Off the Turnpikes (Sam/Dean)
Characters: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1,957
A/N: Second of two auction fics for ash48 and colls. (The first is here.) Much love to the wonderful marciaelena for the beta. <3 Title from Agha Shahid Ali.
I’m making this up, I know, but since you
were there, none of it’s a lie.
-Agha Shahid Ali, ‘A Nostalgist’s Map of America’
Marking journeys on his somewhat crumpled map of the country has become a bit of a pastime for Sam now, three months into his new life at Stanford. At first, he tells himself that he’s only recording the road trips that they’d made for cases, those frantic times when every small town looked like every other, and he and Dean had followed Dad’s truck from state to state, leaving behind schools and almost-friends and cheap motel rooms. The rooms almost always looked alike, but Sam couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t left behind a small mark of himself in most of them-his initials scratched behind a bathroom mirror where no one would ever see them, or into the rickety wooden desk at which he’d sat doing his homework while Dean meticulously cleaned the guns, humming tunelessly to himself.
There was even that one motel room in which Dean had added his initials next to Sam’s. Dean had just turned twenty-one, but Sam was still sixteen. It had felt a little like Dean was leaving him behind, going off someplace where Sam couldn’t follow. They’d hustled pool in a roadhouse somewhere on a highway just outside the state limits of Kansas, skirting around the past as they always did.
They’d even gotten drunk, because Dean couldn’t deny Sam the celebration Sam had been planning for weeks. “It’s your twenty-first,” he’d pointed out, looking at Dean as though he’d be crazy to not allow his sixteen-year-old brother to have a drink that night. Dean had given in, muttering something about allowing it just this once, and he’d even laughed out loud and ruffled Sam’s hair when Sam had let out a little whoop of victory.
Later, they’d gotten back to their motel room and turned on the TV, watched the second half of Back to the Future III, Dean’s eyes half-closed, his arm dangling off the side of his bed. Sam sat next to him (their bags still sat on the other bed, dumped there hastily before they went on their hustling spree), back against the bunched-up pillows, looking down occasionally at the top of Dean’s head, his hair golden in the lamplight.
“You talking to me, Tannen?” Marty McFly said on the screen, Dean saying the words along with him. Sam slid down a bit, his head coming to rest on Dean’s shoulder. He turned his face into Dean’s neck and inhaled.
Next to him, Dean was absolutely still, one arm behind his head and the other still somewhere off the bed. Sam closed the gap between his mouth and the skin of Dean’s throat. His fingertips were on Dean’s chest, tracing the decal on Dean’s cheap, worn-in Zeppelin t-shirt. He moved his lips lower, tentatively brushing them against the pulse point on Dean’s neck.
Dean didn’t move away. They stayed like that until Doc and Clara sailed through the air on the hoverboard, when Sam’s hand finally moved lower, sliding down Dean’s chest to his belt buckle, fingertips worrying at the metal, the inside of his head buzzing with worry and want. Dean’s hand closed around Sam’s wrist in an unrelenting grip. They stayed liked that until they fell asleep, Sam’s face tucked into Dean’s neck and his lips mapping Dean’s skin, Dean’s fingers warm around his wrist, his thumb absently rubbing against Sam’s pulse.
He’d been ashamed the next morning for asking for what wasn’t his to take. But Dean had smiled winningly at him over his greasy cheeseburger and fries the next morning, and Sam knew they were never going to talk about it.
Dean did, however, catch Sam scratching his initials behind the headboard of the bed in which he’d awoken that morning with his limbs entangled with his brother’s. It was a silly thing to do, childish, and Sam hadn’t done it in years. Dean didn’t ask why they were doing it. He’d just grinned and gotten out his Swiss Army knife and carved his initials into the cheap wood right beside Sam’s, as though it were a thing that they did. Later, when Dean was paying the bill and Sam was stowing their stuff in the back seat of the Impala, he’d realized-without really understanding how-that Dean had known about his little habit all along.
