FIC: haven't you heard (winning the war)
Title: haven’t you heard (winning the war)
Part: Standalone (possible ‘verse to come)
Author: miss_drea_fic
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Sam/Gabriel
Summary: Sam’s college experience can be summed up in pretty much one word: Gabriel.
Disclaimer: Kripke, Singer and Gamble own it all.
Notes: Originally written for wolfish_willow, for team_free_love's ficathon. I think. Anyway, it was written for wolfish_willow.
haven’t you heard
you’re walking around and
you’re falling in circles
and I’m never gonna win this war
what wrongs are you righting
and why are you fighting
if you don’t know what you’re fighting for
- “Andromeda,” Enter the Haggis
Sam’s college experience can be summed up in pretty much one word: Gabriel. Gabriel’s exactly the opposite of Sam. He’s loud, messy and extroverted. Their first semester together consists of four botched attempts at partying and three late nights where Sam vomited up everything he’d ever eaten ever.
Their second semester has Sam ready to explode Gabriel. With his mind. If Sam had his way, Gabriel would be a grease smear on their carpet, several times over. Unfortunately, his power doesn’t work that way. Sam can only read minds.
Even though his iTunes is playing music into his ear buds at brain melting decibels, Sam can still hear Gabriel’s thoughts. Sam growls quietly under his breath and opens up his phone. It’s a little before midnight where Dean is and he hopes his brother is still awake. It rings for a distressingly long time before Dean answers, a little out of breath.
“Hey bro,” he says, and Sam can hear the smile in his voice. “Don’t they teach you how to call people at normal hours in that fancy college of yours?”
Sam laughs. “It is a normal hour. Here.”
“Uh-huh. What’s up?” There’s rustling on Dean’s end and Sam gets a particularly strong mental image of his brother changing in front of the mirror in their shared room. Shaking off the picture, Sam shrugs.
“Nothing.” Dean snorts quietly and Sam doesn’t need to be able to read minds to know what his brother is thinking. “I’m just . . . college isn’t what I thought it would be.”
Dean chuckles. “Aw, you miss me, baby brother?” It’s true but Sam’s not going to say anything. Besides, Dean’s power lies in talking to machinery, not reading minds. Usually Sam is safe to think what he wants. “What’s really wrong, Sam?” Dean asks after a second.
“My room mate and I don’t get along,” he answers eventually. For all his ability to communicate, getting his point across is shockingly difficult sometimes. That might be just Dean, though.
“Don’t get along like how?” Dean responds, and Sam gets another blurry mental image of Dean sitting on the bed, brows furrowed. “Don’t get along like he leaves the lights on all night, or doesn’t care that you’re trying to sleep?”
“No . . . we don’t get along like he’s a prankster, and he drinks too much and he never listens.” Sam doesn’t need to think about his list of ‘why Gabriel is a terrible room mate.’ His mind is a carefully ordered place, and he has lists for everything.
Dean seems amused. It’s wafting down the phone line like a breeze. “You should tell him you can read minds,” he says and Sam isn’t sure if his brother is joking, for once.
“You’re not serious,” he says, to make sure, because there is no way.
Another mental image pierces the phone line, this one of his own making. Sam has to shake his head to clear his thoughts, missing the first half of Dean’s sentence. “... the harm in him knowing? Maybe things will get better.”
Sam’s laugh is a little bitter. “Oh yeah, Dean. I can see it now, ‘you want anything from the DC by the way I can read minds’ I can see how that would go over well.” He’d told exactly two people he could read minds. One was his brother, who had immediately confessed he could talk to machinery like they were people, and the other was his father who went off the deep end and refused to speak to Sam privately for the rest of his childhood.
He knows Dean is thinking of the same things, can feel the impression of old sadness down the line before Dean twitches the thoughts away from him. “Maybe not quite like that,” he says softly. “What’s the worst that could happen? If he takes it badly, just steal it out of his head.”
Dean’s been watching X-Men again. “Dude,” Sam says, choking on a laugh. “I’m not Charles Xavier.”
“Meh,” Dean dismisses him. “I’m just saying. Lay it all out on the table. What’s his mind like?” His brother asked him that a lot, whenever they met new people, especially people who had the potential to become close to them. Teachers, guidance counselors, neighbors who came over for dinner. Usually they were clean, good people who wanted good things, but once it had ended badly for them.
Sam was twelve, small, scrawny and shorter than Dean by almost a foot and a half. He was Dean’s football coach and Sam saw him frequently after school, waiting around for Dean after practice. Dean worshiped the ground the man walked on. Until Sam walked past him one day to hear him thinking about fucking Dean in the locker room.
In the image, Dean was crying and Sam nearly vomited then and there. Dean quit football and they steered clear of the coach after that.
“Hectic,” Sam answers. “He’s always planning, thinking quickly. Nothing weird, but... I don’t know, he’s a lot... he’s closed minded. It’s hard to get anything but surface thoughts from him.”
“So he’s perfect for you ” Dean says with a loud laugh. “Look Sammy, just go with it, okay? I’m going to bed. Stop calling at stupid o’clock at night, bitch ”
Sam would have responded the same way he always does, but he just rolls his eyes and says, “good night, jerk,” and hangs up the phone. Insisting he wasn’t gay to Dean always ended in more ammunition for his brother to hit him with later.
He plugs the phone into the wall to charge and turns to find Gabriel gazing at him. “What?” he says warily.
“Who were you talking to, Gigantor?” Gabriel asks, interested. Sam fights to keep his mind out of Gabriel’s and his expression even.
“Uh, my brother.” Gabriel’s face falls for a second before the expression is hidden behind a wide smile. “What?”
