Fic: Simulacrum
I'm going to be scarce around these parts due to work this week and next, sooooo, um, this is a story what I wrote. Like I said in the notes, do go see the art that inspired it: Pygmalion and Galatea Sam/Dean by dark_reaction
*
Title: Simulacrum
Rating: R
Pairings/Characters: Sam/Dean
Wordcount: 3,403
Notes: dark_reaction inspired this piece with her gorgeous art of Sam/Dean as Pygmalion and Galatea. Thanks to regala_electra for giving this a look-over.
Summary: Sam tries to piece him together, bring him back to life. And Pygmalion gave life to what was never living.
Simulacrum
His skin is cold to the touch.
*
It starts when Sam puts his pen to the paper, and he starts to draw a curve, and it loops back around to another curve, and another inside. The iris of the eye forms, and he defines that further with a dark black pupil.
He messily sketches an eyelid over it, a thick eyebrow in an arch, like when he smirked or cracked a joke to Sam, that sly, teasing eyebrow. Sam tries to shade in a dark circle underneath the eye, like when he would go for days with only hours of sleep; but that messes up the whole thing and he crushes the paper into a ball and throws it away.
*
"You're worthy of a palace," he says, whispering to it in the night. "You'd be right at home in a royal courtyard, or adorning the temple of the goddess, draped in fine linens. Or naked as you are, your perfect body for all to worship."
Sam swallows and moves around the statue, carefully brushing away any flecks of marble or dust left behind from the thorough refining he'd done that afternoon using grit and stone. His brush moves up and down the legs, pure white ivory lines of muscle and flesh.
"It's where you should be, where your beauty can be fully, erm, appreciated," Sam says as he dusts up to his back. Muscles upon muscles and perfect definition cut from the finest materials, it's Sam's favorite part.
"I wish I could make sure you end up there, because you're just-" Sam pauses, flinching over the naked curve of the statue's backside. He laughs at the ridiculousness of his hesitation.
"I forget sometimes, your lack of modesty-or my, my lack of modesty I had in carving you as you are."
Sam walks to face him, his statue, finally finished after more than a year of meticulous labor. "I forget sometimes, that you're not real, Dean."
*
The exact density of Dean's torso is not easily recreated using hotel pillows and sheets but Sam comes close-very close-to it one night in a B&B in Tulsa.
But it's got no warmth, no heat underneath and the only sound he can hear when Sam puts his ear to the cotton and flannel "body" is the whir of the central air and the sound of a car horn as someone pulls out of the driveway outside.
*
Commissioned by the chancellor of the school for artisans, it was originally proposed by Sam as "The Dean"; a statue based upon one of the school deacons. But by the time the deadline rolled around, Sam was nowhere near finished, and told them he was bowing out of the project. He continued the piece for himself, on his own time.
One of his colleagues questioned him, why he was focusing so much on perfecting the body that was just going to be draped in cloth. Sam would shrug, and come up with some excuse about seeking perfection, that the true art would be found in the details.
The truth was, that it had become more than just a project of a statue, the more Sam focused on it. He was rebuilding an entire body from an idea, just a thought of form. In the one of late nights he'd spent on the project, practicing on a piece of clay how to perfecting the details of the wristbone and fingernails; Sam had a thought that he was doing the work of the gods in the old stories, the ones that said they built the first people out of river-clay.
"All I would need is the breath of life, to breathe between your lips," Sam muttered aloud to the statue.
It was in that moment that The Dean, became Dean.
*
Replicating the thickness and weight of Dean's hands comes along by accident, as Sam wraps his shoulder tight in an Ace bandage, and for a moment stops when he realizes it.
The tightness of the bandage almost feels like his grip, he can close his eyes and press down until it feels like a touch and Sam's been so starved for it he wants to mummify his entire body in bandages.
But the feeling passes when the throbbing pain returns, and Sam realizes he's been squeezing an open wound, blood trickling down his arm.
*
It's more than the love of an artist for his creation, when Sam realizes he can't part with Dean for any sum of money. Even when a priest of the temple of the goddess offers to buy it, which is exactly what he was hoping for.
