Under my skin, part 3
One | Two | Three
"Can we just get out of here?" Dean says in the morning over cups of coffee. "I'm itching to be gone, and you are too, don't lie." He wants to leave so bad it stings. There's an undertow of a compulsion to stay, to see this out, to wait around with their thumbs up their asses and let the insanity consume them drive them mad send them running for the waves, but Dean's ingrained desire to leave and move overpowers it easily.
"Only because of you though. You're driving me nuts."
"I aim to please."
They sit in silence for a little longer. "You're right," Sam says. "Let's take off. I'll keep looking for a cure, but I can do that on the road."
Dean breathes out a sigh of relief.
"What the hell are you so terrified of? Why do you need to move move move always going?" Sam won't look at him though, not really. He isn't looking forward to the answer.
"Because the stillness gets under my skin and eats me alive. Not running so much as I need change."
Sam nods. "I used to hate it. Dean you don't understand just how much I hated a new town every month, every other month. I like better now, I guess. I grew into it."
Dean clicks the TV on for background noise and packs up his portion of the room. He throws in clothes and dirty rags and odds and ends with no care for organization. He has it down to a quick system, one two three four items, grab another handful of things, so many things but when looked at in the scope of life they own such a bare minimum.
The sky outside is vibrant blue, same as every day they've been here. Dean is sick of it. Same color sky, same humid heat, same bitter coffee, same pretty sunsets. He goes out anyways, leaves the door open so he can hear the television, lights a cigarette and waits for Sam to finish packing.
The news station yammers on and on with dumb stories. A Wal Mart parking lot is getting expanded. A gift shop on the Cape had a shipment of key rings stolen. Dean scoffs. No mention of a grave robbery last night, so he tunes out.
"Help me pack up the car," Sam says, leaning out the open door.
Dean waves his cigarette like a badge of procrastination. "Once I smoke this."
Sam walks closer, has some sort of intent, but Dean doesn't know what for until Sam takes the cigarette out of his hand. "Go bring your stuff to the car. I'll finish it for you." He takes a drag and smirks around the filter. "Chop chop."
"You're a douchebag."
"So you tell me pretty much every day. I don't think I understand quite yet. Tell me again?"
"Douchebag."
"Okay, I think I get it now. Wait, what did you say?"
"You think you're so clever, wise guy?"
"What? I can't hear you. There's a buzzing in my ear, I think it's a mosquito."
Dean punches Sam on his shoulder. "You're a little bitch."
Sam laughs and cocks his head. "What?"
"Sam, I hate you," Dean says and goes to get his bags. "I'm going to leave you on the side of the road in Nowhere, Oregon or something, just you wait."
"It's dumb to tell me these things, Dean. You're giving me plenty of time to plan a mutiny, because we're pretty far from Oregon."
"You wouldn't know Oregon from Texas, what with your shitty navigation skills and how much you sleep, so I don't know what you're talking about." Dean picks up Sam's backpack while he's at it, and brings their total of four bags to the trunk of the Impala, which Sam has graciously opened for him. He arranges the bags towards the back so that they can still get to the false bottom in case they need quick access.
Sam steps up close, probably too close to an outsider's eye, but everything they are is too close, and it's all a matter of perspective anyways. He flicks the accumulated ash off the end of the cigarette and offers the last couple drags to Dean. "Kill it."
Dean shrugs and takes it. Why not.
"So where do you want to go? You're the one itching to leave. Any hunts to track down?"
There aren't any yet. He had found a couple other potentials in the area, but he wants to be gone of the place, so he'll call Bobby eventually and pass them on. No, he just wants to take off, go somewhere fast, and remind himself of the finer things in life.
"We could do that," Sam says. "The two of us against the world, and we'll always win, right?"
Blind optimism isn't their style, but sometimes, occasionally, rarely, he'll indulge in it. "Batman always wins, what are you thinking?" He wants to believe it so bad.
"Hey, I'll go check us out," Dean says moments later, spinning the room key around his finger. Spin and catch one, spin and catch two…
"Get out some David Bowie. I don't care which one," Dean says as they roar out of the parking lot.
Sam pulls the cardboard box out from under his seat and clicks around until he finds a Bowie cassette with all the tape on one side. His warm voice sings out "Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing" and Dean makes Sam fast forward to the next song because this one is in 6/8 which is a terrible way to start out a day of driving.
They stay on the road all day. Dean wants to drive with no purpose, soak in the ever-changing scenery, see things he's never seen before. So he drives for hours, passing through mostly sun and the occasional rain shower. The outside surroundings slowly shift from East Coast evergreen to dusty southern roads, and he is so glad to be away from the ocean.
Coffee and diner stops are brief but necessary. Dean gets them in and out efficiently and with little flirting with waitresses, cute they may be. They're just as in step with each other as ever, despite the way they can't quite meet each other's eyes or how Sam freezes if Dean touches him.
They aren't talking about it though, even if Sam is busy thinking about something. Denial has always worked fine for Dean, so he sees no need to alter a working system.
Instead, Dean focuses on the feel of the Impala, rumbling and vibrating and completely under his control. When it's like this, he owns the road; he points his car to the west and eats blacktop. There are miles left he hasn't seen, all that unimaginable potential buried under empty highways and a faraway horizon.
Sam is barely awake, with his head against the window and a broad stretch of sunshine across his legs for warmth. He laughs sleepily at Dean's thoughts and things are okay.
It's their second day on the road since leaving North Carolina. They've been driving all morning and all day and all afternoon. The sun is setting and Sam is dozing off again.
