Chapter Eight - November 2005
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VIII
November, 2005 - Sam
They stand in the rain and neither of them can say anything. Sam isn’t entirely sure if all the moisture on Dean’s face is from the rain or if some of it is from crying-he keeps sniffling quietly under the noise of the rain and thunder, but it could just be the cold getting to him.
He knew it was coming. Didn’t know how, thinks he might have known for most of his life, that it just wasn’t right for her to be around instead of Dad, or without him. It seems fitting, standing in Lawrence and staring at their headstones next to each other. Even if it does hurt a little bit.
He takes off the rosary he’s been wearing since he left home-one thing he took from home that was Mary’s and that she gave to him even when she knew he was leaving and was pretty sure he wouldn’t come back-and places it between their headstones. He kisses the first two fingers on his right hand and presses them to the rain-slick stone above Mary’s name. Dean clears his throat and rubs his eyes.
As they drive back toward the hotel they booked for a few days on Dean’s surprisingly wonderful credit-Sam doesn’t know why that surprises him-Sam pulls out his cellphone and calls everyone he knows will care that Mary Cohen is dead. He tells each and every one of them exactly the situation and nothing more. None of them ask for anything more than what he tells. He goes on to the next.
In the hotel room, Dean disappears into the bathroom and turns on the shower. He continues to call. Ten minutes later, over the sound of the rain on the hotel wall and the shower water, he hears Dean scream hideously, but knows it isn’t fright that compelled the sound. He finishes his calls and waits.
Dean comes out, blurry eyed and anguished, and the first thing Sam does is grab him just under his ribs, pull him close, and kiss him. Dean struggles for a second, token protest that turns into the grappling of pent up frustrations. Sam’s wet clothes peel away from his skin with strange, sickening noises, leaving behind clammy skin and goosepimple. The towel drops.
The bed sinks and groans under their combined weight. Dean fists his hands in Sam’s hair, bites his lip, startles when Sam slips his tongue into Dean’s mouth.
“When did you get your tongue pierced?”
“When I was seventeen,” Sam murmurs, and lowers his head to run his tongue over Dean’s nipple. Dean arches, clutching at Sam’s hair with long, hard fingers.
It’s a terrible idea and they both know it, but it doesn’t stop them from rubbing their bodies against each other, warming the moisture off both their bodies, biting and kissing and clawing at flesh they’ve known their whole lives and yet haven’t at the same time-and there’s that strange paradox, this “I’ve done this before” that Sam still cannot explain. He doesn’t worry about that now.
Dean’s hands are sure and strong, guiding Sam, caressing him. His voice shivers when he says, “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m already going to hell for incest and homosexuality,” Dean grumbles, then hisses, then moans as Sam shifts their erections against each other. “And there’s no point compounding the problem.”
“It’s not like that,” Sam assures. His fingers sink deep into Dean’s body, and Dean just groans, his eyes shivering closed as his body shakes. Sam lays his mouth against Dean’s throat and inhales the smell of him. “It’s not like that, Dean.”
“Sammy,” Dean gasps, and Sam cannot quite control himself if it’s going to be like that.
Dean groans when Sam sinks into him, grips the sheets on either side of his head and makes himself breathe deeply. Sam pants against his neck, back arched and arms shaking with forced control and natural exertion. The groan becomes a quiet keen as Sam presses in, steady and persistent. It ends on an undignified little noise as Sam settles in to the hilt and rests for a second, back still arched and arms still shaking.
“Fuck, you feel good,” Dean whispers. Sam lifts his head from Dean’s shoulder and smiles a little. Dean stares at him, earnest and perhaps a little forlorn, before he touches Sam’s face and barely breathes, “I missed you.”
“I’m here, Dean,” Sam murmurs, and bends to kiss Dean soundly. “I’m here now.”
There is no strange paradox to this, no harkening back to other times in other places with other people-at least not on his end, and Dean keeps his eyes open as much as he possibly can, perhaps reaffirming that, Yes, this is Sam, not anybody else, sunk balls-deep in him and loving every second of fucking him. Words do not pass between them, or at least not anything intelligible-there’s the occasion fuck and yeah, like that, but for the most part they are eerily silent. The bedsprings make more noise than they do.
Dean comes before Sam does, and Sam chuckles against Dean’s neck and keeps working inside him until he comes with a deep, shuddering inhale of the sweaty smell of Dean’s skin. He supports his weight over Dean’s body on his arms, doesn’t look at Dean, and slides away slowly. Dean doesn’t look at him either.