--
Soon, he realizes that he isn’t mapping the road trips they’d made for work. Not really. Some of the roads he’s traced on the map (using one of his blue pencils from art class) are the ones they’d driven down while chasing something supernatural, sure. But many of them are trips he associates with other memories. The time he was thirteen and they’d visited the Botanical Garden. That trip to the Ozzy concert. The drive to the ocean, a treat for Sam’s fifteenth birthday. They’d parked the car at the beach and Sam had gone to sleep in the back seat listening to the waves and woken with salt on his lips, unable to remember a time when he’d been happier.
--
He falls ill the week before Christmas break. It’s nothing serious, just an annoying cough and a low-grade fever, but he feels miserable enough with it to skip classes for a day. His roommate has already left for the holidays. When the fever hasn’t gone away by the end of the day, he forces himself to get out of bed and go out for some medicine.
When he gets back, Dean’s sitting on the steps outside the building.
“Hey, Sammy.”
“Dean?”
Dean rolls his eyes and gets to his feet. “No, it’s the tattooed guy from the carnival.”
“Dean, what’re you doing here?”
Dean shrugs. “I was in the neighborhood.”
“You were not,” Sam says, accusatory, disbelieving, his eyes drinking in their fill of Dean.
Dean chuckles, the sound weirdly incongruous, as though things had never changed between them. It warms Sam from the inside, in a way that even his fever hasn’t been able to. “What can I say, Sammy. It’s Christmas.”
“Dean, are you drunk?”
“No,” Dean says, not missing a beat. “Okay, maybe a little.” He nods at the paper bag in Sam’s hands. “Tell me that’s whiskey.”
“It’s cold medicine.”
Dean frowns. “You sick?”
“No, I just like to drink this stuff for fun.”
Deans laughs then, a full-throated laugh, his eyes never leaving Sam’s face. “C’mere,” he says, leaning in and pulling Sam into a hug. It’s a full-bodied one, his arms encircling Sam and squeezing him close, his chin on Sam’s shoulder, their knees knocking together, and Sam almost feels dizzy at the fierce, unexpected joy of it.
--
Dean throws himself on Sam’s roommate’s empty bed, letting out a whistle as he looks around. “Nice digs.”
Sam shrugs, uncapping his medicine bottle and taking a swig. “I gotta share, but I’m used to it.”
“Seriously though.” Dean nods at the bottle again. “You okay?”
“It’s nothing, Dean. Just a cold.”
Dean gets to his feet as quickly as he’d sat down, seemingly thrumming with energy. “I’ll pick up some food. You get yourself warm, Sammy.”
He’s back just as Sam gets done with his hot shower, bearing cartons of steaming soup and crispy-fried wontons and Chinese fried rice that has mushrooms in it, which has always been Sam’s favorite kind. They sink into the worn but comfortable couch in front of the TV to eat the food while it’s still hot, Dean playfully bumping his shoulder against Sam’s and saying “Good, huh?” with his mouth full.
In short, it’s like they’re in bizarro-world.
Sam almost has the urge to say who are you and what have you done with my brother, but there’s been some familiarity in the last hour too, enough for him to know that the person next to him is somehow, inexplicably, Dean. Typically, his brother finishes his food in record time and stretches his legs out so that his feet are on the small coffee table in front of him, remote in hand, flippantly surfing through the channels.
--
Sam wakes with a start, momentarily puzzled both by what is unmistakably Cary Grant’s voice and by the somewhat unusual shape of his pillow. It takes him a few seconds to figure out that the TV’s still on and that the pillow is, in fact, Dean’s shoulder.
He’s comfortably warm in a way that he hasn’t felt in ages, both because he’s tucked against Dean’s side and because the colorful throw from the back of the couch-his roommate's family apparently has a thing for sending him knitted stuff-is covering him from neck to feet. His half-finished plate of food is on the table. And Dean’s fingers are in his hair.
Dean’s clearly asleep, his breathing quiet and even, and he’s got one arm around Sam’s shoulders with his fingers in Sam’s hair, as though he’d been stroking it before he fell asleep.
Sam’s first thought is that he must be ridiculously ill. Maybe dying, even. Because the last time Dean had stroked his hair, it was right after Sam had almost bled out during a hunt.
But no, that can’t be true. If he were dying, Dean would be driving him to the ER, not sitting there asleep with his fingers tangled in Sam’s hair.