He can't get comfortable against the window though. He fidgets around, tries to shift his bundled-up sweatshirt into a better position, but his head keeps on falling back and straining his neck. He's so painfully sleepy though, and it's made disgustingly worse by the crick in his neck. His mind is filled with discomfort-induced thoughts of North Carolina and getting back there and solving their problem because they still might die or something might happen, this isn't over for good and there are going to be people in the future that have to deal with this. It'll kill most anybody else it seems but they're chickening out and running and now others will die because they couldn't solve it.
Dean shifts in his seat and rubs at the phantom pain in his own neck. "Sam," he says.
"What?" Sam mumbles back.
"Just stop fidgeting and get over here."
Sam looks at him through cracked open eyes. "Huh?"
Dean pulls on Sam's hair and Sam follows until he's laying horizontal with his head on Dean's thigh, Dean's hand still in his hair. "Just go to sleep. You're driving me mad with all your moving around." He has the muscles in his leg clenched past the point of comfort and he can't loosen them for the life of him. It's just that Sam is really fucking close, all up in his business, but he has nobody to blame but himself.
Sam feels his discomfort, of course he does, and he tries to sit up, get away, take avoidance into his own hands. "Sorry no I'm sorry it's still weird isn't it?"
"Ssh nope we still aren't discussing this." Dean thinks and shoves Sam back down. He relaxes his leg muscles by force of will and necessity. "Just go to sleep."
Sam smiles and submits and noses at Dean's jeans. "Fine, bossypants. When did you last wash these?" he asks.
"Shut up."
"No, it's a serious question. I don't want to end up with a grease rash or something dumb and unavoidable."
"For the last time, just sleep, you little bitch," Dean says and presses Sam's face down roughly into his leg. "I'm doing us a favor."
Dean lightly scratches Sam's scalp, one two one-one two, to the drumline of the Zeppelin song he has stuck in his head, one two three four one-and-two-and-one-and-two-and. Sam drifts off again without a problem, humming along as he loses consciousness.
It's a beautiful, lazy afternoon, still miles left to travel. Dean likes looking at the people in the cars he passes, wonders where they're going and why. He keeps a running tally of how many cars he's gone by, adding for each one he passes and subtracting for the ones that pass him.
Two cars pass him one after another, bringing him down to twelve. Dean tightens his grip in Sam's hair and guns it until he reaches up past seventeen. Sam shifts to a looser, more relaxed position and dreams about laying on the roof of the Impala while it hurtles down the highway.
They drive for a couple more days, chasing exhilaration, only stopping for a few hours a night in forgettable towns to sleep.
After a while, they end up in New Mexico. In the late afternoon, Dean pulls over into a dusty stretch of land with blood-red rocks and a wide, clear sky.
"Mm, home sweet home!" Sam says as he gets out of the car and stretches until his fingers touch the sunset.
Dean shakes out his limbs and walks around the car a few times, partly to stretch further and partly to make sure nothing had happened in the past few hours to the Impala's paint job.
Sam looks at the tall, red mountains rising up in the distance. Big, endless expanses of desolate rock, towering over everything. He wants to run until he gets to them and then climb until he's at the top so he can shout down "Here I am!" to nobody except for Dean.
Instead, he pulls the cooler out of the back seat. They had made a beer and hot dog stop a couple hours back at Sam's insistence.
"Want to build the fire?" Sam asks.
Dean grins. "That's a silly question," he says. "You get to help me find wood though."
They strike off into the dust and rock, scavenging for branches and brush. They steadily build up a pile next to the Impala, separated into kindling and everything else.
"Help me carry this back," Sam thinks to Dean from a ways off.
Dean looks up. Sam is by the road toeing an old wooden flat. It's dry and battered, prime burning material. He lifts an edge of it to gauge its weight. It's not too heavy, but it's wide and flat and will probably give them splinters.
"You're a pussy," Dean thinks and walks over. "Do you need your brave, heroic big brother to swing by and save the day?"
"Har har," Sam thinks back.
The sun is still setting brilliantly when Dean sits down and starts to build the fire. He starts out with small kindling and an old newspaper from the passenger side footwell all stomped and flattened by Sam's sasquatch boots, feeding the little sticks and brush until it's almost self-sustainable.
Sam supervises. He's not as helpful as he'd like to believe. "You know, we have gasoline in the car if you're having trouble," he says with a shit-eating grin that Dean can't see but knows is there.
"But it's all about the art of it!" Dean says. He pokes at the little flame as it stutters out. And it had almost made it too. "Anybody can make a fire if they have enough gasoline at hand."
He tries again. Sam gets bored and wanders off to inspect a cactus, while Dean builds up another teepee of twigs and brush.
This one catches, bless the universe, so Dean hums some AC/DC in celebration and feeds the flames until they've reached a respectable strength. The burning wood twinkles and pops like crystal glasses shattering on the floor. It's a quiet, soothing sound that Dean closes his eyes to hear better. He zones Sam out like a radio in the background, paying only the barest attention to him.
The peacefulness of the desert breaks when Sam lets out an undignified shout and jumps back from his cactus. Dean startles and whips his eyes over to Sam, scanning for the danger.
Except there isn't actually any danger, so to speak, just a scorpion waving its tail threateningly at Sam. Dean shoots his brother a bitch face that could probably rival his own. "Are you serious?"
"It startled me," Sam says sheepishly. "So sue me." He sends it scurrying away with a flick of his boot then retreats back to the safety of the fire. "Yeah, this looks about hot enough to cook over. Do you have any long sticks for us?"
