, but with a sort of put-upon sadness. Sam takes a step back on the stoop and hunches his shoulders, trying to make himself nonthreatening. He hates witnessing the grief of strangers, no matter how necessary he knows their presence here is. This, he thinks, is the hardest part of the job.
Dean would say so too, for different reasons. Five minutes ago, on the drive over from the motel, he was cracking tasteless jokes about the dead man's last name, and worrying aloud about the safety of leaving the Impala street-parked in this lower middle-class Baltimore neighborhood. Now he's in the game and he's a totally different person, sober and appropriate. Sam knows he is sizing her up, working out the puzzle, trying to decide what tack to take.
“My name is Dean,” Dean says. “I was a friend of Victor's, out in California.” The three-inch obit in the Sun mentioned that Coffin went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music a couple years back. “I'm so sorry,” he says. “I was so sorry to hear.” He pauses, like he's only what he appears to be, a young guy in work clothes who has driven a long way in the dark to stand in front of someone he doesn't know, searching for the right words. Like he is not, in fact, a professional at this. “Just showing up here - I know it's a little weird.”
Sam watches the woman inside the house narrow her eyes at his brother's dusty boots and for one bad second he's certain she is going to call Dean's bluff, but when she raises them again, they are dark with emotion, and she's stepping out over the threshhold to fold him into an embrace. “Come on in, honey,” she says. “Any friend of Vic's is welcome here.”
People are the last variable, as their dad used to say.
Sam follows Dean and Mrs. Coffin into a sun-drenched room at the front of the house. At least twenty white plastic folding chairs, their backs stamped with the words Seventh Metro Baptist Church, are scattered across the floor. All the regular furniture has been pushed up against the walls to make way for a long folding table, bare except for a stack of paper plates and assorted disposable cutlery. She tosses the tablecloth down on the surface. “Please, have a seat. I was in the middle of clearing all this away. Are you hungry? We have more casseroles than we can eat just now.”
“No ma'am,” Dean says, sinking down onto the sofa against the windows. “No thank you.” There is a battered upright piano in the corner with framed photographs on the back. The largest is a formal black-and-white of a good-looking kid in a cap and gown. The shot is obviously posed, but he is grinning widely, naturally.
Victor Derron Coffin, born in 1983 at Harbor Hospital. Moved out west after high school, studied composition, and wrote music for TV pilots. Almost two years ago, he returned to Baltimore and moved back in with his mother. Died last Wednesday. His body was found in a Dumpster behind the Fell's Point restaurant where he was working, with water in the lungs, but otherwise not a mark on it.
That's what they learned from the paper. It's the third body drowned near (but not in) the Chesapeake Bay in a little over a month, and Dean is thinking some kind of jealous spirit, maybe a Llorona. Sometimes they go after the lost and recovered.
“Does anyone know much about what happened?” Sam asks softly. He's not hoping for any new information - they talked to the coroner this morning - but it's the kind of question normal people ask when someone dies under mysterious circumstances. She will expect them to want to know.
Wordlessly, Mrs. Coffin shakes her head, barely seeming to hear. He realizes that she hasn't made eye contact with him once since they came in off the stoop. All of her attention is concentrated on his brother. It's almost like she's pretending Sam isn't there. She turns back to Dean. “Did you know Vic very well?”
“Pretty well, yeah,” Dean says, and risks a low-wattage smile. “He liked San Francisco, but he was always talking about home. How much he missed it, you know?”
“That surprises me,” Mrs. Coffin says. “He sure never let on when he was here, always moaning and complaining.” Strike one, Sam thinks.
The springs of the sofa creak as Dean leans forward, elbows on his knees, chin up, appealing. He doesn't have much of a gift for reading people, but he is charming and persistent as hell and utterly shameless, so he is good enough at this work - better than he has any right to be, according to their father, who tried to teach them both. Dean is a born con man, and he can flirt with whoever's pushing papers at the Sheriff's Department or the records room like a champ, but Sam is supposed to take the lead with the grieving mamas and other situations for which subtler psychology is needed. But sometimes, like now, Sam just isn't in the right fucking mood.
Besides that, this grieving mama has apparently already decided that she hates his guts. He doesn't know what's up with that, but he can take a hint. He jerks his head delicately toward Dean - it's all you, dude, and settles into the couch cushions, studying the framed pictures.
Other than the big graduation photo, they are mostly casual shots, Victor with groups of friends and with people who look enough like him to be related. He was definitely a handsome young man. Sam pays particular attention to one beach photo, Victor on a boardwalk somewhere with his arm around a redheaded guy about the same age with skinny protruding ribs. The sun is setting behind them. Both of them are wearing bathing suits, and Sam can't help but notice the definition of Victor's naked shoulders, the tight abdominal muscles angling down to the waistband of his bright blue jams, and it's a messed-up thing to be thinking about, he realizes that, because this is somebody's tragedy. It always is.
