The Road, 2/2
Part 1
Civilians accumulated so much fucking stuff, it was appalling. Lisa and Ben, even-that still hurt to think of, but it was almost a sweet hurt-they’d been able to fill an entire house with their random crap, all of it drenched in their memories. Dean wondered, if he visited them now, if he touched the kitchen table, would it remember him, or did the angel mindwipe cover that too?
Point was, regular people had probably thousands of things, at least a dozen important enough to them that Dean could get a pretty good picture of them just from handling the object, even setting aside the ones that had taken an imprint of some horrible supernatural happening. Dean could get a pretty good read on any random stranger, if he were allowed to follow them home.
But Sam hadn’t accumulated much over his lifetime; even his weapons were largely shared in common. And Sam was the only one Dean really wanted to know. At least sometimes-other times he thought that finding out how Sam felt about him, deep inside, would most likely be enough to get him to put a gun to his head for real. Plus, Sam would definitely consider it an invasion of his privacy, which there wasn’t much of in the first place.
Still, Dean spent a bunch of time thinking about how he could go about getting a look inside Sam’s giant brain, if he wanted to. The choices weren’t good. Probably the most significant object that they still possessed was Ruby’s knife. And given how that must’ve been made, how Ruby’s Hell-stench and smug betrayal would’ve clung to it, Dean wasn’t going to touch that knife even if a demon put it to his throat.
So they did more cases. It didn’t get more pleasant to experience a victim’s death. Kind of a mindfuck, to experience being torn violently apart and then to have his body intact again. A real blast from the past. But he didn’t get to save anyone in Hell, and that made a big difference. Even if Sam was watching every drink he pounded down with quiet concern. The man was thirty years old; the puppy eyes should’ve disappeared by now.
****
This time, their victim was a junkie, found drained on the floor of an abandoned house. Tossed there like the used condoms and broken vials. And the cops didn’t see him as a person any more than the vamp who killed him. Some days Sam wondered why they spent so much time hunting inhuman monsters, when people were so good at hurting each other without any help from outside.
The case itself went down quickly. Dean had become practiced at extracting the maximum information from his glimpses into people’s lives. He’d even found an app that he could use to create police artist-style pictures of anyone he saw in his visions, though he complained that it was no good on monsters that didn’t look human. So they ID’d the vamp, went in and took its head off along with two others for good measure, and kicked back for the night.
Except that Dean’s beers didn’t calm him. He was alternately flushed and pale, and drops of sweat stood out along his hairline. He tried to hide it, but running water wasn’t enough to disguise the sound of him throwing up the bites of burger he’d managed to choke down at dinner.
When he came out of the bathroom, Sam was sitting on the edge of his bed, arms folded, waiting. “What’s wrong?”
Dean twitched, then swiped at his forehead. “Nothing.”
Sam didn’t dignify that with a response, though he could feel his face getting tighter.
Dean went over to his bag and pulled his sweat-soaked tee off. As he rummaged around for a clean one, Sam noted distantly that his shoulders and back were as broad and muscular as ever. Dean’s animal vitality would never stop drawing him in, like it drew everyone else; Sam had accepted that a long time ago. As long as he stayed just close enough to orbit Dean and not close enough to crash into him, they’d be okay.
Dean shrugged his shoulders irritably under the weight of Sam’s gaze. “If I tell you,” he said, almost too soft to hear, “you’re gonna be mad.”
Sam took a careful breath in through his nose. “Oh, I’m already there. You can’t do this, Dean. You can’t shut me out.”
As Dean busied himself pulling on his new shirt, he began to talk. “Paul was riding the white horse for the past five years. Right about now, he’d really need to be getting well, if he was still alive. How about you grab me an OJ and we can wait it out watching some reality show idiots yell at each other.”
Sam took the order as a peace offering, as intended. “Sure,” he said, soft now that Dean had told him what he needed to know. And later, when he brought Dean a damp washcloth for his fevered forehead as Dean tossed restlessly, neither asleep nor awake, he smiled down at his brother and promised himself that he wasn’t ever going to let Dean go through this alone.
****
Sam got a notice about Dad’s old storage unit-they had to pay up or it’d be auctioned off-and they ended up driving out to New York to load up the contents. The bunker had plenty of lockboxes strong enough to contain the dangerous objects, and it didn’t make sense to keep paying to store a bunch of other crap.
The drive was good, except for the misery of the kid who put together Dean’s hamburger at McDonald’s. Dean didn’t get a name, but maybe Sammy could work some of his computer magic, and Dean’d drop a dime on the parents. He doubted that would help in the long run, but he didn’t know how to save people from other people.
They packed up mostly in silence, putting boxes into the U-Haul they’d rented (no way was Dean going to risk his baby’s suspension on a trailer). There was almost nothing not related to hunting, which was par for the course with Dad. They’d already found most of the mementoes from their childhood the first time they’d visited. There was still a spray of dried blood on the concrete floor from Zachariah’s torture.
Right before they left, Dean gave into impulse and peeled off a glove so that he could touch that very first sawed-off.
He was drowning, pulled under by the wave of emotion, so much bigger than anything else. Like being hit with a wall of sound, if the sound was a need to protect so profound that it wrapped him in a layer of insulation, making his vision waver and his legs too weak to hold him up.
“What is it?” Sam demanded, his hands warm and concerned as he grabbed on to Dean’s shoulders and helped keep him from falling to the ground like a pile of dirty laundry.
Dean was gasping, straining to breathe even though it was like getting thrown off the world, spinning in a completely new direction.
“Dean!”
“He loved me,” he said, not even meaning to.
Sam looked from Dean to the shotgun and back. His face softened in terrible compassion, and that was even worse. Dean ducked his head, but Sam wouldn’t let him go, hugged him close. “Of course he did,” Sam said, voice filled with saddened wonder. “You have to know that.”
Dean shook his head involuntarily, still dampening Sam’s shirt. Yes, Dad had sold his soul-but it wasn’t the same, knowing that and feeling this. An emotion so big he hadn’t known it could be shared with more than one person.
Sam didn’t make him talk about it, just delayed their departure for an hour while Dean showed him exactly what he’d done to cut the shotgun down, using tools from the garage where Dad had been working at the time. Sam knew this stuff already, Dean understood, but he appreciated the effort.
****
They worked more cases.
Sam grew increasingly concerned for Dean. There was one incident where Dean had to go through six charred corpses before he found a clue that actually helped identify the doer, which turned out to be an ifrit. The others hadn’t seen anything but their own deaths.
Dean said that he was fine; if Dean had been smarter, he would have complained loudly and Sam would’ve known that the pain was bearable. Instead Dean drank whiskey like he was hoping for a prize at the bottom of the bottle, and he didn’t sleep until they’d returned to the bunker. Every hunt strung him out a little more, made him more eager to get on to the next one. He was burning himself down, and Sam didn’t know what to do about it.
Dean balked at certain motel rooms, or sometimes just at a towel or a mattress. He always made a face and named some sex act that he insisted had been performed between two (once, three) extremely unattractive individuals, but Sam had been in enough motel rooms to know that most of the stories were likely far uglier than that. Still, unless the whole room was so contaminated that Dean got too antsy to stay, they wouldn’t switch rooms; they didn’t need to draw that much attention. It was hard for Sam to sleep on a mattress he knew had seen the kind of human darkness that didn’t need demons. He’d been doing it for years, sure, but it was different to be confronted by it, even only indirectly in the form of Dean’s flinch.
****
Dean was sitting in the car in a motel parking lot, waiting out another of Sam’s snits over how Dean was drinking too many meals and watching porn through too many nights. So what else was new, right? But Sam didn’t see it that way. Dean had eventually given up and gone to wait for Sam in the car. Sam’d be out eventually, when he’d calmed himself down enough to convince himself that a reasonable lecture would work better.