Dean shakes is head. "I didn't look for any. You should go get some."
"But there are probably scorpions waiting for me out there. You can go."
"Wuss. Your boots go up past your ankles."
"But what if they jump on me from up high?"
"They won't. I built the fire so you can go get the sticks. You'll be fine." Dean mentally pushes him away from the fire. "Into the wilderness with you, Indie Jones."
With a grumble, Sam takes off. It's hard to see anything clearly in the fading light, so Dean helps him look. Their combined efforts prove successful after a few minutes, and Sam returns with a small grin.
"Yes, yes, you win a prize," Dean says and takes one of the sticks. He puts it aside to rip open the pack of hot dogs with his teeth. Sam gets the buns out from the back seat, a rare set of New England hot dog rolls he didn't expect to find a hundred miles back.
They share the small cooler-cum-chair, pulled up close to the fire, and burn their hot dogs in silence, drinking their way through a case of PBR.
("Dean, no," Sam had protested back in the store, "that's gross." Dean shrugged, laughed, and refused to put it back, saying "some nights you need shitty beer to remind yourself of how good it can get." Sam tried to grab it out of his hands. "But not tonight!" Dean pulled it out of reach and went to the counter to pay anyways, throwing over his shoulder, "Then you're shit out of luck bud, because it's my pool winnings and this is what I want.")
"What is it about the outdoors that makes terrible beer taste okay?" Sam asks rhetorically.
Dean laughs at him. "See? It's growing on you. Knew it would."
Sam is obsessing over something, something to do with that night about a week ago, but he's suppressing his thoughts the sneaky bastard. Dean wants to avoid the subject for as long as he can, so he thinks "Sam, for god's sake quit it. Let it go."
It's quiet enough that they can hear each other breathing (a little faster than normal) and it's still enough that Dean feels his heart beating, sees his chest jump one two three four thump pump pulse. Sam is thinking hard despite Dean's protestations. He's anxious which is rubbing off on Dean, and it's making their hearts race.
Sam can't stop looking at him. Not staring, but compulsively glancing over and then away, as if nervous to look too long.
(Which is funny, because they've spent their entire lives staring at each other, learning each other, and only now they're wary of eye contact.)
The sun finally dips away after an eternal sunset. Stars and planets begin to poke through the darkening sky, starting with a pale Mars.
They relocate to the hood of the Impala. Dean pulled out an old wool blanket to drape over the cold steel but it barely cuts the chill.
"Why did we come out here to go car camping? At least back in North Carolina it stayed warm at night," Sam grouches.
Dean jostles their knees together. "Because you can't see the stars anywhere better than out here. It's been too long since I felt this small."
Sam smiles and hooks two of their ankles together. "Point taken."
More and more stars appear and the sky grows blacker. "Hi there, stars," Dean thinks at them absently. "It's been a long time." He turns his head to look at Sam. "Hey, do you think we'll ever get to watch one of them go supernova? That would be pretty sweet, huh?"
Sam nods and grins with him. "What's with us and explosions?" he wonders.
They watch each other laugh. "Let's blow something up sometime," Dean says with a smile.
"What do you have in mind?"
"Well, we could steal a car maybe, bring it out to the middle of nowhere, soak it in gasoline and light it up." He smirks, shows a little teeth, and Sam's stomach flips over.
"Or just find some C4 or dynamite or fucking anything that goes boom." Sam can't keep the excited grin off his face either despite his liberal college instinct that car theft is bad and blowing them up is worse.
"Wuss. I'll train you back out of that, don't worry Sammy. Ooh, we could do the gas thing still but then shoot at it with big guns until something exciting happens."
They laugh with each other, the potential for insanity driving them wild.
The moment passes, and Dean bumps his knee against Sam's to bring him down from the remaining thrill. Tap tap one and two and three and four, and then Sam taps both sets of his toes in two counter beats: one one-and two one-and three one-and four one-and five and so on.
"See that tiny cluster of stars right there, looks like a little little dipper?" Sam asks after a while and Dean sees it through Sam's eyes because it's so fucking small he never would have seen it otherwise.
"Yeah what about them?"
"Nothing, really, I've just always liked them. The Seven Sisters, daughters of Titan or something. Zeus made them into stars to protect them from some guy that was chasing them down."
"You learn that at your fancy college, college boy?" Dean asks with a laugh.
"Yep. Took a Mythology and Folklore class and man they got some things wrong."
"Like what?"
Sam has to think for a moment because the memories have been fading away and it's getting harder to find them again. "Well, my professor was under the impression that wendios were a kind of mutated werewolf, but I managed to straighten him out."
"That's a relief."
"Tell me about it. Hell, I even managed to score a TA position with him my sophomore year. I got a couple credits to grade tests and papers and to help confused students and-" Sam suddenly bursts out laughing as he lets himself remember, "-there was this one kid who obviously hadn't done any of the readings and she tried to write one of her papers about the Baba Yaga except she only knew the bit about her house standing on chicken legs and then ended up pulling the rest from Howl's Moving Castle which isn't Baba Yaga at all, and then I got to give her a D on it and it was so satisfying." He can't stop laughing as he drags up the faint residues of memory.
Dean laughs too because amusement spreads between them faster than the flu. Sam gets up after another moment to pee on the coals.
Dean is just finishing his fifth beer by now, and is at the point where the alcohol is buzzing through his blood and making him lightheaded and horny. He also has to pee like a racehorse.
