There's a Hell of a Universe Next Door (Chapter Two)
Title: There's a Hell of a Universe Next Door
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Sam/Dean, Sam/Dean (this will totally make sense if you read it)
Warnings: AU (sort of), dub-con (sort of), suicide (sort of), mental illness, violence
Rated: R-NC17
Word count: 28,000// this part: 6,858
Summary: There's a big difference between dying and never being born.
There’s a Hell of a Universe Next Door
II.
Cause I don't want to get over love
I could listen to my therapist,
Pretend you don't exist
And not have to dream of what I dream of
The Magnetic Fields
The curtains were pulled open again when Dean came awake and the light was fainter than when he‘d crawled into bed, but it was still too much. Still too invasive.
And all the noise in his head, all the fear and that clawing sense of wrongness was back. The wind was blowing through that hole in his soul again and Dean felt his eyes water with it. “No,” he moaned, turning his face into his blanket. “Sam,” he whispered, holding the name to him like it would save him. “Sam.”
“Dean?”
Dean peeked over the edge of his comforter to find his mother staring at him with wide, green eyes. Her face was a little more pale than usual and her mouth was pinched closed against her teeth. She looked… afraid? That couldn’t be right. His mother was fearless. Besides, Dean had been sleeping, he hadn’t even done anything.
“What’s wrong?” Dean said, sitting up quickly. “Is Dad--?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Mary assured him. “Your father’s fine. He… He just got home. Dean…” She hesitated and frowned at him, looking worried and still upset despite her assurances. “Dean, who were you talking to?”
Dean looked at her blankly.
“Just now,” she insisted.
“I… I wasn’t talking to anybody,” Dean said. He swallowed and looked down at his hands nervously. “I was dreaming.”
“Oh,” Mary said. “Okay, honey. Well… come on down for dinner when you’re ready.”
Dean just wanted to go back to sleep. He didn’t care about dinner, he didn’t want to tell them about his day or see the disappointed look in his father’s eyes when he talked about his visit with Dr. Fraus. He wanted to be back in his head with Sam.
“Okay,” Dean said. “I’ll… I’ll be right down.”
Def Leppard was on the radio in the kitchen when Dean went down to dinner. His dad had turned it down for Mary’s sake so it wouldn’t blast her while she was cooking and probably just because he knew she didn’t like it. John was setting the table when Dean came into the kitchen and he stood there watching them for a little while. It made him happy to see them there like that, to be there with them like that, but it hurt like so much broken glass being ground into his raw open and bleeding heart that it just wasn’t right and he couldn’t shake that feeling even now. He wanted to allow himself to be happy and let that be enough, but it wasn’t. There was still that hollow, whistling place inside him that wouldn’t let him be.
“Hey, Dean,” John said when he noticed him standing there. “You alright, son?”
“Everyone keeps asking me that,” Dean muttered. He smiled to take the sting of annoyance out of his words and John smiled back at him, a little relieved.
“You have a good day?” John asked.
There was a wariness to the question that always made Dean wonder why he even asked it if it bothered him so much, but Dean nodded his head and tried to make his smile genuine.
“That’s good then,” John said. “Your mother made lasagna.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially and glanced toward where Mary was getting the lasagna out of the oven. “She said something about eggplant. Try to be nice.”
Dean made a face and Mary, on her way to the table, gave John a stern look. “It’s good for you,” she said in defense of her lasagna. “You’ll eat it and like it, John Winchester, or you can eat some of the dog’s Kibbles n’ Bits and see how you like that.”
John held his hands up in surrender, grinning. He kissed her cheek when she set the dish down on the potholder in the middle of the table and Mary smiled back at him, mollified.
“I love you guys,” Dean said abruptly. Mary and John both turned to stare at him and Dean fidgeted uneasily under their eyes. “Um… I just wanted you to know,” he said. “That’s all.”
John and Mary exchanged a look, one that they seemed to reserve only for times when Dean did something deeply upsetting. Then they both smiled at him with smiles that didn’t quite reach their eyes.
“Okay, honey,” Mary said.
“We love you, too, son,” John said.
Dean smiled back at them because they needed him to, but he felt really stupid. “Okay,” he said, ducking his head with embarrassment as they finished setting the table and all sat down.
The lasagna with eggplant actually wasn’t that bad and Dean ate with his eyes on his plate while his parents talked. They talked about the shop and about a friend of Mary’s from work and the whole time, Dean could feel them both looking at him. Mary looked more than John and though John was always concerned, Mary was always so sad and Dean hated that he made his mother look like that. She was the most beautiful woman in the world and should never be sad for anything, but it was something he couldn’t help. Something in his blood.
Something genetic? Dean thought maybe so. That would explain why his mother was always so sad and so scared and still always so nice and sweet to him even when he wasn’t. Even when he was Being Crazy or having a Bad Day. She didn’t yell and she had never hit and she blamed herself, so consequentially she took the brunt of Dean’s very worst days. Dean didn’t know why, but he thought maybe his mother did that because he got it from her. He didn’t know his grandparents because they died before he was born, but maybe they had been crazy too and now Dean was but it had skipped his mother and passed over Adam. Maybe Dean had been the lucky winner of some cosmic game of genetic Russian roulette.
He wasn’t supposed to think like that or know things like that, though, so he couldn’t even tell Mary he was sorry or that he forgave her.
The phone rang as they were finishing dinner and Mary went to answer it while Dean and his dad cleared the table. Dean heard enough of Mary’s side of the conversation as he was putting the dishes in the sink to figure out it was Adam on the other end calling from college. He ran water on the plates and hurried to leave the kitchen without being noticed, but he didn’t quite make it.
“Dean, here, come talk to your brother,” Mary said, holding out the phone to him. “He’s coming home in a couple of weeks to visit. He wants to talk to you.”
Dean shook his head emphatically no and avoided taking the phone. “I… I’m tired. I’m going to bed. I… can’t.”
“Honey,” Mary said, disapproving but still patient as always. “Just for a little while. He’s your brother.”
“No,” Dean said, pleading with her with his eyes to understand. “I can’t.”
“This is ridiculous, boy. You lived in this house for eighteen years with him while he was growing up in the room right down the hall from yours,” John said. He wasn’t unkind about it, but he was much more impatient and exasperated with him than Mary. “You never got along much, but you didn’t really start this nonsense until after he moved out, so what gives here?”
“It’s better,” Dean whispered.
“What?” John said, though Dean was pretty sure he’d heard him.
Dean tapped his finger with savage emphasis against his right temple. “It’s better,” he said again, louder. “Still wrong but not always as bad. That’s all. I’m going to bed now, I can’t.”
Dean fled the kitchen and hurried upstairs to his room, leaving them behind to stare after him in confusion. He knew he had confused them, probably hurt Mary’s feelings and Adam’s if he were listening, and probably made his dad a little bit mad. He couldn’t help it, though. Some things just made everything in his head feel like his eyes were crossing and Adam was the worst of those things. It wasn’t Adam’s fault, it wasn’t even Adam that upset him because Adam was a pretty cool kid and always had been, but it was Adam because Adam shouldn’t be there. Adam should never have been there.
~~*~~
Dean tried to sleep that night, he really did, but it wouldn’t happen. He lay there in bed listening to his parents in the house, the cars passing outside, the sound of a dog barking down the block, the news on TV right before his parents went to bed, then he lay there some more and stared at the ceiling. All he wanted to do was the same thing he had been wanting to do since the dreams first started; he wanted to sleep. But sometimes, like now, the drugs worked against him instead of for him and he just couldn’t.
With a regretful sigh, he rolled out of bed and got dressed to leave.