Sam sends him away, saying he has to consider other offers, but there are none left that he hasn't declined.
"Maybe after spending all this time with you, it's made it too hard to let you go."
Sam looks at Dean's face for an answer but of course he doesn't move from his fixed expression. His eyes don't blink, don't even flinch and the muscles of his face are frozen in marble. Not even a twitch of his lips when Sam runs his fingers along them.
"If I could speak for you, I would-" Sam stops himself. He steps back, sliding into a chair facing Dean.
"I wouldn't want to speak for you," Sam says. "I'd want you speak with your own voice, I built you everything else from my imagination but I wouldn't want to speak in a voice for you. I want you to have one of your own."
Sam closes his eyes, his body tenses as the words keep pouring out, as crazy as they sound to him, but he believes every one.
"I don't know when you became a 'you', Dean. It scares me sometimes how much I want you to be a person."
*
For his mouth, Sam contemplates a strip of bacon over breakfast.
He pushes it with his fork to the bottom of his plate where it stares up at him, a wobbly, awkward smile; and Sam can't help but hear Dean's voice in his head, calling bullshit.
Sam can see Dean snatching it up and eating it right off his plate, saying "Try again".
*
The priest comes back the next day and Sam refuses him as politely as he possibly can. The old man eyes him, and then the statue. Back and forth until he smiles, satisfied, and strokes his beard.
"I would think that you would want to curry the goddess' favor."
Sam lowers his eyes. "I'm not that devout a man."
"Even if she rewards you with true love, in flesh and blood? Or do you prefer the feeling of cold, dead stone against your skin?"
Sam feels a jolt of adrenaline in his veins and he clenches his jaw tight as he escorts the priest out of his workroom and throws a beige dropcloth over the statue of Dean, feeling his body quake with fear and excitement. Sam runs outside to the streets, to feel the wind on his skin and runs all the way home.
He knew, the old man took one look at him and read Sam like a book. Saw what he'd been trying to hide from himself, saw through the façade he was trying to put up. Sam had tried to convince himself it was just the madness of an artist, the feeling of creation and satisfaction with his work.
But artists don't see ivory-white stone faces when they close their eyes, mouths curving supple towards theirs, hands and arms and legs embracing them. It was a far more recognizable state of madness.
It was love.
*
Sam's played his last voicemail messages too many times to count. He can even reenact them without listening, every pause, every breath, every stumbled phrase and "um" or "er" he makes.
*
"I've fallen in love with you," Sam admits. "And I'm sending you away."
Sam sighs heavily, sitting at the statue's feet. "That sounds stupid, I went back to the temple, and I've agreed to let them take you away. It's where you belong, in the temple of the goddess of love. Where you're surrounded by beauty and perfection, and you can be appreciated by her followers. Where you're far, far away from me and I can forget your face. I can cure myself of this sickness-this belief that some day you'll walk into my arms and say-"
Sam squeezes his eyes shut, and makes a fist in the dropcloth, trying to keep himself from pulling it off and letting himself have one more look at the statue that has become beloved to him.
"It's not right, to try and will you to be real. You'll never be real, you'll never be anything more than an image of what is real. You're not alive, but I can't stop myself from wanting you to live."
Sam feels himself tug on the cloth and it falls to the floor, pooling at Dean's feet. He crosses over to face him, one last time. Stares into empty white eyes and Sam looks at his mouth.
"The gods breathed life into us," Sam whispers as he places his lips upon Dean's.
*
The second attempt at recreating the softness of Dean's mouth is a success. When nectarines are in season and Sam buys a whole bag of them and savors every bite.
He still hears Dean's voice in his head, chastising him for performing lewd and perverted acts upon innocent fruit.
*
"But you're not a god," she says, hand on her hip, a vision before him like a glimpse of heaven upon earth.
She shrugs playfully, "but maybe you are that good, of a kisser, eh? Why don't we ask Dean?" she says, pointing and Sam whips right around as cold marble arms wrap around his neck.
The empty white eyes blink slowly, stone lids clinking shut and opening again, mouth spreading in a smile.