"Don't break the seal!" Sam say with a tipsy laugh. He's halfway done with his seventh and the last PBR. "It was a terrible decision on my part and I don't recommend it to anybody! Oh damn I have to go again. Fuck you Dean."
"Fuck you too, motormouth."
"Hey! That is an unfair accusation, asshole. For your information, my voice is melodious and my words are as riveting as--"
"A politician's? Yeah, you're right."
Sam intends to reach a hand over and tickle Dean's stomach in retaliation, but he's not very sneaky when he's drunk so Dean sees it coming a mile away. He rolls out of the way and off the hood of the Impala, and tries not to think about having Sam's hands all over him.
"You're a jerk," Sam says with a pout.
Dean pisses on the back tire, marking their territory against any wayward scorpions.
Sam practically giggles. ("Whoah I don't giggle!") "Okay I take it back. You're a great brother, protecting me from all the scary scorpions in the night." He slides off the hood and onto his feet as well. "I'll get the other side." He sways a bit and Dean has to steady his feet. Sam looks over the top of the car at him and smiles.
Sam is concentrating too hard on being coordinated, and Dean wants to mess him up.
"Hey Sam," he says conversationally. "Remember that time in Texas, you were probably just a freshman or something, and I had a girl over? I knew you were watching us, getting off to us."
Shock makes Sam freeze up and trip over his own feet. He knows immediately what Dean is talking about.
Dean laughs triumphantly. Sam is always too composed; panic looks good on him.
"What? I mean -- how -- you -- I was just --"
"Shut up and calm down."
Sam close his mouth and looks away, but his fingers are trembling as he zips himself up, and he's too involved in his little freak out to recognize how much Dean is enjoying himself.
"Sam," Dean says after a couple more moments. "As fun as it is to see you like this, I have no idea why you think I'd be angry at you over something that happened more than ten years ago, especially given the things we've done in the past month."
Sam nods and takes a deep breath, but his heart is still racing. "You're cruel."
Dean cackles. "You'd be lost without me."
Sam forces himself to look back at Dean. "Well, did you know I jerked off to that for years?"
Dean feels like he's been punched in the gut. "Jesus, Sam!" he says.
Sam laughs at him, a bright, silly laugh. "And that's payback, fucker." Sam is laughing, but he's nervous and isn't sure where this is going, is wary to assume anything in favor of what he wants. He twists his fingers together and remembers looking through the crack in the door at Dean (his perfect, idolized, adored big brother) making love to his girl of the week like she was the only thing in the world.
"It wasn't like that, Sammy. Not like that," Dean thinks and chokes on a moan as the arousal that's been teasing the edge of his consciousness all night trips into full force with the old memories. "I knew you were there and I put on a show because you hadn't gotten laid yet and didn't watch enough porn. God, Sammy, it drove me crazy, you watching. I could hear you jerking yourself, you didn't know how to stay completely quiet and oh fuck, Sammy, the way you sounded." Dean leans against the drivers side door and widens his legs a little so he can rub himself through his jeans.
"You fucking exhibitionist," Sam thinks. He unbuttons his jeans and slides his hand inside before he can convince himself that it's a lousy idea. "The sad thing is, I never should have expected any different." He jerks himself to Dean's memory of getting off on him watching, what it was like to have his little brother's eyes on him.
"What are we even doing?" Dean wonders, mostly rhetorically, before slipping his hand down his pants. He drops his head back onto the top of the car and moans loudly, all real but emphasized for Sam's benefit.
"Now isn't the time for philosophy, but I believe the beer made us bold," Sam says and giggles at his alliteration. He looks at Dean, looks as hard as he can because he's allowed to now, because Dean likes it. He remembers, in as clear detail as he can manage, the smooth roll of Dean's hips, his flexing thighs, his hitched breaths, the way he kissed her mouth neck face and made her choke on pleasure.
"And this isn't really the time for word play, Sam," Dean thinks back with a mental eye roll. He gorges himself on Sam's attention, lets it curl through him possessively and he can't absorb it fast enough. They've spent their entire lives watching each other but never knowing the other was watching back just as closely, so this confirmation of pretty much everything he's ever wanted is enough to leave him a strung-out mess held up by just his car and his little brother's will.
"Sammy, Sammy," Dean gasps inside his head because keeping it bottled up means the words get tangled with the numbers get caught and kept and can never slip away. He slides his other hand under his shirt, drags it over the tight, hot skin of his stomach and digs his finger tips in between two of his ribs because Sam likes a little pain to amp up the pleasure.
Sammy, little Sammy little brother, who wants to come around the car and get on his knees in front of him and worship his body with his mouth and teeth, who wants to rip welts in his back to declare him "Mine, you're mine, you're mine," who wants to suck bruises into his chest and arms. Sam wants to bite him until he bleeds and then feed on the blood and secondhand pain. He wants to stay on his knees before him for hours until he's stiff and sore so that Dean puts his hands in his hair and looks down at him and doesn't see anything else and is pleased by what he sees.
There's also a part of Sam that's whispering how much he'd like to draw Dean's pants down and run his nose through his pubic hair, tug at it with his teeth little pinpricks of pain, get his mouth and tongue on his hard dick so he can lick it suck it taste it.
But it's just a quiet whisper, a veiled desire that Sam tries to keep hidden away, as if it's significantly worse than his louder thoughts.
Dean can't stop the sounds that are tearing out of his mouth because he wants Sam like that, wants him to need him. He's a selfish son-of-a-bitch for it, greedy and aching for whatever Sam is willing to give, but Sam wants it too. Sam wants it too.
