Make Thick My Blood (4/5)
Piled into a motel room on the outskirts of town, the three of them get through a whole lot of alcohol in the course of the night: a cooler full of beers and a warm bottle of whisky that Cas produces triumphantly from an inner pocket of his coat. Despite this contribution, Cas probably doesn’t get drunk. But Dean does, a little; and Sam does, significantly: not as hardened as he might be by what Dean suspects have been several long, lonely nights of self-anaesthesia over the past two years.
Sam, when he’s happy, is a cuddly drunk: smacking his big hands into the sides of Dean’s face, leaning on him pliant and sloppy and smiley, gesturing with wide open arms. Even when he’s worried, or scared, drink tends to relax him: to set long-guarded secrets and innermost feelings spilling recklessly free. It’s a weakness that Dean’s often found occasion to exploit. Tonight, though, at least to begin with, he’s only half-successful. Several times, he catches Sam sneaking what he probably thinks are subtle glances at Dean’s naked arm. More than once, he sees Sam extending careful fingers towards him, snatching back his hand like burning as soon as Dean shifts. But whatever Dean does, however close he leans and however much he smiles and however unthreatening he tries to make himself, Sam just can’t seem to work up the courage finally to bridge that gap.
Eventually, it gets to the point where Dean’s drunk away enough of his shame just to offer his brother his forearm. Sam looks at him, nervous. Dean shoves the limb into his face.
“For God’s sake. Go for it, Sammy,” he says.
He thinks for one awful moment that Sam isn’t going to do it: that maybe, Sam won’t ever touch him again. But, finally, Sam reaches towards him. Pat pat, he goes, fingers floppy over Dean’s skin. Pat pat, over the space where the Mark deformed him.
Pat. With his hand still heavy on Dean’s arm, Sam looks up into his face and smiles a sunbeam of a smile, unleashing his dimples and leaving Dean blinking, dazzled by light.
“It’s gone,” he says.
“Yep, it’s gone,” Dean agrees.
He’s glad to feel Sam’s fingers warm and sweaty against him; but there’s a little black knot in his stomach that won’t dissolve. It isn’t just the Mark that’s disappeared. All the years of their childhood, of their adolescence, of their stupid youth, there used to be something binding Dean to his brother: something unbreakable, the strong spinal cord of his life. Now though, that tether is twisted, maybe snapped altogether. It’s enough to leave Dean paralysed.
The emotion’s redundancy makes it doubly embarrassing. It’s not like it’s a new thing, this distance between them. But Dean seems to be feeling it freshly: a consequence, perhaps, of the rush of emotion back into his system after the lifting of the Mark. It’s like the new skin that grows over a wound. His feelings are sensitive, pink. More than maybe any time since Sam got back from Hell, Dean misses his brother. That was the cruelty of… of RoboSam, the other guy, whatever you want to call him. Dean was missing Sam and Sam was still right there. He wonders if that’s what Sam’s felt about him, these past several months. These years.
“Dean,” says Sam, breaking into his reverie, comically serious.
“Yep,” Dean says, reaching for a grin.
“I was thinking,” says Sam; and suddenly Sam’s face is looming, Sam right beside him, his breath sour and alcoholic and warm against Dean’s skin. Dean doesn’t move. He’s scared, suffused with an adrenaline that feels dangerously akin to the held-back power of the Mark. Dean doesn’t move but Sam does, his face inching closer and closer until his mouth is colliding with Dean’s in what is definitely a kiss.
It doesn’t go anywhere. Dean doesn’t move, or open his mouth. He feels frozen, honestly, pinned into place by the butterfly pressure of Sam’s lips on his. It’s only a moment; a few seconds, just a little too long to be explained away. And when Sam draws back, he doesn’t catch Dean’s eye. What he does is almost more confusing: he looks at Dean’s mouth, a slow, unfocused stare that might only be drunkenness, might be lust.