"Hi Sam," Dean says, as color starts to permeate and fill his skin. He blinks away the blankness in his eyes and there's no sound this time, only green where Sam had etched irises and a black pupil forms in the center.
Dean's skin turns from cold stone to warm flesh, hair dusting his arms, legs, and chest where Sam had once smoothed marble . He places a trembling hand on Dean's head and pets the hair forming there, feels the breath run down his face as Dean takes in his first lungful of air.
Where there was once solid stone, now blood pumping through veins, a heartbeat starting up against Sam's body as Dean pulls him closer.
*
Some nights Sam puts all of the sheets on one side of the bed, just so he can wake up and steal them back in the morning.
*
When his toes can wiggle free of the podium, Dean steps off, stumbling into Sam's arms and nearly taking Sam down to the floor with him.
"Um," Sam manages to get out as Dean finds his footing, standing wobbly in front of him. He shuts his eyes, as Dean's now very real state of undress is rubbing up against his leg. "You need to wear clothes now."
"Oh," Dean says, almost disappointed. "Why?"
"Because you're naked." Sam gestures to his body.
"Do you not like me this way?"
Sam ignores him at first, needing to not focus so intently on the body he'd been fantasizing about, now real and in front of him. Sam quickly turns the dropcloth into a makeshift toga for Dean, draping it over him.
Dean walks off towards the window as he's throwing the last piece over Dean's shoulder and Sam lets him go, noticing how his balance is starting to right itself. Each step Dean takes is more and more natural.
"Is that the sky?" Dean asks.
"Yes," Sam answers.
"Do you still think I'm more beautiful than the stars?" Dean says, looking over his shoulder. "Or were you just saying that to impress me?"
*
"Come here often?" Sam mutters to himself in the shower when he realizes it's been exactly one month since he laughed.
Come here often was Dean's lamest joke, the one that would make Sam groan and roll his eyes. Sam would smack Dean whenever he used it after jacking him off.
One time in the shower, after Dean had sucked him dry and Sam's body was still feeling all fluttery and sensitive, Dean said that, leaning in on the shower wall and leering at him like some creep in a sleazy bar.
Sam had been so torn between embarrassed, annoyed and amused, that all he managed to do was stick out his tongue at Dean. Which just made Dean laugh, smile wide and crinkles at the side of his eyes as the water beat down from the showerhead on both of them.
"Hey baby, come here often?" Sam says to himself in his best attempt at recreating Dean's tone.
*
"So do you-" Sam pauses as Dean walks into his home. "Do you eat?"
Dean surveys the room "Do you have food?"
"Yes, are you hungry?" Sam asks.
"No." Dean turns around. "I don't know. What's hungry look like?"
"It's like a feeling in your stomach."
"Feeling?"
"Under your skin, do you feel something?" Sam blinks. "I mean, it's a feeling, like what happens when you touch something. You're feeling it."
Dean blinks and stands up straight, turning his head to Sam. "There's so many things, pieces and parts of you that can see and hear and-" Dean reaches out his fingers to catch a lock of Sam's hair in-between them. "-touch, now. I don't know how I can get to them all."
Sam catches his breath, and then smiles awkwardly. "There will be time."
*
Some nights Dean is cold beer and a burger, other nights he's bitter whiskey and an empty stomach. Some nights Dean is the last slice of pie in the diner and a big glass of milk.
"Eyes bigger than your stomach?" the waitress asks Sam as he plays with the uneaten food on his plate. He shakes his head and forces down a bite to show her.
Dean is sugar-sweet washed down with coffee that night, and Sam wants to devour him slowly, make him last.
*
"I don't know what I've done wrong," Dean says to Sam, interrupting him mid-conversation as he shows Dean the various rooms in the house.
"You haven't done anything wrong, Dean," Sam says.
Dean shakes his head. "There must have been something I've done. It's the only explanation."
"Explanation for what?"
"All you could talk about before was how much you wanted me to be real, how much you wanted to take me into your arms and touch me, smell me, taste me. How much you wanted to be with me and how wonderful we would be, how happy. And you've barely touched me. Kissed me only once, when you promised me thousands. You couldn't keep your eyes off my body, but now I'm covered up to hide from you."