In the shower, Sam runs his fingers over the welts Dean’s nails left and the single bite-mark Dean made as he came, a lopsided oblong of teeth in the meat of Sam’s forearm. He washes away the smell of sex and the rain from the cemetery, and dresses in the bathroom.
Dean isn’t in the room when he comes out, but Sam tracks him down easily enough: standing outside on their tiny balcony, wearing only his jeans, a cigarette in one hand already streaming smoke and a pack and lighter in the other. Sam joins him silently, takes the pack and lighter, and pries out one for himself.
The nicotine hits hard, and Sam inhales the cool, humid air to dull the edge of the hot smoke.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” Dean says. He brings the cigarette toward his mouth, inhales, inhales the clean air, and puffs out a long stream of white smoke. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
“I’ve never thought of you as a brother,” Sam offers as consolation. Dean laughs, shaking his head. “Did you like it?”
“That’s not the point,” Dean protests. He repeats his drag-pattern. Sam blows a smoke-ring at his head. “Everyone enjoys sinning.”
“You’ve been listening to Pastor Murphy too much.” He blows another billow of smoke at Dean’s head and gets a little glare for his trouble. He grins boyishly. “Do you enjoy saving people? Or does that not count because it’s ‘God’s Work’?”
“Don’t patronize me,” Dean demands, short and quiet. He finishes the cigarette, stubs it out, and holds out his hand for the pack and lighter. Sam hands them over. “It won’t happen again.”
“Sure, Dean,” Sam agrees amicably. “Whatever you say.”
-----
“So what do we do now?”
“You’re telling me you’re stickin’ around? Figured you for hittin’ the road back to the Big Apple as soon as we found out what happened to Mary.”
Dean drums his fingers on the steering wheel and Sam casts him a little look out of the corner of his eye, wondering if he can pick out the song Dean’s thinking of this time. They merge and weave through traffic, expert, and Sam remembers the rumble of the Impala under his back and legs as a child; the sedan is not as smooth a ride, but much quieter.
“I’ve been checking my messages. Nothing real interesting. Disappearances in Wisconsin. If you’re interested.”
“I don’t Hunt,” Sam says, smooth and easy.
Dean laughs and turns on the radio. Zeppelin is playing, and Sam experiences that strange vertigo-deja vu he hates. “Neither do I,” Dean says, and then sings along with the song on the radio.
-----
Except for a whole two days while they’re in Fitchburg, Sam is violently ill in their motel bathroom. For the first two days, Dean simply says, “I told you not to eat that hamburger.” But as the sickness continues and Sam goes sallow and really sick-looking, Dean’s concern turns from offhanded joking to real concern: “Do we need to get you to a hospital, Sammy? Christ, don’t die on me, okay? Don’t know what I’d do if you died on me.”
“Nice to know you care,” Sam croaks the first time Dean tells him.
It ends up being that smoking, of all things, keeps him from being sick. He understands. He knows. Everything else about the situation-minus some obvious fine detail-work-is the same as that place and time he doesn’t know but knows of. Smoking is decidedly different.
“We should write the cigarette company,” Dean says one evening while Sam chain smokes through a damn box of cigarettes and he attempts to find something on the creature they’re after. “Tell them their product keeps the universe from imploding. I’m sure they’ll be very proud. Come up with a whole new ad campaign.” At that point, he looks over at the cigarettes and just says, “Gimme one. You can spare it.”
When they finally get out of Fitchburg, everything put to rest and the whole fiasco tied up neatly by Dick Winchester-Sam entertains brief, wild fantasies of bad noir film and wonders whether he’d be the dopey sidekick or the beautiful vixen always flashing her cleavage over the desk-Sam asks, “You get why that’s happening?”
“I get that you’re a little messed up. Don’t get why.”
“We have to fix it, Dean,” Sam tells him, earnest and harsh. “It’s always been like this. I kept leaving because I thought that would fix it. I tracked you down because I thought we could fix it. We need to fix it, Dean.”
“You don’t even know what we’re fixing, Samuel,” Dean snaps. Sam sinks back in the passenger seat and crosses his arms over his chest. Dean sighs uproariously. “Look, I’m sorry, Sam. But you can’t just keep going on about how we need to fix something just because you have a psychosomatic response to random cities.”
“It’s not supposed to be like this,” Sam insists.
Dean is silent for a very long time, and when Sam looks at him, he can see the flush on Dean’s cheek in the intermittent headlights that pass the sedan. “How’s it supposed to be, huh, Samuel? Tell me that.”
“We’re supposed to be brothers, for one thing,” Sam begins.