Dean doesn’t know what to say. It’s only for the past few hours that he’s really felt anything. His emotions aren’t prepared to deal with something this precious, this big.
So he says nothing, does nothing, stays just where he is and freaks out internally and waits to see what Sam does next.
“I’m glad you’re back,” Sam says. He sways backward, smiles at Dean again, the same big goofy grin as before.
There was once a time when Dean could read every single little thing Sam did.
“Okay,” Dean says, “yeah. Me too.”
“And I’m certainly glad,” says Cas; and that’s it, that’s enough to shift the atmosphere back into something like what it was before. Sam reaches over for another beer; Dean slaps his hand because the kid’s had quite enough; Cas solemnly downs another finger of whiskey; and the night carries on unravelling toward the dawn.
~~~
In the morning, Cas wants to know if he should go: “You might need some space,” he says, inconveniently perceptive. Nervous about being alone with his brother, Dean is about to suggest that the angel stay; when he realises that it isn’t him who Cas is asking. It probably doesn’t say very nice things about his character that even this small gesture of respect for Sam’s wishes pricks him into annoyance. Who is Cas to care about Sam, when in the past he’s helped to betray him in so many ways?
Sam, less troubled (more forgiving), considers Cas’s offer; tells him eventually, “Yes, thank you;” and crushes the angel in a bonebreaking hug that makes Dean ache with longing right down to his marrow.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” Sam says, choked, into Cas’s shoulder. Dean digs his toe into the gravel at the side of the road.
It takes Dean a little while to shake the bad mood; but if anything can bring him joy it’s flying along in the car, the Impala’s engine roaring strong underneath him and the trees blurring fast through the windows outside. It’s a beautiful April day. The sky is blue and the air is fresh and Dean finds himself almost dizzy with it, giddy with relief, tingling all over with the glorious sensation of finding happiness in something so small. He feels good right through, quick and nimble and mercifully free of the stifling weight that’s hung on him since he first grasped Cain’s hand. It’s like everything’s more real, more vivid: like the world’s shifted back into Technicolour after months of wearying black and white.
This is especially true of Sam. Dean keeps looking over at his brother. Little bits of Sam’s face jump out at him: his moles; his eyebrows; the tilted slope of his nose. Dean likes all of them. This is how it feels.
“Hey, Sam,” he wants to say. “I don’t want to kill you. Not even a little bit. Isn’t that great?”
He doesn’t say it, but the thought remains, reassuring, at the back of his mind; even as the road spools on and his mind rushes forward with it, accelerating on down the tarmac to their eventual destination. Dean’s stomach sinks a little at the thought of the bunker; at the thought of slotting back into the narrow walls of the maze through which he’s been stalking his brother for the past twelve months. He imagines walking past the patched-up wall where his hammer missed Sam’s head, without the insulating cushion of disinterest that the Mark provided.
He looks across to the passenger seat. Sam’s gazing out through the windshield, unfocused, his expression mercifully clear.
"Wanna take a diversion?" Dean says.
Sam looks at him, surprised, but not unwelcoming. "What did you have in mind?"
~~~
It's only spring and it shouldn't be so warm in New York but it's like the whole world is sharing in Dean’s good mood. The sun is shining brightly and the car heats up quick.
Dean drives steadily and with purpose for the next three hours, until at last he pulls up at a spot where the road widens, deep in the woods. Sam looks quizzical, but Dean just grins at him and gestures into the trees.
A short stumble through the forest brings them out onto a wide expanse of water. The lake is quiet and dark under the bright, still sun, and the forest is thick and green all around. In front of them, the rocks climb over the edge of the water, extending low and wide like a jetty.
“We’ve been here before,” Sam says. It’s true. Dean hasn’t been driving back and forth across the continental US for the whole of his life without generating a mental list of his greatest hits. He’s come here for a reason, with a memory in mind. But he doesn’t say that, just grunts in agreement and walks on down towards the shore.