Dean slumps his shoulders. "I must have done something horrible without realizing, to repulse you so."
Sam shakes his head. "No, no Dean you don't understand, you weren't alive before. You weren't a person, and now that you are-now I want to know who that person is."
"I'm the person you wanted me to be."
"Dean, you don't know what you want though, I couldn't, you don't know the person I am. How do you know you'd want me?"
"I'm the person you want me to be, and you are the person I want. How can it be more simple for you. All you have to do is love me, and I will be the one you love."
Sam wavers on his feet. "It's not supposed to be that way, you're not supposed to wake up and everything's perfect. It's supposed to be real, flaws and obstacles and everything standing in your way."
Sam blinks. "I fell in love with love, not with you. There was never any 'you' beneath that marble until the goddess breathed life there. I was just trying to make up an image in my head of the one I will find someday. The person who isn't built from my imagining the ideal lover, the person my ideal lover turns into."
Dean smiles, "I was hoping you'd figure it out."
*
The front seat of the Impala doesn't smell like Dean anymore. That scent of Dean's sweat running from his nape to the seat, the lingering smell of chili-cheese fries is gone, they haven't been eaten in the front seat in weeks.
Sam even misses the way sex smells. The way testosterone and sweat and spit and everything dirty and tired and rough hung in the air.
Sam misses the way Dean would inhale his smell, the way he'd press his face close to Sam's chest and breathe in, running his wet mouth up Sam's body. He misses the way Dean would smell before the shower, not just after.
*
"He wasn't real," Sam whispers as he's back in his work room, and Dean is still a marble statue, frozen before him. "He could never have been real."
"Are you reassuring yourself, or were you talking to me?" she asks. Arms white like milk crossed over her chest as she leans in his doorway.
Sam throws the dropcloth over the statue. "Maybe a bit of both."
"You'll never find him in clay and stone," she says. "He's not hiding there from you."
"I know," Sam nods. "I'll find him, and I'll know."
"He'll find you." She vanishes with a breeze.
*
Dean's skin is warm, and Sam smiles.
"I never told you this before, when you were dead, before it got really, really bad." Sam licks his lips, Dean nods him on.
"I realized that all I could find were pieces of you. I thought that maybe, if I could put them all together, I could build you from scratch, and make you whole," Sam swallows. "Maybe it'd make myself whole."
Dean arches an eyebrow at him. "The fuck are you talking about, Sammy?"
Sam ducks his head down against Dean's body as they lay together, Sam sprawled out on top of him. "Nothing, just something I was thinking about," he says, pressing his mouth against Dean's chest.
Dean runs his fingers through Sam's hair, coaxing his head back up. "Tell me."
"I dreamed you were a statue I brought to life," Sam says.
Dean smirks. "No shit, like in Mannequin?"
"More like Pygmalion."
"I like my scenario better."
"Fine, then I guess that makes you Kim Cattrall."
"Fuck you, I'm James Spader."
"But that doesn't make any sense."
"Well, I was in hell, so if I say I want to be James Spader; you have to let me be James fucking Spader. Those are the rules, Sammy."
Sam sighs. "Anyway, so let's say you were a statue of James Spader."
"Excellent, continue," Dean says, nodding.
"And when I brought you to life it was all wrong, everything felt wrong because I couldn't make you. I could make something that looked, talked, and acted like you-but it could never be you. I couldn't give it your soul."
Dean gets quiet. "Because you can't make a soul, Sam. You can bend it and break it and watch it fall to pieces, but you can't build one out of nothing. Human, demon, or anything in-between."
"Dean?" Sam asks, rubbing a thumb along his face, trying to turn his focus back.
Dean's eyes turn back on Sam's again, half-lidded, blank stare.
"Sometimes they'll turn black and red and ooze between your fingers like mud," Dean whispers.
*
He'll take him with the scars and the flaws, with the lame come-ons and the stubbornness, with the pieces he'd left behind opening a gaping hole inside him, pain and anguish and guilt holding on tight to him.
He'll take Dean even if it's wrong and sick and they're too tightly wound up in each other-that they've ruined themselves for anyone else to come in and fix them. He'll take Dean though it means staying broken.