He pulled off a glove, struck by an impulse, and put out a finger to brush over the amulet those fangirls had given him. A wave of exhausted satisfaction rolled through him-late nights at the school, working to make something with other people who wanted the same, magic for people who didn’t know that real magic existed. She hadn’t known much about Supernatural when she started, but she wasn’t just a props mistress; she was the props mistress, and she did her homework-the whole series’ worth. And maybe read some fan fiction too, because let’s face it, beautiful boys hunting things and saving people were a relief from the endless pressure of AP homework and volleyball and civic responsibility that might help her get into an Ivy. When she cast the amulet in the school’s art room, she wanted it to be perfect-and visible from the back seats. Maybe it had come out more Dobby the house elf than all-knowing Buddha figure, but she’d made it with her own hands, for a cause she loved, and she’d planned to keep it as her souvenir of the production.
The door creaked open, startling Dean out of his reverie. Sam slid in beside him as Dean replaced his glove, moving slow like he wasn’t embarrassed to have been caught mooning over that ridiculous fan story.
“I guess there are some good parts to the power, too,” Sam said, because Sam didn’t need to be able to read minds to know what Dean was thinking.
Dean shrugged. “I can handle it. I can save people. How many people are alive because we’ve been able to find the bad guys faster?”
“We saved lives before,” Sam insisted, half-turned on the seat so that he could look at Dean, giving him the full big-eyed begging treatment. “We can do it again.”
Dean shook his head. “This isn’t like the Mark. It isn’t making me into a monster.”
“No, it’s hurting you,” Sam said, like Dean didn’t know that.
“I been through worse.” It meant a lot that Sam cared, though. Probably enough to keep Dean going, really.
“Not a good enough reason,” Sam said, like shutting the bunker door on the rest of the world. “Look, I-I want you to read me, okay? An object important to me.”
Dean had never expected Sam to say it outright. He wasn’t that good at predicting Sam, honestly, once you got past the aliases and moves in a fight. He closed his eyes. “Sam, I know, all right?”
“Dean,” Sam sighed. “What do you think you know?”
He wanted to hate Sam for making him do this, but it was less than he deserved. Sam had already said every brutal truth to him one time or another. He didn’t have to look Sam in the eye, at least. “I know how pathetic I am,” he rasped. “I fucked up any peace you ever got. You stick with me because I fucked you up enough you think you can’t leave. You think you have to take care of me. And the worst part is, I’ll take it.” Sam ought to have someone who could give him hope, but what he had was Dean.
He could hear Sam shaking his head. Sam maybe even believed his own denials. “That’s not what this is, Dean. But if you think it is-you owe me. If you're going to do this you need to understand what it costs. You're not less important than anyone else.”
Dean couldn’t keep his face straight at that one. Importance wasn’t the problem. Not with all the shit Dean had done, to Sam and so many others.
“Dean. Please. I need you to do this.” When Dean dared a look, Sam’s eyes were like a Southern preacher’s, rock-solid certain of an order to the world that existed only in his head.
He’d let his brother go to Hell at a similar request. Hard to imagine how this could be worse, even if it was fresher. “Fine,” he said, putting his hands on the wheel for strength. “Let’s hit the road.”
****
For all the time Sam had spent thinking about this, he still wasn’t sure whether it would actually work. The cases they’d done had taught them that Dean’s powers latched on to emotionally powerful events in the vicinity of the objects he touched, and given the plural apocalypses they’d been through, there was no guarantee any memory Dean got from any of Sam’s stuff would be from Sam’s viewpoint.
But there was nothing to do other than try.
His choice was an old hoodie. He had no clue how it had survived so long. It was stained and the cuff of one sleeve had unraveled, but it was recognizably Sam’s, maybe almost since Sam came back on the road with Dean after Jessica died. It had spent years stuffed into a back corner of the Impala’s trunk. Sam could only hope that it had picked up more from him than from the car; if there were an inanimate object that could have a viewpoint of its own for Dean to see, it would undeniably be that car.
Dean didn’t mention his promise all the way back to the bunker. But he turned on the music and hummed tunelessly along, which he hadn’t done in a while. Sam chose to treat that as a good sign.
****
Sam came to Dean’s room that night, holding a bundle of gray fabric that looked washcloth-sized in his huge paws.
“You sure about this?” Dean asked. “This is me gettin’ in your head.”
If Sam had said ‘it’s worth it,’ Dean would’ve thrown him out right then. He wasn’t going to let Sam make another sacrifice on his account. Instead, Sam nodded. “I want you to know,” he said.
“Okay,” Dean said, and sat down on his bed, just in case he pitched a fit. He tugged off a glove and held his hand out.
The cotton was soft against his skin-
A thousand thoughts, all at once, calculating and hating how the calculations kept him at a distance. Staring at Dean, wanting nothing more than for them to be okay, just okay, just for once. Wanting Dean to see him, not a little brother but a man. Dean like a pillar of fire, like the sun he needed to live and so always let burn him. Dean whose suffering made him feel flayed, so helpless, small again. He’d rather have his fingernails torn out than watch Dean crisp away to nothing like he was doing, leaving Sam behind again. Dean got cut, but Sam bled. Sam wanted so much only to stop the bleeding.
Dean came back to himself gasping for air, Sam poised above him like he was about to start in with CPR. Sam’s face was unfamiliar, the flawed and twisted creature Sam saw when he looked in the mirror so different from the unbendingly strong man Dean knew.
“Sam,” he said, because it was the only word he knew, and reached up to put his hand on Sam’s cheek, grinning helplessly through the crystal haze of tears that couldn’t even embarrass him right now. “Sammy.”
Slowly, as if afraid Dean might jump up at him, Sam raised his own hand to cover Dean’s, big and warm and comforting. Sam opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
Dean’s home didn’t burn down when he was four. His home was right here, and it had no plans to go anywhere. Also, his home had jerked off to fantasies of him for about ten years, and had recently, half-resentfully, returned to doing so now that he’d lost any regular sexual outlet.
Dean could process the sex thing easier than the rest, so before he could think any more he said, “That really how you feel?”
Sam nodded.
“All of it?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, and Dean could tell that his near-smile was from Dean’s thickheadedness. Dean was being deliberate, that was all, you’d think Sam would appreciate it given all the times he’d yelled at Dean for running first and thinking never.
“Sammy,” he said, “you are the bravest, dumbest guy I’ve ever met.”
Sam’s expression lightened further, and Dean’s heart was pounding fit to run an engine. “Dumb?” Sam asked, dimpling. Dean felt the movement under his hand, Sam’s smile changing them both, making Dean’s blood run hot and his bones heavy.
Dean gestured at himself with his free hand. “Me?” Whole world out there, and Sam knew it, thought about it, and chose-
“You,” Sam confirmed, and then he was bending down, his huge hands tight on Dean’s shoulders, and then-
****
Sam had honestly never thought they’d go here. It was enough, without that. He didn’t have Dean’s needs, even if he enjoyed sex as much as the next guy, which he knew because he’d been the next guy, back when he’d been without a soul.
But he’d wanted it, in a theoretical and distant way. The concrete, sweaty reality was overwhelming, and he had to struggle not to shut down the way he’d learned to when the bad overwhelming things happened. He didn’t have anything to compare this to. It was just Dean, giving himself all the way.
Dean, wide-eyed underneath him, holding himself so still as Sam sank down. Dean’s dick had none of Dean’s uncertainties, hot and spearing into him, making him into someone new. He was stretched impossibly wide, like all the impossible things he’d done for Dean. Dean’s body had a fevered stillness, as if he moved his dream would fracture.