“Some things just look better from a distance,” Dean is saying to Mrs. Coffin. “California's like that, believe me.” He sneaks a sideways glance at Sam. “What's really important in life is family, though. I think Victor knew that. That's why he left, right?”
Mrs. Coffin nods. She now is regarding Dean with a kind of focused need that pains Sam. “Would you like to see his bedroom?” she asks. “Maybe you'd like to see his things?”
Sometimes, when the subject of an investigation is a woman, Sam and Dean ask for this favor. It's easy when it's a roommate they're talking to, but even bereaved families usually understand. They look at Dean's face and think about their daughter and they make certain assumptions. It's more rare that that someone would offer. Especially the mother of a son.
Sam glances across the room to the miniature figures of the boys on the beach, and finally, he thinks he gets what's going on. “I'll just wait for my brother in here, ma'am,” he says carefully, and yes, he is met by a look of surprise, followed by something much friendlier than he's seen from her so far. He's not Dean's new boyfriend. He's not Victor's replacement.
They leave him alone and the house is almost totally silent. Someone drives by slowly on the street outside; Sam hears the Top 40 hit playing on the stereo, that Shakira song with whatshisname, Wyclef. Then they turn the corner and the music fades and becomes inaudible. A dog is barking a few yards away. He wonders what Victor's room is like. He wonders if Dean has figured out the game yet. He'll play along, Sam hopes, but he's not going to like it.
The first time he ever saw his brother with another man - or boy, actually - was when Dean was in high school. John was off somewhere on a job that week. One of Sam's major lingering regrets is that neither of them ever tested Sam's deeply-held suspicion that their father would have flipped his shit if he'd known. And yeah, Dean might say that it was unfair to the old man's memory, to assume that way, but Dean was the one who waited until he was out of the state to get freaky on the brown loveseat, two pairs of jeans twisted together in a pile on the floor and the whole rental unit reeking of Adidas Sport. Sam came home early from some after school program, and Dean practically pushed this guy out the door, grinning though, like he couldn't help himself.
There were no explanations or excuses, and the next week, it was a girl from the Dance Team again. But that wasn't the only time.
What would it be like, to have a parent who knew you were queer and who didn't seem to mind? Who was kind to your lovers and not just accepting, but protective of you? Sam really can't fathom it. He spent his teenage years confused. By the time he figured out that he himself was bisexual, at Stanford, he was not even on speaking terms with his family, but he was not going to be in the closet, not for anyone - he promised that to himself. He went to the LGBT Community Resources Center and joined the Gender Neutral Housing Task-force. He came out to all the other dishwashers at Tortilla Flats. Later, when he started seeing Jess, he told her first thing.
The one guy he ever dated seriously - Dustin, spring of his sophomore year - called him out about the family thing once, threw it in his face once during a fight, actually. He said it was awfully convenient that he was already estranged from them, Sam still remembers that. Obviously, he had no idea.
He finally came out to his brother after a couple of weeks on the road together. Sam thought it would clear the air for Dean, too, but he just sat there in the front seat of the Impala, nodding, but not saying anything. He did tone down the casual homophobia after that, although he can't seem to be able to resist calling Sam a homo any time he orders a latte.
Whatever. They have an understanding, sort of.
He does wish he'd told his dad, though.
Someone is at the door, fumbling with the lock, and he sits up straighter. A woman comes into the room with a baby girl on her hip. She, too, is dressed formally in black, but the child, who is maybe three, is wearing a bright pink outfit, and she has pink and white beads in her hair. She stares at Sam curiously with round eyes.
“Hey,” he says. He remains seated, conscious that this might be rude, but not wanting to loom over them in their own living room. “My name is Sam Winchester. I'm here with my brother to pay our respects. He's in the back with your mom, I guess.”
The woman nods shortly, stepping out of her high heels. “Teresa Coffin-Daley. This is my daughter Chanel. Ex-boyfriend?”
“Yeah, um, he is.” Sam feels obscurely guilty for saying so, even though he knows, A., that Dean does in fact still sleep with the occasional man, most recently some guy with dreadlocks he picked up in a bar in Jackson Hole two weeks ago, B., that there is nothing wrong with sleeping with men even if Dean himself didn't, and C., that Dean would gleefully say the same about him if the situation was reversed and tease him about it later. “I'm so sorry about Victor,” he says.
“Thank you.” She bends and deposits the little girl on the carpet near Sam's feet. “Are you staying for supper?”
“Thanks, but we might have to hit the road. I'm not sure, but I think Dean has work tomorrow.” He's not sure how long he can count on Dean to play along.
“I've got to take a quick shower. Do me a favor and keep an eye on her?”
“Sure. Hi there,” he says to Chanel. She waves a tiny hand at him, and then sticks her thumb in her mouth. Sam listens to the water run and looks for Teresa's face in the pictures on the piano. She's in two of them. They look happy.