They set up a kind of picnic at the side of the lake, spread out on one of the broad, flat rocks, digging into the sandwiches and soft drinks and chips that they picked up at a gas station forty minutes back. When they’ve eaten, Sam lies on his back in the sun, his closed eyelids fluttering paper delicate and his eyelashes fanning dark across his cheek.
For a long few moments, Dean savours the sight; Sam, catlike, catching rays. The thin stubble on his brother’s jawline glitters golden in the light; and Dean traces his eyes over the lines of Sam’s face, the cut of the chin and the delicate bones and the shadowy hollow of Sam’s cheek. Then he pulls himself together.
"Come on, Sammy," Dean says. "Last one in the water pays for dinner tonight."
Sam groans; but he clambers upright and bends to shuck off his shirt, shedding his clothes methodically into a tidy pile of denim and plaid. Dean, still sneaking glances at his brother, is shocked. Sam's body, which has been nut-brown and chiselled since the summer half a lifetime ago when he shot up six inches and turned seventeen, is slimmer and paler than Dean ever remembers seeing it; freshly marred by a long white scar that twists over his right shoulder. This must be the injury that had Sam in a sling last summer. It’s not quite the simple dislocation that Sam had implied.
There's another alien element to his brother's torso in the shiny pink burn that discolours his chest, just at the spot where Dean’s own body is marked by his tattoo. There's no sign that Sam has done anything to replace his own protection since the moment over a year ago when Cas burned it off him at Dean’s request.
Both scars combined prompt a quick flash of anger. Fuck’s sake, Dean thinks. Sam. Take care of yourself.
He doesn’t say it: he’s still stuck on his best behaviour, trying to make up for what went down over the past eighteen months. Instead, he tugs his own pants off quickly, shrugs out of his T-shirt and dive-bombs into the lake, splashing icy water back over Sam where he’s still getting changed.
“Unlucky,” says Dean, but Sam just shakes his head.
“You realise we share finances, Dean,” he says; and slides graceful and naked down off the rock. Ducking his head straight under, he comes up dripping and launches in a confident breaststroke out across into the deeps.
Dean doesn’t follow. Instead, he lets his legs drift up to the surface; lies there with the cold chill of the lake cradling the back of his head, feeling the sun over his cheeks and on his nose. He lets his thoughts empty away, consciously pushing out everything beside the moment’s immediate physical sensation. It’s been a long time, such a long time, since he’s felt so calm.
The trees around the edge of the lake have an insulating effect, so that none of the sound from the road filters through. All Dean hears is the lapping of the water against the rocks, the soft splash of a surfacing fish, the chirping song of the birds. Out at the edge of his consciousness, there are the rhythmic sounds of Sam’s swimming. It lulls him. The thing about the Mark was that it cut him off: from everything, from himself. Out here in the water, under the sun, he can feel the connections re-forming, links curling out like tendrils, binding him into the world.
Dean’s been floating for a good while, clear and peaceful, when suddenly there’s a hand on his shoulder and he’s plunged deep and sudden down into the chill. Choking and gasping, he claws his way back to the surface to find Sam laughing, treading water right beside him.
“Dude,” Sam says, “Were you actually asleep?”
Dean can’t talk for a moment, still catching his breath; but there’s nothing wrong with his eyesight, and there’s a blue tinge to Sam’s lips which doesn’t look healthy. Too long in the cold, Dean decides; and when he’s finally able to function properly, he kicks off back towards the rocks where they slid in.
Sam follows him and they sit there together, basking, drying in the sun. It’s a long time before either one of them says anything, but eventually Sam breaks the silence.
“How does it feel? Not having the Mark.”
Dean considers it, tries to find the words. “Lighter,” he settles on, eventually. “Like I can think for myself.”
Sam nods.
“I can feel things better,” Dean says. “It might… I don’t know. Do you remember how it felt, getting back your soul?”