“Come on,” Sam urged. Dean put his hands on Sam’s hips, still hesitant, not sure he was allowed. Dean’s fingers were shockingly cool against Sam’s skin, making the thick throb inside him even more powerful. Sam rose up just enough to feel the drag inside him, then subsided. Dean’s mouth opened and his eyelids slipped down until only a gleam was visible. Sam reached out and pressed his thumb down on Dean’s lower lip, which yielded immediately, enveloping him in wet heat and teasing him with the scrape of teeth. Sam’s cock jumped, and he almost wanted to pull off so that Dean could suck him off. But having Dean, allowing him in, felt too good.
Dean’s fingers clenched and Sam jerked, which changed the angle and sent an electric shock through him. Like that, they were fucking frantically, Dean’s hips pulsing up as Sam surged on him. Dean spared a hand to wrap around Sam’s cock, the dry friction almost too intense. He jacked Sam with a perfect rhythm he must’ve picked up over decades living in the same rooms, the muscles of his arm flexing and reminding Sam of his strength. Sam had always expected Dean would have a filthy mouth, but he was silent except for grunts every time he punched his hips up. Sam’s panting breath was louder by far.
Sam leaned back, bracing his hands behind him on Dean’s solid quads, slipping a little on the sweat between them. Dean’s thumb swiped over his shining cockhead, and that was enough.
Sam seized up around Dean’s dick. He came in thick white lines across Dean’s stomach up to the place where his amulet used to rest. Every pulse blanked his vision and his brain. Dean stroked him through it with the same steadiness he’d use to clean a weapon. Sam shuddered, body buzzing down to his fingertips with pleasure.
Dean’s stunned expression turned savage. He grabbed at the meat of Sam’s ass and fucked up into him, sending them both off the bed and back down. Dean’s teeth bit deep into his own lip-Sam made plans to do the same as soon as Dean gave him the chance. He watched in fascination as Dean threw his head back, exposing his neck. Dean’s cock pounded at him where he was so sensitive that he couldn’t tell pleasure from pain.
The smell in the air was thick and dark, different than their usual mix of sweat, soap, and blood-a subtle alchemy had taken place, making something rich and strange.
“Sam,” Dean groaned, long and low, then twisted his hips once more, pressing into Sam as he came. His chest was flushed, his nipples peaked, and Sam could see the freckles sprinkled across his shoulders-it seemed fundamentally Dean, that his skin was the same whether it was hidden from the world or not. Sam reached behind himself, where they were still joined, feeling the twitch of Dean’s cock as it shivered with aftershocks. He moved just enough that Dean whimpered and Sam felt the first slippery traces of Dean’s come slipping out of him. Then, reluctantly, he eased off and laid down next to Dean, chin propped up so that he could see Dean’s face and arm splayed across Dean’s chest just in case Dean decided to freak out.
The room was still. They were here, safe, and they were together. Happiness filled him like helium; Dean was the string that kept him tied to the world.
Also, Sam was going to be sore into next week. Especially since he planned on making Dean repeat his performance regularly. Sam grinned into Dean’s pillow and hoped his memory foam would remember this.
****
He never would’ve pegged Sam for a roll-over-and-fall-asleep guy, Dean thought, Sam’s arm strapped across him like a seatbelt. Then again, he was probably pretty clear that Dean had enjoyed himself. Speaking of which, Sam had pinned him down so long that he was going to be disgusting until he managed half an hour in a hot shower. So there was really no point in trying to get up now.
He could freak out, he supposed. Pretend that this was a total shock, that this was the one line he’d never meant to cross. Or he could enjoy the idea of getting lucky on a regular basis, in his very own home, with the one person he needed more than anything else. Even for him, that wasn’t a particularly hard choice.
Dean drifted in and out of sleep, letting Sam’s warmth tug him back down every time he thought about getting up, until at last he woke to Sam not-so-subtly humping his leg. He wasn’t going to turn down an invitation like that, even if it meant scrambling awkwardly for a new bottle of lube since they’d used up the last one in their haste last night. Sam watched him fumble in his bedside drawer, smiling indulgently, which meant that he was paying enough attention to see Dean’s flinch.
“What?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” Dean said, and really meant it given the alternative to talking, which was getting laid, but then he had to relent under Sam’s pissed-off glare (which clearly meant that the alternative to talking was not getting laid). “Just got a flash of somebody who unpacked this thing from its box, that’s all.”
He could see from Sam’s calculating expression that Sam was already considering alternatives. Maybe olive oil or something else that counted as food even if you used it as lube. Dean wouldn’t mind experimenting, as long as they could return to the fucking right now.
But there was no point in wasting good lube, after the memory had already been triggered, and Dean coaxed Sam over onto his stomach so that he could work Sam open nice and slow, with bonus nibbles on Sam’s ass when the temptation got too great. Sam’s back was, objectively speaking, gorgeous: broad and muscled, golden skin dotted with moles that Dean planned to connect with his tongue, except that right now Sam was groaning and telling him to get a fucking move on, Dean, you’re not that big.
Dean just snorted-Sam was a wiseass even when it came to getting ass, no surprise there-and slicked himself up, closing his eyes and grabbing at the base of his dick until he was calm enough to continue.
Sam felt even hotter and tighter in the morning, all the space Dean had made for himself needing to be reclaimed. Dean worked his hand under Sam’s belly and pulled him up as he spread his knees, forcing Sam’s legs wider. Sam would tell him if he got too rough, but he had an inkling that Sam wouldn’t. Sure enough, Sam shook underneath him and tossed his head back. His eyes were closed and his face blank with bliss.
Dean gave it to him good and regular, jerking him off in rhythm with the back-and-forth of his hips. Sam’s dick was so fat he could barely get his hand around it. “I wish I could suck and fuck you at the same time,” he said, dreamily imagining it-all those doubles he’d encountered could’ve been useful for something, after all-and Sam bucked underneath him, enough that Dean had to wrap his free arm around Sam’s chest and redouble his efforts to fuck Sam senseless.
Sam came with a grunt that was Dean’s most satisfying accomplishment in a long time. He’d reduced his brother to this sweating, shaking animal, Sam’s genius brain and Sasquatch strength all given over to him. He didn’t deserve it but he’d take it, take everything he was given. That thought pushed him over the edge as well, lighting up every nerve with electric fire.
Afterwards, Sam didn’t push him away, so Dean kept his hold on Sam even as they slumped over, not quite spooning (Sam was never going to qualify as anyone’s little spoon).
“We should get up,” Sam said eventually, with the questioning tone of someone who wanted to hear the arguments to the contrary.
“Or,” Dean said, “we could stay here a while longer and I could make pancakes later.”
Sam made a sleepy, affirmative-sounding noise. “Don’t know why we waited so long,” he said into the pillow. “Should’ve stuffed you into that hoodie soon as we figured it out.”
Dean closed his eyes, struck once again by how he was always running to catch up with Sam. “Sam,” he said, and swallowed, pressing his forehead into the sweaty skin at the back of Sam’s neck. “I wish-I wish I could do that for you. Let you see how I-” It was no good. He couldn’t even get the words out; from him, the idea was just a cop-out, another acknowledgement of all the ways he failed Sam.
But when Dean raised his head enough to see, Sam half-turned to look at him. There was no judgment in Sam’s eyes. “I know. Maybe more than you do.”
****
Even though Dean maintained that his life was four thousand percent better now, Sam was no happier with Dean’s unwanted psychic talent than before. He’d seen the horrors of this world and the next grind Dean down before, and he wasn’t going to let a chance for real contentment slip out of his hands just for some occasionally useful information.
Fortunately, Dean turned out to be much more agreeable when approached while Sam was giving him a handjob.
