Scheherazade | Sam/Dean | R | 970 words
Scheherazade. Sam/Dean. R. 970 words. For wendy.
--
He remembers the smell of his brother’s skin pressed against his, remembers the taste of a twenty-year-old Dean and the noises his brother made, buried deep inside Sam, remembers how the rain sounded sleeting against the window, and the feel of Dean above him, on him, in him.
--
Tell me a story, Sam, she asks, time and time again, and his tales twine around the nation’s history, rub against people and places and those things out there in the dark that he pretends, for her sake, are legends just as she believes they really are. He tells her about everything he’s seen and heard and killed, everything except Dean, and she always says, Your stories, Sam. They’re always painful, and he doesn’t tell her that with Dean gone, the only thing left is an ache that never heals.
--
Dean comes back and she dies like a million others like her have died. It surprises Sam, how quickly he falls back into the rhythms of the hunt, the stillness of the days in between. It doesn’t surprise him that other things long-repressed come back as well.
--
The scars littering his body like unwanted garbage throb when he kisses her. He tells her that his stories are sad because they lack someone like her. This is a lie, because every story that isn’t about Dean is about someone like her. In 1919, after the Spanish Flu and World War One, when people were doing nothing but looking forward to the promise of better times, a woman fell and broke her ankle fleeing from a poltergeist.
--
In a pool hall three hours north of Dallas, Sam sees eyes on Dean and he knows. They need the money, they like the fun of hustling, but Dean’s playing to the crowd now: his hands stroke the cue, his lips blow out a cloud of chalk dust, faerie dust, over entranced voyeurs, his back arches as he bends and stretches. Dean wins, mostly by distracting everyone else, and Sam can’t deal with it, not another night of eyes coveting what isn’t theirs, but it isn’t his, either.
--
He tells her stories about a prince, a noble, gentle man, and she sighs when his fingers lap at her, when his tongue draws runes over her thighs. She tells him that he can spin stories about a man like that because he is like that, and he doesn’t argue. She wouldn’t understand the way he prowls the streets at night, looking for danger, soaking in the smell of fear and bathing in terror.
--
He slams Dean against the door when they get back to the motel, fists knotted in Dean’s jacket, and he bites Dean’s collarbone, draws blood, hears Dean mutter, Finally. Clothes come off in a flurry of torn-up rags, ripped to shreds and piling on the floor with Sam’s patience and nobility and gentleness, need over-riding everything else. Dean tries to say something, but Sam growls and knocks his brother against the door again, tears a trail of marks and bruises up one side of Dean’s neck and down the other, and Dean comes when Sam growls, Mine, against his ear.
--
Dad’s gone when Sam leaves their house in the middle of town, duffel slung over his back. He makes it out of the driveway before he turns and sees Dean upstairs, watching him out of their bedroom window, and the candy-colored fingertip-shaped bruises on Sam’s hips sting with something that might be betrayal.
--
Yours, Dean whispers, hands pinned above his head, against the door, Sam writhing against him. Dean’s eyes look white in the dark, already recovered, and Sam comes when Dean says it again, a prayer. Yours.
--
Tell me a story, Jess says, and Sam thinks of Dean, the smell and taste and furious intensity of his brother, and then he says, In 1886, after the Civil War, a plantation widow saw the ghost of her husband in their home’s attic. He thinks, even as he tells the story, that he, too, knows what it is to be haunted.
--
They sleep together, Dean curled against him, one hand on Sam’s heart. Sam’s beginning to relearn his brother, his twenty-six-year-old brother, changed by the years but not in the way it counts; Dean still smells the same, his skin still tastes the smell, the weight of him pressed against Sam is heavier but still familiar, the way puzzle pieces feel when slotted together. Cars go by as he lies awake, Dean breathing in patterns of dreams and sleep, tires splashing in puddles as wipers beat rhythms of rain to the ground. When I was eighteen, he says, and Dean stirs but doesn’t wake up, I thought I was leaving a nightmare I couldn’t escape. I was wrong, though, and he looks at the ceiling, at the stained stucco, waiting for the rain to drip through.
--
Tell me a story, Sam.
--
I wasn’t leaving a nightmare. I’d just fallen into one.
--
She hugs him after he’s finished speaking and says, One day, there’ll be some hope in your stories, and his mouth smiles, hearing the promise, while eyes run with worry, because he knows how this story will end, and people like her always die.
--
But I’m awake now, Dean, he says, and Dean’s lips move against his chest. I know. Go to sleep, and Dean’s voice is rough and scratchy. Sam did that, and his fingers skitter over the rips on Dean’s throat, half-pleased at the sleepy hiss Dean gives voice to before falling back asleep. I’m awake, he says, and closes his eyes, listening to the low promise of morning hidden in the rain.