Gabriel shakes his head slowly. “Just... you aren’t happy here, are you, Gigantor?” he asks, intuitively. “Because I just watched you talk to your brother for like, ten minutes, and you seem a lot happier talking to him than you do to anyone else.”
Sam’s brow furrows. “How long were you listening?” he asks, suddenly really worried.
“Not long,” Gabriel lies with a smile. “Long enough to know you hate it here.”
Sam lets it drop, blocking any noise from surrounding minds. He doesn’t want to try and read Gabriel’s mind, it’s rude. And he’s a little afraid of what he’ll find there. “I have trouble,” he says instead, “with people. I don’t get them, most of the time.” That’s probably not true, he understands people just fine, he just doesn’t want to.
Gabriel shrugs one shoulder with a smile meant to disarm. “I’m probably not the best room-mate huh?” he asks rhetorically. “Make me a deal,” he adds, “if I do something that pisses you off, just tell me and I’ll do the same, okay?”
Hesitantly Sam nods. “Okay. Turn your freakin’ music down.”
“Stop worrying so damn much,” Gabriel shoots back. They share a grin and shake on it.
*
When Gabriel hears that Sam can hear people’s thoughts, he has a totally rational panic attack. Some of the things he thinks are not for public consumption; especially not his totally hot, totally shy room-mate.
Also, he kind of can make things out of thin air and that’s a secret he’s kept from everyone but his brothers for his entire life. Granted his brothers are just weird as he is, only in totally different ways.
Lucien can influence people. He calls it ‘suggesting’ and considering that his moral compass doesn’t exactly point North, Gabriel and his other brothers spent most of their formative years trying to keep him in line.
Zach could alter dreams. It came in handy, sometimes, whenever they had nightmares but in general he tended to grump about having a useless power.
Michael can heal. Not everything, and nothing huge, but it saved Lucien’s life when he fell out of a tree and broke three ribs.
Castiel, the baby of the family, got probably the best power out of all of them: teleportation. Unfortunately before he hit puberty, whenever he felt a strong emotion he’d pop in and out of place, and only Gabriel’s quick thinking with illusions kept him from getting caught.
Gabriel himself, got the illusions. And he never wanted to tell anyone more than he did talking to Sam. If Sam has power too... that might mean others are like them. But Sam’s right, how do you tell someone you can make illusions out of thin air?
The next time he and Sam sit down to study together, he decides to just... let it all out. He’s never been a very good liar.
“So uh, I have something to confess to you,” Gabriel says suddenly and Sam jerks in surprise. He has a question in his eyes and Gabriel hurries to say, “I overheard you tell your brother you can read minds.”
Sam’s reaction isn’t one Gabriel is expecting. Instead of yelling or freaking out, Sam turns nine shades of pale, closes his eyes and looks resigned. His face his drawn and he looks centuries older than he should and Gabriel wonders absently if his worst nightmare is someone finding out what he can do.
“Yeah,” Sam says hoarsely. “It is my worst nightmare.”
Well that certainly tells him whether or not Sam was telling the truth. “It’s okay, Sam,” Gabriel says, and hearing Gabriel call him by his first name rather than the surplus of nicknames Gabriel has come up with makes him open his eyes. “I’m not exactly normal, either.” Sam looks at him, really looks at him, and Gabriel opens his hand, and creates a chocolate bar.
Sam blinks. “Whoa. Is that... real?”
“Real enough for the time being, but it’s actually an illusion.” Gabriel grins and takes a bite. “Tastes real enough too.”
Sam raises one eyebrow and takes it from him, taking a bite. Mid chew, the whole thing vanishes and he nearly bites down on his tongue. “What the hell, dude ” he says.
“Sorry, sometimes they don’t last long enough,” Gabriel says impishly, not at all remorseful. “So now you know.”
“Huh,” Sam says thoughtfully.
And that’s that.
For the most part.
*
Once Sam’s been in his head it’s really hard to stay out. He has the same problem with Dean, and it’s way more awkward with Gabriel. Gabriel, in point of fact, is downright fucking devious. Sam will be walking to the bathroom and he’ll catch a burst of thought from Gabriel that makes him turn around and decide to shower later.
There’s a reason the whole floor calls Gabriel “The Prankster King” and Sam was on the receiving end more than once, now he knows better. And gets prior knowledge.
It kind of pisses Gabriel off because he misses the bitch faces. Of course, then he just changes tactics and starts thinking about steamy threesomes with the hot twins from Beta Kappa Phi down the street which makes Sam stutter and blush for no apparent reason.
Gabriel is apparently really good at projecting.
They have a system and it works. It works so well that they room together for their sophomore year.
That’s when Sam finally hears the thought that Gabriel doesn’t want him to hear. Sam goes to take a shower, after carefully screening Gabriel’s thoughts for any mischief involved with the shower heads. Because, the last time he didn’t he found menthol cough drops in the showerhead. Only reason he found them at all is because he’s too damn tall for the stall and is practically at eye level with the shower head.
He forgets his shirt on his bed, and walks half naked back into his room. It’s a boys dorm hall, so it’s not like he’ll run into anyone who hasn’t seen it all already or doesn’t have what he has. He opens the door to their room and Gabriel turns to say something to him. “Hey Gigan-uh.” Gabriel blinks for a second before rallying. “Guess what?”
“What?” Sam says, amused, as he shrugs on his shirt. “If you futzed with the shower head, I will legitimately beat you to death.”
That brings up a series of mental images pouring down the line from Gabriel’s brain directly to Sam’s. Sam in the shower, Sam getting changed, that one time he walked in on Sam and a girl, Sam, Sam Sam Sam Sam- “Whoa,” Sam manages to say, blinking a little.