They agreed that the best place to start was where he got cursed. They’d ID’d the head of the coven initially. Dean suggested that they could go in while she was at work and he could use his power to figure out where her spellbook was. Worst case scenario, they could try to reverse-engineer the unlocking spell into a locking spell.
Sam wasn’t so sure that breaking in was the smartest move. “We could just ask,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, ‘cause witches have really proven they can be trusted,” Dean tossed back, happily sharpening his knives.
“Screw up a break-in and we’re not going to get a chance to convince her to help.” Sam checked the enchanted cord he’d found in a box in a corner of one of the storage rooms. Supposedly, it could be used to bind a witch and keep her from her powers-the idea was to keep her secured while you burned her alive, but Sam was hoping it also worked for less final methods of immobilization.
“Go up and ask, and if she says no she’s gonna be expecting us.”
They spent a while debating, before Sam finally conceded to Dean’s argument that the effect on him had obviously been an accident. Whatever he’d inhaled from the burning house had triggered it. “I’m not gonna be polite to a bunch of incompetent witches,” he said, and Sam knew that was a fact; Dean could barely be civil to witches when he knew they could break him in half. The gentle approach required someone who could in fact be gentle, and Dean wasn’t going to let Sam go ask on his own.
So they went into the witch’s house covertly, midday, dressed as exterminators. Then Dean dicked around touching random shit, because he was Dean, until finally he found a little cat figurine that gave him an image of the coven’s circle, where they did all their spells-
Out in the middle of the forest, of course. Which meant another day of hiking, and Dean bitching, and Sam not getting fucked because it was a bad idea while they were on a hunt. (Dean possibly had a little bit of a point when he said that, for a guy who lived like a monk for years at a time, Sam got kind of grumpy when there was the actual prospect of sex but he was denied it.)
Fortunately, the spellbook was open on the altar when they finally arrived at the witches’ cabin, which in Dean’s loudly expressed viewpoint had a sad lack of being made out of candy. Sam flipped through, translating on the fly and taking photos of anything that looked remotely relevant, including what he recognized as the initial unlocking spell. They’d probably mistranslated a Hebrew word for its Latin cognate, he thought on quick inspection.
Before he got too absorbed in geekdom, as Dean called it, Dean tugged his arm and they got out, uncaught.
****
Sam said that he’d fixed the spell, and that now that he’d seen how it had gone wrong he could probably reverse it. Dean believed him, if only because he doubted Sam would put Dean’s life at risk with as great an ease as he’d gamble his own.
“You realize this makes you a man-witch, right?” Dean asked him. Sam rolled his eyes.
There was a “make me a sandwich” joke in there somewhere, Dean thought. Hmm, he could go for some food right now. “You want anything?” he called over his shoulder, already putting thought into action.
“Nah,” Sam said, but from the distracted tone in his voice that was only his ‘all my energy goes into thinking and I am a creature of pure thought’ reflexive answer. He’d eat if Dean put a plate in front of him, and he should, so now there was something that Dean could be useful about.
Later that night, when Dean was stretched out temptingly on the bed, already wearing only his boxers, Sam hesitated instead of joining him.
“Before we get rid of it,” Sam said, blushing hotly. “There’s something.”
“What?” Dean asked, fascinated. Sam was a hundred percent filthy in bed, all ‘put your fingers in my ass, Dean’ and ‘suck my balls, Dean,’ and Dean was almost nervous thinking about what Sam might consider edgy.
Sam fumbled under the bed and brought out a box. After turning a few shades deeper red, he opened it. Inside was a substantial purple dildo-not bigger than Dean himself, but clearly not for an amateur.
“Sam?” Dean asked, because he needed a little help here. “You want me to use it on you? Or on me?” Either way could work, he thought.
Sam shook his head, eyes lowered. His voice was much lower than usual, a rumble that barely reached to Dean. “I already used it. I want you to touch it while we’re fucking. So you feel what it’s like, for me.”
Dean went from vaguely interested, the way he pretty much always was when it came to sex, to painfully hard in less than a breath. He wasn’t going to be able to speak for a minute, so instead he nodded vigorously and started to wriggle out of his boxers.
He was probably overly hasty prepping Sam. Then again, Sam didn’t mind if it hurt some, and the thought of having Sam in so many ways at once was nearly enough to make him blow his load before he even got the action going.
Sam gripped him so hot and tight Dean thought he might have a heart attack. He barely managed to get going in the rhythm he knew Sam liked, forcing his hips to move on autopilot and biting his own lip until it tore and bled, before he was begging Sam to hand it over, please please please.
Sam braced his weight and Dean’s on one amazingly muscled arm and used the other to bring the dildo up. Dean touched it-
Sam’s head was almost never quiet. Even sex, most of the time, didn’t quite mute all the niggling worries, all the little self-reminders of his fuckups. But right now he was filled up, stuffed too full for anything but pleasure, thinking about Dean and about how Dean would be feeling the exact same thing, they’d be feeling it together. Every fiber of Sam was Dean’s, and every cell of Dean’s was Sam. Dean’s cock stiff and wet in his fist, Dean’s ass clenching around the intrusion: Sam was doing this for him, giving this to him. Giving him everything. He said Dean’s name as the lightning crawled up his spine-
Dean came back to himself in a tangle of legs and arms with Sam, still inside Sam and Sam making no moves to throw him off. “Um,” he managed, not quite anxious yet, too blissed with pleasure to be really worried. “You need a hand?”
Sam snorted, which shifted Dean’s half-hard cock in interesting ways. “Nah,” he said, and the thick satisfaction in his voice said it was true.
****
They prepared in the main research room, because that had enough room to move if something went wrong, as well as all the containment devices Sam knew how to set up. “This is a kind of blinding,” Sam said before he started the spell, honesty compelling him to give Dean one last chance.
“Some things aren’t worth seeing,” Dean said. He hesitated. “But if you -”
“We did okay without this,” Sam said firmly, though that was sometimes debatable. What wasn’t in question was that Dean needed to stop seeing people die from the inside, the way he did now. He wasn’t going to quit hunting, so this talent-even if it had always been a potential part of him-had to go.
Since Sam was a lot better at Hebrew than the errant coven, the spell wasn’t that difficult, in the end. There was a flash of bright light that half-blinded both of them for several minutes, and then Dean had a headache that, he said, felt like somebody’d driven a railroad spike straight through his eye and out the back of his head. But after he threw up a few times and napped for a couple of hours, he said he was ready to test their success.
Sam handed him the least dangerous thing he’d been able to find in the archives, a rock that had been taken from Frances Griffith’s garden as part of an old investigation into whether the Cottingley Fairies that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle were real or fake.
Dean held it for a moment in the palm of his hand, then looked up. “I got a rock,” he said.
“It’s gone?”
Dean reached for one of the spellbooks Sam had consulted, pressing down hard on the spine. “It’s gone,” he said, and looked up. “My hero.”
Sam couldn’t stop smiling, hard enough to hurt. “Do I get a hero’s reward?”
“Depends,” Dean said, unsuccessfully fighting his own grin. “How does the hero feel about gettin’ eaten out and fucked?”
“Only one way to find out,” Sam told him, and Dean shoved all the spell materials to the side, clearing a space on the table. (Sam winced and ignored the mess.)
“Did we do the right thing?” Dean asked some time later, his head pillowed on Sam’s chest. Sam’s back was going to hurt something awful, and they might need to refinish the table, but that didn’t mean he planned on moving any time soon.
“Yeah,” Sam told him. “We’ll keep saving people. Neither of us need psychic powers. And us? We know all we need to know about each other.”
“I might need some reminding,” Dean admitted.
“That’s okay,” Sam told him. “I might need to remind you.”
