A touch (Dean/Sam ficlet)
A touch means so much to them. They’re not good with words, they haven’t been taught to, they don’t know how to say things without feeling a trail of embarrassment. They talk only when they feel their souls crushing under the weight of too much heartbreak or gratitude…but they let their hands, their bodies talk, usually.
They touch…more than it’s necessary, more than it is probably allowed.
They learned to communicate with their bodies: a brush of the shoulders, their legs pressed together, hands cradling faces and necks. It’s their way to freak out, to say, “Thank God you’re alright…don’t you dare ever scaring me like that, again.”
It’s their way of expressing all the things they can’t say, all the things that make them whole, that make them function.
People notice…notice the intimacy of their gestures. They pretend not to know. They pretend…
They always pretend.
They touch each other because they need to know, feel, when things are okay…they need to know how to fix things when they’re not okay.
They aren’t aware of how gentle their hands on each other usually are; as if they’re afraid the other would burst, as if they’re each other’s most precious possession. There is so much violence in their world…and yet the care that it’s in every brush of the shoulders, every gentle cradling of faces, comes naturally to them.
There aren’t casual gestures. Not with them.
But they’re good at pretending.
They always do.