Dean often sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night, so he was good at it by now. He’d been doing it since he was in his early teens, about the time everything up in his head that was just a little messed up started to get really messed up. When he was still going to high school, he’d hitch a ride or walk over to the school, sit on the swing and watch the stars while he listened to the wailing emptiness inside himself, trying to decipher what it meant. After he had to leave public school because he got too bizarre for stressed out teachers at a substandard pay grade to be expected to deal with, he discovered the local community college had an engineering building. The engineering building was ten stories high with access to the roof and they didn’t lock it up until midnight. He would go up there and stay all night, spread his coat out on the floor and lay down on it to stare up at the sky and bask in the relative silence of being alone on top of the world.
The first time he did that, his mother and father were in a panic when he returned home. The maintenance people didn’t go through and unlock the doors until eight in the morning, so Dean hadn’t gotten home early enough to sneak back into the house unnoticed. Dean calmed them both by telling them the truth--he had gone to the school because he couldn’t sleep and he had fallen asleep. They believed him and, unlike most parents would have done, they let it drop.
Now that he was an adult, his parents were used to it all and the only real precautions he took when leaving the house were to tread softly and carefully lock the door behind himself when he left. He didn’t even leave a note, they knew.
The local community college was three miles east of their house, but Dean didn’t mind the walk. On a good night when everyone was abed or out on the town somewhere else, he could hunch up his shoulders and watch the speckled pavement under his feet as he walked, the rhythm of his footsteps a kind of soothing, monotonous form of meditation where he could tune the world out, tune the rhythm out, even sometimes tune out the maddening itch of his own insanity. Lawrence, Kansas was a big city, but they lived in the suburbs so when he walked to the school, most nights were good nights. So good sometimes, he had been known to walk right by the campus and not even notice it until something would make him look up; a shout, a bark, a lewd cat-call.
Dean thought about that now as he walked and it made him smile a little. Then it made him remember Jolene because Jolene didn’t make pervert noises at him, but she didn’t have to. She stared with a lonely, covetous kind of hunger at him that was louder than any appreciative little whistle could have been. And maybe Dean didn’t do that kind of thing or even really think it sounded like fun at all because touching and touching was very no, but he wasn’t stupid or completely ignorant, either. So he climbed up to the roof of the local community college’s engineering building to sleep sometimes; that didn’t make him like some kind of non-functioning Gilbert Grape type retard. Even if he thought sex sounded like a disgusting, invasive waste of time, he still knew that made him even more of a freak because almost no one else thought that. There were magazines, TV commercials, movies, music, it was everywhere. And Jolene was pretty obvious.
And Jolene’s face had been the face of a monster when he saw her earlier. In the excitement of finally learning the name of the man in his dreams--Sam--he had nearly forgotten it. He remembered it now and even the memory made his skin crawl. There were two ways to look at it, the way Dean figured it, and the way most people would look at it, Dean was crazy, therefore Jolene’s face had not been the face of a monster because Dean was crazy and that explained everything. However, as Dean was the crazy person, he liked to think he had a better handle on what was and was not a figment of his imagination or product of his misfiring synapses than these kinds of people. He disagreed. Just because no one else appeared to see it did not make what he had seen unreal. It was very much real.
Something had happened to Jolene’s face. How did no one else see it, though? It wasn’t like a little scar or a freckle, it was her entire face. It was God playing twister with her facial tissue.
It was gross and the very minor possibility that it was something in his head and not something really real just made it even worse because that? That was new.
It was only 10:15 when Dean got to the school and because he looked like any other average guy that might be a middle-aged returning student, no one ever bothered him. Drunk people sometimes tried to pick him up and not-so-drunk people sometimes tried to talk to him, but Dean was pretty good at extricating himself from such unwanted situations. ‘Accidental’ rudeness was one of the few perks of being certifiably whacked and he was pretty good at playing the crazy card if the circumstances demanded it.
Thankfully, tonight circumstances did not and he took the stairs up to the roof without meeting anyone along the way. Of course, most people would never take the stairs all the way to the tenth floor because that meant climbing twenty flights of stairs, twenty-five stairs per flight, and people were always in a hurry. Although, by the time he reached the roof Dean was usually a little dizzy from climbing in circles to the top like that, he didn’t really mind it that much. Dizziness was nothing, comparatively speaking. Elevators were deathtraps.
When he stepped out onto the roof, Dean leaned his back against the closed door, let his head thump back against it, and felt in his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter. With his eyes closed, he could hear the steam rising through the ventilation, the sound of the campus power plant not far away, the scratching scuffle of brittle little cockroach feet, and very distantly, the bass of music played way too loud coming across the campus from the resident halls. The familiarity of it was intensely soothing and he thought perhaps he would sleep after all, just not at home in his bed tonight.
He fumbled a cigarette out of the pack without looking, put it in his mouth, and lit it with a satisfied grumble as he inhaled.
Something crashed off to his left and Dean’s eyes snapped instantly open, searching. Someone was on the roof with him, probably just another student who had wandered up there drunk and passed out or one of the maintenance people having a cigarette of their own before locking the building up for the night, but Dean still stood away from the door and craned his neck to see.
“Hello?” he called softly, not sure if he really wanted a response if it was going to be a campus employee. They’d demand to see his student ID, then make him leave whether he had one or didn’t. He didn’t, though he could have obtained a fake one if he wanted it. “Hello? Who’s there?”
Something clattered again followed by a painful groan. Then a gruff, strained voice said, “Me.”
Dean considered this for a minute then, feeling like he was being led straight into the punch-line of a knock-knock joke, he said, “Me who?”
There was no reply for a long time. Then whoever it was coughed, spat something, and managed to pull themselves upright so they could lean around the wall obscuring them from Dean’s sight. Big blue eyes blinked at him in the dark from a face Dean was positive he had never seen before and the stranger said, “It’s you. I made it.”
“You did what?” Dean said, watching him with wary confusion. After all, he wasn’t the only crazy person on the planet and some of the other ones got violent. “Who are you?”
The man with the blue eyes groaned and lifted a hand to rub at his forehead like it pained him. “This introduction seems a bit… redundant, but I am Castiel.”
“Good for you,” Dean said. The strange man said the name like he expected Dean to know it. Dean noticed his tie and long coat and frowned. “Are you a teacher?”
Castiel’s cracked lips quirked in amusement and he shook his head, then winced at the movement. “Sometimes. Most often against my will and better judgment.”
Dean didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing.
After a few minutes, Castiel forced himself to stand straight and peered at Dean in a way that made him deeply uncomfortable. It wasn’t just the usual rude, uncomfortable-making kind of staring, it was more like Dean was a bug of a kind that Castiel almost recognized, but a new and previously undiscovered species of it. It was weird as hell, but that was exactly the impression Dean got; a detached breed of fascination coupled with a sort of strange recognition.
“This is not right,” Castiel muttered to himself. He put his hands in his coat pockets and shrugged his shoulders, hunching them against the light breeze. “I was right. This is wrong.”
“What?” Dean said. He was getting the feeling this was going somewhere, probably unpleasant, that meant he wasn’t going to be left alone to have his nap on the rooftop. “What’s wrong? Um… Are you okay? Maybe--”
“Everything is wrong with you,” Castiel said. “How can you not feel that?”
Dean’s eyes narrowed and he barely restrained himself from decking the man because seriously? He did not need some strange guy he had just accidentally stumbled upon up on a rooftop to tell him he had issues. That was why he had a therapist. “I’m just… I’m gonna go. Let you do… whatever,” Dean mumbled.
He flicked his cigarette away and turned to go back down the stairs and hopefully make it out before he got locked in for the night.
“I will see you again,” Castiel said. “This must be put right. One little thing manages to fall out of place… Your mother should have known better. You should have known better. What were you thinking? ‘There’s a big difference between dying and never being born,’ you said and tell me something, Dean, is there really?”