Sam walks his two fingers down a deep scratch in the rock. “Not really,” he says, looking down at his hands. “It wasn’t straightforward. You know. To start off I didn’t even remember it had happened. I couldn’t remember, or wasn’t supposed to. And when I did, it was almost… it was kinda like watching a movie, inside my head. I could see him do stuff but I couldn’t really figure out why.”
“Yes,” Dean says.
“And when I got all of it back,” Sam says, “I got Hell, too. So that fucked me up of itself.” He looks sideways at Dean. “And then Cas took that. Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad for. But now that’s another set of memories that aren’t properly connected. Or something. I don’t know.” He runs a hand through his hair. “It’s a bit… I don’t know. I can feel a bit funny, in here.”
“In here?”
“In my own skin,” Sam says. “It feels like, I don’t know. Like all of our houses. Like I’m not quite sure I’m at home.” His gaze flickers, nervous. “Sorry. I know you don’t like when I say that.”
“It’s fine,” Dean says, heavily. “Fuck, man. I can hardly blame you if you feel uncomfortable there, not after… you know.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “You can’t… you didn’t mean to, man. It’s okay.”
It’s not okay, but Dean doesn’t bother to dispute the point; and the pair of them sit for a little while longer, silent, gazing out at the trees across the lake.
Eventually, Sam shifts. He clears his throat.
“Did you. Um,” he says.
“Did I what?”
"No, sorry, it's weird."
Dean watches the water. "I'm not going to shout at you, Sam.”
“I know,” Sam says.
Dean waits.
“Did you ever, you know. Smoke out. When you were a demon. Did you ever possess someone?” Sam says.
Dean hears the waver in his brother's voice. He feels the weight of the question, suspended between them.
“No,” he says. “I didn't, Sammy. Never, okay? Not once.” Christ in heaven but he's grateful for the casual, careless chance that's let him answer this honestly without losing Sam forever.
“Okay,” Sam says. He picks a tiny pebble out of the crack in the rock, poises it on the flat plane of the surface, and flicks it out over the water. It lands with a tiny splash, and disappears.
~~~
They stay out on by the lake until the sky turns pink and Sam starts to shiver: and even then they just drive down the road to the diner in the next small town. Dean orders steak and potatoes for both of them and tries to slip bits of his food onto Sam's plate. Sam forks doggedly at pieces of greenery, carrying them to his open mouth with fingers that are still trembling, and Dean worries about the chill in his brother's bones.
When they get back to the car, he goes rooting around in the trunk, searching his duffel for the soft grey hoodie that he likes to wear to work out. Successful, he drops it through the window and onto Sam’s lap.
“Put a sweater on, Sammy,” he says. “And close the window while you’re at it. It’s freezing out here.”
Sam, still shivering, shakes his head. “No thank you. I’m too hot,” he says.
God knows Sam’s always been stubborn, but it’s weird for him to be so defensive over something so small. Still, Dean reflects, Sam’s had good reason lately to be cautious about exposing his weaknesses. So he lets it slide. That’s the new policy, right? Don’t boss Sam around, don’t tell him what to do, don’t remind him how you told him you were running a dictatorship before you gracelessly punched him out cold. Still, Dean leans over to the Impala’s heating control and ratchets it round a few notches, setting stale warm air wheezing out of the vents.
Sam huddles in the passenger seat while Dean drives them back to the lake, passing the spot where they’d stopped off earlier to drive around to its far side where a cabin sits dusty under the trees. He hauls the sleeping bags out of the trunk, carrying both of them into the house with his duffel slung over his back. Ahead of him, Sam stumbles under the weight of his single bag, weaving almost drunkenly up the dirt path to the door. Kid must be dead on his feet. He sleeps badly at the best of times and Dean can’t imagine that it could have been easy lately for Sam to get much rest, locked in an underground chamber with a brother only half-himself.