Dean mutters something in his sleep, rolling his head around. His nose is now in Sam’s hair, too.
“Dean?” Sam tries cautiously, because this is getting a bit… weird. In a good way, if he’s honest with himself, but still weird.
He feels rather than sees Dean tense into alertness. “Everything okay, Sammy?”
“Yeah, I just…” Sam squints up at Dean, his eyes tracing the outline of his brother’s form in the light flickering from the television. Dean’s arm is still tight around him, his other hand just starting to relax on the holster strapped to his belt. “It’s okay, Dean. No demons here.” He puts his hand on top of Dean’s over the gun, and Dean’s fingers go lax under his.
Sam settles back down against Dean's chest, not letting go of Dean’s hand. There’s a new scar on the back of it, slicing across the small space between his index finger and his thumb. (Sam wonders how many more there are on Dean’s skin, like signposts marking each time Sam wasn’t there beside him, each time Sam failed to have his brother’s back, each time Dean was injured and alone.) He wants to raise Dean’s hand to his mouth and kiss each knuckle, feel the warmth of their shared blood under Dean’s skin, but the last thing he wants is for Dean to freak out and bolt.
Dean turns his hand under Sam’s, linking their fingers together.
Sam’s stunned into silence for a minute. They aren’t looking at each other, Sam’s face still tucked against Dean’s neck; he isn’t sure he’d be able to breathe if he looked up at Dean right then. He’s sixteen all over again, worry and longing warring inside him.
“It’s okay, little brother,” Dean says, settling his chin on top of Sam’s head. His hand’s curled around the nape of Sam’s neck, thumb rubbing against Sam’s skin.
Sam lets out a small sound, pressing closer against Dean. Dean’s allowing this. Dean says it’s okay. This time, when he reaches for Dean’s belt, maybe Dean won’t stop him. Maybe Sam will actually have the courage to lift his head and look Dean in the eye.
But for now, this is enough (it’s too much): this moment (so huge that Sam can’t fit all of it into his heart), this litany of DeanDeanDean in his head (it’s chasing every other thought away), this inescapable sensation of being home (because in all the ways that mattered, he’d never left).
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1,957
A/N: Second of two auction fics for ash48 and colls. (The first is here.) Much love to the wonderful marciaelena for the beta. <3 Title from Agha Shahid Ali.
I’m making this up, I know, but since you
were there, none of it’s a lie.
-Agha Shahid Ali, ‘A Nostalgist’s Map of America’
Marking journeys on his somewhat crumpled map of the country has become a bit of a pastime for Sam now, three months into his new life at Stanford. At first, he tells himself that he’s only recording the road trips that they’d made for cases, those frantic times when every small town looked like every other, and he and Dean had followed Dad’s truck from state to state, leaving behind schools and almost-friends and cheap motel rooms. The rooms almost always looked alike, but Sam couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t left behind a small mark of himself in most of them-his initials scratched behind a bathroom mirror where no one would ever see them, or into the rickety wooden desk at which he’d sat doing his homework while Dean meticulously cleaned the guns, humming tunelessly to himself.
There was even that one motel room in which Dean had added his initials next to Sam’s. Dean had just turned twenty-one, but Sam was still sixteen. It had felt a little like Dean was leaving him behind, going off someplace where Sam couldn’t follow. They’d hustled pool in a roadhouse somewhere on a highway just outside the state limits of Kansas, skirting around the past as they always did.
They’d even gotten drunk, because Dean couldn’t deny Sam the celebration Sam had been planning for weeks. “It’s your twenty-first,” he’d pointed out, looking at Dean as though he’d be crazy to not allow his sixteen-year-old brother to have a drink that night. Dean had given in, muttering something about allowing it just this once, and he’d even laughed out loud and ruffled Sam’s hair when Sam had let out a little whoop of victory.
Later, they’d gotten back to their motel room and turned on the TV, watched the second half of Back to the Future III, Dean’s eyes half-closed, his arm dangling off the side of his bed. Sam sat next to him (their bags still sat on the other bed, dumped there hastily before they went on their hustling spree), back against the bunched-up pillows, looking down occasionally at the top of Dean’s head, his hair golden in the lamplight.