The torrent cuts out with abject mortification. Sam stares at Gabriel who in turn, very calmly picks up his cell phone and dials speed dial 6. “Hey bro,” he says very carefully into the phone. “I could use a ride. Like, right now.” Sam flinches when Castiel appears in the dorm room, more out of surprise than shock. He’s known for months now what each of the brothers can do.
“Hello Sam,” Castiel says pleasantly enough, before taking Gabriel’s wrist and asking, “where to?”
“Don’t care. Just now.” Then they’re gone, and Gabriel can freak out in peace.
*
Gabriel sleeps at home for the first time since he turned eighteen. He wakes in the morning to twelve angry texts from Sam, one annoyed voice mail and a post-it note from Castiel fixed to his forehead. ‘Went back to my apartment,’ it says in Castiel’s neat handwriting. ‘Call me when you want a ride back to school.’
Gabriel wants a ride to the edge of the earth but he isn’t sure what Castiel’s range is. Probably not far enough to get away from the humiliation. Definitely not far enough to get away from the humiliation. His phone chirps again and he looks down to see another text message from Sam. He hits ignore without reading it.
The phone dings again literally two seconds later and Gabriel sees the words before he can stop himself from reading it. STOP DELETING THESE. I CAN READ YOUR MIND, YOU DUMB FUCK. He laughs helplessly despite himself. It dings again. SEE? YOU’RE LAUGHING. Gabriel flops back on the bed and doesn’t respond. Give me some time, he thinks. I just need some time.
*
Sam’s radius for mind reading is killer. Seriously. Gabriel can’t get far enough for Sam’s text message responses to his messy, off-kilter thoughts. Stanford is in California, and Gabriel grew up in Los Angeles, and Sam has no trouble hearing him there.
It becomes a game. Gabriel collects Sam’s text messages, saving them to the SIM card in his phone each time. First he and Castiel go to Colorado, and he gets a ‘Nope, try again.’ Then he tries Texas and gets a ‘you’re not even trying hard’. He convinces Castiel to go to North Carolina next, and before they’ve even really landed his phone tells him ‘I can still hear you’. Next is Maine, and Sam sends him a series of textual faces and says ‘portland ME, really? You read too much King.’
Gabriel very carefully thinks back that if Sam doesn’t butt the fuck out he was going to wake up in the morning and cough drops in the shower will be the least of his worries.
The text message back says ‘:D just try me’.
He gives up about then, and Castiel drops him off in the alley by his dorm not ten minutes later. Gabriel goes to open the door, thinking complicated thoughts when the door is wrenched open and Sam stands there, dressed thankfully and looking frazzled. “Can we talk about this now?” he asks plaintively and Gabriel nods.
“Yeah,” he says, and he knows he’s way quieter than he usually is, but he can’t help it. He hadn’t told Sam he was gay and now Sam knows about all his Very Inappropriate Thoughts.
Sam snorts. “Dude, I knew you were gay.” Gabriel blinks up at him and can only think in question marks. “Uh, when I brought Jess home that one time in Freshmen year? I wasn’t reading your mind but the revulsion you felt at seeing naked breasts was a big tip off.”
Gabriel flushes. “I like breasts,” he protests. “Just... clothed.”
“Uh huh,” Sam says skeptically. “Now how about you tell me about those very inappropriate thoughts?”
“Dude ” Gabriel recoils. “So against the bro code ”
Then Sam is kissing him and Gabriel throws the bro code out the window. “Get it now?” Sam asks against his lips and Gabriel nods. Sam grins and kisses him again. And holy hell but Sam is a good kisser.
Said good kisser grins again and says, “thanks, I think.”
Gabriel tugs him closer and tilts his head to get a better angle. Shut up, he thinks loudly, shut up. Sam laughs again, and does.
*
Sam kisses down Gabriel’s chest, leaving damp wet marks on his trail. Gabriel has had plenty of sex before, with many men (and one girl) but he’s never loved any of them before. It’s too intense and they’ve barely even started. His cock is hard as nails, pressing against the fly of his jeans and Sam hasn’t even touched him there yet.
As though his boyfriend is reading his mind, Sam’s hand darts down to cover his trapped erection and palm it just-this-side of rough. Gabriel keens and arches. He suddenly gets the feeling that having a boyfriend who can read his every thought is both a curse and a blessing in the bedroom.
Sam grins against his chest and bites one of Gabriel’s nipples, just the way he likes it. Gabriel starts thinking about using a gag because there is no way he’s going to be able to be quiet. “Fuck Gabe, you can’t think shit like that,” Sam groans against his chest. “Not nice.”
He grins. “Turn about is so fair play,” Gabriel announces, albeit breathlessly.
Sam flashes a smile. “I’ll just have to keep you distracted,” he says, and slides down the bed. True to Sam’s word, Gabriel finds himself momentarily distracted by Sam’s mouth on his cock - through both the jeans and his boxers. He whines, arching against Sam’s hands, trying to wiggle out of the rest of his clothes.
Graciously, Sam allows him to squirm out of his jeans, tangling them around his ankles in his haste. Sam hasn’t given head all that often, maybe three times since high school. He’d been with girls for the most part, trying to be normal.
But then, he realized that faking normal was just silly when he could read the minds of the people around him and most of them weren’t all that normal either.
He focuses on Gabriel’s bobbing cock, an inch away from his nose. Gabriel is tense, laying silent and still, muscles quivering with the effort not to move. Sam licks a long stripe up the center of his boyfriend’s dick, starting at the base. Gabriel clamps a hand over his mouth when he yells, hips twisting.