Inside the cabin, little has changed since the summer fifteen years ago when they stayed here last. It was dilapidated then: now it’s almost derelict, a thick layer of dust over everything that makes Sam sneeze when Dean scrubs at it with his discarded overshirt. It’ll have to do. But Dean makes sure that Sam gets the good roll-mat and most of the extra comforter he digs out of the back of the car.
Lying close up beside his brother on the floor of the cabin’s main room, half-dozing and half anxiously monitoring Sam’s uneven breaths, Dean drifts back to the last time they were here, a few hot weeks in August 2001. Sam and John had been fighting every moment back then, Dean stiff with the tension and sore with the effort of trying to keep the peace. Then, in the last week of July, John’d got a call from somebody, Bobby or Travis or Jim, and set off hell for leather into the distance, leaving the pair of them cooped up here with nothing to do. Well. Nothing but each other.
Maybe half of the reason that Dean hates Ruby so much, that he still hates her so much he’d like to kill her all over again, is that he blames her for putting an end to what he had with Sam. So yeah. Dean had come back from Hell angry and fucked-up and not really in a state to be getting in bed with anybody, probably least of all someone he loved. But it was Ruby (wasn’t it?) who kept prying them further apart; and it was the stomach-burning, furious jealousy she provoked that stopped Dean forgiving Sam the betrayal until it was really too late, until Sam was a night away from jumping into the pit and they spent those last, desperate hours together on Bobby’s sagging spare bed. And after that… well, after that it was Lisa and then Sam-who-wasn’t-Sam, and Sam restored but fragile like an oyster out of its shell, and the year Dean spent pickled and desperate and half-ready to die, and then Purgatory and the long, slow, bitter split of the last few years.
It’s an absence. It’s an absence, Sam there but not there, and lying here in the cabin with his brother so near him, Dean’s consumed by the need to close the gap.
He shuffles up behind Sam, sleeping bag hissing across the floorboards, and spoons himself tight along his brother’s back. As Dean makes contact, Sam’s muscles tense. For a moment, he doesn’t move; just freezes, rigid, barely breathing. Dean’s face is almost in Sam’s hair. He can smell it, can feel it brushing soft over the tip of his nose. But after a moment, Sam wriggles, shifts away - just a little - and turns around so that he’s facing Dean. His face is pale in the darkness of the cabin, his eyes registering as great black holes in the skin of his face.
Sam angles his big black-hole eyes toward Dean. “You okay?” he says. He’s whispering, although there’s nobody to hear them.
“Yeah,” says Dean, “yeah,” almost under his breath. Then he says, “I don’t know;” and, “Sam;” and he leans forward a little more, just closing the gap, presses his mouth against his brother’s for the second time in twenty-four hours.
For half a second, it seems like Sam is going to respond. All the tension drains out of him, and he opens up, his lips soft under Dean’s.
Then Dean reaches out, settles a hand on Sam’s waist or hip; and his brother shoots backward, scooting back across the floor, a great ripping sound tearing into the air as the shiny outer fabric of his sleeping bag catches a nail. The noise is enough to shatter the atmosphere. It might have done it, even if it hadn’t happened only because Sam couldn’t get away from Dean fast enough. As it is, it’s cold water chillier than the shock of the lake.
“Sorry,” says Dean, dazed.
“No,” Sam says, scrambling into a sitting position. The lining of his sleeping bag, split like a belly, bulges outward from his shins. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have… I shouldn’t have, last night.”
“It’s fine,” Dean says.
“I just.” says Sam. “It’s just… it’s too much. Right now.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not saying never,” Sam says.
Dean should appreciate that; should savour it. It’s more than he would have hoped. But right now he’s still stinging with embarrassment, too absorbed in the sensation of his rightly wounded pride to process what he might come to appreciate more in time. “Look,” he says, loud in the darkness, “it’s okay. You don’t owe me anything, Sammy, and I owe you a fuck of a lot. Okay? I crossed a line, fair enough. Let’s go back to sleep.”