Dean whipped around, a thrill of some kind of excitement and alarm making his heart leap inexplicably into the back of his throat at these words and that voice taking that oddly familiar tone with him, though he had never in his life met this man. He said, “I never said that--” then stopped.
Castiel was gone and Dean was alone on the rooftop. A moment before that was exactly what he had wanted, but now he wanted to be able to call the man back and demand he explain himself. He looked around, but the rooftop was abandoned, the only company to be had a couple of scurrying cockroaches and the chill wind.
If he didn’t know better, Dean would think he was starting to lose his mind.
~~*~~
After he calmed his racing heart, Dean almost managed to convince himself that he imagined everything. Jolene’s fucked up face and the weirdo talking about his mom and things Dean had said that Dean had never said; all of it. He wasn’t sure when the switch in his mind flipped and he stopped being sure as hell it was all real and started hoping that none of it really was, but somewhere in there it did. By the time he stretched out on his back to relax, the only thing he hoped wasn’t a delusion was the one thing in his life that most closely resembled one: Sam.
Laying there with his head pillowed on his folded coat, staring up at the sky through a lacework pattern of steam rising from the ventilation, Dean counted the stars. It was something he did a lot of the time to help him sleep. He would count stars where other people would count imaginary sheep, but he never ran out and each one was a little different. This time, he was sleepy and counting when he became distracted by the moon.
It was almost full. One more night and it would be full and ready to wane again. There was something about the moon… something he knew… something about the full moon. What was it? People acted funny. People and their neighbors’ many cats acted very strangely around the full moon. The moon pulled the tide. The moon was earth’s only natural satellite. The Man in the Moon. Wolves howled at the moon.
Werewolves…
But that was nonsense, he told himself, though on the brink of sleep, it didn’t much feel like nonsense. It felt like something he had believed to the point of knowing it right down to his bones not so very long ago. Except Dean was a realist. Most people didn’t think so because they found the idea of his extreme mental instability an unlikely companion to reason and rational thinking. But Dean didn’t believe in things like the Man in the Moon or werewolves.
Dean yawned and rolled onto his side, pulling his folded coat in tighter to his chest.
He believed in what he could see and touch and until he ran his fingers through the pelt of a werewolf, they didn’t exist.
“Dean?”
Dean opened his eyes and he was laying on his stomach with his arm wrapped around a lumpy pillow. He blinked in confusion and looked around the small room. A motel room, it looked like, though Dean had never spent the night in a motel in his life. He wanted to twist around and look for the source of that achingly familiar voice that had spoken his name, but instead he ran a hand through his hair and crawled out of the bed, going to the bathroom.
“Damn, man, you scared the hell out of me,” Sam said behind him. “You know you’ve been asleep all day?”
“Oh yeah?” Dean said, and the words were coming out of his mouth, but they weren’t his words. “What the fuck happened? Did I get drunk and not know it or something like that? You slip me a roofie, Sammy?”
Dean turned his head to look at Sam over his shoulder and there he was, sitting there in a chair by the bed that he’d pulled up from the table by the window. He was looking at him and he was so worried, little frown lines etched between his brows. His hair was too long and he was wearing the same softly worn cowboy shirt he’d been wearing the last time and Dean wanted to go over there and touch him, a desire that was too alien for words, but almost painfully true.
“No, I didn’t slip you a roofie,” Sam said. He rolled his eyes in exasperation and stood up, pulling the chair back over to the table where it belonged. “You really don’t remember?”
Dean frowned. “I remember going into that bar. You were reading the newspaper and I was going to grab some food and a beer while we talked. I ordered it and… that’s it,” Dean said. And still, these were not his words because he didn’t remember any of that. He didn’t even know what he was talking about. “Next thing I know, I wake up with you watching me sleep. Creepy, Sam. All I’m saying.”
“And you don’t remember anything else?” Sam said.
“Like what?” Dean said. He turned back around to look at Sam and survey the room. “Wasn’t Cas supposed to be here when we got back? Wait… what day is it?”
“Dude, just stop talking before you freak me out, okay?” Sam said. “I’m serious. What the hell is going on with you? You didn’t even know who I was back there, you know that? You asked me my name, then you asked me if I was your boyfriend.”
Dean blinked at him in surprise, but he did remember that and he was starting to figure a few things out--at least he thought he was--and it was beginning to scare him. “Boyfriend, right. Okay, so I blacked out and had temporary amnesia,” Dean said. “Did you ask Cas about it?”
“Yeah. He poked and prodded at you, said hmm, then told me there was something very wrong,” Sam said.
“Did he bother to clarify?” Dean asked and he realized they were talking about the weird guy he’d met up on the roof.
“No, except I think it’s something to do with the whole… time travel thing,” Sam said.
“The what?” Dean asked and this time that was him, then against his will he snapped his mouth closed and shook his head as if to clear it. “So,” Dean said, speaking slowly and carefully now, “what is it? I left some of my brain back there in Kansas?”
Sam shrugged. “I hope not,” he said. “Cas said he was going to find out, then he just left.”
Dean scrubbed his hands over his face and sighed. “Alright, then we’ll just have to wait,” he said. “Until then, I’m hitting the shower.”
“Yeah, okay,” Sam said, eyeing him with concern. “I’m gonna go across the street to that sandwich place and get us something while you do that. You’ll be okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” Dean said. He turned and went into the bathroom, the whole time trying to make himself stop and go back and say something more or just say nothing, maybe put his hand on Sam’s shoulder to feel his real solid warmth under his hand and know.
Dean closed and locked the bathroom door, then turned to the sink and leaned on it on his elbows with his head down, breathing hard. Something was making his heart race, he realized. He turned the cold water on, cupped some in his hands, and splashed it on his face a few times, then turned it off and finally lifted his head to look at his own face in the mirror.
He stared until his own face stopped making sense, until the mirror stopped being a flat surface and became malleable as water. He stared and he noticed a scar in the corner of his right eye and four more silvery ones on his forehead over his left eye like they had been made by claws, and Dean didn’t have those marks in the world where he stuck prescriptions for antipsychotics to the refrigerator with smiley face magnets. There were blond highlights in his hair from sunlight that Dean had never walked through and something cold and calculating in his eyes that didn’t belong there. As he stared at himself in the mirror, it became less and less like staring into his own reflection and more and more like coming face to face with someone who looked a scary lot like himself.
“Yeah, you’re in there, aren’t you?” Dean said to him from the mirror and he suddenly felt exposed and afraid. “I see you. I feel you.” He gestured toward his temple. “All scrambled up in there and you’re so in love with him, aren’t you? I can feel that, too, and it’s a bad idea, buddy.”
He was quiet for a minute and they stared at each other. Finally, Dean tried to speak again like he had before when Sam mentioned time travel and, not sure if he could do it, he said, “I can’t help it.”
Dean smiled slowly at him from the mirror and nodded, giving him a sympathetic look. “I know,” he said. “And you’re no demon, I know that, too. Though what the fuck’s going on here, I have no idea.”
He was dreaming anyway and this shit was completely crazy from the beginning, so Dean just said, “I’m dreaming.”
Dean’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Oh yeah?”
“I’m sorry,” Dean said, not sure why he was sorry because it was his dream.
Dean nodded and seemed to accept this--a lot more easily and calmly than could have ever been expected. “You want to see something?” he asked. “Something about Sam?”
“Yes,” Dean said. “Oh yes.”
Dean smiled from the mirror again, this time a touch of something smug and wicked in his expression. Then he closed his eyes. “It’s a memory,” he said. “From the first time.”
The memory opened up before him and Dean was kneeling in the grass by the edge of a pond washing his hands in the cold water. Across the pond there was a swing set and a playground. Off to the right there was a picnic table and a pretty tree with cotton blossoms blowing white fluffy lint through the air.