"Yes," Sam agrees. "Yesyesyes." He watches Dean fall apart and wishes for more. "You have it all, anything, everything you want."
Dean locks his knees straight to keep from falling over as he nears the edge. He gasps breaths of hot air into the cold night and comes all over his hand. He shakes through it so hard he accidentally slams his elbow into the door.
It's that unexpected hot flare, burning through their pain receptors that makes Sam double over and come in long, wet pulses. Their second orgasm shreds through Dean and he shivers in submission as his body tries to come again.
They don't move for a few minutes, catching their breath and letting the cold air register. Eventually Dean pulls his hand out of his pants. He looks at it with a twisted face of disgust and shakes off what he can, wiping the rest on his jeans.
"Hey, Dean?" Sam asks in a quiet voice.
He wants to talk about this.
Dean gulps in air. "Not now, okay?"
Sam is a little hurt, shrinks back into himself. "Um. Okay."
Dean pulls himself back together and looks at Sam, at his guarded, tight face. "Just let me absorb it all, okay? I'm not saying no or shutting you out, but let's sleep on it and think in the morning."
Sam nods and smiles, is so relieved he could fall over.
Dean pushes away from the Impala. He sways on his feet, still kind of drunk. Goddamn.
"Go ahead and sleep, Dean," Sam says. "I want some time to think on my own."
Dean nods. He grabs the blanket off the hood and another from the trunk then settles into the front. Sam tidies up while he waits for Dean to fall asleep, thinking about North Carolina and the jutting cape and the deep waters.
Dean wakes up early as the sky is turning a smoky light blue, the sun just a hint of light under the horizon. It's fucking cold out.
He sits up and pushes his blankets over the seat back and spreads them out over Sam. He slips on his leather jacket which he'd used as a pillow and puts on his boots before getting out of the car as quietly as possible.
Dean paces in laps around the Impala and tries to figure out what the fuck is happening between him and Sam. To start with, it's pretty obvious by now that his little brother can get him off harder and hotter than anyone else he's been with, and they haven't even--
Oh god.
Dean makes himself focus, makes himself think the thoughts he's never been able to approach before. His knee-jerk reaction is to scream or cough or gag because of the way his stomach twists and churns in horror at the thought of putting his mouth all over Sam, touching him, tasting him.
It's the inborn fear of being too close to his brother. It's an intoxicating fear. Sam was always his to look after and now he wants to mess him up bring him down to his level, down and down. He wants Sam so bad it's smothering him, but more than his own desire he wants Sam to want him just as much.
It was easier before this stupid curse, back when he thought Sam was planning on running back to school any day. Now that he knows Sam is here for keeps, he wants the rest, everything Sam promised him last night.
Sam isn't supposed to be willing to give him all that, which means he fucked up somewhere.
No, Dean thinks and stops that train of thought right there since it wasn't going to help.
He takes a deep breath and looks at the sun rising over the desert for a few minutes. He counts up to ten over and over again until his mind is a blank slate once more and he can start all over.
He remembers the way Sam wanted him last night and his passion and his endless devotion, and he buries the doubt because he promised Sam he'd think about this.
Dean taps his fingers in an absent-minded rhythm as a way to distract that knee-jerk NO! INCEST! repulsion. He imagines reaching up and pressing his mouth to Sam's, softly at first, testing the whitewater.
Even just that makes him shudder and grit his teeth, but he knows he wants this to happen (and more importantly, he knows Sam wants this to happen), and when it finally does, there can't be any lingering incest freakouts laying in wait.
Dean pushes forward again. He pretends to kiss Sam. He'd lick Sam's closed mouth, tease his lips apart and breathe the carbon dioxide from his lungs. He would taste him and savor the taste and sink as close to him as he could get.
Dean blinks a few times and squares his shoulders. Okay so he isn't fully comfortable with the idea of being physically intimate with Sam, but the twisting in his stomach that's trying to warn him away can't stop him anymore.
It's time to do this, before he loses his nerve and slips back into second-guessing himself. He walks the few steps over to the door at Sam's feet. He raps loudly on the window. "Sammy! Wake up, it's time to do your talking thing."
Sam rolls onto his back and squints up at him. "Now? Dean, go away I'm sleeping."
Dean opens the door anyways. "Too bad," he says. "We're doing this now." He pulls the blankets off of Sam and tickles his toes until he squirms awake.
"Okay, okay, you ass. I'm up. What the fuck is so important?" Sam sits up and wants to brush the hours-old beer taste off his tongue.
"Just that I want to do this thing we've been doing," Dean says. "I mean, I can think about it now and I really really want it. I want you. This thing whatever it can and will be." He makes himself look at Sam because otherwise he'd be looking at the sunrise and the sunrise isn't as good as seeing the smile appear and spread over Sam's familiar beautiful face.
Sam smiles and it becomes a happy laugh and he grabs onto Dean's jacket. "Get your ass in here you dork." He pulls him in just this side of too rough. They end up crammed on top of each other, their thighs and elbows and shoulders knocking around.
"Hey you," Sam says. He reaches forward and brushes his fingers along Dean's neck then curls them into his hair, hardly believing Dean is letting him touch and isn't bolting away.
Dean bumps his knuckles on Sam's stomach. It's such a small touch but it's the first one after he's been given permission to do anything and it knocks him thoughtless. He splays his hand out and soaks in the body heat and the living warmth.