“You talking to me, Tannen?” Marty McFly said on the screen, Dean saying the words along with him. Sam slid down a bit, his head coming to rest on Dean’s shoulder. He turned his face into Dean’s neck and inhaled.
Next to him, Dean was absolutely still, one arm behind his head and the other still somewhere off the bed. Sam closed the gap between his mouth and the skin of Dean’s throat. His fingertips were on Dean’s chest, tracing the decal on Dean’s cheap, worn-in Zeppelin t-shirt. He moved his lips lower, tentatively brushing them against the pulse point on Dean’s neck.
Dean didn’t move away. They stayed like that until Doc and Clara sailed through the air on the hoverboard, when Sam’s hand finally moved lower, sliding down Dean’s chest to his belt buckle, fingertips worrying at the metal, the inside of his head buzzing with worry and want. Dean’s hand closed around Sam’s wrist in an unrelenting grip. They stayed liked that until they fell asleep, Sam’s face tucked into Dean’s neck and his lips mapping Dean’s skin, Dean’s fingers warm around his wrist, his thumb absently rubbing against Sam’s pulse.
He’d been ashamed the next morning for asking for what wasn’t his to take. But Dean had smiled winningly at him over his greasy cheeseburger and fries the next morning, and Sam knew they were never going to talk about it.
Dean did, however, catch Sam scratching his initials behind the headboard of the bed in which he’d awoken that morning with his limbs entangled with his brother’s. It was a silly thing to do, childish, and Sam hadn’t done it in years. Dean didn’t ask why they were doing it. He’d just grinned and gotten out his Swiss Army knife and carved his initials into the cheap wood right beside Sam’s, as though it were a thing that they did. Later, when Dean was paying the bill and Sam was stowing their stuff in the back seat of the Impala, he’d realized-without really understanding how-that Dean had known about his little habit all along.
--
Soon, he realizes that he isn’t mapping the road trips they’d made for work. Not really. Some of the roads he’s traced on the map (using one of his blue pencils from art class) are the ones they’d driven down while chasing something supernatural, sure. But many of them are trips he associates with other memories. The time he was thirteen and they’d visited the Botanical Garden. That trip to the Ozzy concert. The drive to the ocean, a treat for Sam’s fifteenth birthday. They’d parked the car at the beach and Sam had gone to sleep in the back seat listening to the waves and woken with salt on his lips, unable to remember a time when he’d been happier.
--
He falls ill the week before Christmas break. It’s nothing serious, just an annoying cough and a low-grade fever, but he feels miserable enough with it to skip classes for a day. His roommate has already left for the holidays. When the fever hasn’t gone away by the end of the day, he forces himself to get out of bed and go out for some medicine.
When he gets back, Dean’s sitting on the steps outside the building.
“Hey, Sammy.”
“Dean?”
Dean rolls his eyes and gets to his feet. “No, it’s the tattooed guy from the carnival.”
“Dean, what’re you doing here?”
Dean shrugs. “I was in the neighborhood.”
“You were not,” Sam says, accusatory, disbelieving, his eyes drinking in their fill of Dean.
Dean chuckles, the sound weirdly incongruous, as though things had never changed between them. It warms Sam from the inside, in a way that even his fever hasn’t been able to. “What can I say, Sammy. It’s Christmas.”
“Dean, are you drunk?”
“No,” Dean says, not missing a beat. “Okay, maybe a little.” He nods at the paper bag in Sam’s hands. “Tell me that’s whiskey.”
“It’s cold medicine.”
Dean frowns. “You sick?”
“No, I just like to drink this stuff for fun.”
Deans laughs then, a full-throated laugh, his eyes never leaving Sam’s face. “C’mere,” he says, leaning in and pulling Sam into a hug. It’s a full-bodied one, his arms encircling Sam and squeezing him close, his chin on Sam’s shoulder, their knees knocking together, and Sam almost feels dizzy at the fierce, unexpected joy of it.
--
Dean throws himself on Sam’s roommate’s empty bed, letting out a whistle as he looks around. “Nice digs.”
Sam shrugs, uncapping his medicine bottle and taking a swig. “I gotta share, but I’m used to it.”