Dean stood up and wiped his wet hands on the thighs of his jeans, then turned and started walking up the side of a short embankment toward where his car was parked and Sam was waiting for him. He had spilled a can of soda and his fingers were sticky, so he’d stopped there in the park to find a place to wash his hands. Instead of walking down with him, Sam had stayed behind in the car.
Now as he walked up to where he’d parked the car, Dean could see Sam sitting there on the hood, his long legs splayed with his heels hooked against the bumper, a book open in his lap that he wasn’t reading because he was looking out over the nearly vacant park. His hair had been too long even then, the time between haircuts lengthened by his need to rebel against their father’s insistence that he looked like a slob, and the wind had blown a puff of cotton into it that tickled at his cheek when he turned his head.
He smiled at Dean when he saw him and closed his book, the sun which was going down touching his gold brown hair and his teenager’s tanned skin until he almost glowed, and Dean loved him. A switch flipped somewhere between his head and his heart and everything changed from I love my brother to I love Sam in an instant. It was a hard thing to realize and strange how different the two feelings were at the core, but when Dean reached him, he put his hand out and touched Sam, let his fingers caress in a way that was not brotherly at all.
Sam didn’t make him stop, he just smiled and looked oddly relieved to see him. Dean put his hands on Sam’s thighs and he spread his legs to allow Dean to stand there and pull him close. He was young and in a lot of ways innocent, in a lot of ways not, and when Dean started to kiss him, Sam kissed him back and it wasn’t clumsy. It was like Sam had been waiting for him.
Dean opened his eyes and suddenly the memory was being pushed back under a wall where he couldn’t get to it. He tried to pull it back, but it slipped away, still playing there somewhere where Sam’s voice echoed hollowly on a moan remembered from long ago. He could have cried or screamed in frustration, but Dean clenched his jaw down on these sounds and refused to let him.
“Sorry, pal, but the rest is mine,” Dean told him. Dean realized that had been the point of the memory all along. Dean was telling him that whoever was hanging out in his head with him might be in love with him, but Sam was his.
Disappointment slipped in beside the painful yearning he’d been feeling since he first opened his eyes in this dream world months before and Dean wanted to fight about it, but instead he let it go. It was a dream, he reminded himself. He probably made the whole memory up inside his head anyway. He could always make up more.
He retreated back into silence and without him to talk to anymore, Dean stripped down and stepped into the shower. Distantly, he noticed that he had scars all over his body, that his skin was more tanned and his muscles more dense. There was a weird tattoo on his chest that looked like some sort of occult symbol and a burn scar in the shape of a hand on his left arm. That was probably the strangest mark of all because in the real world, how would something like that even happen?
Dean didn’t know, but it was just one more thing that made him more and more certain that this dream--and the ones before--weren’t as real as he’d begun to hope on some level that they were. Things like handprints burned into the skin were straight out of dream logic, where everyone floated and things were always contrariwise because they couldn’t help it.
He put his jeans on when he got out of the shower but he left his shirt and the rest on the floor and went out into the main room, toweling his hair as he followed the scent of food. Sam was back and he’d brought them both Subway from the place across the street. He was sitting at the table, leaned back against the wall by the bed to look out the window when Dean walked over and picked up the nearest bag to sniff.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Meatball marinara with onions, tomatoes and extra cheese,” Sam said. He picked a slice of cucumber from his own sandwich and ate it, watching Dean.
“Have I told you lately that I love you, Sammy?” Dean said and he hadn’t been responsible for saying that, but Dean knew he would have flushed with embarrassment anyway. Even if he meant it.
“Not lately,” Sam said. He grinned at him.
“Dude, what the hell are you eating?” Dean said.
“Veggie club,” Sam said. “Want a bite?”
Dean shook his head and made a retching noise. “Gross. No way.”
Sam shrugged. “I got you cookies. They don’t do pie.”
“They should do pie,” Dean said. He unwrapped the top of his sandwich and took a big bite of the gooey, tomatoey, cheesy thing Sam had brought him. “Everyone should do pie. God this is good. Are you sure I wasn’t out longer? I’m starving.”
“I think maybe Michael fried some of your brain cells, but that wouldn’t fuck with your stomach,” Sam said.
“Sounds just like something that dick would do, too,” Dean said. He sat down on the edge of the bed near where Sam was sitting at the table, bouncing a little before he settled. “I hate that guy. He’s an ass-hole.”
Sam laughed. “I think that’s wrath, huh? I mean… that counts as something done out of spite, so it’s like… a deadly sin. Are you sure he’d do that? On purpose?”
“He’d totally do that if he thought he could get away with it. The fucker,” Dean said, talking around another mouthful of his sandwich. “Angels suck.”
Sam made a sound of agreement in his throat and finished the first half of his sandwich. He wiped his hands on a napkin and took a drink of his soda, the carbonation bubbling in the straw as he sipped it.
Dean watched him, his eyes following each movement, memorizing it for later in case he might need to remember. In case this was it. Dreams were funny things, and just because they often repeated didn’t mean they always would. Knowing that made him at once sad and deeply envious of the strange twin whose eyes he was watching through with all the scars that weren’t his.
He swallowed the food in his mouth and reached over on the table to put the rest of the sandwich down and every movement was like pushing through deep water, but he did it. He took control of the body and the dream and wrestled it into just enough submission to lean over and kiss Sam.
It surprised them both, Sam just because he clearly hadn’t expected it, and Dean because he couldn’t believe he had actually dared. But then Sam smiled at him in a pleased way and he didn’t laugh at him or shove him back, but caught Dean’s chin against his thumb and drew him back again, pressed his mouth to Dean’s and opened under his lips, teasing him gently with his tongue until Dean responded.
Dean didn’t know much about kissing, though he had seen it done by others often enough. It was all part of his aversion to strange touching and on a personal level, he knew even less about it than he did about sex, but Sam either didn’t notice or he noticed his hesitation and didn’t care. He turned in his chair at the table and pulled Dean down on the corner of the bed until he was partly sitting on the edge of the mattress and nearly sitting in Sam’s lap. Sam’s hands were rough with calluses, making whispering sounds on his skin as he pulled them both down Dean’s sides to grasp his hips, and Dean kept waiting to freak out about the contact, for his skin to come alive like biting insects, but it never happened. He kissed Sam back the best that he could, following his lead because Sam seemed to know precisely what he was doing, and the whole time his head was spinning because he felt like he was racing to catch up.
Dean brought his hands up and grabbed the front of Sam’s shirt, leaning into him as Sam pulled him closer, and he kissed him and tried not to give himself away as a complete imposter the whole time. He felt the tug of the Dean he wasn’t trying to pull back control of himself, then he felt him relax and stop fighting and he couldn’t think why that was. Just like he didn’t understand why he was dreaming this or what any of it meant. He wanted to wrap himself around Sam, who he barely knew and yet couldn’t get enough of, couldn’t get close enough to, and he wanted to understand it and he never wanted to leave.
Why do I love you? he wanted to ask, but how could he ask it? And he couldn’t stop touching long enough to say the words. He doubted that Sam would know the answer, and he wondered if any of it mattered worth a damn at all since none of it was real.
Sam ran his fingers up the side of Dean’s neck into his hair and Dean shivered and shivered. He closed his eyes, a feeling like water warmed in the sun snaking through his belly and he couldn’t stop shivering. When he opened his eyes again, he was laying on his side on the rooftop in the cold all alone.
Dean shuddered against the cool wind and drew his legs up to his chest to huddle in his own body warmth. There was a pressing, insistent weight on the backs of his eyes and he told himself he wasn’t going to cry even as tears gathered on his lashes. He right away tried to make himself go back to sleep, but he lay there until the sun came up and it never happened.