Sam purses his lips. "Yes I know my stomach is cool. Get the fuck over here and kiss me already." He pulls Dean to him with the hand that's still in his hair and kisses him. It's not as hesitant as Dean was imagining earlier. Sam moans and immediately opens his mouth to him, pulls him even closer as close as they can get. Sam spreads his legs and Dean slips forward between them. He tilts his head so he can kiss Sam harder deeper taste more of him, so much better than he could have ever imagined.
Sam puts his hands all over him, can't possibly touch him enough all at once. So much warm skin, so much time to account for. He bucks under him, a mess of needy moans and writhing desire, each of Dean's touches like explosives buried under his skin.
"Oh god, closer come closer," he says into Dean's mouth. He shifts until he has his thighs squeezed around Dean's waist and his ankles locked behind him.
Dean sinks in, closer closer like Sam wants (like Dean needs) and touches him with reverence. He breaks away for just a moment to look, to take in his little brother's floppy hair messed across his forehead, his flushed cheeks, his wet lips. Sam smirks up at him and is exactly where he wants to be.
"Shit," Dean says, dumbstruck. He rocks his hips against Sam's ass until the tight friction drives them mad. Sam tosses his head back against the window, displaying his long neck and then there's nothing Dean can do to stop himself from dipping down and finding his brother's pulse with his mouth and teeth. He presses his tongue flat to Sam's neck and waits until he can feel the blood pumping under his skin, reassurance of life. He sucks that one spot until Sam is incoherent, teases it between his teeth. He wonders if he opens his mouth wide enough could he swallow all of Sam right up and he could be a part of him, one body one mind, never apart.
"You're so fucking weird," Sam laughs out. "Fucking hell just get back up here and get back to kissing me."
Dean does. "You're really goddamn pretty," Sam whispers to him between long kisses. "Like, gorgeous."
"I'm not a girl," Dean says and nips Sam's tongue hard enough to draw a few drops of blood. He shares the rich taste between them until it fade away. It's just an objection for the record; the flattery doesn't bother him as much as he wishes it would.
"Fine then." Sam continues anyways because he wants to despite not needing to prove his point. "Hot, too attractive for my own good, ruggedly handsome. Jesus, Dean, you make me want to peel off you skin and wear it."
Dean pulls back enough to look at Sam in shock. "And you think I'm weird? Dude."
Sam shrugs and laughs. "Whatever." He yanks Dean's hair. "Just kiss me again and again and again again again again Dean again." He repeats the word until it becomes gibberish and wrong, until the sounds melt together, so Dean does. He kisses him until they're stupid with it.
It's about fifty miles to the nearest town with a motel. Dean drives too fast and is filled with a frantic, desperate energy. He had stopped them from getting each other off in the back of the Impala with "No not here not in the back seat. Sam let's just get to a motel and I can fuck you right. I'm going to fuck you so hard and sweet, baby brother."
Sam is sitting pushed right up next to him in the car as Dean drives. He has the tips of his fingers under Dean's shirt then down his waistband then in his bellybutton, and he's thinking about the things he could make Dean do to him.
"You kinky son of a bitch," Dean says with a nervous laugh because he's never been into restraints or blindfolds or cock rings or wax play, but if Sam is then he could probably learn to be.
Sam presses his little smile into Dean's shoulder. "Yeah, we'll work up to that stuff."
They pull into the motel and check in quickly. They don't bother to bring in the bags yet, Dean just fumbles with the keys and gets them in the room as quickly as possible. He pushes Sam down on the closer bed and follows, kissing him speechless. "Sam my Sammy all mine forever," he thinks and takes off their shirts, too impatient to go slow and tease.
They rock into each other, steady and mindless while Dean takes a moment to enjoy how Sam looks under him, too blissed and ready to be fucked into the mattress to do more than blink and smile at him.
And well shit, they're so goddamn pretty like this, wanting each other and savoring every touch like it's the only ones they'll get. Maybe it's his narcissism or maybe it's Sam's hero-worshipping, rose-tinted vision, but he is fucking hot. Then again, so is Sam, and neither of them have any trouble accepting the fact.
"You're really full of yourself," Sam says. "Also, put your hands in my hair and pull it and move me around however you want. Put me where you want me then kiss me again, and get around to the sex sometime before tomorrow."
"When did you get so bossy?" Dean asks rhetorically and laughs, but twists a hand through Sam's hair and jerks his head back so he can bite that spot on his brother's pulse again.
"You're so good, you're so so good at doing what I want," Sam moans and starts to work Dean's pants off.
Later, they lie on top of the sheets next to each other, sweaty and relatively content. Dean feels a little twitchy, like his fight or flight reflexes are kicking in and he wants to flee. Sam is too distracted with wanting to ask him something to notice it.
"Dean?" Sam finally asks. He's trying to hide the thoughts until he gets the words out in proper sentences, but he's imagining home and hot and mountains.
Dean wants to take his flight instinct and run away with Sam to the safety of the East Coast, but instead he replies, "What's up?"
"Let's go to California--" Dean doesn't mean to cut him off, doesn't intend the vehement sense of NO, and Sam stops for a moment and stares at him a little too long before continuing. "Hear me out. Please. I'm not taking off. I'm not going to disappear into the hills and never see you again. I just want to drive through, see a few places. Dean, I lived in California for longer than anywhere else I've ever lived in my life and I miss it. We can't avoid that part of the country forever. I know you hate it there, it scares you, but please?"
Dean doesn't say anything, just scratches his fingernails against the grain of the sheets one two three four one two three four.