END
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Civilians accumulated so much fucking stuff, it was appalling. Lisa and Ben, even-that still hurt to think of, but it was almost a sweet hurt-they’d been able to fill an entire house with their random crap, all of it drenched in their memories. Dean wondered, if he visited them now, if he touched the kitchen table, would it remember him, or did the angel mindwipe cover that too?
Point was, regular people had probably thousands of things, at least a dozen important enough to them that Dean could get a pretty good picture of them just from handling the object, even setting aside the ones that had taken an imprint of some horrible supernatural happening. Dean could get a pretty good read on any random stranger, if he were allowed to follow them home.
But Sam hadn’t accumulated much over his lifetime; even his weapons were largely shared in common. And Sam was the only one Dean really wanted to know. At least sometimes-other times he thought that finding out how Sam felt about him, deep inside, would most likely be enough to get him to put a gun to his head for real. Plus, Sam would definitely consider it an invasion of his privacy, which there wasn’t much of in the first place.
Still, Dean spent a bunch of time thinking about how he could go about getting a look inside Sam’s giant brain, if he wanted to. The choices weren’t good. Probably the most significant object that they still possessed was Ruby’s knife. And given how that must’ve been made, how Ruby’s Hell-stench and smug betrayal would’ve clung to it, Dean wasn’t going to touch that knife even if a demon put it to his throat.
So they did more cases. It didn’t get more pleasant to experience a victim’s death. Kind of a mindfuck, to experience being torn violently apart and then to have his body intact again. A real blast from the past. But he didn’t get to save anyone in Hell, and that made a big difference. Even if Sam was watching every drink he pounded down with quiet concern. The man was thirty years old; the puppy eyes should’ve disappeared by now.
****
This time, their victim was a junkie, found drained on the floor of an abandoned house. Tossed there like the used condoms and broken vials. And the cops didn’t see him as a person any more than the vamp who killed him. Some days Sam wondered why they spent so much time hunting inhuman monsters, when people were so good at hurting each other without any help from outside.
The case itself went down quickly. Dean had become practiced at extracting the maximum information from his glimpses into people’s lives. He’d even found an app that he could use to create police artist-style pictures of anyone he saw in his visions, though he complained that it was no good on monsters that didn’t look human. So they ID’d the vamp, went in and took its head off along with two others for good measure, and kicked back for the night.
Except that Dean’s beers didn’t calm him. He was alternately flushed and pale, and drops of sweat stood out along his hairline. He tried to hide it, but running water wasn’t enough to disguise the sound of him throwing up the bites of burger he’d managed to choke down at dinner.
When he came out of the bathroom, Sam was sitting on the edge of his bed, arms folded, waiting. “What’s wrong?”
Dean twitched, then swiped at his forehead. “Nothing.”
Sam didn’t dignify that with a response, though he could feel his face getting tighter.
Dean went over to his bag and pulled his sweat-soaked tee off. As he rummaged around for a clean one, Sam noted distantly that his shoulders and back were as broad and muscular as ever. Dean’s animal vitality would never stop drawing him in, like it drew everyone else; Sam had accepted that a long time ago. As long as he stayed just close enough to orbit Dean and not close enough to crash into him, they’d be okay.
Dean shrugged his shoulders irritably under the weight of Sam’s gaze. “If I tell you,” he said, almost too soft to hear, “you’re gonna be mad.”
Sam took a careful breath in through his nose. “Oh, I’m already there. You can’t do this, Dean. You can’t shut me out.”
As Dean busied himself pulling on his new shirt, he began to talk. “Paul was riding the white horse for the past five years. Right about now, he’d really need to be getting well, if he was still alive. How about you grab me an OJ and we can wait it out watching some reality show idiots yell at each other.”
Sam took the order as a peace offering, as intended. “Sure,” he said, soft now that Dean had told him what he needed to know. And later, when he brought Dean a damp washcloth for his fevered forehead as Dean tossed restlessly, neither asleep nor awake, he smiled down at his brother and promised himself that he wasn’t ever going to let Dean go through this alone.
****
Sam got a notice about Dad’s old storage unit-they had to pay up or it’d be auctioned off-and they ended up driving out to New York to load up the contents. The bunker had plenty of lockboxes strong enough to contain the dangerous objects, and it didn’t make sense to keep paying to store a bunch of other crap.
The drive was good, except for the misery of the kid who put together Dean’s hamburger at McDonald’s. Dean didn’t get a name, but maybe Sammy could work some of his computer magic, and Dean’d drop a dime on the parents. He doubted that would help in the long run, but he didn’t know how to save people from other people.
They packed up mostly in silence, putting boxes into the U-Haul they’d rented (no way was Dean going to risk his baby’s suspension on a trailer). There was almost nothing not related to hunting, which was par for the course with Dad. They’d already found most of the mementoes from their childhood the first time they’d visited. There was still a spray of dried blood on the concrete floor from Zachariah’s torture.
Right before they left, Dean gave into impulse and peeled off a glove so that he could touch that very first sawed-off.
He was drowning, pulled under by the wave of emotion, so much bigger than anything else. Like being hit with a wall of sound, if the sound was a need to protect so profound that it wrapped him in a layer of insulation, making his vision waver and his legs too weak to hold him up.
“What is it?” Sam demanded, his hands warm and concerned as he grabbed on to Dean’s shoulders and helped keep him from falling to the ground like a pile of dirty laundry.
Dean was gasping, straining to breathe even though it was like getting thrown off the world, spinning in a completely new direction.
“Dean!”
“He loved me,” he said, not even meaning to.
Sam looked from Dean to the shotgun and back. His face softened in terrible compassion, and that was even worse. Dean ducked his head, but Sam wouldn’t let him go, hugged him close. “Of course he did,” Sam said, voice filled with saddened wonder. “You have to know that.”
Dean shook his head involuntarily, still dampening Sam’s shirt. Yes, Dad had sold his soul-but it wasn’t the same, knowing that and feeling this. An emotion so big he hadn’t known it could be shared with more than one person.
Sam didn’t make him talk about it, just delayed their departure for an hour while Dean showed him exactly what he’d done to cut the shotgun down, using tools from the garage where Dad had been working at the time. Sam knew this stuff already, Dean understood, but he appreciated the effort.
****
They worked more cases.
Sam grew increasingly concerned for Dean. There was one incident where Dean had to go through six charred corpses before he found a clue that actually helped identify the doer, which turned out to be an ifrit. The others hadn’t seen anything but their own deaths.
Dean said that he was fine; if Dean had been smarter, he would have complained loudly and Sam would’ve known that the pain was bearable. Instead Dean drank whiskey like he was hoping for a prize at the bottom of the bottle, and he didn’t sleep until they’d returned to the bunker. Every hunt strung him out a little more, made him more eager to get on to the next one. He was burning himself down, and Sam didn’t know what to do about it.
Dean balked at certain motel rooms, or sometimes just at a towel or a mattress. He always made a face and named some sex act that he insisted had been performed between two (once, three) extremely unattractive individuals, but Sam had been in enough motel rooms to know that most of the stories were likely far uglier than that. Still, unless the whole room was so contaminated that Dean got too antsy to stay, they wouldn’t switch rooms; they didn’t need to draw that much attention. It was hard for Sam to sleep on a mattress he knew had seen the kind of human darkness that didn’t need demons. He’d been doing it for years, sure, but it was different to be confronted by it, even only indirectly in the form of Dean’s flinch.
****
Dean was sitting in the car in a motel parking lot, waiting out another of Sam’s snits over how Dean was drinking too many meals and watching porn through too many nights. So what else was new, right? But Sam didn’t see it that way. Dean had eventually given up and gone to wait for Sam in the car. Sam’d be out eventually, when he’d calmed himself down enough to convince himself that a reasonable lecture would work better.