Sam grins once and sucks the head of Gabriel’s cock into his mouth. Gabriel is too long and Sam’s not used it to it, so he pays most of his attention to the spongy head between his lips. He licks at it with his tongue, dragging his wet palm up and down the rest of Gabriel’s length. The way Gabriel is moaning - muffled or not - makes him want to learn how to deep throat. As Sam sucks at Gabriel with vary degrees of pressure, a mental image blasts through him.
It’s of Sam, in the same position he is now, only with his mouth on Gabriel’s balls. Sam immediately shifts targets, and pulls off of Gabriel’s cock with a wet pop. He presses Gabriel’s erection up towards his belly, and mouths at the area between his balls and his cock. Gabriel jerks, and Sam grins at the mental litany of swears.
He licks at Gabriel’s balls, sucking one into his mouth for a gentle suck, then the other. Gabriel thrashes, nearly upsetting Sam and causing him to lose his grip on Gabriel’s cock. “Flip over,” Sam says, and tugs Gabriel up onto his knees when he obeys. He continues tonguing Gabriel’s balls as Gabriel bites a pillow instead of his hand. His other hand drifts down towards his cock but Sam bats him away.
Can’t can’t can’t unless you touch me can’t stand same rhythm please please Sam, Gabriel thinks in his general direction, desperate and writhing. But Sam has a burning desire to see Gabriel come without him touching his cock. He licks steadily over the seam of Gabriel’s balls, brushing his fingers higher over the cleft of his ass.
Gabriel groans, and Sam latches his mouth onto the hole he finds there. Gabriel howls into the pillow and bucks his hips. Two licks later and Gabriel is coming, soaking the sheet and Sam’s hand. Usually Sam gives his partners time to recover but an errant thought from Gabriel changes his mind on it.
He rolls Gabriel over, and cleans up his come wet dick with broad strokes of his tongue as Gabriel flinches and twitches and tries to escape Sam’s mouth even as he hardens again. Once he’s fully hard again, and gasping Sam’s name, Sam reaches over into the bedside table and pulls out his lube.
There’s just enough to slick Gabriel’s erection and give himself a cursory prep job with two fingers. He can fuck Gabriel later. “What are you-oh ” Gabriel starts to say but cuts himself off as Sam lowers himself down onto Gabriel’s cock.
They both groan in unison and Sam knows he’s not going to last much longer. Sam wraps himself up in Gabriel’s mind, in Gabriel’s flesh and lets the movement take him over. He comes in an embarrassingly short amount of time and Gabriel follows not long after, sore and sensitive.
“Next time,” Gabriel says, and it echoes in Sam’s head, “I get to be on top. Okay?”
Sam grins, hiding his face in the pillow. “Okay,” he agrees.
*
“Do you think there are other people like us?” Gabriel asks, propping his chin on his hands. He’s laying on Sam, their legs tangled and Sam pinches his side every time Gabriel shifts around too much. “It can’t be coincidence that you and I ended up as room-mates and both have freaky powers.”
They’d already tried to find a correlation between the two of them, everything from birth years, to birth dates to childhood trauma. Nothing fit, except that they had both been born in 1983 (which didn’t actually count because Dean had been born in ‘79, and all of Gabriel’s brothers were two years apart.)
“I don’t know,” Sam finally answers. “Would be fun to look for them, huh?”
“We need to find you a cerebro,” Gabriel responds solemnly.
Sam snorts a laugh, dislodging Gabriel as he does. “You need to stop spending so much time with Dean. I am not Professor X.”
“Yet,” Gabriel insists.
Shoving his boyfriend off him onto the pillow next to him, Sam turns to face Gabriel and rolls his eyes. “Dude,” he stresses, “I can only read minds. I can’t project into them.”
“Yet ” Gabriel sing-songs. “We’ll learn. Just like I’ll learn how to make my illusions last longer or real more real.”
“Taste, you mean,” Sam mutters, ducking the ensuing blow from Gabriel. “So is that our graduation plan? Find others like us?”
Gabriel lights up and Sam winces. He knows that face. That’s a planning face. It never, ever means anything good. “Road trip ” he announces. “We’ll take a road trip ”
“Oh God,” Sam moans exaggeratedly. “We’re never going to survive the summer.”
Shut up Gabriel thinks loudly and kisses Sam to make sure he listens. “We’ll take your brother and Castiel It’s perfect.”
“Yeah,” Sam says quietly. “Perfect.” But only because it’s with you.
*
Sam’s Epic List of Why He Should Never Go On A Road Trip Again
1. Dean’s music sucks.
2. Lucien is not subtle. (And he’s jealous he didn’t get invited.)
3. Gabriel doesn’t do long car rides (WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO KNOW BEFORE THIS, ASSHAT.)
4. Castiel has a crush on Dean. (Don’t tell him, okay, Gabe? That would just be mean.)
5. The Impala is not big enough for Gabriel, Sam, Dean, Castiel and Gabriel’s ego.
6. Prank wars. ‘Nuff said.
7. Tourist attractions are weird.
- 7a. Giant ceramic cow in North Dakota.
- 7b. Biggest yogurt cup in Pennsylvania
- 7c. 4 different ‘Biggest Ball of Twine’
- 7d. If you see a sign for “two headed snake” in Texas, it’s not a zoo. It’s a brothel.
8. Castiel is too awkward for words. No really.
9. Gabriel can’t keep it in his pants.
10. No one can decide where to go next year.
Gabriel looks at Sam and crosses out number nine. “That’s all you’ve got?”
Sam shrugs. “I don’t want to fight you on that.”
Looking smug, Gabriel writes in his own number nine. “Eh,” he says, signing it with a flourish, “I already won the war.”