"We don't have to go to Palo Alto. Maybe just San Francisco, and then up North? We could see the redwoods."
Dean eventually nods. "Okay," because in the end it's all about what Sam wants and he's not leaving, Dean won't be left behind again. "Okay, we can go."
The blinding, ecstatic happiness he feels in response from Sam kind of makes it worth it, and it's catching. "You want to show big brother all your old haunts?" he asks with a laugh. He can't stay angry when Sam is like this.
Sam nods enthusiastically. "Yes! There's this coffee place I used to go to sometimes, an old book store, this pond in the park."
"Oh my god," Dean say incredulously. "You were such a college kid!"
Sam grins. "Yeah I know." He touches their toes together, thankful.
So, the next morning, after a long afternoon and night of fucking and kissing and learning what makes each other tick, Dean points the Impala to the West and towards California.
During his mid-morning nap, in between coffee and lunch, Sam dreams. It's night and he's standing on some shoreline, watching the waves break at his feet. The warm water tickles his bare toes, but a cold wind makes him shiver. There's mist over the stars and the moon is nowhere to be seen. It's so dark out. He wants to wade out into the water to see if it's any warmer than the air, power through the opposing force of the surf, wade out until his clothes are heavy and waterlogged and drag behind him. The ocean looks so black and inviting and quiet, so quiet, so deep and silent and peaceful. He wants to taste the salt water, dunk down and drink the brine, swirl away like discarded seaweed. The rushing in his ears would sound like silence.
Dean breathes out a shaken gasp and hits Sam on the knee to wake him up. "Dude that's some messed-up dream you're having. Been hitting the hard stuff already?"
Sam sits up and shakes off the dream-memory. "Let's just stop for coffee again soon. I don't want to sleep."
He can't stop thinking about the ocean for the rest of the day, even when Dean cranks Sam's favorite Jethro Tull tape or when he cracks lewd jokes or buys him a salad or pulls over onto the side of the highway and blows him. He can't stop thinking about the ocean and their curse and how he's scared of North Carolina but feels a sick pull to go back and examine those frothing waters where past example says they'll go drown themselves.
Dean tries to avoid routes and exits that add or multiply or subtract out to three because they make him nervous. He cuts his eyes away and holds his breath as they pass by those signs and resists the urge to scratch the itch out from under his skin. Sometimes three hurts, like a brain tumor, stealing away his sanity. He wants to purge it from his mind, rip it away and destroy it like it's destroyed him.
He takes a deep breath and stops thinking for a minute so he can calm his heart rate back to normal. Sam keeps to his side of their mind and lets him work through it on his own. Thank the universe for Sam, calm, understanding Sam.
They pull into San Francisco in the late evening. Sam knows a cheap hotel, relatively clean and pretty close to his favorite restaurant.
Dean tries to lay down on the springy bed with Sam and get him on top of him all over him, but Sam just laughs and kisses him and gets up. "Come on. Let's find some food and booze and enjoy this beautiful city."
Sam leads the way and Dean follows out the front of the hotel into the lively neighborhood. Sam remembers these winding streets and cramped buildings more vividly than almost anything else from his school years, from taking study breaks with Jess and coming out to the city for rampant adventures.
Sam pulls him around by the sleeve. He's full of happy excitement to share his city with Dean, the lights and people and salty air, and Dean is content to indulge him.
They get a table at a place Sam remembers, outdoors on the street so they can watch people flowing by. It's flashy like everything else but, not presumptuous (their menu is entirely in English, rather than some places he's seen where you need an English-to-Whatever dictionary to order because the owner thinks it makes them more "authentic"), and Sam is adamant they have the best pizza in the state.
Dean lights a cigarette as they wait for their beers. The first drag is like bitter coffee in the morning, the second not quite as good. Sam gestures over for it, so Dean offers him one of his own.
"No, the food should be here pretty soon. I just want some of yours. It tastes better stolen."
Dean gives it to him but can't help adding in, "God this is so gay."
"It doesn't matter here. You could get under the table and blow me and nobody would bat an eyelash." Sam smirks around the filter of the cigarette and imagines Dean doing just that, wishes he was yanking his brother's hair and fucking his mouth until spit dripped down his chin and he was close to coming in his jeans.
"You fucking dick," Dean says. "You can't think shit like that unless we can follow through!"
"It's called foreplay, Dean, and I promise you can do whatever you want to me later on. But first, it looks like the waiter is about here with our beer."
The beer is good and the pizza is as awesome as Sam promised, crisp and brick-oven cooked like he's never cared about before, but Sam distracts him by sucking on his greasy fingers like they're Dean's tongue and considers rimming him tonight.
"Could you think any more inappropriate dinner thoughts?" Dean asks, slightly aghast and getting hard against his volition. "That isn't a challenge, either." He waves his pizza crust at Sam as if it would prove his point, but Sam just takes it out of his hand and eats it, and isn't convinced. Instead he thinks about finger-fucking Dean with his cock down his throat until he comes in his mouth and Sam can feel him jerking against his tongue.
"Fucking hell, Sam. Let's finish eating and then we can go back to the room, whatever, but remember it was you that pushed us out the door half an hour ago."
Sam shrugs a little sheepishly. "Okay okay. And then after we'll come back out and find a bar, yeah?"
"Yeah that sounds good." Dean can't help grinning at him though, at his horny little brother and how they can't get enough of each other.