The others come out of the bedroom together a few minutes later, and Dean is grinning. He waves something at Sam - a little notebook with a red cover - over Mrs. Coffin's head before stuffing it into the waistband, and gives him a thumbs-up.
“Hello, babydoll!” Mrs. Coffin scoops Chanel into her arms and holds her up. “This is my granddaughter. Baby, this is Dean. He was a very good friend of your uncle Victor's. He and his brother are going to eat with us tonight.”
“I'm sorry, Mrs. Coffin, but we can't,” Sam says. “We've got to drive back. Dean has work in the morning. Don't you, Dean.”
“Um, yeah.”
“That's too bad.” Teresa is in the doorway again, wrapped in a bathrobe now. Her hair hangs down wet onto her shoulders and she's checking out his brother, not in a prurient way, not under the circumstances, but with distinct proprietary interest. “Mama, can you take Chanel? I'll show them out.” She is very pretty - very much like Victor in the photos - and Sam prays that Dean has bought a clue and won't embarrass them as he follows her to the door.
“Look,” she says, when they're on the stoop out of hearing range. “We all knew Vic dated white boys. We supported him - we did. I'm sorry we never knew about you. He just didn't always share the details.”
“It's OK,” Dean says. “I understand.” Sam scuffs the toe of his boot into the white marble of the top step, not daring to look at him.
“I think you should be aware, my mother is genuinely happy to have you here. You don't have to run right off if you don't want to. Whatever he wanted to do was OK with her. He was her special boy, her firstborn. For some reason, she thinks Chanel is too young to hear about about him being gay.” Teresa shrugs. “Her house, her rules. But don't let the euphemisms fool you. She understood, and Victor was loved here first.” It's a reassurance, or a threat.
“I'm really sorry,” Dean says. “He was a great guy. I'll ... I'll really miss him.”
He sounds so much like he means it that it twists Sam up inside. Dean is on first-name terms with deception. It's the job. Demons lie, and hunters do too. A good lie comes from a true feeling, though. That's straight from the John Winchester school of Method acting.
Who has Dean loved? Who does he miss?
Teresa narrows her eyes at him, sad and skeptical and fond all at once. “Yeah," she says. "We know.”
The place where they're staying is downtown, right near the highway on-ramp. The street looks seedy after dark, and the vending machines in the almost empty motel parking lot outside are encased in mesh cages, with holes just big enough for you to punch in your numbers and retrieve your junk food.
Their room also leaves something to be desired. There are no little bottles of shampoo in the bathroom, for one thing, and while there is a tiny coffee maker in the room, there's no coffee or filters. Sam figures out how to use it to boil water and mixes up Styrofoam cups of instant coffee from the emergency jar he keeps in his duffel bag, then cooks three packages of ramen right in the coffee pot.
“Roadhouse Blues” by the Doors plays tinnily from the laptop's speakers. Perversely, Dean is on the internet finding user reviews of the motel. “Listen to this,” he says. “Some guy says he took a stripper here because it was the closest place to the club he was at, but she left when she saw the condition of the bed linens.” He whistles. “We should have looked into this stuff before we paid up.”
“You picked the place.”
“Sure, 'cause I didn't want to stay at a fucking Econo Lodge.” He takes a pull from his coffee and spits it immediately into the trash between the beds.
“That's disgusting,” Sam says.
“Yeah, no kidding. What the hell? Why does this taste like molasses?”
“It's the grocery store brand. We need to get new cards. Eat your soup and stop bitching.”
“We could have had a nice, home-cooked meal but no. I have work tomorrow.”
“I'm sorry,” Sam says. “I was trying to help you out.”
“What? You don't trust me to pretend to like cock for one hour while we eat?”
It takes an effort to resist pointing out that Dean does like cock. Sam wants to have a productive, civil conversation about this. He's been waiting for years, actually. “Obviously, the situation made you uncomfortable.”
“I'm never uncomfortable,” Dean says. “Did I look uncomfortable to you?”
Sam reaches for the coffee pot of noodles and thinks about it. “OK. You were good. Better than I expected, honestly.”
“What did you think I was going to do, freak out in front of that poor guy's mom? I know this shit isn't a joke. It's not like the time that lady at the bed-and-breakfast thought we were a couple. Somebody died.”
“People died at the B and B,” Sam points out. “People always die.” All of a sudden, he's tired, and they still has a hundred pages of handwritten journal to go through tonight or tomorrow and the family of Melissa Wells, La Llorona's presumed victim number two, to interview. Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel, that's how the song goes. He's sick of it. He doesn't know how Dean keeps from getting sick of it too. “If it was me,” he says, “if it was me that she thought was the boyfriend, this would be a joke to you too.”
“Feel free to make fun of me if you want,” Dean says piously. “I don't think it's very funny, that's all.”