9. Get married in Vegas, next time - G
The End
Part: Standalone (possible ‘verse to come)
Author: miss_drea_fic
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Sam/Gabriel
Summary: Sam’s college experience can be summed up in pretty much one word: Gabriel.
Disclaimer: Kripke, Singer and Gamble own it all.
Notes: Originally written for wolfish_willow, for team_free_love's ficathon. I think. Anyway, it was written for wolfish_willow.
haven’t you heard
you’re walking around and
you’re falling in circles
and I’m never gonna win this war
what wrongs are you righting
and why are you fighting
if you don’t know what you’re fighting for
- “Andromeda,” Enter the Haggis
Sam’s college experience can be summed up in pretty much one word: Gabriel. Gabriel’s exactly the opposite of Sam. He’s loud, messy and extroverted. Their first semester together consists of four botched attempts at partying and three late nights where Sam vomited up everything he’d ever eaten ever.
Their second semester has Sam ready to explode Gabriel. With his mind. If Sam had his way, Gabriel would be a grease smear on their carpet, several times over. Unfortunately, his power doesn’t work that way. Sam can only read minds.
Even though his iTunes is playing music into his ear buds at brain melting decibels, Sam can still hear Gabriel’s thoughts. Sam growls quietly under his breath and opens up his phone. It’s a little before midnight where Dean is and he hopes his brother is still awake. It rings for a distressingly long time before Dean answers, a little out of breath.
“Hey bro,” he says, and Sam can hear the smile in his voice. “Don’t they teach you how to call people at normal hours in that fancy college of yours?”
Sam laughs. “It is a normal hour. Here.”
“Uh-huh. What’s up?” There’s rustling on Dean’s end and Sam gets a particularly strong mental image of his brother changing in front of the mirror in their shared room. Shaking off the picture, Sam shrugs.
“Nothing.” Dean snorts quietly and Sam doesn’t need to be able to read minds to know what his brother is thinking. “I’m just . . . college isn’t what I thought it would be.”
Dean chuckles. “Aw, you miss me, baby brother?” It’s true but Sam’s not going to say anything. Besides, Dean’s power lies in talking to machinery, not reading minds. Usually Sam is safe to think what he wants. “What’s really wrong, Sam?” Dean asks after a second.
“My room mate and I don’t get along,” he answers eventually. For all his ability to communicate, getting his point across is shockingly difficult sometimes. That might be just Dean, though.
“Don’t get along like how?” Dean responds, and Sam gets another blurry mental image of Dean sitting on the bed, brows furrowed. “Don’t get along like he leaves the lights on all night, or doesn’t care that you’re trying to sleep?”
“No . . . we don’t get along like he’s a prankster, and he drinks too much and he never listens.” Sam doesn’t need to think about his list of ‘why Gabriel is a terrible room mate.’ His mind is a carefully ordered place, and he has lists for everything.
Dean seems amused. It’s wafting down the phone line like a breeze. “You should tell him you can read minds,” he says and Sam isn’t sure if his brother is joking, for once.
“You’re not serious,” he says, to make sure, because there is no way.
Another mental image pierces the phone line, this one of his own making. Sam has to shake his head to clear his thoughts, missing the first half of Dean’s sentence. “... the harm in him knowing? Maybe things will get better.”
Sam’s laugh is a little bitter. “Oh yeah, Dean. I can see it now, ‘you want anything from the DC by the way I can read minds’ I can see how that would go over well.” He’d told exactly two people he could read minds. One was his brother, who had immediately confessed he could talk to machinery like they were people, and the other was his father who went off the deep end and refused to speak to Sam privately for the rest of his childhood.
He knows Dean is thinking of the same things, can feel the impression of old sadness down the line before Dean twitches the thoughts away from him. “Maybe not quite like that,” he says softly. “What’s the worst that could happen? If he takes it badly, just steal it out of his head.”
Dean’s been watching X-Men again. “Dude,” Sam says, choking on a laugh. “I’m not Charles Xavier.”
“Meh,” Dean dismisses him. “I’m just saying. Lay it all out on the table. What’s his mind like?” His brother asked him that a lot, whenever they met new people, especially people who had the potential to become close to them. Teachers, guidance counselors, neighbors who came over for dinner. Usually they were clean, good people who wanted good things, but once it had ended badly for them.
Sam was twelve, small, scrawny and shorter than Dean by almost a foot and a half. He was Dean’s football coach and Sam saw him frequently after school, waiting around for Dean after practice. Dean worshiped the ground the man walked on. Until Sam walked past him one day to hear him thinking about fucking Dean in the locker room.
In the image, Dean was crying and Sam nearly vomited then and there. Dean quit football and they steered clear of the coach after that.
“Hectic,” Sam answers. “He’s always planning, thinking quickly. Nothing weird, but... I don’t know, he’s a lot... he’s closed minded. It’s hard to get anything but surface thoughts from him.”
“So he’s perfect for you ” Dean says with a loud laugh. “Look Sammy, just go with it, okay? I’m going to bed. Stop calling at stupid o’clock at night, bitch ”
Sam would have responded the same way he always does, but he just rolls his eyes and says, “good night, jerk,” and hangs up the phone. Insisting he wasn’t gay to Dean always ended in more ammunition for his brother to hit him with later.
He plugs the phone into the wall to charge and turns to find Gabriel gazing at him. “What?” he says warily.
“Who were you talking to, Gigantor?” Gabriel asks, interested. Sam fights to keep his mind out of Gabriel’s and his expression even.
“Uh, my brother.” Gabriel’s face falls for a second before the expression is hidden behind a wide smile. “What?”