Chapter Three>>
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Sam/Dean, Sam/Dean (this will totally make sense if you read it)
Warnings: AU (sort of), dub-con (sort of), suicide (sort of), mental illness, violence
Rated: R-NC17
Word count: 28,000// this part: 6,858
Summary: There's a big difference between dying and never being born.
There’s a Hell of a Universe Next Door
II.
Cause I don't want to get over love
I could listen to my therapist,
Pretend you don't exist
And not have to dream of what I dream of
The Magnetic Fields
The curtains were pulled open again when Dean came awake and the light was fainter than when he‘d crawled into bed, but it was still too much. Still too invasive.
And all the noise in his head, all the fear and that clawing sense of wrongness was back. The wind was blowing through that hole in his soul again and Dean felt his eyes water with it. “No,” he moaned, turning his face into his blanket. “Sam,” he whispered, holding the name to him like it would save him. “Sam.”
“Dean?”
Dean peeked over the edge of his comforter to find his mother staring at him with wide, green eyes. Her face was a little more pale than usual and her mouth was pinched closed against her teeth. She looked… afraid? That couldn’t be right. His mother was fearless. Besides, Dean had been sleeping, he hadn’t even done anything.
“What’s wrong?” Dean said, sitting up quickly. “Is Dad--?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Mary assured him. “Your father’s fine. He… He just got home. Dean…” She hesitated and frowned at him, looking worried and still upset despite her assurances. “Dean, who were you talking to?”
Dean looked at her blankly.
“Just now,” she insisted.
“I… I wasn’t talking to anybody,” Dean said. He swallowed and looked down at his hands nervously. “I was dreaming.”
“Oh,” Mary said. “Okay, honey. Well… come on down for dinner when you’re ready.”
Dean just wanted to go back to sleep. He didn’t care about dinner, he didn’t want to tell them about his day or see the disappointed look in his father’s eyes when he talked about his visit with Dr. Fraus. He wanted to be back in his head with Sam.
“Okay,” Dean said. “I’ll… I’ll be right down.”
Def Leppard was on the radio in the kitchen when Dean went down to dinner. His dad had turned it down for Mary’s sake so it wouldn’t blast her while she was cooking and probably just because he knew she didn’t like it. John was setting the table when Dean came into the kitchen and he stood there watching them for a little while. It made him happy to see them there like that, to be there with them like that, but it hurt like so much broken glass being ground into his raw open and bleeding heart that it just wasn’t right and he couldn’t shake that feeling even now. He wanted to allow himself to be happy and let that be enough, but it wasn’t. There was still that hollow, whistling place inside him that wouldn’t let him be.
“Hey, Dean,” John said when he noticed him standing there. “You alright, son?”
“Everyone keeps asking me that,” Dean muttered. He smiled to take the sting of annoyance out of his words and John smiled back at him, a little relieved.
“You have a good day?” John asked.
There was a wariness to the question that always made Dean wonder why he even asked it if it bothered him so much, but Dean nodded his head and tried to make his smile genuine.
“That’s good then,” John said. “Your mother made lasagna.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially and glanced toward where Mary was getting the lasagna out of the oven. “She said something about eggplant. Try to be nice.”
Dean made a face and Mary, on her way to the table, gave John a stern look. “It’s good for you,” she said in defense of her lasagna. “You’ll eat it and like it, John Winchester, or you can eat some of the dog’s Kibbles n’ Bits and see how you like that.”
John held his hands up in surrender, grinning. He kissed her cheek when she set the dish down on the potholder in the middle of the table and Mary smiled back at him, mollified.
“I love you guys,” Dean said abruptly. Mary and John both turned to stare at him and Dean fidgeted uneasily under their eyes. “Um… I just wanted you to know,” he said. “That’s all.”
John and Mary exchanged a look, one that they seemed to reserve only for times when Dean did something deeply upsetting. Then they both smiled at him with smiles that didn’t quite reach their eyes.
“Okay, honey,” Mary said.
“We love you, too, son,” John said.
Dean smiled back at them because they needed him to, but he felt really stupid. “Okay,” he said, ducking his head with embarrassment as they finished setting the table and all sat down.
The lasagna with eggplant actually wasn’t that bad and Dean ate with his eyes on his plate while his parents talked. They talked about the shop and about a friend of Mary’s from work and the whole time, Dean could feel them both looking at him. Mary looked more than John and though John was always concerned, Mary was always so sad and Dean hated that he made his mother look like that. She was the most beautiful woman in the world and should never be sad for anything, but it was something he couldn’t help. Something in his blood.
Something genetic? Dean thought maybe so. That would explain why his mother was always so sad and so scared and still always so nice and sweet to him even when he wasn’t. Even when he was Being Crazy or having a Bad Day. She didn’t yell and she had never hit and she blamed herself, so consequentially she took the brunt of Dean’s very worst days. Dean didn’t know why, but he thought maybe his mother did that because he got it from her. He didn’t know his grandparents because they died before he was born, but maybe they had been crazy too and now Dean was but it had skipped his mother and passed over Adam. Maybe Dean had been the lucky winner of some cosmic game of genetic Russian roulette.
He wasn’t supposed to think like that or know things like that, though, so he couldn’t even tell Mary he was sorry or that he forgave her.
The phone rang as they were finishing dinner and Mary went to answer it while Dean and his dad cleared the table. Dean heard enough of Mary’s side of the conversation as he was putting the dishes in the sink to figure out it was Adam on the other end calling from college. He ran water on the plates and hurried to leave the kitchen without being noticed, but he didn’t quite make it.
“Dean, here, come talk to your brother,” Mary said, holding out the phone to him. “He’s coming home in a couple of weeks to visit. He wants to talk to you.”
Dean shook his head emphatically no and avoided taking the phone. “I… I’m tired. I’m going to bed. I… can’t.”
“Honey,” Mary said, disapproving but still patient as always. “Just for a little while. He’s your brother.”
“No,” Dean said, pleading with her with his eyes to understand. “I can’t.”
“This is ridiculous, boy. You lived in this house for eighteen years with him while he was growing up in the room right down the hall from yours,” John said. He wasn’t unkind about it, but he was much more impatient and exasperated with him than Mary. “You never got along much, but you didn’t really start this nonsense until after he moved out, so what gives here?”
“It’s better,” Dean whispered.
“What?” John said, though Dean was pretty sure he’d heard him.
Dean tapped his finger with savage emphasis against his right temple. “It’s better,” he said again, louder. “Still wrong but not always as bad. That’s all. I’m going to bed now, I can’t.”
Dean fled the kitchen and hurried upstairs to his room, leaving them behind to stare after him in confusion. He knew he had confused them, probably hurt Mary’s feelings and Adam’s if he were listening, and probably made his dad a little bit mad. He couldn’t help it, though. Some things just made everything in his head feel like his eyes were crossing and Adam was the worst of those things. It wasn’t Adam’s fault, it wasn’t even Adam that upset him because Adam was a pretty cool kid and always had been, but it was Adam because Adam shouldn’t be there. Adam should never have been there.
~~*~~
Dean tried to sleep that night, he really did, but it wouldn’t happen. He lay there in bed listening to his parents in the house, the cars passing outside, the sound of a dog barking down the block, the news on TV right before his parents went to bed, then he lay there some more and stared at the ceiling. All he wanted to do was the same thing he had been wanting to do since the dreams first started; he wanted to sleep. But sometimes, like now, the drugs worked against him instead of for him and he just couldn’t.
With a regretful sigh, he rolled out of bed and got dressed to leave.