He pulled off a glove, struck by an impulse, and put out a finger to brush over the amulet those fangirls had given him. A wave of exhausted satisfaction rolled through him-late nights at the school, working to make something with other people who wanted the same, magic for people who didn’t know that real magic existed. She hadn’t known much about Supernatural when she started, but she wasn’t just a props mistress; she was the props mistress, and she did her homework-the whole series’ worth. And maybe read some fan fiction too, because let’s face it, beautiful boys hunting things and saving people were a relief from the endless pressure of AP homework and volleyball and civic responsibility that might help her get into an Ivy. When she cast the amulet in the school’s art room, she wanted it to be perfect-and visible from the back seats. Maybe it had come out more Dobby the house elf than all-knowing Buddha figure, but she’d made it with her own hands, for a cause she loved, and she’d planned to keep it as her souvenir of the production.
The door creaked open, startling Dean out of his reverie. Sam slid in beside him as Dean replaced his glove, moving slow like he wasn’t embarrassed to have been caught mooning over that ridiculous fan story.
“I guess there are some good parts to the power, too,” Sam said, because Sam didn’t need to be able to read minds to know what Dean was thinking.
Dean shrugged. “I can handle it. I can save people. How many people are alive because we’ve been able to find the bad guys faster?”
“We saved lives before,” Sam insisted, half-turned on the seat so that he could look at Dean, giving him the full big-eyed begging treatment. “We can do it again.”
Dean shook his head. “This isn’t like the Mark. It isn’t making me into a monster.”
“No, it’s hurting you,” Sam said, like Dean didn’t know that.
“I been through worse.” It meant a lot that Sam cared, though. Probably enough to keep Dean going, really.
“Not a good enough reason,” Sam said, like shutting the bunker door on the rest of the world. “Look, I-I want you to read me, okay? An object important to me.”
Dean had never expected Sam to say it outright. He wasn’t that good at predicting Sam, honestly, once you got past the aliases and moves in a fight. He closed his eyes. “Sam, I know, all right?”
“Dean,” Sam sighed. “What do you think you know?”
He wanted to hate Sam for making him do this, but it was less than he deserved. Sam had already said every brutal truth to him one time or another. He didn’t have to look Sam in the eye, at least. “I know how pathetic I am,” he rasped. “I fucked up any peace you ever got. You stick with me because I fucked you up enough you think you can’t leave. You think you have to take care of me. And the worst part is, I’ll take it.” Sam ought to have someone who could give him hope, but what he had was Dean.
He could hear Sam shaking his head. Sam maybe even believed his own denials. “That’s not what this is, Dean. But if you think it is-you owe me. If you're going to do this you need to understand what it costs. You're not less important than anyone else.”
Dean couldn’t keep his face straight at that one. Importance wasn’t the problem. Not with all the shit Dean had done, to Sam and so many others.
“Dean. Please. I need you to do this.” When Dean dared a look, Sam’s eyes were like a Southern preacher’s, rock-solid certain of an order to the world that existed only in his head.
He’d let his brother go to Hell at a similar request. Hard to imagine how this could be worse, even if it was fresher. “Fine,” he said, putting his hands on the wheel for strength. “Let’s hit the road.”
****
For all the time Sam had spent thinking about this, he still wasn’t sure whether it would actually work. The cases they’d done had taught them that Dean’s powers latched on to emotionally powerful events in the vicinity of the objects he touched, and given the plural apocalypses they’d been through, there was no guarantee any memory Dean got from any of Sam’s stuff would be from Sam’s viewpoint.
But there was nothing to do other than try.
His choice was an old hoodie. He had no clue how it had survived so long. It was stained and the cuff of one sleeve had unraveled, but it was recognizably Sam’s, maybe almost since Sam came back on the road with Dean after Jessica died. It had spent years stuffed into a back corner of the Impala’s trunk. Sam could only hope that it had picked up more from him than from the car; if there were an inanimate object that could have a viewpoint of its own for Dean to see, it would undeniably be that car.
Dean didn’t mention his promise all the way back to the bunker. But he turned on the music and hummed tunelessly along, which he hadn’t done in a while. Sam chose to treat that as a good sign.
****
Sam came to Dean’s room that night, holding a bundle of gray fabric that looked washcloth-sized in his huge paws.
“You sure about this?” Dean asked. “This is me gettin’ in your head.”
If Sam had said ‘it’s worth it,’ Dean would’ve thrown him out right then. He wasn’t going to let Sam make another sacrifice on his account. Instead, Sam nodded. “I want you to know,” he said.
“Okay,” Dean said, and sat down on his bed, just in case he pitched a fit. He tugged off a glove and held his hand out.
The cotton was soft against his skin-
A thousand thoughts, all at once, calculating and hating how the calculations kept him at a distance. Staring at Dean, wanting nothing more than for them to be okay, just okay, just for once. Wanting Dean to see him, not a little brother but a man. Dean like a pillar of fire, like the sun he needed to live and so always let burn him. Dean whose suffering made him feel flayed, so helpless, small again. He’d rather have his fingernails torn out than watch Dean crisp away to nothing like he was doing, leaving Sam behind again. Dean got cut, but Sam bled. Sam wanted so much only to stop the bleeding.
Dean came back to himself gasping for air, Sam poised above him like he was about to start in with CPR. Sam’s face was unfamiliar, the flawed and twisted creature Sam saw when he looked in the mirror so different from the unbendingly strong man Dean knew.
“Sam,” he said, because it was the only word he knew, and reached up to put his hand on Sam’s cheek, grinning helplessly through the crystal haze of tears that couldn’t even embarrass him right now. “Sammy.”
Slowly, as if afraid Dean might jump up at him, Sam raised his own hand to cover Dean’s, big and warm and comforting. Sam opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
Dean’s home didn’t burn down when he was four. His home was right here, and it had no plans to go anywhere. Also, his home had jerked off to fantasies of him for about ten years, and had recently, half-resentfully, returned to doing so now that he’d lost any regular sexual outlet.
Dean could process the sex thing easier than the rest, so before he could think any more he said, “That really how you feel?”
Sam nodded.
“All of it?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, and Dean could tell that his near-smile was from Dean’s thickheadedness. Dean was being deliberate, that was all, you’d think Sam would appreciate it given all the times he’d yelled at Dean for running first and thinking never.
“Sammy,” he said, “you are the bravest, dumbest guy I’ve ever met.”
Sam’s expression lightened further, and Dean’s heart was pounding fit to run an engine. “Dumb?” Sam asked, dimpling. Dean felt the movement under his hand, Sam’s smile changing them both, making Dean’s blood run hot and his bones heavy.
Dean gestured at himself with his free hand. “Me?” Whole world out there, and Sam knew it, thought about it, and chose-
“You,” Sam confirmed, and then he was bending down, his huge hands tight on Dean’s shoulders, and then-
****
Sam had honestly never thought they’d go here. It was enough, without that. He didn’t have Dean’s needs, even if he enjoyed sex as much as the next guy, which he knew because he’d been the next guy, back when he’d been without a soul.
But he’d wanted it, in a theoretical and distant way. The concrete, sweaty reality was overwhelming, and he had to struggle not to shut down the way he’d learned to when the bad overwhelming things happened. He didn’t have anything to compare this to. It was just Dean, giving himself all the way.
Dean, wide-eyed underneath him, holding himself so still as Sam sank down. Dean’s dick had none of Dean’s uncertainties, hot and spearing into him, making him into someone new. He was stretched impossibly wide, like all the impossible things he’d done for Dean. Dean’s body had a fevered stillness, as if he moved his dream would fracture.