Gabriel shakes his head slowly. “Just... you aren’t happy here, are you, Gigantor?” he asks, intuitively. “Because I just watched you talk to your brother for like, ten minutes, and you seem a lot happier talking to him than you do to anyone else.”
Sam’s brow furrows. “How long were you listening?” he asks, suddenly really worried.
“Not long,” Gabriel lies with a smile. “Long enough to know you hate it here.”
Sam lets it drop, blocking any noise from surrounding minds. He doesn’t want to try and read Gabriel’s mind, it’s rude. And he’s a little afraid of what he’ll find there. “I have trouble,” he says instead, “with people. I don’t get them, most of the time.” That’s probably not true, he understands people just fine, he just doesn’t want to.
Gabriel shrugs one shoulder with a smile meant to disarm. “I’m probably not the best room-mate huh?” he asks rhetorically. “Make me a deal,” he adds, “if I do something that pisses you off, just tell me and I’ll do the same, okay?”
Hesitantly Sam nods. “Okay. Turn your freakin’ music down.”
“Stop worrying so damn much,” Gabriel shoots back. They share a grin and shake on it.
*
When Gabriel hears that Sam can hear people’s thoughts, he has a totally rational panic attack. Some of the things he thinks are not for public consumption; especially not his totally hot, totally shy room-mate.
Also, he kind of can make things out of thin air and that’s a secret he’s kept from everyone but his brothers for his entire life. Granted his brothers are just weird as he is, only in totally different ways.
Lucien can influence people. He calls it ‘suggesting’ and considering that his moral compass doesn’t exactly point North, Gabriel and his other brothers spent most of their formative years trying to keep him in line.
Zach could alter dreams. It came in handy, sometimes, whenever they had nightmares but in general he tended to grump about having a useless power.
Michael can heal. Not everything, and nothing huge, but it saved Lucien’s life when he fell out of a tree and broke three ribs.
Castiel, the baby of the family, got probably the best power out of all of them: teleportation. Unfortunately before he hit puberty, whenever he felt a strong emotion he’d pop in and out of place, and only Gabriel’s quick thinking with illusions kept him from getting caught.
Gabriel himself, got the illusions. And he never wanted to tell anyone more than he did talking to Sam. If Sam has power too... that might mean others are like them. But Sam’s right, how do you tell someone you can make illusions out of thin air?
The next time he and Sam sit down to study together, he decides to just... let it all out. He’s never been a very good liar.
“So uh, I have something to confess to you,” Gabriel says suddenly and Sam jerks in surprise. He has a question in his eyes and Gabriel hurries to say, “I overheard you tell your brother you can read minds.”
Sam’s reaction isn’t one Gabriel is expecting. Instead of yelling or freaking out, Sam turns nine shades of pale, closes his eyes and looks resigned. His face his drawn and he looks centuries older than he should and Gabriel wonders absently if his worst nightmare is someone finding out what he can do.
“Yeah,” Sam says hoarsely. “It is my worst nightmare.”
Well that certainly tells him whether or not Sam was telling the truth. “It’s okay, Sam,” Gabriel says, and hearing Gabriel call him by his first name rather than the surplus of nicknames Gabriel has come up with makes him open his eyes. “I’m not exactly normal, either.” Sam looks at him, really looks at him, and Gabriel opens his hand, and creates a chocolate bar.
Sam blinks. “Whoa. Is that... real?”
“Real enough for the time being, but it’s actually an illusion.” Gabriel grins and takes a bite. “Tastes real enough too.”
Sam raises one eyebrow and takes it from him, taking a bite. Mid chew, the whole thing vanishes and he nearly bites down on his tongue. “What the hell, dude ” he says.
“Sorry, sometimes they don’t last long enough,” Gabriel says impishly, not at all remorseful. “So now you know.”
“Huh,” Sam says thoughtfully.
And that’s that.
For the most part.
*
Once Sam’s been in his head it’s really hard to stay out. He has the same problem with Dean, and it’s way more awkward with Gabriel. Gabriel, in point of fact, is downright fucking devious. Sam will be walking to the bathroom and he’ll catch a burst of thought from Gabriel that makes him turn around and decide to shower later.
There’s a reason the whole floor calls Gabriel “The Prankster King” and Sam was on the receiving end more than once, now he knows better. And gets prior knowledge.
It kind of pisses Gabriel off because he misses the bitch faces. Of course, then he just changes tactics and starts thinking about steamy threesomes with the hot twins from Beta Kappa Phi down the street which makes Sam stutter and blush for no apparent reason.
Gabriel is apparently really good at projecting.
They have a system and it works. It works so well that they room together for their sophomore year.
That’s when Sam finally hears the thought that Gabriel doesn’t want him to hear. Sam goes to take a shower, after carefully screening Gabriel’s thoughts for any mischief involved with the shower heads. Because, the last time he didn’t he found menthol cough drops in the showerhead. Only reason he found them at all is because he’s too damn tall for the stall and is practically at eye level with the shower head.
He forgets his shirt on his bed, and walks half naked back into his room. It’s a boys dorm hall, so it’s not like he’ll run into anyone who hasn’t seen it all already or doesn’t have what he has. He opens the door to their room and Gabriel turns to say something to him. “Hey Gigan-uh.” Gabriel blinks for a second before rallying. “Guess what?”
“What?” Sam says, amused, as he shrugs on his shirt. “If you futzed with the shower head, I will legitimately beat you to death.”
That brings up a series of mental images pouring down the line from Gabriel’s brain directly to Sam’s. Sam in the shower, Sam getting changed, that one time he walked in on Sam and a girl, Sam, Sam Sam Sam Sam- “Whoa,” Sam manages to say, blinking a little.