Dean often sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night, so he was good at it by now. He’d been doing it since he was in his early teens, about the time everything up in his head that was just a little messed up started to get really messed up. When he was still going to high school, he’d hitch a ride or walk over to the school, sit on the swing and watch the stars while he listened to the wailing emptiness inside himself, trying to decipher what it meant. After he had to leave public school because he got too bizarre for stressed out teachers at a substandard pay grade to be expected to deal with, he discovered the local community college had an engineering building. The engineering building was ten stories high with access to the roof and they didn’t lock it up until midnight. He would go up there and stay all night, spread his coat out on the floor and lay down on it to stare up at the sky and bask in the relative silence of being alone on top of the world.
The first time he did that, his mother and father were in a panic when he returned home. The maintenance people didn’t go through and unlock the doors until eight in the morning, so Dean hadn’t gotten home early enough to sneak back into the house unnoticed. Dean calmed them both by telling them the truth--he had gone to the school because he couldn’t sleep and he had fallen asleep. They believed him and, unlike most parents would have done, they let it drop.
Now that he was an adult, his parents were used to it all and the only real precautions he took when leaving the house were to tread softly and carefully lock the door behind himself when he left. He didn’t even leave a note, they knew.
The local community college was three miles east of their house, but Dean didn’t mind the walk. On a good night when everyone was abed or out on the town somewhere else, he could hunch up his shoulders and watch the speckled pavement under his feet as he walked, the rhythm of his footsteps a kind of soothing, monotonous form of meditation where he could tune the world out, tune the rhythm out, even sometimes tune out the maddening itch of his own insanity. Lawrence, Kansas was a big city, but they lived in the suburbs so when he walked to the school, most nights were good nights. So good sometimes, he had been known to walk right by the campus and not even notice it until something would make him look up; a shout, a bark, a lewd cat-call.
Dean thought about that now as he walked and it made him smile a little. Then it made him remember Jolene because Jolene didn’t make pervert noises at him, but she didn’t have to. She stared with a lonely, covetous kind of hunger at him that was louder than any appreciative little whistle could have been. And maybe Dean didn’t do that kind of thing or even really think it sounded like fun at all because touching and touching was very no, but he wasn’t stupid or completely ignorant, either. So he climbed up to the roof of the local community college’s engineering building to sleep sometimes; that didn’t make him like some kind of non-functioning Gilbert Grape type retard. Even if he thought sex sounded like a disgusting, invasive waste of time, he still knew that made him even more of a freak because almost no one else thought that. There were magazines, TV commercials, movies, music, it was everywhere. And Jolene was pretty obvious.
And Jolene’s face had been the face of a monster when he saw her earlier. In the excitement of finally learning the name of the man in his dreams--Sam--he had nearly forgotten it. He remembered it now and even the memory made his skin crawl. There were two ways to look at it, the way Dean figured it, and the way most people would look at it, Dean was crazy, therefore Jolene’s face had not been the face of a monster because Dean was crazy and that explained everything. However, as Dean was the crazy person, he liked to think he had a better handle on what was and was not a figment of his imagination or product of his misfiring synapses than these kinds of people. He disagreed. Just because no one else appeared to see it did not make what he had seen unreal. It was very much real.
Something had happened to Jolene’s face. How did no one else see it, though? It wasn’t like a little scar or a freckle, it was her entire face. It was God playing twister with her facial tissue.
It was gross and the very minor possibility that it was something in his head and not something really real just made it even worse because that? That was new.
It was only 10:15 when Dean got to the school and because he looked like any other average guy that might be a middle-aged returning student, no one ever bothered him. Drunk people sometimes tried to pick him up and not-so-drunk people sometimes tried to talk to him, but Dean was pretty good at extricating himself from such unwanted situations. ‘Accidental’ rudeness was one of the few perks of being certifiably whacked and he was pretty good at playing the crazy card if the circumstances demanded it.
Thankfully, tonight circumstances did not and he took the stairs up to the roof without meeting anyone along the way. Of course, most people would never take the stairs all the way to the tenth floor because that meant climbing twenty flights of stairs, twenty-five stairs per flight, and people were always in a hurry. Although, by the time he reached the roof Dean was usually a little dizzy from climbing in circles to the top like that, he didn’t really mind it that much. Dizziness was nothing, comparatively speaking. Elevators were deathtraps.
When he stepped out onto the roof, Dean leaned his back against the closed door, let his head thump back against it, and felt in his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter. With his eyes closed, he could hear the steam rising through the ventilation, the sound of the campus power plant not far away, the scratching scuffle of brittle little cockroach feet, and very distantly, the bass of music played way too loud coming across the campus from the resident halls. The familiarity of it was intensely soothing and he thought perhaps he would sleep after all, just not at home in his bed tonight.
He fumbled a cigarette out of the pack without looking, put it in his mouth, and lit it with a satisfied grumble as he inhaled.
Something crashed off to his left and Dean’s eyes snapped instantly open, searching. Someone was on the roof with him, probably just another student who had wandered up there drunk and passed out or one of the maintenance people having a cigarette of their own before locking the building up for the night, but Dean still stood away from the door and craned his neck to see.
“Hello?” he called softly, not sure if he really wanted a response if it was going to be a campus employee. They’d demand to see his student ID, then make him leave whether he had one or didn’t. He didn’t, though he could have obtained a fake one if he wanted it. “Hello? Who’s there?”
Something clattered again followed by a painful groan. Then a gruff, strained voice said, “Me.”
Dean considered this for a minute then, feeling like he was being led straight into the punch-line of a knock-knock joke, he said, “Me who?”
There was no reply for a long time. Then whoever it was coughed, spat something, and managed to pull themselves upright so they could lean around the wall obscuring them from Dean’s sight. Big blue eyes blinked at him in the dark from a face Dean was positive he had never seen before and the stranger said, “It’s you. I made it.”
“You did what?” Dean said, watching him with wary confusion. After all, he wasn’t the only crazy person on the planet and some of the other ones got violent. “Who are you?”
The man with the blue eyes groaned and lifted a hand to rub at his forehead like it pained him. “This introduction seems a bit… redundant, but I am Castiel.”
“Good for you,” Dean said. The strange man said the name like he expected Dean to know it. Dean noticed his tie and long coat and frowned. “Are you a teacher?”
Castiel’s cracked lips quirked in amusement and he shook his head, then winced at the movement. “Sometimes. Most often against my will and better judgment.”
Dean didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing.
After a few minutes, Castiel forced himself to stand straight and peered at Dean in a way that made him deeply uncomfortable. It wasn’t just the usual rude, uncomfortable-making kind of staring, it was more like Dean was a bug of a kind that Castiel almost recognized, but a new and previously undiscovered species of it. It was weird as hell, but that was exactly the impression Dean got; a detached breed of fascination coupled with a sort of strange recognition.
“This is not right,” Castiel muttered to himself. He put his hands in his coat pockets and shrugged his shoulders, hunching them against the light breeze. “I was right. This is wrong.”
“What?” Dean said. He was getting the feeling this was going somewhere, probably unpleasant, that meant he wasn’t going to be left alone to have his nap on the rooftop. “What’s wrong? Um… Are you okay? Maybe--”
“Everything is wrong with you,” Castiel said. “How can you not feel that?”
Dean’s eyes narrowed and he barely restrained himself from decking the man because seriously? He did not need some strange guy he had just accidentally stumbled upon up on a rooftop to tell him he had issues. That was why he had a therapist. “I’m just… I’m gonna go. Let you do… whatever,” Dean mumbled.
He flicked his cigarette away and turned to go back down the stairs and hopefully make it out before he got locked in for the night.
“I will see you again,” Castiel said. “This must be put right. One little thing manages to fall out of place… Your mother should have known better. You should have known better. What were you thinking? ‘There’s a big difference between dying and never being born,’ you said and tell me something, Dean, is there really?”