"And I'll love him because of it," he tells her, milk-white goddess glowing in the moonlight.
*
Title: Simulacrum
Rating: R
Pairings/Characters: Sam/Dean
Wordcount: 3,403
Notes: dark_reaction inspired this piece with her gorgeous art of Sam/Dean as Pygmalion and Galatea. Thanks to regala_electra for giving this a look-over.
Summary: Sam tries to piece him together, bring him back to life. And Pygmalion gave life to what was never living.
Simulacrum
His skin is cold to the touch.
*
It starts when Sam puts his pen to the paper, and he starts to draw a curve, and it loops back around to another curve, and another inside. The iris of the eye forms, and he defines that further with a dark black pupil.
He messily sketches an eyelid over it, a thick eyebrow in an arch, like when he smirked or cracked a joke to Sam, that sly, teasing eyebrow. Sam tries to shade in a dark circle underneath the eye, like when he would go for days with only hours of sleep; but that messes up the whole thing and he crushes the paper into a ball and throws it away.
*
"You're worthy of a palace," he says, whispering to it in the night. "You'd be right at home in a royal courtyard, or adorning the temple of the goddess, draped in fine linens. Or naked as you are, your perfect body for all to worship."
Sam swallows and moves around the statue, carefully brushing away any flecks of marble or dust left behind from the thorough refining he'd done that afternoon using grit and stone. His brush moves up and down the legs, pure white ivory lines of muscle and flesh.
"It's where you should be, where your beauty can be fully, erm, appreciated," Sam says as he dusts up to his back. Muscles upon muscles and perfect definition cut from the finest materials, it's Sam's favorite part.
"I wish I could make sure you end up there, because you're just-" Sam pauses, flinching over the naked curve of the statue's backside. He laughs at the ridiculousness of his hesitation.
"I forget sometimes, your lack of modesty-or my, my lack of modesty I had in carving you as you are."
Sam walks to face him, his statue, finally finished after more than a year of meticulous labor. "I forget sometimes, that you're not real, Dean."
*
The exact density of Dean's torso is not easily recreated using hotel pillows and sheets but Sam comes close-very close-to it one night in a B&B in Tulsa.
But it's got no warmth, no heat underneath and the only sound he can hear when Sam puts his ear to the cotton and flannel "body" is the whir of the central air and the sound of a car horn as someone pulls out of the driveway outside.
*
Commissioned by the chancellor of the school for artisans, it was originally proposed by Sam as "The Dean"; a statue based upon one of the school deacons. But by the time the deadline rolled around, Sam was nowhere near finished, and told them he was bowing out of the project. He continued the piece for himself, on his own time.
One of his colleagues questioned him, why he was focusing so much on perfecting the body that was just going to be draped in cloth. Sam would shrug, and come up with some excuse about seeking perfection, that the true art would be found in the details.
The truth was, that it had become more than just a project of a statue, the more Sam focused on it. He was rebuilding an entire body from an idea, just a thought of form. In the one of late nights he'd spent on the project, practicing on a piece of clay how to perfecting the details of the wristbone and fingernails; Sam had a thought that he was doing the work of the gods in the old stories, the ones that said they built the first people out of river-clay.
"All I would need is the breath of life, to breathe between your lips," Sam muttered aloud to the statue.
It was in that moment that The Dean, became Dean.
*
Replicating the thickness and weight of Dean's hands comes along by accident, as Sam wraps his shoulder tight in an Ace bandage, and for a moment stops when he realizes it.
The tightness of the bandage almost feels like his grip, he can close his eyes and press down until it feels like a touch and Sam's been so starved for it he wants to mummify his entire body in bandages.
But the feeling passes when the throbbing pain returns, and Sam realizes he's been squeezing an open wound, blood trickling down his arm.
*
It's more than the love of an artist for his creation, when Sam realizes he can't part with Dean for any sum of money. Even when a priest of the temple of the goddess offers to buy it, which is exactly what he was hoping for.
Sam sends him away, saying he has to consider other offers, but there are none left that he hasn't declined.
"Maybe after spending all this time with you, it's made it too hard to let you go."