The torrent cuts out with abject mortification. Sam stares at Gabriel who in turn, very calmly picks up his cell phone and dials speed dial 6. “Hey bro,” he says very carefully into the phone. “I could use a ride. Like, right now.” Sam flinches when Castiel appears in the dorm room, more out of surprise than shock. He’s known for months now what each of the brothers can do.
“Hello Sam,” Castiel says pleasantly enough, before taking Gabriel’s wrist and asking, “where to?”
“Don’t care. Just now.” Then they’re gone, and Gabriel can freak out in peace.
*
Gabriel sleeps at home for the first time since he turned eighteen. He wakes in the morning to twelve angry texts from Sam, one annoyed voice mail and a post-it note from Castiel fixed to his forehead. ‘Went back to my apartment,’ it says in Castiel’s neat handwriting. ‘Call me when you want a ride back to school.’
Gabriel wants a ride to the edge of the earth but he isn’t sure what Castiel’s range is. Probably not far enough to get away from the humiliation. Definitely not far enough to get away from the humiliation. His phone chirps again and he looks down to see another text message from Sam. He hits ignore without reading it.
The phone dings again literally two seconds later and Gabriel sees the words before he can stop himself from reading it. STOP DELETING THESE. I CAN READ YOUR MIND, YOU DUMB FUCK. He laughs helplessly despite himself. It dings again. SEE? YOU’RE LAUGHING. Gabriel flops back on the bed and doesn’t respond. Give me some time, he thinks. I just need some time.
*
Sam’s radius for mind reading is killer. Seriously. Gabriel can’t get far enough for Sam’s text message responses to his messy, off-kilter thoughts. Stanford is in California, and Gabriel grew up in Los Angeles, and Sam has no trouble hearing him there.
It becomes a game. Gabriel collects Sam’s text messages, saving them to the SIM card in his phone each time. First he and Castiel go to Colorado, and he gets a ‘Nope, try again.’ Then he tries Texas and gets a ‘you’re not even trying hard’. He convinces Castiel to go to North Carolina next, and before they’ve even really landed his phone tells him ‘I can still hear you’. Next is Maine, and Sam sends him a series of textual faces and says ‘portland ME, really? You read too much King.’
Gabriel very carefully thinks back that if Sam doesn’t butt the fuck out he was going to wake up in the morning and cough drops in the shower will be the least of his worries.
The text message back says ‘:D just try me’.
He gives up about then, and Castiel drops him off in the alley by his dorm not ten minutes later. Gabriel goes to open the door, thinking complicated thoughts when the door is wrenched open and Sam stands there, dressed thankfully and looking frazzled. “Can we talk about this now?” he asks plaintively and Gabriel nods.
“Yeah,” he says, and he knows he’s way quieter than he usually is, but he can’t help it. He hadn’t told Sam he was gay and now Sam knows about all his Very Inappropriate Thoughts.
Sam snorts. “Dude, I knew you were gay.” Gabriel blinks up at him and can only think in question marks. “Uh, when I brought Jess home that one time in Freshmen year? I wasn’t reading your mind but the revulsion you felt at seeing naked breasts was a big tip off.”
Gabriel flushes. “I like breasts,” he protests. “Just... clothed.”
“Uh huh,” Sam says skeptically. “Now how about you tell me about those very inappropriate thoughts?”
“Dude ” Gabriel recoils. “So against the bro code ”
Then Sam is kissing him and Gabriel throws the bro code out the window. “Get it now?” Sam asks against his lips and Gabriel nods. Sam grins and kisses him again. And holy hell but Sam is a good kisser.
Said good kisser grins again and says, “thanks, I think.”
Gabriel tugs him closer and tilts his head to get a better angle. Shut up, he thinks loudly, shut up. Sam laughs again, and does.
*
Sam kisses down Gabriel’s chest, leaving damp wet marks on his trail. Gabriel has had plenty of sex before, with many men (and one girl) but he’s never loved any of them before. It’s too intense and they’ve barely even started. His cock is hard as nails, pressing against the fly of his jeans and Sam hasn’t even touched him there yet.
As though his boyfriend is reading his mind, Sam’s hand darts down to cover his trapped erection and palm it just-this-side of rough. Gabriel keens and arches. He suddenly gets the feeling that having a boyfriend who can read his every thought is both a curse and a blessing in the bedroom.
Sam grins against his chest and bites one of Gabriel’s nipples, just the way he likes it. Gabriel starts thinking about using a gag because there is no way he’s going to be able to be quiet. “Fuck Gabe, you can’t think shit like that,” Sam groans against his chest. “Not nice.”
He grins. “Turn about is so fair play,” Gabriel announces, albeit breathlessly.
Sam flashes a smile. “I’ll just have to keep you distracted,” he says, and slides down the bed. True to Sam’s word, Gabriel finds himself momentarily distracted by Sam’s mouth on his cock - through both the jeans and his boxers. He whines, arching against Sam’s hands, trying to wiggle out of the rest of his clothes.
Graciously, Sam allows him to squirm out of his jeans, tangling them around his ankles in his haste. Sam hasn’t given head all that often, maybe three times since high school. He’d been with girls for the most part, trying to be normal.
But then, he realized that faking normal was just silly when he could read the minds of the people around him and most of them weren’t all that normal either.
He focuses on Gabriel’s bobbing cock, an inch away from his nose. Gabriel is tense, laying silent and still, muscles quivering with the effort not to move. Sam licks a long stripe up the center of his boyfriend’s dick, starting at the base. Gabriel clamps a hand over his mouth when he yells, hips twisting.