“Come on,” Sam urged. Dean put his hands on Sam’s hips, still hesitant, not sure he was allowed. Dean’s fingers were shockingly cool against Sam’s skin, making the thick throb inside him even more powerful. Sam rose up just enough to feel the drag inside him, then subsided. Dean’s mouth opened and his eyelids slipped down until only a gleam was visible. Sam reached out and pressed his thumb down on Dean’s lower lip, which yielded immediately, enveloping him in wet heat and teasing him with the scrape of teeth. Sam’s cock jumped, and he almost wanted to pull off so that Dean could suck him off. But having Dean, allowing him in, felt too good.
Dean’s fingers clenched and Sam jerked, which changed the angle and sent an electric shock through him. Like that, they were fucking frantically, Dean’s hips pulsing up as Sam surged on him. Dean spared a hand to wrap around Sam’s cock, the dry friction almost too intense. He jacked Sam with a perfect rhythm he must’ve picked up over decades living in the same rooms, the muscles of his arm flexing and reminding Sam of his strength. Sam had always expected Dean would have a filthy mouth, but he was silent except for grunts every time he punched his hips up. Sam’s panting breath was louder by far.
Sam leaned back, bracing his hands behind him on Dean’s solid quads, slipping a little on the sweat between them. Dean’s thumb swiped over his shining cockhead, and that was enough.
Sam seized up around Dean’s dick. He came in thick white lines across Dean’s stomach up to the place where his amulet used to rest. Every pulse blanked his vision and his brain. Dean stroked him through it with the same steadiness he’d use to clean a weapon. Sam shuddered, body buzzing down to his fingertips with pleasure.
Dean’s stunned expression turned savage. He grabbed at the meat of Sam’s ass and fucked up into him, sending them both off the bed and back down. Dean’s teeth bit deep into his own lip-Sam made plans to do the same as soon as Dean gave him the chance. He watched in fascination as Dean threw his head back, exposing his neck. Dean’s cock pounded at him where he was so sensitive that he couldn’t tell pleasure from pain.
The smell in the air was thick and dark, different than their usual mix of sweat, soap, and blood-a subtle alchemy had taken place, making something rich and strange.
“Sam,” Dean groaned, long and low, then twisted his hips once more, pressing into Sam as he came. His chest was flushed, his nipples peaked, and Sam could see the freckles sprinkled across his shoulders-it seemed fundamentally Dean, that his skin was the same whether it was hidden from the world or not. Sam reached behind himself, where they were still joined, feeling the twitch of Dean’s cock as it shivered with aftershocks. He moved just enough that Dean whimpered and Sam felt the first slippery traces of Dean’s come slipping out of him. Then, reluctantly, he eased off and laid down next to Dean, chin propped up so that he could see Dean’s face and arm splayed across Dean’s chest just in case Dean decided to freak out.
The room was still. They were here, safe, and they were together. Happiness filled him like helium; Dean was the string that kept him tied to the world.
Also, Sam was going to be sore into next week. Especially since he planned on making Dean repeat his performance regularly. Sam grinned into Dean’s pillow and hoped his memory foam would remember this.
****
He never would’ve pegged Sam for a roll-over-and-fall-asleep guy, Dean thought, Sam’s arm strapped across him like a seatbelt. Then again, he was probably pretty clear that Dean had enjoyed himself. Speaking of which, Sam had pinned him down so long that he was going to be disgusting until he managed half an hour in a hot shower. So there was really no point in trying to get up now.
He could freak out, he supposed. Pretend that this was a total shock, that this was the one line he’d never meant to cross. Or he could enjoy the idea of getting lucky on a regular basis, in his very own home, with the one person he needed more than anything else. Even for him, that wasn’t a particularly hard choice.
Dean drifted in and out of sleep, letting Sam’s warmth tug him back down every time he thought about getting up, until at last he woke to Sam not-so-subtly humping his leg. He wasn’t going to turn down an invitation like that, even if it meant scrambling awkwardly for a new bottle of lube since they’d used up the last one in their haste last night. Sam watched him fumble in his bedside drawer, smiling indulgently, which meant that he was paying enough attention to see Dean’s flinch.
“What?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” Dean said, and really meant it given the alternative to talking, which was getting laid, but then he had to relent under Sam’s pissed-off glare (which clearly meant that the alternative to talking was not getting laid). “Just got a flash of somebody who unpacked this thing from its box, that’s all.”
He could see from Sam’s calculating expression that Sam was already considering alternatives. Maybe olive oil or something else that counted as food even if you used it as lube. Dean wouldn’t mind experimenting, as long as they could return to the fucking right now.
But there was no point in wasting good lube, after the memory had already been triggered, and Dean coaxed Sam over onto his stomach so that he could work Sam open nice and slow, with bonus nibbles on Sam’s ass when the temptation got too great. Sam’s back was, objectively speaking, gorgeous: broad and muscled, golden skin dotted with moles that Dean planned to connect with his tongue, except that right now Sam was groaning and telling him to get a fucking move on, Dean, you’re not that big.
Dean just snorted-Sam was a wiseass even when it came to getting ass, no surprise there-and slicked himself up, closing his eyes and grabbing at the base of his dick until he was calm enough to continue.
Sam felt even hotter and tighter in the morning, all the space Dean had made for himself needing to be reclaimed. Dean worked his hand under Sam’s belly and pulled him up as he spread his knees, forcing Sam’s legs wider. Sam would tell him if he got too rough, but he had an inkling that Sam wouldn’t. Sure enough, Sam shook underneath him and tossed his head back. His eyes were closed and his face blank with bliss.
Dean gave it to him good and regular, jerking him off in rhythm with the back-and-forth of his hips. Sam’s dick was so fat he could barely get his hand around it. “I wish I could suck and fuck you at the same time,” he said, dreamily imagining it-all those doubles he’d encountered could’ve been useful for something, after all-and Sam bucked underneath him, enough that Dean had to wrap his free arm around Sam’s chest and redouble his efforts to fuck Sam senseless.
Sam came with a grunt that was Dean’s most satisfying accomplishment in a long time. He’d reduced his brother to this sweating, shaking animal, Sam’s genius brain and Sasquatch strength all given over to him. He didn’t deserve it but he’d take it, take everything he was given. That thought pushed him over the edge as well, lighting up every nerve with electric fire.
Afterwards, Sam didn’t push him away, so Dean kept his hold on Sam even as they slumped over, not quite spooning (Sam was never going to qualify as anyone’s little spoon).
“We should get up,” Sam said eventually, with the questioning tone of someone who wanted to hear the arguments to the contrary.
“Or,” Dean said, “we could stay here a while longer and I could make pancakes later.”
Sam made a sleepy, affirmative-sounding noise. “Don’t know why we waited so long,” he said into the pillow. “Should’ve stuffed you into that hoodie soon as we figured it out.”
Dean closed his eyes, struck once again by how he was always running to catch up with Sam. “Sam,” he said, and swallowed, pressing his forehead into the sweaty skin at the back of Sam’s neck. “I wish-I wish I could do that for you. Let you see how I-” It was no good. He couldn’t even get the words out; from him, the idea was just a cop-out, another acknowledgement of all the ways he failed Sam.
But when Dean raised his head enough to see, Sam half-turned to look at him. There was no judgment in Sam’s eyes. “I know. Maybe more than you do.”
****
Even though Dean maintained that his life was four thousand percent better now, Sam was no happier with Dean’s unwanted psychic talent than before. He’d seen the horrors of this world and the next grind Dean down before, and he wasn’t going to let a chance for real contentment slip out of his hands just for some occasionally useful information.
Fortunately, Dean turned out to be much more agreeable when approached while Sam was giving him a handjob.