Sam looks at Dean's face for an answer but of course he doesn't move from his fixed expression. His eyes don't blink, don't even flinch and the muscles of his face are frozen in marble. Not even a twitch of his lips when Sam runs his fingers along them.
"If I could speak for you, I would-" Sam stops himself. He steps back, sliding into a chair facing Dean.
"I wouldn't want to speak for you," Sam says. "I'd want you speak with your own voice, I built you everything else from my imagination but I wouldn't want to speak in a voice for you. I want you to have one of your own."
Sam closes his eyes, his body tenses as the words keep pouring out, as crazy as they sound to him, but he believes every one.
"I don't know when you became a 'you', Dean. It scares me sometimes how much I want you to be a person."
*
For his mouth, Sam contemplates a strip of bacon over breakfast.
He pushes it with his fork to the bottom of his plate where it stares up at him, a wobbly, awkward smile; and Sam can't help but hear Dean's voice in his head, calling bullshit.
Sam can see Dean snatching it up and eating it right off his plate, saying "Try again".
*
The priest comes back the next day and Sam refuses him as politely as he possibly can. The old man eyes him, and then the statue. Back and forth until he smiles, satisfied, and strokes his beard.
"I would think that you would want to curry the goddess' favor."
Sam lowers his eyes. "I'm not that devout a man."
"Even if she rewards you with true love, in flesh and blood? Or do you prefer the feeling of cold, dead stone against your skin?"
Sam feels a jolt of adrenaline in his veins and he clenches his jaw tight as he escorts the priest out of his workroom and throws a beige dropcloth over the statue of Dean, feeling his body quake with fear and excitement. Sam runs outside to the streets, to feel the wind on his skin and runs all the way home.
He knew, the old man took one look at him and read Sam like a book. Saw what he'd been trying to hide from himself, saw through the façade he was trying to put up. Sam had tried to convince himself it was just the madness of an artist, the feeling of creation and satisfaction with his work.
But artists don't see ivory-white stone faces when they close their eyes, mouths curving supple towards theirs, hands and arms and legs embracing them. It was a far more recognizable state of madness.
It was love.
*
Sam's played his last voicemail messages too many times to count. He can even reenact them without listening, every pause, every breath, every stumbled phrase and "um" or "er" he makes.
*
"I've fallen in love with you," Sam admits. "And I'm sending you away."
Sam sighs heavily, sitting at the statue's feet. "That sounds stupid, I went back to the temple, and I've agreed to let them take you away. It's where you belong, in the temple of the goddess of love. Where you're surrounded by beauty and perfection, and you can be appreciated by her followers. Where you're far, far away from me and I can forget your face. I can cure myself of this sickness-this belief that some day you'll walk into my arms and say-"
Sam squeezes his eyes shut, and makes a fist in the dropcloth, trying to keep himself from pulling it off and letting himself have one more look at the statue that has become beloved to him.
"It's not right, to try and will you to be real. You'll never be real, you'll never be anything more than an image of what is real. You're not alive, but I can't stop myself from wanting you to live."
Sam feels himself tug on the cloth and it falls to the floor, pooling at Dean's feet. He crosses over to face him, one last time. Stares into empty white eyes and Sam looks at his mouth.
"The gods breathed life into us," Sam whispers as he places his lips upon Dean's.
*
The second attempt at recreating the softness of Dean's mouth is a success. When nectarines are in season and Sam buys a whole bag of them and savors every bite.
He still hears Dean's voice in his head, chastising him for performing lewd and perverted acts upon innocent fruit.
*
"But you're not a god," she says, hand on her hip, a vision before him like a glimpse of heaven upon earth.
She shrugs playfully, "but maybe you are that good, of a kisser, eh? Why don't we ask Dean?" she says, pointing and Sam whips right around as cold marble arms wrap around his neck.
The empty white eyes blink slowly, stone lids clinking shut and opening again, mouth spreading in a smile.
"Hi Sam," Dean says, as color starts to permeate and fill his skin. He blinks away the blankness in his eyes and there's no sound this time, only green where Sam had etched irises and a black pupil forms in the center.