Sam grins once and sucks the head of Gabriel’s cock into his mouth. Gabriel is too long and Sam’s not used it to it, so he pays most of his attention to the spongy head between his lips. He licks at it with his tongue, dragging his wet palm up and down the rest of Gabriel’s length. The way Gabriel is moaning - muffled or not - makes him want to learn how to deep throat. As Sam sucks at Gabriel with vary degrees of pressure, a mental image blasts through him.
It’s of Sam, in the same position he is now, only with his mouth on Gabriel’s balls. Sam immediately shifts targets, and pulls off of Gabriel’s cock with a wet pop. He presses Gabriel’s erection up towards his belly, and mouths at the area between his balls and his cock. Gabriel jerks, and Sam grins at the mental litany of swears.
He licks at Gabriel’s balls, sucking one into his mouth for a gentle suck, then the other. Gabriel thrashes, nearly upsetting Sam and causing him to lose his grip on Gabriel’s cock. “Flip over,” Sam says, and tugs Gabriel up onto his knees when he obeys. He continues tonguing Gabriel’s balls as Gabriel bites a pillow instead of his hand. His other hand drifts down towards his cock but Sam bats him away.
Can’t can’t can’t unless you touch me can’t stand same rhythm please please Sam, Gabriel thinks in his general direction, desperate and writhing. But Sam has a burning desire to see Gabriel come without him touching his cock. He licks steadily over the seam of Gabriel’s balls, brushing his fingers higher over the cleft of his ass.
Gabriel groans, and Sam latches his mouth onto the hole he finds there. Gabriel howls into the pillow and bucks his hips. Two licks later and Gabriel is coming, soaking the sheet and Sam’s hand. Usually Sam gives his partners time to recover but an errant thought from Gabriel changes his mind on it.
He rolls Gabriel over, and cleans up his come wet dick with broad strokes of his tongue as Gabriel flinches and twitches and tries to escape Sam’s mouth even as he hardens again. Once he’s fully hard again, and gasping Sam’s name, Sam reaches over into the bedside table and pulls out his lube.
There’s just enough to slick Gabriel’s erection and give himself a cursory prep job with two fingers. He can fuck Gabriel later. “What are you-oh ” Gabriel starts to say but cuts himself off as Sam lowers himself down onto Gabriel’s cock.
They both groan in unison and Sam knows he’s not going to last much longer. Sam wraps himself up in Gabriel’s mind, in Gabriel’s flesh and lets the movement take him over. He comes in an embarrassingly short amount of time and Gabriel follows not long after, sore and sensitive.
“Next time,” Gabriel says, and it echoes in Sam’s head, “I get to be on top. Okay?”
Sam grins, hiding his face in the pillow. “Okay,” he agrees.
*
“Do you think there are other people like us?” Gabriel asks, propping his chin on his hands. He’s laying on Sam, their legs tangled and Sam pinches his side every time Gabriel shifts around too much. “It can’t be coincidence that you and I ended up as room-mates and both have freaky powers.”
They’d already tried to find a correlation between the two of them, everything from birth years, to birth dates to childhood trauma. Nothing fit, except that they had both been born in 1983 (which didn’t actually count because Dean had been born in ‘79, and all of Gabriel’s brothers were two years apart.)
“I don’t know,” Sam finally answers. “Would be fun to look for them, huh?”
“We need to find you a cerebro,” Gabriel responds solemnly.
Sam snorts a laugh, dislodging Gabriel as he does. “You need to stop spending so much time with Dean. I am not Professor X.”
“Yet,” Gabriel insists.
Shoving his boyfriend off him onto the pillow next to him, Sam turns to face Gabriel and rolls his eyes. “Dude,” he stresses, “I can only read minds. I can’t project into them.”
“Yet ” Gabriel sing-songs. “We’ll learn. Just like I’ll learn how to make my illusions last longer or real more real.”
“Taste, you mean,” Sam mutters, ducking the ensuing blow from Gabriel. “So is that our graduation plan? Find others like us?”
Gabriel lights up and Sam winces. He knows that face. That’s a planning face. It never, ever means anything good. “Road trip ” he announces. “We’ll take a road trip ”
“Oh God,” Sam moans exaggeratedly. “We’re never going to survive the summer.”
Shut up Gabriel thinks loudly and kisses Sam to make sure he listens. “We’ll take your brother and Castiel It’s perfect.”
“Yeah,” Sam says quietly. “Perfect.” But only because it’s with you.
*
Sam’s Epic List of Why He Should Never Go On A Road Trip Again
1. Dean’s music sucks.
2. Lucien is not subtle. (And he’s jealous he didn’t get invited.)
3. Gabriel doesn’t do long car rides (WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO KNOW BEFORE THIS, ASSHAT.)
4. Castiel has a crush on Dean. (Don’t tell him, okay, Gabe? That would just be mean.)
5. The Impala is not big enough for Gabriel, Sam, Dean, Castiel and Gabriel’s ego.
6. Prank wars. ‘Nuff said.
7. Tourist attractions are weird.
- 7a. Giant ceramic cow in North Dakota.
- 7b. Biggest yogurt cup in Pennsylvania
- 7c. 4 different ‘Biggest Ball of Twine’
- 7d. If you see a sign for “two headed snake” in Texas, it’s not a zoo. It’s a brothel.
8. Castiel is too awkward for words. No really.
9. Gabriel can’t keep it in his pants.
10. No one can decide where to go next year.
Gabriel looks at Sam and crosses out number nine. “That’s all you’ve got?”
Sam shrugs. “I don’t want to fight you on that.”
Looking smug, Gabriel writes in his own number nine. “Eh,” he says, signing it with a flourish, “I already won the war.”
9. Get married in Vegas, next time - G
The End