Dean whipped around, a thrill of some kind of excitement and alarm making his heart leap inexplicably into the back of his throat at these words and that voice taking that oddly familiar tone with him, though he had never in his life met this man. He said, “I never said that--” then stopped.
Castiel was gone and Dean was alone on the rooftop. A moment before that was exactly what he had wanted, but now he wanted to be able to call the man back and demand he explain himself. He looked around, but the rooftop was abandoned, the only company to be had a couple of scurrying cockroaches and the chill wind.
If he didn’t know better, Dean would think he was starting to lose his mind.
~~*~~
After he calmed his racing heart, Dean almost managed to convince himself that he imagined everything. Jolene’s fucked up face and the weirdo talking about his mom and things Dean had said that Dean had never said; all of it. He wasn’t sure when the switch in his mind flipped and he stopped being sure as hell it was all real and started hoping that none of it really was, but somewhere in there it did. By the time he stretched out on his back to relax, the only thing he hoped wasn’t a delusion was the one thing in his life that most closely resembled one: Sam.
Laying there with his head pillowed on his folded coat, staring up at the sky through a lacework pattern of steam rising from the ventilation, Dean counted the stars. It was something he did a lot of the time to help him sleep. He would count stars where other people would count imaginary sheep, but he never ran out and each one was a little different. This time, he was sleepy and counting when he became distracted by the moon.
It was almost full. One more night and it would be full and ready to wane again. There was something about the moon… something he knew… something about the full moon. What was it? People acted funny. People and their neighbors’ many cats acted very strangely around the full moon. The moon pulled the tide. The moon was earth’s only natural satellite. The Man in the Moon. Wolves howled at the moon.
Werewolves…
But that was nonsense, he told himself, though on the brink of sleep, it didn’t much feel like nonsense. It felt like something he had believed to the point of knowing it right down to his bones not so very long ago. Except Dean was a realist. Most people didn’t think so because they found the idea of his extreme mental instability an unlikely companion to reason and rational thinking. But Dean didn’t believe in things like the Man in the Moon or werewolves.
Dean yawned and rolled onto his side, pulling his folded coat in tighter to his chest.
He believed in what he could see and touch and until he ran his fingers through the pelt of a werewolf, they didn’t exist.
“Dean?”
Dean opened his eyes and he was laying on his stomach with his arm wrapped around a lumpy pillow. He blinked in confusion and looked around the small room. A motel room, it looked like, though Dean had never spent the night in a motel in his life. He wanted to twist around and look for the source of that achingly familiar voice that had spoken his name, but instead he ran a hand through his hair and crawled out of the bed, going to the bathroom.
“Damn, man, you scared the hell out of me,” Sam said behind him. “You know you’ve been asleep all day?”
“Oh yeah?” Dean said, and the words were coming out of his mouth, but they weren’t his words. “What the fuck happened? Did I get drunk and not know it or something like that? You slip me a roofie, Sammy?”
Dean turned his head to look at Sam over his shoulder and there he was, sitting there in a chair by the bed that he’d pulled up from the table by the window. He was looking at him and he was so worried, little frown lines etched between his brows. His hair was too long and he was wearing the same softly worn cowboy shirt he’d been wearing the last time and Dean wanted to go over there and touch him, a desire that was too alien for words, but almost painfully true.
“No, I didn’t slip you a roofie,” Sam said. He rolled his eyes in exasperation and stood up, pulling the chair back over to the table where it belonged. “You really don’t remember?”
Dean frowned. “I remember going into that bar. You were reading the newspaper and I was going to grab some food and a beer while we talked. I ordered it and… that’s it,” Dean said. And still, these were not his words because he didn’t remember any of that. He didn’t even know what he was talking about. “Next thing I know, I wake up with you watching me sleep. Creepy, Sam. All I’m saying.”
“And you don’t remember anything else?” Sam said.
“Like what?” Dean said. He turned back around to look at Sam and survey the room. “Wasn’t Cas supposed to be here when we got back? Wait… what day is it?”
“Dude, just stop talking before you freak me out, okay?” Sam said. “I’m serious. What the hell is going on with you? You didn’t even know who I was back there, you know that? You asked me my name, then you asked me if I was your boyfriend.”
Dean blinked at him in surprise, but he did remember that and he was starting to figure a few things out--at least he thought he was--and it was beginning to scare him. “Boyfriend, right. Okay, so I blacked out and had temporary amnesia,” Dean said. “Did you ask Cas about it?”
“Yeah. He poked and prodded at you, said hmm, then told me there was something very wrong,” Sam said.
“Did he bother to clarify?” Dean asked and he realized they were talking about the weird guy he’d met up on the roof.
“No, except I think it’s something to do with the whole… time travel thing,” Sam said.
“The what?” Dean asked and this time that was him, then against his will he snapped his mouth closed and shook his head as if to clear it. “So,” Dean said, speaking slowly and carefully now, “what is it? I left some of my brain back there in Kansas?”
Sam shrugged. “I hope not,” he said. “Cas said he was going to find out, then he just left.”
Dean scrubbed his hands over his face and sighed. “Alright, then we’ll just have to wait,” he said. “Until then, I’m hitting the shower.”
“Yeah, okay,” Sam said, eyeing him with concern. “I’m gonna go across the street to that sandwich place and get us something while you do that. You’ll be okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” Dean said. He turned and went into the bathroom, the whole time trying to make himself stop and go back and say something more or just say nothing, maybe put his hand on Sam’s shoulder to feel his real solid warmth under his hand and know.
Dean closed and locked the bathroom door, then turned to the sink and leaned on it on his elbows with his head down, breathing hard. Something was making his heart race, he realized. He turned the cold water on, cupped some in his hands, and splashed it on his face a few times, then turned it off and finally lifted his head to look at his own face in the mirror.
He stared until his own face stopped making sense, until the mirror stopped being a flat surface and became malleable as water. He stared and he noticed a scar in the corner of his right eye and four more silvery ones on his forehead over his left eye like they had been made by claws, and Dean didn’t have those marks in the world where he stuck prescriptions for antipsychotics to the refrigerator with smiley face magnets. There were blond highlights in his hair from sunlight that Dean had never walked through and something cold and calculating in his eyes that didn’t belong there. As he stared at himself in the mirror, it became less and less like staring into his own reflection and more and more like coming face to face with someone who looked a scary lot like himself.
“Yeah, you’re in there, aren’t you?” Dean said to him from the mirror and he suddenly felt exposed and afraid. “I see you. I feel you.” He gestured toward his temple. “All scrambled up in there and you’re so in love with him, aren’t you? I can feel that, too, and it’s a bad idea, buddy.”
He was quiet for a minute and they stared at each other. Finally, Dean tried to speak again like he had before when Sam mentioned time travel and, not sure if he could do it, he said, “I can’t help it.”
Dean smiled slowly at him from the mirror and nodded, giving him a sympathetic look. “I know,” he said. “And you’re no demon, I know that, too. Though what the fuck’s going on here, I have no idea.”
He was dreaming anyway and this shit was completely crazy from the beginning, so Dean just said, “I’m dreaming.”
Dean’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Oh yeah?”
“I’m sorry,” Dean said, not sure why he was sorry because it was his dream.
Dean nodded and seemed to accept this--a lot more easily and calmly than could have ever been expected. “You want to see something?” he asked. “Something about Sam?”
“Yes,” Dean said. “Oh yes.”
Dean smiled from the mirror again, this time a touch of something smug and wicked in his expression. Then he closed his eyes. “It’s a memory,” he said. “From the first time.”
The memory opened up before him and Dean was kneeling in the grass by the edge of a pond washing his hands in the cold water. Across the pond there was a swing set and a playground. Off to the right there was a picnic table and a pretty tree with cotton blossoms blowing white fluffy lint through the air.