Dean's skin turns from cold stone to warm flesh, hair dusting his arms, legs, and chest where Sam had once smoothed marble . He places a trembling hand on Dean's head and pets the hair forming there, feels the breath run down his face as Dean takes in his first lungful of air.
Where there was once solid stone, now blood pumping through veins, a heartbeat starting up against Sam's body as Dean pulls him closer.
*
Some nights Sam puts all of the sheets on one side of the bed, just so he can wake up and steal them back in the morning.
*
When his toes can wiggle free of the podium, Dean steps off, stumbling into Sam's arms and nearly taking Sam down to the floor with him.
"Um," Sam manages to get out as Dean finds his footing, standing wobbly in front of him. He shuts his eyes, as Dean's now very real state of undress is rubbing up against his leg. "You need to wear clothes now."
"Oh," Dean says, almost disappointed. "Why?"
"Because you're naked." Sam gestures to his body.
"Do you not like me this way?"
Sam ignores him at first, needing to not focus so intently on the body he'd been fantasizing about, now real and in front of him. Sam quickly turns the dropcloth into a makeshift toga for Dean, draping it over him.
Dean walks off towards the window as he's throwing the last piece over Dean's shoulder and Sam lets him go, noticing how his balance is starting to right itself. Each step Dean takes is more and more natural.
"Is that the sky?" Dean asks.
"Yes," Sam answers.
"Do you still think I'm more beautiful than the stars?" Dean says, looking over his shoulder. "Or were you just saying that to impress me?"
*
"Come here often?" Sam mutters to himself in the shower when he realizes it's been exactly one month since he laughed.
Come here often was Dean's lamest joke, the one that would make Sam groan and roll his eyes. Sam would smack Dean whenever he used it after jacking him off.
One time in the shower, after Dean had sucked him dry and Sam's body was still feeling all fluttery and sensitive, Dean said that, leaning in on the shower wall and leering at him like some creep in a sleazy bar.
Sam had been so torn between embarrassed, annoyed and amused, that all he managed to do was stick out his tongue at Dean. Which just made Dean laugh, smile wide and crinkles at the side of his eyes as the water beat down from the showerhead on both of them.
"Hey baby, come here often?" Sam says to himself in his best attempt at recreating Dean's tone.
*
"So do you-" Sam pauses as Dean walks into his home. "Do you eat?"
Dean surveys the room "Do you have food?"
"Yes, are you hungry?" Sam asks.
"No." Dean turns around. "I don't know. What's hungry look like?"
"It's like a feeling in your stomach."
"Feeling?"
"Under your skin, do you feel something?" Sam blinks. "I mean, it's a feeling, like what happens when you touch something. You're feeling it."
Dean blinks and stands up straight, turning his head to Sam. "There's so many things, pieces and parts of you that can see and hear and-" Dean reaches out his fingers to catch a lock of Sam's hair in-between them. "-touch, now. I don't know how I can get to them all."
Sam catches his breath, and then smiles awkwardly. "There will be time."
*
Some nights Dean is cold beer and a burger, other nights he's bitter whiskey and an empty stomach. Some nights Dean is the last slice of pie in the diner and a big glass of milk.
"Eyes bigger than your stomach?" the waitress asks Sam as he plays with the uneaten food on his plate. He shakes his head and forces down a bite to show her.
Dean is sugar-sweet washed down with coffee that night, and Sam wants to devour him slowly, make him last.
*
"I don't know what I've done wrong," Dean says to Sam, interrupting him mid-conversation as he shows Dean the various rooms in the house.
"You haven't done anything wrong, Dean," Sam says.
Dean shakes his head. "There must have been something I've done. It's the only explanation."
"Explanation for what?"
"All you could talk about before was how much you wanted me to be real, how much you wanted to take me into your arms and touch me, smell me, taste me. How much you wanted to be with me and how wonderful we would be, how happy. And you've barely touched me. Kissed me only once, when you promised me thousands. You couldn't keep your eyes off my body, but now I'm covered up to hide from you."
Dean slumps his shoulders. "I must have done something horrible without realizing, to repulse you so."