Sam feels frustration boiling up inside him. “The same rules just never apply to you, ever. Is that it?”
“What?”
They've had this fight before. He must know what's coming. “You sleep with men, that makes you queer, Dean.”
“Why is this such a big deal to you? You're my brother. I've never hidden anything from you.” He throws himself back onto the bed, almost violently. “I fucking couldn't, even if I wanted to.”
“Yeah, but you're lying. You're lying about yourself to everybody.”
“In case you haven't noticed, that's what we do. We lie all the time. You lie too, Joan of Arc.”
“At least I know who I am.”
“I know who I am, Sammy.” He says this like he's speaking to the stupidest person in the world. “I don't need to join a club to know and I don't need to register to vote. Why do we have to talk about every single thing until it's beaten down into the ground? I just want to do what I do and feel what I feel. I don't want to talk about it. I don't think I have time.”
And that's it. One oblique mention of the deal, and Sam knows he's done. He thinks of all the times he's bullied his brother in the last couple months - about Dad's death, about Dean's own impending death - and he feels like an asshole. Maybe if they had a different life, things would be different. Maybe he is the way he is because he had a different life once, for a while.
“OK,” he says, and he gets up and shuts off the light. “I'm sorry.”
“What do you want?” Dean says a few minutes later, in the dark. The combative edge is gone from his voice; he's really asking.
“I don't know,” Sam tells him.
It's maybe a month later -- long after the Weeping Woman is salted and burned, anyway -- when Sam decides to clear out the back seat of the Impala. Dean's inside the Williston, Vermont rest stop, one of their favorites because it has wi-fi and gives out free cups of coffee.
He heaves their duffels on top of the car and starts pulling out fast food cups and plastic bags and newspapers to throw away. There's a bunch of notes back here and credit card applications, and half a telephone directory from Beloit, Wisconsin, and hey, there's that ticket from the MassPike that they couldn't find when it was time to pay the toll yesterday. By the time he's done, Dean is coming back with the coffee, walking funny because the laptop is pinned between his torso and his left arm so that he can carry both cups and a paper bag streaked with grease in his hands.
“Cider doughnuts!” he says triumphantly.
“Watch it.” Sam takes the computer from him. “Next time bring the case.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He picks up the red leather book from where Sam put it on the hood. “Is this the journal? From that kid in Baltimore? Was there anything dirty in it?”
Sam was the one who had read it, the first half in the diner around the corner from the motel over breakfast, the rest in the car while Dean drove them to Annapolis. “Maybe,” he says. “It's none of your business. Wasn't really mine either.”
“He have money problems? A rough breakup?”
“What do you want to know, Dean?”
His brother shrugs. “Just wondering why that guy left San Francisco, what with it being the gayest city in the free world and everything. Something must have happened, right?”
“Family,” Sam says. “Like you told his mom. He really did just want to be with his family.”
“Really?” Dean looks surprised and delighted, almost too surprised and delighted - like he arranged this somehow to prove a point.
“Did you read it too?” Sam asks suspiciously.
“Nah.”
Part of Sam, deep down inside, believes that everything should be fair. He was obsessed with the idea as a kid, and even now that he knows that the world is much, much too complicated for it to be possible, he still has trouble letting it go. Sometimes he feels like he always loses the arguments they have and always will, right up until the day they drag Dean down to hell, not because Dean is smarter than him or any more ruthless, but because his brother just won't give in no matter what. Dean will never admit to caring what anyone else thinks of him. He will never admit to being scared, or wrong.
Sam's not like that. It was a betrayal, when he left and went to California, but he's glad he went, and he's most of all glad he came back home. He's told Dean that before, and he'll tell him again. It would be nice to get some kind of an admission in return, but he's not going to get one, and that's OK with him, really.
He's been envisioning himself as the Vic in this situation, but maybe it would be instructive to try and think of Dean as the wayward son, the one who is ready to leave the place he belongs. Sam's sure as hell not the only person in the world who's ever had to sacrifice for family.
“There were pictures of him all over that house,” Dean says.
“Yeah. I remember.”
“Did you see the one where he was bare-chested?” He raises his eyebrows, a little self-consciously, Sam thinks, but not mockingly. “Damn. Guy was cut.”
“Sure.”
“I'd tap that,” Dean says. “If he wasn't, you know, dead.”
“Right,” says Sam and opens the passenger door.
FIN.
Author: ion_bond
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing/characters: Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester (with references to Dean/OMC, Sam/OMC and Sam/Jessica)
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~4200
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural.
Prompt: Dean has always thought of himself as a guy who has sex with other guys, he's not gay, he's not bi, he's not queer, thank you very much. Sam has always embraced his queer identity, and after attending Stanford being a part of the LGBTQQIA community is very important to him personally and socially. Something happens that forces the brothers to discuss and confront their difference of opinion and identity.
Summary: Sometimes, Sam and Dean have to be flexible to do their job.