Dean stood up and wiped his wet hands on the thighs of his jeans, then turned and started walking up the side of a short embankment toward where his car was parked and Sam was waiting for him. He had spilled a can of soda and his fingers were sticky, so he’d stopped there in the park to find a place to wash his hands. Instead of walking down with him, Sam had stayed behind in the car.
Now as he walked up to where he’d parked the car, Dean could see Sam sitting there on the hood, his long legs splayed with his heels hooked against the bumper, a book open in his lap that he wasn’t reading because he was looking out over the nearly vacant park. His hair had been too long even then, the time between haircuts lengthened by his need to rebel against their father’s insistence that he looked like a slob, and the wind had blown a puff of cotton into it that tickled at his cheek when he turned his head.
He smiled at Dean when he saw him and closed his book, the sun which was going down touching his gold brown hair and his teenager’s tanned skin until he almost glowed, and Dean loved him. A switch flipped somewhere between his head and his heart and everything changed from I love my brother to I love Sam in an instant. It was a hard thing to realize and strange how different the two feelings were at the core, but when Dean reached him, he put his hand out and touched Sam, let his fingers caress in a way that was not brotherly at all.
Sam didn’t make him stop, he just smiled and looked oddly relieved to see him. Dean put his hands on Sam’s thighs and he spread his legs to allow Dean to stand there and pull him close. He was young and in a lot of ways innocent, in a lot of ways not, and when Dean started to kiss him, Sam kissed him back and it wasn’t clumsy. It was like Sam had been waiting for him.
Dean opened his eyes and suddenly the memory was being pushed back under a wall where he couldn’t get to it. He tried to pull it back, but it slipped away, still playing there somewhere where Sam’s voice echoed hollowly on a moan remembered from long ago. He could have cried or screamed in frustration, but Dean clenched his jaw down on these sounds and refused to let him.
“Sorry, pal, but the rest is mine,” Dean told him. Dean realized that had been the point of the memory all along. Dean was telling him that whoever was hanging out in his head with him might be in love with him, but Sam was his.
Disappointment slipped in beside the painful yearning he’d been feeling since he first opened his eyes in this dream world months before and Dean wanted to fight about it, but instead he let it go. It was a dream, he reminded himself. He probably made the whole memory up inside his head anyway. He could always make up more.
He retreated back into silence and without him to talk to anymore, Dean stripped down and stepped into the shower. Distantly, he noticed that he had scars all over his body, that his skin was more tanned and his muscles more dense. There was a weird tattoo on his chest that looked like some sort of occult symbol and a burn scar in the shape of a hand on his left arm. That was probably the strangest mark of all because in the real world, how would something like that even happen?
Dean didn’t know, but it was just one more thing that made him more and more certain that this dream--and the ones before--weren’t as real as he’d begun to hope on some level that they were. Things like handprints burned into the skin were straight out of dream logic, where everyone floated and things were always contrariwise because they couldn’t help it.
He put his jeans on when he got out of the shower but he left his shirt and the rest on the floor and went out into the main room, toweling his hair as he followed the scent of food. Sam was back and he’d brought them both Subway from the place across the street. He was sitting at the table, leaned back against the wall by the bed to look out the window when Dean walked over and picked up the nearest bag to sniff.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Meatball marinara with onions, tomatoes and extra cheese,” Sam said. He picked a slice of cucumber from his own sandwich and ate it, watching Dean.
“Have I told you lately that I love you, Sammy?” Dean said and he hadn’t been responsible for saying that, but Dean knew he would have flushed with embarrassment anyway. Even if he meant it.
“Not lately,” Sam said. He grinned at him.
“Dude, what the hell are you eating?” Dean said.
“Veggie club,” Sam said. “Want a bite?”
Dean shook his head and made a retching noise. “Gross. No way.”
Sam shrugged. “I got you cookies. They don’t do pie.”
“They should do pie,” Dean said. He unwrapped the top of his sandwich and took a big bite of the gooey, tomatoey, cheesy thing Sam had brought him. “Everyone should do pie. God this is good. Are you sure I wasn’t out longer? I’m starving.”
“I think maybe Michael fried some of your brain cells, but that wouldn’t fuck with your stomach,” Sam said.
“Sounds just like something that dick would do, too,” Dean said. He sat down on the edge of the bed near where Sam was sitting at the table, bouncing a little before he settled. “I hate that guy. He’s an ass-hole.”
Sam laughed. “I think that’s wrath, huh? I mean… that counts as something done out of spite, so it’s like… a deadly sin. Are you sure he’d do that? On purpose?”
“He’d totally do that if he thought he could get away with it. The fucker,” Dean said, talking around another mouthful of his sandwich. “Angels suck.”
Sam made a sound of agreement in his throat and finished the first half of his sandwich. He wiped his hands on a napkin and took a drink of his soda, the carbonation bubbling in the straw as he sipped it.
Dean watched him, his eyes following each movement, memorizing it for later in case he might need to remember. In case this was it. Dreams were funny things, and just because they often repeated didn’t mean they always would. Knowing that made him at once sad and deeply envious of the strange twin whose eyes he was watching through with all the scars that weren’t his.
He swallowed the food in his mouth and reached over on the table to put the rest of the sandwich down and every movement was like pushing through deep water, but he did it. He took control of the body and the dream and wrestled it into just enough submission to lean over and kiss Sam.
It surprised them both, Sam just because he clearly hadn’t expected it, and Dean because he couldn’t believe he had actually dared. But then Sam smiled at him in a pleased way and he didn’t laugh at him or shove him back, but caught Dean’s chin against his thumb and drew him back again, pressed his mouth to Dean’s and opened under his lips, teasing him gently with his tongue until Dean responded.
Dean didn’t know much about kissing, though he had seen it done by others often enough. It was all part of his aversion to strange touching and on a personal level, he knew even less about it than he did about sex, but Sam either didn’t notice or he noticed his hesitation and didn’t care. He turned in his chair at the table and pulled Dean down on the corner of the bed until he was partly sitting on the edge of the mattress and nearly sitting in Sam’s lap. Sam’s hands were rough with calluses, making whispering sounds on his skin as he pulled them both down Dean’s sides to grasp his hips, and Dean kept waiting to freak out about the contact, for his skin to come alive like biting insects, but it never happened. He kissed Sam back the best that he could, following his lead because Sam seemed to know precisely what he was doing, and the whole time his head was spinning because he felt like he was racing to catch up.
Dean brought his hands up and grabbed the front of Sam’s shirt, leaning into him as Sam pulled him closer, and he kissed him and tried not to give himself away as a complete imposter the whole time. He felt the tug of the Dean he wasn’t trying to pull back control of himself, then he felt him relax and stop fighting and he couldn’t think why that was. Just like he didn’t understand why he was dreaming this or what any of it meant. He wanted to wrap himself around Sam, who he barely knew and yet couldn’t get enough of, couldn’t get close enough to, and he wanted to understand it and he never wanted to leave.
Why do I love you? he wanted to ask, but how could he ask it? And he couldn’t stop touching long enough to say the words. He doubted that Sam would know the answer, and he wondered if any of it mattered worth a damn at all since none of it was real.
Sam ran his fingers up the side of Dean’s neck into his hair and Dean shivered and shivered. He closed his eyes, a feeling like water warmed in the sun snaking through his belly and he couldn’t stop shivering. When he opened his eyes again, he was laying on his side on the rooftop in the cold all alone.
Dean shuddered against the cool wind and drew his legs up to his chest to huddle in his own body warmth. There was a pressing, insistent weight on the backs of his eyes and he told himself he wasn’t going to cry even as tears gathered on his lashes. He right away tried to make himself go back to sleep, but he lay there until the sun came up and it never happened.
Chapter Three>>