Sam shakes his head. "No, no Dean you don't understand, you weren't alive before. You weren't a person, and now that you are-now I want to know who that person is."
"I'm the person you wanted me to be."
"Dean, you don't know what you want though, I couldn't, you don't know the person I am. How do you know you'd want me?"
"I'm the person you want me to be, and you are the person I want. How can it be more simple for you. All you have to do is love me, and I will be the one you love."
Sam wavers on his feet. "It's not supposed to be that way, you're not supposed to wake up and everything's perfect. It's supposed to be real, flaws and obstacles and everything standing in your way."
Sam blinks. "I fell in love with love, not with you. There was never any 'you' beneath that marble until the goddess breathed life there. I was just trying to make up an image in my head of the one I will find someday. The person who isn't built from my imagining the ideal lover, the person my ideal lover turns into."
Dean smiles, "I was hoping you'd figure it out."
*
The front seat of the Impala doesn't smell like Dean anymore. That scent of Dean's sweat running from his nape to the seat, the lingering smell of chili-cheese fries is gone, they haven't been eaten in the front seat in weeks.
Sam even misses the way sex smells. The way testosterone and sweat and spit and everything dirty and tired and rough hung in the air.
Sam misses the way Dean would inhale his smell, the way he'd press his face close to Sam's chest and breathe in, running his wet mouth up Sam's body. He misses the way Dean would smell before the shower, not just after.
*
"He wasn't real," Sam whispers as he's back in his work room, and Dean is still a marble statue, frozen before him. "He could never have been real."
"Are you reassuring yourself, or were you talking to me?" she asks. Arms white like milk crossed over her chest as she leans in his doorway.
Sam throws the dropcloth over the statue. "Maybe a bit of both."
"You'll never find him in clay and stone," she says. "He's not hiding there from you."
"I know," Sam nods. "I'll find him, and I'll know."
"He'll find you." She vanishes with a breeze.
*
Dean's skin is warm, and Sam smiles.
"I never told you this before, when you were dead, before it got really, really bad." Sam licks his lips, Dean nods him on.
"I realized that all I could find were pieces of you. I thought that maybe, if I could put them all together, I could build you from scratch, and make you whole," Sam swallows. "Maybe it'd make myself whole."
Dean arches an eyebrow at him. "The fuck are you talking about, Sammy?"
Sam ducks his head down against Dean's body as they lay together, Sam sprawled out on top of him. "Nothing, just something I was thinking about," he says, pressing his mouth against Dean's chest.
Dean runs his fingers through Sam's hair, coaxing his head back up. "Tell me."
"I dreamed you were a statue I brought to life," Sam says.
Dean smirks. "No shit, like in Mannequin?"
"More like Pygmalion."
"I like my scenario better."
"Fine, then I guess that makes you Kim Cattrall."
"Fuck you, I'm James Spader."
"But that doesn't make any sense."
"Well, I was in hell, so if I say I want to be James Spader; you have to let me be James fucking Spader. Those are the rules, Sammy."
Sam sighs. "Anyway, so let's say you were a statue of James Spader."
"Excellent, continue," Dean says, nodding.
"And when I brought you to life it was all wrong, everything felt wrong because I couldn't make you. I could make something that looked, talked, and acted like you-but it could never be you. I couldn't give it your soul."
Dean gets quiet. "Because you can't make a soul, Sam. You can bend it and break it and watch it fall to pieces, but you can't build one out of nothing. Human, demon, or anything in-between."
"Dean?" Sam asks, rubbing a thumb along his face, trying to turn his focus back.
Dean's eyes turn back on Sam's again, half-lidded, blank stare.
"Sometimes they'll turn black and red and ooze between your fingers like mud," Dean whispers.
*
He'll take him with the scars and the flaws, with the lame come-ons and the stubbornness, with the pieces he'd left behind opening a gaping hole inside him, pain and anguish and guilt holding on tight to him.
He'll take Dean even if it's wrong and sick and they're too tightly wound up in each other-that they've ruined themselves for anyone else to come in and fix them. He'll take Dean though it means staying broken.
"And I'll love him because of it," he tells her, milk-white goddess glowing in the moonlight.