--
He remembers the smell of his brother’s skin pressed against his, remembers the taste of a twenty-year-old Dean and the noises his brother made, buried deep inside Sam, remembers how the rain sounded sleeting against the window, and the feel of Dean above him, on him, in him.
--
Tell me a story, Sam, she asks, time and time again, and his tales twine around the nation’s history, rub against people and places and those things out there in the dark that he pretends, for her sake, are legends just as she believes they really are. He tells her about everything he’s seen and heard and killed, everything except Dean, and she always says, Your stories, Sam. They’re always painful, and he doesn’t tell her that with Dean gone, the only thing left is an ache that never heals.
--
Dean comes back and she dies like a million others like her have died. It surprises Sam, how quickly he falls back into the rhythms of the hunt, the stillness of the days in between. It doesn’t surprise him that other things long-repressed come back as well.
--
The scars littering his body like unwanted garbage throb when he kisses her. He tells her that his stories are sad because they lack someone like her. This is a lie, because every story that isn’t about Dean is about someone like her. In 1919, after the Spanish Flu and World War One, when people were doing nothing but looking forward to the promise of better times, a woman fell and broke her ankle fleeing from a poltergeist.
--
In a pool hall three hours north of Dallas, Sam sees eyes on Dean and he knows. They need the money, they like the fun of hustling, but Dean’s playing to the crowd now: his hands stroke the cue, his lips blow out a cloud of chalk dust, faerie dust, over entranced voyeurs, his back arches as he bends and stretches. Dean wins, mostly by distracting everyone else, and Sam can’t deal with it, not another night of eyes coveting what isn’t theirs, but it isn’t his, either.
--
He tells her stories about a prince, a noble, gentle man, and she sighs when his fingers lap at her, when his tongue draws runes over her thighs. She tells him that he can spin stories about a man like that because he is like that, and he doesn’t argue. She wouldn’t understand the way he prowls the streets at night, looking for danger, soaking in the smell of fear and bathing in terror.
--
He slams Dean against the door when they get back to the motel, fists knotted in Dean’s jacket, and he bites Dean’s collarbone, draws blood, hears Dean mutter, Finally. Clothes come off in a flurry of torn-up rags, ripped to shreds and piling on the floor with Sam’s patience and nobility and gentleness, need over-riding everything else. Dean tries to say something, but Sam growls and knocks his brother against the door again, tears a trail of marks and bruises up one side of Dean’s neck and down the other, and Dean comes when Sam growls, Mine, against his ear.
--
Dad’s gone when Sam leaves their house in the middle of town, duffel slung over his back. He makes it out of the driveway before he turns and sees Dean upstairs, watching him out of their bedroom window, and the candy-colored fingertip-shaped bruises on Sam’s hips sting with something that might be betrayal.
--
Yours, Dean whispers, hands pinned above his head, against the door, Sam writhing against him. Dean’s eyes look white in the dark, already recovered, and Sam comes when Dean says it again, a prayer. Yours.
--
Tell me a story, Jess says, and Sam thinks of Dean, the smell and taste and furious intensity of his brother, and then he says, In 1886, after the Civil War, a plantation widow saw the ghost of her husband in their home’s attic. He thinks, even as he tells the story, that he, too, knows what it is to be haunted.
--
They sleep together, Dean curled against him, one hand on Sam’s heart. Sam’s beginning to relearn his brother, his twenty-six-year-old brother, changed by the years but not in the way it counts; Dean still smells the same, his skin still tastes the smell, the weight of him pressed against Sam is heavier but still familiar, the way puzzle pieces feel when slotted together. Cars go by as he lies awake, Dean breathing in patterns of dreams and sleep, tires splashing in puddles as wipers beat rhythms of rain to the ground. When I was eighteen, he says, and Dean stirs but doesn’t wake up, I thought I was leaving a nightmare I couldn’t escape. I was wrong, though, and he looks at the ceiling, at the stained stucco, waiting for the rain to drip through.
--
Tell me a story, Sam.
--
I wasn’t leaving a nightmare. I’d just fallen into one.
--
She hugs him after he’s finished speaking and says, One day, there’ll be some hope in your stories, and his mouth smiles, hearing the promise, while eyes run with worry, because he knows how this story will end, and people like her always die.
--
But I’m awake now, Dean, he says, and Dean’s lips move against his chest. I know. Go to sleep, and Dean’s voice is rough and scratchy. Sam did that, and his fingers skitter over the rips on Dean’s throat, half-pleased at the sleepy hiss Dean gives voice to before falling back asleep. I’m awake, he says, and closes his eyes, listening to the low promise of morning hidden in the rain.