“I tried, Sam,” Dean interrupts ruthlessly. “I tried to be your brother for thirteen years. And then you decided it would be a really fucking good idea to go off and disappear into the wood work for eight years, yeah? So what else are we supposed to be?”
Sam watches Dean’s profile for a long time. “We’re supposed to be friends, Dean. Confidants. I’m supposed to have been in love with a girl in California. You’re supposed to be militant, hard.” Dean’s fingers are white-knuckle on the steering wheel. “You’re supposed to love me, even when I don’t love myself.”
“Fuck you,” Dean says through his teeth. “Who says I want that? I’m fine.”
“No you’re not, Dean,” Sam whispers. “We need to fix it.”
-----
Nevada is scorchingly hot and it’s the first real Hunt Sam’s been on since the one and only one he took when he was eighteen and he couldn’t not take it. But the chupacabra doesn’t come out until dark, and anyway the motel room has air conditioning.
Sam knows that Dean’s watching him, that he’s been watching him since he dropped his pants and took to lounging on the bed in only his boxers, sweat on his body despite the air conditioning that keeps the room at a steady seventy-two degrees. He also knows that, the more Dean stares and doesn’t do anything, the more nothing is going to come of the situation.
They have three hours to sundown, and Sam is bored.
It is thus that he finds pay-per-view.
Dean’s ears go red at the first sounds on the television. “Turn that off. This is getting charged to my credit card.”
“Ah, c’mon, Dean-o,” Sam murmurs. He spreads his legs wide and watches the men on screen surrounding the lone woman. “Live a little.”
“I live plenty, thanks.” But Dean is watching it, eyes guarded.
After about five minutes, Dean starts pointing things out: the woman’s breasts are implants, that man has “dramatic male enhancements,” the stage-lighting is terrible. At the last, Sam laughs-tosses back his head and just laughs about the whole thing. He throws the remote down, sits up and stares evenly at the side of Dean’s head.
“If it’s so bad, do it better.” Dean doesn’t look at Sam, and Sam just grins. He can win this game; he’s the little brother.
Eventually, Dean does look over, and Sam makes a big show about stretching and lounging back on the bed. The mattress groans around him. He palms himself through his boxers, even though the porn isn’t doing anything for him, really. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Dean’s eyes flit between the movie and Sam’s sprawled body.
The movie flicks off with a little static noise. Sam grins and closes his eyes, and pulls Dean against him when he feels the weight on the bed shift.
VIII
November, 2005 - Sam
They stand in the rain and neither of them can say anything. Sam isn’t entirely sure if all the moisture on Dean’s face is from the rain or if some of it is from crying-he keeps sniffling quietly under the noise of the rain and thunder, but it could just be the cold getting to him.
He knew it was coming. Didn’t know how, thinks he might have known for most of his life, that it just wasn’t right for her to be around instead of Dad, or without him. It seems fitting, standing in Lawrence and staring at their headstones next to each other. Even if it does hurt a little bit.
He takes off the rosary he’s been wearing since he left home-one thing he took from home that was Mary’s and that she gave to him even when she knew he was leaving and was pretty sure he wouldn’t come back-and places it between their headstones. He kisses the first two fingers on his right hand and presses them to the rain-slick stone above Mary’s name. Dean clears his throat and rubs his eyes.
As they drive back toward the hotel they booked for a few days on Dean’s surprisingly wonderful credit-Sam doesn’t know why that surprises him-Sam pulls out his cellphone and calls everyone he knows will care that Mary Cohen is dead. He tells each and every one of them exactly the situation and nothing more. None of them ask for anything more than what he tells. He goes on to the next.
In the hotel room, Dean disappears into the bathroom and turns on the shower. He continues to call. Ten minutes later, over the sound of the rain on the hotel wall and the shower water, he hears Dean scream hideously, but knows it isn’t fright that compelled the sound. He finishes his calls and waits.
Dean comes out, blurry eyed and anguished, and the first thing Sam does is grab him just under his ribs, pull him close, and kiss him. Dean struggles for a second, token protest that turns into the grappling of pent up frustrations. Sam’s wet clothes peel away from his skin with strange, sickening noises, leaving behind clammy skin and goosepimple. The towel drops.
The bed sinks and groans under their combined weight. Dean fists his hands in Sam’s hair, bites his lip, startles when Sam slips his tongue into Dean’s mouth.
“When did you get your tongue pierced?”
“When I was seventeen,” Sam murmurs, and lowers his head to run his tongue over Dean’s nipple. Dean arches, clutching at Sam’s hair with long, hard fingers.