Warnings: This story takes place sometime during season 3 and contains spoilers for canon events up to that point, as well as profanity, crude language and mention of consensual underage sex.
“Mrs. Coffin?” Dean asks the woman who opens the door. She is tiny and severe-looking in her black clothes, her hair pulled back so tight it must hurt. She has something in her hands, a folded tablecloth printed with daisies. The service was this morning.
“Yes?” Sometimes they're cops in situations like these. Today, they're dressed as civilians, and she regards them not with open mistrust, but with a sort of put-upon sadness. Sam takes a step back on the stoop and hunches his shoulders, trying to make himself nonthreatening. He hates witnessing the grief of strangers, no matter how necessary he knows their presence here is. This, he thinks, is the hardest part of the job.
Dean would say so too, for different reasons. Five minutes ago, on the drive over from the motel, he was cracking tasteless jokes about the dead man's last name, and worrying aloud about the safety of leaving the Impala street-parked in this lower middle-class Baltimore neighborhood. Now he's in the game and he's a totally different person, sober and appropriate. Sam knows he is sizing her up, working out the puzzle, trying to decide what tack to take.
“My name is Dean,” Dean says. “I was a friend of Victor's, out in California.” The three-inch obit in the Sun mentioned that Coffin went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music a couple years back. “I'm so sorry,” he says. “I was so sorry to hear.” He pauses, like he's only what he appears to be, a young guy in work clothes who has driven a long way in the dark to stand in front of someone he doesn't know, searching for the right words. Like he is not, in fact, a professional at this. “Just showing up here - I know it's a little weird.”
Sam watches the woman inside the house narrow her eyes at his brother's dusty boots and for one bad second he's certain she is going to call Dean's bluff, but when she raises them again, they are dark with emotion, and she's stepping out over the threshhold to fold him into an embrace. “Come on in, honey,” she says. “Any friend of Vic's is welcome here.”
People are the last variable, as their dad used to say.
Sam follows Dean and Mrs. Coffin into a sun-drenched room at the front of the house. At least twenty white plastic folding chairs, their backs stamped with the words Seventh Metro Baptist Church, are scattered across the floor. All the regular furniture has been pushed up against the walls to make way for a long folding table, bare except for a stack of paper plates and assorted disposable cutlery. She tosses the tablecloth down on the surface. “Please, have a seat. I was in the middle of clearing all this away. Are you hungry? We have more casseroles than we can eat just now.”
“No ma'am,” Dean says, sinking down onto the sofa against the windows. “No thank you.” There is a battered upright piano in the corner with framed photographs on the back. The largest is a formal black-and-white of a good-looking kid in a cap and gown. The shot is obviously posed, but he is grinning widely, naturally.
Victor Derron Coffin, born in 1983 at Harbor Hospital. Moved out west after high school, studied composition, and wrote music for TV pilots. Almost two years ago, he returned to Baltimore and moved back in with his mother. Died last Wednesday. His body was found in a Dumpster behind the Fell's Point restaurant where he was working, with water in the lungs, but otherwise not a mark on it.
That's what they learned from the paper. It's the third body drowned near (but not in) the Chesapeake Bay in a little over a month, and Dean is thinking some kind of jealous spirit, maybe a Llorona. Sometimes they go after the lost and recovered.
“Does anyone know much about what happened?” Sam asks softly. He's not hoping for any new information - they talked to the coroner this morning - but it's the kind of question normal people ask when someone dies under mysterious circumstances. She will expect them to want to know.
Wordlessly, Mrs. Coffin shakes her head, barely seeming to hear. He realizes that she hasn't made eye contact with him once since they came in off the stoop. All of her attention is concentrated on his brother. It's almost like she's pretending Sam isn't there. She turns back to Dean. “Did you know Vic very well?”
“Pretty well, yeah,” Dean says, and risks a low-wattage smile. “He liked San Francisco, but he was always talking about home. How much he missed it, you know?”
“That surprises me,” Mrs. Coffin says. “He sure never let on when he was here, always moaning and complaining.” Strike one, Sam thinks.
The springs of the sofa creak as Dean leans forward, elbows on his knees, chin up, appealing. He doesn't have much of a gift for reading people, but he is charming and persistent as hell and utterly shameless, so he is good enough at this work - better than he has any right to be, according to their father, who tried to teach them both. Dean is a born con man, and he can flirt with whoever's pushing papers at the Sheriff's Department or the records room like a champ, but Sam is supposed to take the lead with the grieving mamas and other situations for which subtler psychology is needed. But sometimes, like now, Sam just isn't in the right fucking mood.
Besides that, this grieving mama has apparently already decided that she hates his guts. He doesn't know what's up with that, but he can take a hint. He jerks his head delicately toward Dean - it's all you, dude, and settles into the couch cushions, studying the framed pictures.