Sam’s silent, and he doesn’t move until Dean repeats his name, sharper; but then he nods his head, and shuffles obediently back to his place on the mat. Dean backs off, slides away until he’s where he started, watching the rise and fall of Sam’s shoulders in the dark.
“I’m not saying never,” Sam says again, quietly, but Dean doesn’t respond. Fuck sake. How much is it fair for him to expect Sam to give?
~~~
Sam’s still shivering when they wake up, pale and peaky looking enough that Dean’s awkwardness about the night before is quickly subsumed in concern. He drives them back to the same diner where they ate last night, orders Sam a short-stack of pancakes with bacon, and watches hawk-eyed as Sam fails to eat any of it, crumbling the batter and pushing it around the plate like it might disappear of itself.
“You gotta eat,” Dean says, before he remembers that he isn’t telling Sam what to do. “Or not,” he says hastily, cutting off the apology that’s already forming on Sam’s lips. “Whatever. Up to you.”
Sam looks suspicious but he doesn’t complain, slides the plate across the table. Dean digs in.
“So,” he says, around a mouthful clogged with maple syrup, “where next?”
Sam looks sideways, out of the window to where the Impala is sitting shining in the sun. He drums his fingers on the table. “Home?”
“Home?”
“Back to the bunker, then,” Sam says.
Dean would be lying if he said he wasn’t disappointed. He’d hoped for a bit more we-time; for a few more days on the road. The bunker’s not an appealing prospect, stuffed as it is with bad memories. But this is Sam’s time, up to Sam, what Sam wants Sam gets. (Dean can’t help thinking, also, of the cabin last night. Maybe Sam wants the safety of his own bed, of a lockable door.)
“Sure thing, Sammy,” he says; and when he peels out of the parking lot, he turns the Impala south.
~~~
They’re maybe a third of the way back to Lebanon when things get real.
Sam’s been dozing in the passenger seat, head knocking soft against the glass of the window, mouth hanging half-open in a way that should look dumb but which is actually inexpressibly endearing. Okay, Sam’s taken some hits. He’s tired, worn out, kinda pale and thin. But in the time that it takes for the guy on the radio to change the song, Sam drops like a stone, all the way from ‘could look better’ to ‘Death’s fucking door’.
Dean misses the actual moment of transformation; he’s watching the road. But he hears Sam gasp; and when he casts a hurried glance across the car, Sam’s shaking; like really shaking, not the tremor that has dogged him since yesterday, but a big movement that rattles his whole skeleton, scary and out of control.
Dean looks at the odometer like it's gonna somehow recalculate, like they're gonna be two hours out from Lebanon instead of fifteen. Then he looks back at Sam, blotchy-faced and sweating. He's jiggling his leg, clenching his hands into the fabric covering his thighs. He breathes, deep and raspy, like it needs concentration.
Fucking Christ. Dean didn’t… in the euphoria of getting free, Dean didn’t even stop to consider that this was coming. He plain forgot.
Well, it’s coming now and they’re in the middle of nowhere.
“Sammy?” says Dean.
Sam looks at him, kinda. He’s blinking rapidly, his forehead bunched, confused. “Sorry, sorry Dean,” he says. “Sorry. I’m fine. We can keep going.”
Dean tries. What Sammy wants, he gets, remember? But now Sam’s mumbling in the passenger seat, “it’s okay, Dean, it’s okay,” when actually it’s pretty fucking obvious that things are anything but. Dean nudges the brakes. “It’s okay,” Sam says again. “I can do this. You don’t have to…”
"Fuck this," Dean says. Outside, a flaking sign lets him know that the Lucky Strike Motel is just three miles up ahead. "AIR CONDITIONING," it says. "CABLE TV IN EVERY ROOM."
Great. At least Dean will have something to watch while Sam writhes in agony on the twin bed beside him.
( Chapter Five)