It’s a terrible idea and they both know it, but it doesn’t stop them from rubbing their bodies against each other, warming the moisture off both their bodies, biting and kissing and clawing at flesh they’ve known their whole lives and yet haven’t at the same time-and there’s that strange paradox, this “I’ve done this before” that Sam still cannot explain. He doesn’t worry about that now.
Dean’s hands are sure and strong, guiding Sam, caressing him. His voice shivers when he says, “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m already going to hell for incest and homosexuality,” Dean grumbles, then hisses, then moans as Sam shifts their erections against each other. “And there’s no point compounding the problem.”
“It’s not like that,” Sam assures. His fingers sink deep into Dean’s body, and Dean just groans, his eyes shivering closed as his body shakes. Sam lays his mouth against Dean’s throat and inhales the smell of him. “It’s not like that, Dean.”
“Sammy,” Dean gasps, and Sam cannot quite control himself if it’s going to be like that.
Dean groans when Sam sinks into him, grips the sheets on either side of his head and makes himself breathe deeply. Sam pants against his neck, back arched and arms shaking with forced control and natural exertion. The groan becomes a quiet keen as Sam presses in, steady and persistent. It ends on an undignified little noise as Sam settles in to the hilt and rests for a second, back still arched and arms still shaking.
“Fuck, you feel good,” Dean whispers. Sam lifts his head from Dean’s shoulder and smiles a little. Dean stares at him, earnest and perhaps a little forlorn, before he touches Sam’s face and barely breathes, “I missed you.”
“I’m here, Dean,” Sam murmurs, and bends to kiss Dean soundly. “I’m here now.”
There is no strange paradox to this, no harkening back to other times in other places with other people-at least not on his end, and Dean keeps his eyes open as much as he possibly can, perhaps reaffirming that, Yes, this is Sam, not anybody else, sunk balls-deep in him and loving every second of fucking him. Words do not pass between them, or at least not anything intelligible-there’s the occasion fuck and yeah, like that, but for the most part they are eerily silent. The bedsprings make more noise than they do.
Dean comes before Sam does, and Sam chuckles against Dean’s neck and keeps working inside him until he comes with a deep, shuddering inhale of the sweaty smell of Dean’s skin. He supports his weight over Dean’s body on his arms, doesn’t look at Dean, and slides away slowly. Dean doesn’t look at him either.
In the shower, Sam runs his fingers over the welts Dean’s nails left and the single bite-mark Dean made as he came, a lopsided oblong of teeth in the meat of Sam’s forearm. He washes away the smell of sex and the rain from the cemetery, and dresses in the bathroom.
Dean isn’t in the room when he comes out, but Sam tracks him down easily enough: standing outside on their tiny balcony, wearing only his jeans, a cigarette in one hand already streaming smoke and a pack and lighter in the other. Sam joins him silently, takes the pack and lighter, and pries out one for himself.
The nicotine hits hard, and Sam inhales the cool, humid air to dull the edge of the hot smoke.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” Dean says. He brings the cigarette toward his mouth, inhales, inhales the clean air, and puffs out a long stream of white smoke. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
“I’ve never thought of you as a brother,” Sam offers as consolation. Dean laughs, shaking his head. “Did you like it?”
“That’s not the point,” Dean protests. He repeats his drag-pattern. Sam blows a smoke-ring at his head. “Everyone enjoys sinning.”
“You’ve been listening to Pastor Murphy too much.” He blows another billow of smoke at Dean’s head and gets a little glare for his trouble. He grins boyishly. “Do you enjoy saving people? Or does that not count because it’s ‘God’s Work’?”
“Don’t patronize me,” Dean demands, short and quiet. He finishes the cigarette, stubs it out, and holds out his hand for the pack and lighter. Sam hands them over. “It won’t happen again.”
“Sure, Dean,” Sam agrees amicably. “Whatever you say.”
-----
“So what do we do now?”
“You’re telling me you’re stickin’ around? Figured you for hittin’ the road back to the Big Apple as soon as we found out what happened to Mary.”
Dean drums his fingers on the steering wheel and Sam casts him a little look out of the corner of his eye, wondering if he can pick out the song Dean’s thinking of this time. They merge and weave through traffic, expert, and Sam remembers the rumble of the Impala under his back and legs as a child; the sedan is not as smooth a ride, but much quieter.
“I’ve been checking my messages. Nothing real interesting. Disappearances in Wisconsin. If you’re interested.”
“I don’t Hunt,” Sam says, smooth and easy.
Dean laughs and turns on the radio. Zeppelin is playing, and Sam experiences that strange vertigo-deja vu he hates. “Neither do I,” Dean says, and then sings along with the song on the radio.