Other than the big graduation photo, they are mostly casual shots, Victor with groups of friends and with people who look enough like him to be related. He was definitely a handsome young man. Sam pays particular attention to one beach photo, Victor on a boardwalk somewhere with his arm around a redheaded guy about the same age with skinny protruding ribs. The sun is setting behind them. Both of them are wearing bathing suits, and Sam can't help but notice the definition of Victor's naked shoulders, the tight abdominal muscles angling down to the waistband of his bright blue jams, and it's a messed-up thing to be thinking about, he realizes that, because this is somebody's tragedy. It always is.
“Some things just look better from a distance,” Dean is saying to Mrs. Coffin. “California's like that, believe me.” He sneaks a sideways glance at Sam. “What's really important in life is family, though. I think Victor knew that. That's why he left, right?”
Mrs. Coffin nods. She now is regarding Dean with a kind of focused need that pains Sam. “Would you like to see his bedroom?” she asks. “Maybe you'd like to see his things?”
Sometimes, when the subject of an investigation is a woman, Sam and Dean ask for this favor. It's easy when it's a roommate they're talking to, but even bereaved families usually understand. They look at Dean's face and think about their daughter and they make certain assumptions. It's more rare that that someone would offer. Especially the mother of a son.
Sam glances across the room to the miniature figures of the boys on the beach, and finally, he thinks he gets what's going on. “I'll just wait for my brother in here, ma'am,” he says carefully, and yes, he is met by a look of surprise, followed by something much friendlier than he's seen from her so far. He's not Dean's new boyfriend. He's not Victor's replacement.
They leave him alone and the house is almost totally silent. Someone drives by slowly on the street outside; Sam hears the Top 40 hit playing on the stereo, that Shakira song with whatshisname, Wyclef. Then they turn the corner and the music fades and becomes inaudible. A dog is barking a few yards away. He wonders what Victor's room is like. He wonders if Dean has figured out the game yet. He'll play along, Sam hopes, but he's not going to like it.
The first time he ever saw his brother with another man - or boy, actually - was when Dean was in high school. John was off somewhere on a job that week. One of Sam's major lingering regrets is that neither of them ever tested Sam's deeply-held suspicion that their father would have flipped his shit if he'd known. And yeah, Dean might say that it was unfair to the old man's memory, to assume that way, but Dean was the one who waited until he was out of the state to get freaky on the brown loveseat, two pairs of jeans twisted together in a pile on the floor and the whole rental unit reeking of Adidas Sport. Sam came home early from some after school program, and Dean practically pushed this guy out the door, grinning though, like he couldn't help himself.
There were no explanations or excuses, and the next week, it was a girl from the Dance Team again. But that wasn't the only time.
What would it be like, to have a parent who knew you were queer and who didn't seem to mind? Who was kind to your lovers and not just accepting, but protective of you? Sam really can't fathom it. He spent his teenage years confused. By the time he figured out that he himself was bisexual, at Stanford, he was not even on speaking terms with his family, but he was not going to be in the closet, not for anyone - he promised that to himself. He went to the LGBT Community Resources Center and joined the Gender Neutral Housing Task-force. He came out to all the other dishwashers at Tortilla Flats. Later, when he started seeing Jess, he told her first thing.
The one guy he ever dated seriously - Dustin, spring of his sophomore year - called him out about the family thing once, threw it in his face once during a fight, actually. He said it was awfully convenient that he was already estranged from them, Sam still remembers that. Obviously, he had no idea.
He finally came out to his brother after a couple of weeks on the road together. Sam thought it would clear the air for Dean, too, but he just sat there in the front seat of the Impala, nodding, but not saying anything. He did tone down the casual homophobia after that, although he can't seem to be able to resist calling Sam a homo any time he orders a latte.
Whatever. They have an understanding, sort of.
He does wish he'd told his dad, though.
Someone is at the door, fumbling with the lock, and he sits up straighter. A woman comes into the room with a baby girl on her hip. She, too, is dressed formally in black, but the child, who is maybe three, is wearing a bright pink outfit, and she has pink and white beads in her hair. She stares at Sam curiously with round eyes.
“Hey,” he says. He remains seated, conscious that this might be rude, but not wanting to loom over them in their own living room. “My name is Sam Winchester. I'm here with my brother to pay our respects. He's in the back with your mom, I guess.”
The woman nods shortly, stepping out of her high heels. “Teresa Coffin-Daley. This is my daughter Chanel. Ex-boyfriend?”
“Yeah, um, he is.” Sam feels obscurely guilty for saying so, even though he knows, A., that Dean does in fact still sleep with the occasional man, most recently some guy with dreadlocks he picked up in a bar in Jackson Hole two weeks ago, B., that there is nothing wrong with sleeping with men even if Dean himself didn't, and C., that Dean would gleefully say the same about him if the situation was reversed and tease him about it later. “I'm so sorry about Victor,” he says.