“Seriously though.” Dean nods at the bottle again. “You okay?”
“It’s nothing, Dean. Just a cold.”
Dean gets to his feet as quickly as he’d sat down, seemingly thrumming with energy. “I’ll pick up some food. You get yourself warm, Sammy.”
He’s back just as Sam gets done with his hot shower, bearing cartons of steaming soup and crispy-fried wontons and Chinese fried rice that has mushrooms in it, which has always been Sam’s favorite kind. They sink into the worn but comfortable couch in front of the TV to eat the food while it’s still hot, Dean playfully bumping his shoulder against Sam’s and saying “Good, huh?” with his mouth full.
In short, it’s like they’re in bizarro-world.
Sam almost has the urge to say who are you and what have you done with my brother, but there’s been some familiarity in the last hour too, enough for him to know that the person next to him is somehow, inexplicably, Dean. Typically, his brother finishes his food in record time and stretches his legs out so that his feet are on the small coffee table in front of him, remote in hand, flippantly surfing through the channels.
--
Sam wakes with a start, momentarily puzzled both by what is unmistakably Cary Grant’s voice and by the somewhat unusual shape of his pillow. It takes him a few seconds to figure out that the TV’s still on and that the pillow is, in fact, Dean’s shoulder.
He’s comfortably warm in a way that he hasn’t felt in ages, both because he’s tucked against Dean’s side and because the colorful throw from the back of the couch-his roommate's family apparently has a thing for sending him knitted stuff-is covering him from neck to feet. His half-finished plate of food is on the table. And Dean’s fingers are in his hair.
Dean’s clearly asleep, his breathing quiet and even, and he’s got one arm around Sam’s shoulders with his fingers in Sam’s hair, as though he’d been stroking it before he fell asleep.
Sam’s first thought is that he must be ridiculously ill. Maybe dying, even. Because the last time Dean had stroked his hair, it was right after Sam had almost bled out during a hunt.
But no, that can’t be true. If he were dying, Dean would be driving him to the ER, not sitting there asleep with his fingers tangled in Sam’s hair.
Dean mutters something in his sleep, rolling his head around. His nose is now in Sam’s hair, too.
“Dean?” Sam tries cautiously, because this is getting a bit… weird. In a good way, if he’s honest with himself, but still weird.
He feels rather than sees Dean tense into alertness. “Everything okay, Sammy?”
“Yeah, I just…” Sam squints up at Dean, his eyes tracing the outline of his brother’s form in the light flickering from the television. Dean’s arm is still tight around him, his other hand just starting to relax on the holster strapped to his belt. “It’s okay, Dean. No demons here.” He puts his hand on top of Dean’s over the gun, and Dean’s fingers go lax under his.
Sam settles back down against Dean's chest, not letting go of Dean’s hand. There’s a new scar on the back of it, slicing across the small space between his index finger and his thumb. (Sam wonders how many more there are on Dean’s skin, like signposts marking each time Sam wasn’t there beside him, each time Sam failed to have his brother’s back, each time Dean was injured and alone.) He wants to raise Dean’s hand to his mouth and kiss each knuckle, feel the warmth of their shared blood under Dean’s skin, but the last thing he wants is for Dean to freak out and bolt.
Dean turns his hand under Sam’s, linking their fingers together.
Sam’s stunned into silence for a minute. They aren’t looking at each other, Sam’s face still tucked against Dean’s neck; he isn’t sure he’d be able to breathe if he looked up at Dean right then. He’s sixteen all over again, worry and longing warring inside him.
“It’s okay, little brother,” Dean says, settling his chin on top of Sam’s head. His hand’s curled around the nape of Sam’s neck, thumb rubbing against Sam’s skin.
Sam lets out a small sound, pressing closer against Dean. Dean’s allowing this. Dean says it’s okay. This time, when he reaches for Dean’s belt, maybe Dean won’t stop him. Maybe Sam will actually have the courage to lift his head and look Dean in the eye.
But for now, this is enough (it’s too much): this moment (so huge that Sam can’t fit all of it into his heart), this litany of DeanDeanDean in his head (it’s chasing every other thought away), this inescapable sensation of being home (because in all the ways that mattered, he’d never left).