-----
Except for a whole two days while they’re in Fitchburg, Sam is violently ill in their motel bathroom. For the first two days, Dean simply says, “I told you not to eat that hamburger.” But as the sickness continues and Sam goes sallow and really sick-looking, Dean’s concern turns from offhanded joking to real concern: “Do we need to get you to a hospital, Sammy? Christ, don’t die on me, okay? Don’t know what I’d do if you died on me.”
“Nice to know you care,” Sam croaks the first time Dean tells him.
It ends up being that smoking, of all things, keeps him from being sick. He understands. He knows. Everything else about the situation-minus some obvious fine detail-work-is the same as that place and time he doesn’t know but knows of. Smoking is decidedly different.
“We should write the cigarette company,” Dean says one evening while Sam chain smokes through a damn box of cigarettes and he attempts to find something on the creature they’re after. “Tell them their product keeps the universe from imploding. I’m sure they’ll be very proud. Come up with a whole new ad campaign.” At that point, he looks over at the cigarettes and just says, “Gimme one. You can spare it.”
When they finally get out of Fitchburg, everything put to rest and the whole fiasco tied up neatly by Dick Winchester-Sam entertains brief, wild fantasies of bad noir film and wonders whether he’d be the dopey sidekick or the beautiful vixen always flashing her cleavage over the desk-Sam asks, “You get why that’s happening?”
“I get that you’re a little messed up. Don’t get why.”
“We have to fix it, Dean,” Sam tells him, earnest and harsh. “It’s always been like this. I kept leaving because I thought that would fix it. I tracked you down because I thought we could fix it. We need to fix it, Dean.”
“You don’t even know what we’re fixing, Samuel,” Dean snaps. Sam sinks back in the passenger seat and crosses his arms over his chest. Dean sighs uproariously. “Look, I’m sorry, Sam. But you can’t just keep going on about how we need to fix something just because you have a psychosomatic response to random cities.”
“It’s not supposed to be like this,” Sam insists.
Dean is silent for a very long time, and when Sam looks at him, he can see the flush on Dean’s cheek in the intermittent headlights that pass the sedan. “How’s it supposed to be, huh, Samuel? Tell me that.”
“We’re supposed to be brothers, for one thing,” Sam begins.
“I tried, Sam,” Dean interrupts ruthlessly. “I tried to be your brother for thirteen years. And then you decided it would be a really fucking good idea to go off and disappear into the wood work for eight years, yeah? So what else are we supposed to be?”
Sam watches Dean’s profile for a long time. “We’re supposed to be friends, Dean. Confidants. I’m supposed to have been in love with a girl in California. You’re supposed to be militant, hard.” Dean’s fingers are white-knuckle on the steering wheel. “You’re supposed to love me, even when I don’t love myself.”
“Fuck you,” Dean says through his teeth. “Who says I want that? I’m fine.”
“No you’re not, Dean,” Sam whispers. “We need to fix it.”
-----
Nevada is scorchingly hot and it’s the first real Hunt Sam’s been on since the one and only one he took when he was eighteen and he couldn’t not take it. But the chupacabra doesn’t come out until dark, and anyway the motel room has air conditioning.
Sam knows that Dean’s watching him, that he’s been watching him since he dropped his pants and took to lounging on the bed in only his boxers, sweat on his body despite the air conditioning that keeps the room at a steady seventy-two degrees. He also knows that, the more Dean stares and doesn’t do anything, the more nothing is going to come of the situation.
They have three hours to sundown, and Sam is bored.
It is thus that he finds pay-per-view.
Dean’s ears go red at the first sounds on the television. “Turn that off. This is getting charged to my credit card.”
“Ah, c’mon, Dean-o,” Sam murmurs. He spreads his legs wide and watches the men on screen surrounding the lone woman. “Live a little.”
“I live plenty, thanks.” But Dean is watching it, eyes guarded.
After about five minutes, Dean starts pointing things out: the woman’s breasts are implants, that man has “dramatic male enhancements,” the stage-lighting is terrible. At the last, Sam laughs-tosses back his head and just laughs about the whole thing. He throws the remote down, sits up and stares evenly at the side of Dean’s head.
“If it’s so bad, do it better.” Dean doesn’t look at Sam, and Sam just grins. He can win this game; he’s the little brother.
Eventually, Dean does look over, and Sam makes a big show about stretching and lounging back on the bed. The mattress groans around him. He palms himself through his boxers, even though the porn isn’t doing anything for him, really. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Dean’s eyes flit between the movie and Sam’s sprawled body.
The movie flicks off with a little static noise. Sam grins and closes his eyes, and pulls Dean against him when he feels the weight on the bed shift.