“Thank you.” She bends and deposits the little girl on the carpet near Sam's feet. “Are you staying for supper?”
“Thanks, but we might have to hit the road. I'm not sure, but I think Dean has work tomorrow.” He's not sure how long he can count on Dean to play along.
“I've got to take a quick shower. Do me a favor and keep an eye on her?”
“Sure. Hi there,” he says to Chanel. She waves a tiny hand at him, and then sticks her thumb in her mouth. Sam listens to the water run and looks for Teresa's face in the pictures on the piano. She's in two of them. They look happy.
The others come out of the bedroom together a few minutes later, and Dean is grinning. He waves something at Sam - a little notebook with a red cover - over Mrs. Coffin's head before stuffing it into the waistband, and gives him a thumbs-up.
“Hello, babydoll!” Mrs. Coffin scoops Chanel into her arms and holds her up. “This is my granddaughter. Baby, this is Dean. He was a very good friend of your uncle Victor's. He and his brother are going to eat with us tonight.”
“I'm sorry, Mrs. Coffin, but we can't,” Sam says. “We've got to drive back. Dean has work in the morning. Don't you, Dean.”
“Um, yeah.”
“That's too bad.” Teresa is in the doorway again, wrapped in a bathrobe now. Her hair hangs down wet onto her shoulders and she's checking out his brother, not in a prurient way, not under the circumstances, but with distinct proprietary interest. “Mama, can you take Chanel? I'll show them out.” She is very pretty - very much like Victor in the photos - and Sam prays that Dean has bought a clue and won't embarrass them as he follows her to the door.
“Look,” she says, when they're on the stoop out of hearing range. “We all knew Vic dated white boys. We supported him - we did. I'm sorry we never knew about you. He just didn't always share the details.”
“It's OK,” Dean says. “I understand.” Sam scuffs the toe of his boot into the white marble of the top step, not daring to look at him.
“I think you should be aware, my mother is genuinely happy to have you here. You don't have to run right off if you don't want to. Whatever he wanted to do was OK with her. He was her special boy, her firstborn. For some reason, she thinks Chanel is too young to hear about about him being gay.” Teresa shrugs. “Her house, her rules. But don't let the euphemisms fool you. She understood, and Victor was loved here first.” It's a reassurance, or a threat.
“I'm really sorry,” Dean says. “He was a great guy. I'll ... I'll really miss him.”
He sounds so much like he means it that it twists Sam up inside. Dean is on first-name terms with deception. It's the job. Demons lie, and hunters do too. A good lie comes from a true feeling, though. That's straight from the John Winchester school of Method acting.
Who has Dean loved? Who does he miss?
Teresa narrows her eyes at him, sad and skeptical and fond all at once. “Yeah," she says. "We know.”
The place where they're staying is downtown, right near the highway on-ramp. The street looks seedy after dark, and the vending machines in the almost empty motel parking lot outside are encased in mesh cages, with holes just big enough for you to punch in your numbers and retrieve your junk food.
Their room also leaves something to be desired. There are no little bottles of shampoo in the bathroom, for one thing, and while there is a tiny coffee maker in the room, there's no coffee or filters. Sam figures out how to use it to boil water and mixes up Styrofoam cups of instant coffee from the emergency jar he keeps in his duffel bag, then cooks three packages of ramen right in the coffee pot.
“Roadhouse Blues” by the Doors plays tinnily from the laptop's speakers. Perversely, Dean is on the internet finding user reviews of the motel. “Listen to this,” he says. “Some guy says he took a stripper here because it was the closest place to the club he was at, but she left when she saw the condition of the bed linens.” He whistles. “We should have looked into this stuff before we paid up.”
“You picked the place.”
“Sure, 'cause I didn't want to stay at a fucking Econo Lodge.” He takes a pull from his coffee and spits it immediately into the trash between the beds.
“That's disgusting,” Sam says.
“Yeah, no kidding. What the hell? Why does this taste like molasses?”
“It's the grocery store brand. We need to get new cards. Eat your soup and stop bitching.”
“We could have had a nice, home-cooked meal but no. I have work tomorrow.”
“I'm sorry,” Sam says. “I was trying to help you out.”
“What? You don't trust me to pretend to like cock for one hour while we eat?”
It takes an effort to resist pointing out that Dean does like cock. Sam wants to have a productive, civil conversation about this. He's been waiting for years, actually. “Obviously, the situation made you uncomfortable.”
“I'm never uncomfortable,” Dean says. “Did I look uncomfortable to you?”
Sam reaches for the coffee pot of noodles and thinks about it. “OK. You were good. Better than I expected, honestly.”
“What did you think I was going to do, freak out in front of that poor guy's mom? I know this shit isn't a joke. It's not like the time that lady at the bed-and-breakfast thought we were a couple. Somebody died.”