They agreed that the best place to start was where he got cursed. They’d ID’d the head of the coven initially. Dean suggested that they could go in while she was at work and he could use his power to figure out where her spellbook was. Worst case scenario, they could try to reverse-engineer the unlocking spell into a locking spell.
Sam wasn’t so sure that breaking in was the smartest move. “We could just ask,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, ‘cause witches have really proven they can be trusted,” Dean tossed back, happily sharpening his knives.
“Screw up a break-in and we’re not going to get a chance to convince her to help.” Sam checked the enchanted cord he’d found in a box in a corner of one of the storage rooms. Supposedly, it could be used to bind a witch and keep her from her powers-the idea was to keep her secured while you burned her alive, but Sam was hoping it also worked for less final methods of immobilization.
“Go up and ask, and if she says no she’s gonna be expecting us.”
They spent a while debating, before Sam finally conceded to Dean’s argument that the effect on him had obviously been an accident. Whatever he’d inhaled from the burning house had triggered it. “I’m not gonna be polite to a bunch of incompetent witches,” he said, and Sam knew that was a fact; Dean could barely be civil to witches when he knew they could break him in half. The gentle approach required someone who could in fact be gentle, and Dean wasn’t going to let Sam go ask on his own.
So they went into the witch’s house covertly, midday, dressed as exterminators. Then Dean dicked around touching random shit, because he was Dean, until finally he found a little cat figurine that gave him an image of the coven’s circle, where they did all their spells-
Out in the middle of the forest, of course. Which meant another day of hiking, and Dean bitching, and Sam not getting fucked because it was a bad idea while they were on a hunt. (Dean possibly had a little bit of a point when he said that, for a guy who lived like a monk for years at a time, Sam got kind of grumpy when there was the actual prospect of sex but he was denied it.)
Fortunately, the spellbook was open on the altar when they finally arrived at the witches’ cabin, which in Dean’s loudly expressed viewpoint had a sad lack of being made out of candy. Sam flipped through, translating on the fly and taking photos of anything that looked remotely relevant, including what he recognized as the initial unlocking spell. They’d probably mistranslated a Hebrew word for its Latin cognate, he thought on quick inspection.
Before he got too absorbed in geekdom, as Dean called it, Dean tugged his arm and they got out, uncaught.
****
Sam said that he’d fixed the spell, and that now that he’d seen how it had gone wrong he could probably reverse it. Dean believed him, if only because he doubted Sam would put Dean’s life at risk with as great an ease as he’d gamble his own.
“You realize this makes you a man-witch, right?” Dean asked him. Sam rolled his eyes.
There was a “make me a sandwich” joke in there somewhere, Dean thought. Hmm, he could go for some food right now. “You want anything?” he called over his shoulder, already putting thought into action.
“Nah,” Sam said, but from the distracted tone in his voice that was only his ‘all my energy goes into thinking and I am a creature of pure thought’ reflexive answer. He’d eat if Dean put a plate in front of him, and he should, so now there was something that Dean could be useful about.
Later that night, when Dean was stretched out temptingly on the bed, already wearing only his boxers, Sam hesitated instead of joining him.
“Before we get rid of it,” Sam said, blushing hotly. “There’s something.”
“What?” Dean asked, fascinated. Sam was a hundred percent filthy in bed, all ‘put your fingers in my ass, Dean’ and ‘suck my balls, Dean,’ and Dean was almost nervous thinking about what Sam might consider edgy.
Sam fumbled under the bed and brought out a box. After turning a few shades deeper red, he opened it. Inside was a substantial purple dildo-not bigger than Dean himself, but clearly not for an amateur.
“Sam?” Dean asked, because he needed a little help here. “You want me to use it on you? Or on me?” Either way could work, he thought.
Sam shook his head, eyes lowered. His voice was much lower than usual, a rumble that barely reached to Dean. “I already used it. I want you to touch it while we’re fucking. So you feel what it’s like, for me.”
Dean went from vaguely interested, the way he pretty much always was when it came to sex, to painfully hard in less than a breath. He wasn’t going to be able to speak for a minute, so instead he nodded vigorously and started to wriggle out of his boxers.
He was probably overly hasty prepping Sam. Then again, Sam didn’t mind if it hurt some, and the thought of having Sam in so many ways at once was nearly enough to make him blow his load before he even got the action going.
Sam gripped him so hot and tight Dean thought he might have a heart attack. He barely managed to get going in the rhythm he knew Sam liked, forcing his hips to move on autopilot and biting his own lip until it tore and bled, before he was begging Sam to hand it over, please please please.
Sam braced his weight and Dean’s on one amazingly muscled arm and used the other to bring the dildo up. Dean touched it-
Sam’s head was almost never quiet. Even sex, most of the time, didn’t quite mute all the niggling worries, all the little self-reminders of his fuckups. But right now he was filled up, stuffed too full for anything but pleasure, thinking about Dean and about how Dean would be feeling the exact same thing, they’d be feeling it together. Every fiber of Sam was Dean’s, and every cell of Dean’s was Sam. Dean’s cock stiff and wet in his fist, Dean’s ass clenching around the intrusion: Sam was doing this for him, giving this to him. Giving him everything. He said Dean’s name as the lightning crawled up his spine-
Dean came back to himself in a tangle of legs and arms with Sam, still inside Sam and Sam making no moves to throw him off. “Um,” he managed, not quite anxious yet, too blissed with pleasure to be really worried. “You need a hand?”
Sam snorted, which shifted Dean’s half-hard cock in interesting ways. “Nah,” he said, and the thick satisfaction in his voice said it was true.
****
They prepared in the main research room, because that had enough room to move if something went wrong, as well as all the containment devices Sam knew how to set up. “This is a kind of blinding,” Sam said before he started the spell, honesty compelling him to give Dean one last chance.
“Some things aren’t worth seeing,” Dean said. He hesitated. “But if you -”
“We did okay without this,” Sam said firmly, though that was sometimes debatable. What wasn’t in question was that Dean needed to stop seeing people die from the inside, the way he did now. He wasn’t going to quit hunting, so this talent-even if it had always been a potential part of him-had to go.
Since Sam was a lot better at Hebrew than the errant coven, the spell wasn’t that difficult, in the end. There was a flash of bright light that half-blinded both of them for several minutes, and then Dean had a headache that, he said, felt like somebody’d driven a railroad spike straight through his eye and out the back of his head. But after he threw up a few times and napped for a couple of hours, he said he was ready to test their success.
Sam handed him the least dangerous thing he’d been able to find in the archives, a rock that had been taken from Frances Griffith’s garden as part of an old investigation into whether the Cottingley Fairies that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle were real or fake.
Dean held it for a moment in the palm of his hand, then looked up. “I got a rock,” he said.
“It’s gone?”
Dean reached for one of the spellbooks Sam had consulted, pressing down hard on the spine. “It’s gone,” he said, and looked up. “My hero.”
Sam couldn’t stop smiling, hard enough to hurt. “Do I get a hero’s reward?”
“Depends,” Dean said, unsuccessfully fighting his own grin. “How does the hero feel about gettin’ eaten out and fucked?”
“Only one way to find out,” Sam told him, and Dean shoved all the spell materials to the side, clearing a space on the table. (Sam winced and ignored the mess.)
“Did we do the right thing?” Dean asked some time later, his head pillowed on Sam’s chest. Sam’s back was going to hurt something awful, and they might need to refinish the table, but that didn’t mean he planned on moving any time soon.
“Yeah,” Sam told him. “We’ll keep saving people. Neither of us need psychic powers. And us? We know all we need to know about each other.”
“I might need some reminding,” Dean admitted.
“That’s okay,” Sam told him. “I might need to remind you.”
END
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