“People died at the B and B,” Sam points out. “People always die.” All of a sudden, he's tired, and they still has a hundred pages of handwritten journal to go through tonight or tomorrow and the family of Melissa Wells, La Llorona's presumed victim number two, to interview. Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel, that's how the song goes. He's sick of it. He doesn't know how Dean keeps from getting sick of it too. “If it was me,” he says, “if it was me that she thought was the boyfriend, this would be a joke to you too.”
“Feel free to make fun of me if you want,” Dean says piously. “I don't think it's very funny, that's all.”
Sam feels frustration boiling up inside him. “The same rules just never apply to you, ever. Is that it?”
“What?”
They've had this fight before. He must know what's coming. “You sleep with men, that makes you queer, Dean.”
“Why is this such a big deal to you? You're my brother. I've never hidden anything from you.” He throws himself back onto the bed, almost violently. “I fucking couldn't, even if I wanted to.”
“Yeah, but you're lying. You're lying about yourself to everybody.”
“In case you haven't noticed, that's what we do. We lie all the time. You lie too, Joan of Arc.”
“At least I know who I am.”
“I know who I am, Sammy.” He says this like he's speaking to the stupidest person in the world. “I don't need to join a club to know and I don't need to register to vote. Why do we have to talk about every single thing until it's beaten down into the ground? I just want to do what I do and feel what I feel. I don't want to talk about it. I don't think I have time.”
And that's it. One oblique mention of the deal, and Sam knows he's done. He thinks of all the times he's bullied his brother in the last couple months - about Dad's death, about Dean's own impending death - and he feels like an asshole. Maybe if they had a different life, things would be different. Maybe he is the way he is because he had a different life once, for a while.
“OK,” he says, and he gets up and shuts off the light. “I'm sorry.”
“What do you want?” Dean says a few minutes later, in the dark. The combative edge is gone from his voice; he's really asking.
“I don't know,” Sam tells him.
It's maybe a month later -- long after the Weeping Woman is salted and burned, anyway -- when Sam decides to clear out the back seat of the Impala. Dean's inside the Williston, Vermont rest stop, one of their favorites because it has wi-fi and gives out free cups of coffee.
He heaves their duffels on top of the car and starts pulling out fast food cups and plastic bags and newspapers to throw away. There's a bunch of notes back here and credit card applications, and half a telephone directory from Beloit, Wisconsin, and hey, there's that ticket from the MassPike that they couldn't find when it was time to pay the toll yesterday. By the time he's done, Dean is coming back with the coffee, walking funny because the laptop is pinned between his torso and his left arm so that he can carry both cups and a paper bag streaked with grease in his hands.
“Cider doughnuts!” he says triumphantly.
“Watch it.” Sam takes the computer from him. “Next time bring the case.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He picks up the red leather book from where Sam put it on the hood. “Is this the journal? From that kid in Baltimore? Was there anything dirty in it?”
Sam was the one who had read it, the first half in the diner around the corner from the motel over breakfast, the rest in the car while Dean drove them to Annapolis. “Maybe,” he says. “It's none of your business. Wasn't really mine either.”
“He have money problems? A rough breakup?”
“What do you want to know, Dean?”
His brother shrugs. “Just wondering why that guy left San Francisco, what with it being the gayest city in the free world and everything. Something must have happened, right?”
“Family,” Sam says. “Like you told his mom. He really did just want to be with his family.”
“Really?” Dean looks surprised and delighted, almost too surprised and delighted - like he arranged this somehow to prove a point.
“Did you read it too?” Sam asks suspiciously.
“Nah.”
Part of Sam, deep down inside, believes that everything should be fair. He was obsessed with the idea as a kid, and even now that he knows that the world is much, much too complicated for it to be possible, he still has trouble letting it go. Sometimes he feels like he always loses the arguments they have and always will, right up until the day they drag Dean down to hell, not because Dean is smarter than him or any more ruthless, but because his brother just won't give in no matter what. Dean will never admit to caring what anyone else thinks of him. He will never admit to being scared, or wrong.
Sam's not like that. It was a betrayal, when he left and went to California, but he's glad he went, and he's most of all glad he came back home. He's told Dean that before, and he'll tell him again. It would be nice to get some kind of an admission in return, but he's not going to get one, and that's OK with him, really.
He's been envisioning himself as the Vic in this situation, but maybe it would be instructive to try and think of Dean as the wayward son, the one who is ready to leave the place he belongs. Sam's sure as hell not the only person in the world who's ever had to sacrifice for family.
“There were pictures of him all over that house,” Dean says.
“Yeah. I remember.”
“Did you see the one where he was bare-chested?” He raises his eyebrows, a little self-consciously, Sam thinks, but not mockingly. “Damn. Guy was cut.”
“Sure.”
“I'd tap that,” Dean says. “If he wasn't, you know, dead.”
“Right,” says Sam and opens the passenger door.
FIN.