They smoke another cigarette on the way back, puff puff pass. Sam elbows him out of the way as they rush up the narrow stairs to their second-floor room (there hadn't been any left on the ground floor and the only other choices were on the third, which, no), but has to wait for Dean to follow with the key. Sam crowds behind him in the doorway with his fingers in his belt loops and rubs against his hip, then trips them into their room once Dean finally, finally (only a couple seconds, really) gets the door unlocked.
Dean yanks them together so he can kiss Sam, wet and needy because he's too aroused to think about technique. He gets them undressed quickly and down onto one of the beds. Their skin sticks together in the muggy heat, so Dean makes sure to touch as much of Sam as he can in this different atmosphere, learning what he feels like when he's silky with sweat.
He fucks him a little too rough, but Sam just whimpers and begs for it harder please harder and bucks into it. He wants him with the neediness of a younger sibling, and Dean gives it to him with the dedication of the older.
It's two more days before Dean can drag Sam away from San Francisco. It's not that he didn't like it (he was surprised by how much fun he had seeing the sights and being introduced to this chapter of Sam's past he missed out on), just that he's got the itch to leave again, to move, to go, and despite having fun, he's still scared that Stanford, less than an hour south, is going to tempt Sam away again.
So they roar away in their car and leave the Bay Area for another day, and head up up north to the rolling hills and endless orchards.
The nightmares are getting worse. Sam dreams about drifting away with the tide, chasing serenity in all the wrong places.
"Dying won't stop this, won't make it better," Dean thinks, trying to convince Sam's subconscious. Sam himself already believes him. He wants to beat the curse too, but Dean doesn't trust a mind that has had death visions before.
More often than not, Sam wakes up from these dreams in a clammy sweat and terrified. Drowning seems much more pleasant when he's asleep than when he's not; when Dean pinches him back into consciousness, the water is choking them instead of bringing them on a new adventure.
Terror feels different on each of them. For Dean, it's confining. He shrinks away and tries to hide from it. It's freezing cold and feels like three and it makes him still and indifferent. For Sam, like recently, he starts shaking and he can't think straight. He gags on it like seawater and it feels acidic in his stomach.
"You're not going to do this, I won't let you die, if you die, I die and that's just how the world works," Dean tells Sam and pulls his head down into his lap. He brushes his sweaty hair away from his forehead and rubs his fingers into his temples. "You're not drowning, I'm not drowning, this thing is just playing games with us. Dreams won't off us. We'll wait it out and then when the dreams stop we'll forget about them, because they can't hurt us." He keeps up a steady stream of reassurances until Sam can breathe properly again and close his eyes without seeing foaming water, and instead sees the passing surroundings like Dean does.
Sam watches the scenery raptly. The bouncing hills get in the way of the horizon and they want to climb one of them because it looks nice up there, a good place to knock back a few shots and watch the sunset. Then appear the hundreds upon hundreds of even rows of trees, acres of them, all lined up perfectly and when you look down in between you can't see their end. The two of them could walk into an orchard and not be found for months, far away from the ocean, and wait the night terrors out.
That night they stay in a nowhere hotel in a little truck stop town. Dean is too tired from the day of driving to do anything but watch a little TV and pass out, but Sam stays up for a while and tries to do some more research on ghost ship curses, but it's a hard subject to find anything on and his frustration makes Dean toss and turn.
He wakes up in the night from Sam's nightmare which is bleeding over into his own uneasy dreams. He's on the other bed shivering and breaking out in a cold sweat. The feeling of slipping under water makes Dean dreadfully still for a moment and the rushing in his ears is awful instead of gentle. But he snaps out of it and jumps between their beds to wake Sam up. "Ssh ssh it's okay. I'm here and they can't do anything when I'm around, right?"
Sam nods. "I'm okay." Even though it feels like there's still water in his lungs stomach nose eyes, salty and making him sick. "Could you just. Stay here, though?"
"Yeah I could do that." Dean slips into bed next to him under the comforter because Sam kicked away the sheet. "You know they never wash these things, right?"
"Yeah whatever. Go to sleep." Sam curls up on his side of the bed, facing Dean. The dreams are scary, but as long as Dean is in arm's reach, he'll always be bigger than them.
Dean wakes up in the morning when Sam tosses his arm across his throat. He grumbles and moves it away from him and then curses his brother's existence because now he's awake. He's always hated sharing beds with people because they get into his space and end up sleeping too close; Sam is no exception to this distaste. So he pokes Sam's mind until he squints open his eyes.
"What the fuck do you want, asshole?"
Dean grins. "Just the pleasure of your company since you so nicely woke me up with your flailing not five minutes ago."
Sam scowls at him. He's still groggy and cranky with sleep, so Dean pulls faces at him until Sam finds himself amused against his will. He refuses to crack a smile though, which just makes Dean increase his efforts.
It's the scrunched nose and sneak tickle attack that finally makes Sam dissolve in quiet peals of laughter that Dean can't help joining. "I win this round."
"But I'm awesomer than you, so I just win at life," Sam says and rolls on top of him to kiss him slow and lazily like mornings suggest. "Hey, I have an idea. Want to run away into the hills and dig a hole in the west-facing side of one and we can live there like hobbits?" he asks, only mostly joking.
Dean laughs and kisses him one two three four. "No."
Sam sighs, but he didn't exactly expect that plan to be met with much enthusiasm. "Fine. I suppose we'll just keep on driving aimlessly around the country killing bad things."
"Yeah that sounds more like it."
Dean loves looking at their maps (so many maps, boxes of maps, maps to anywhere in the country). He likes to spread them out on his bed and flip through the pages of the atlases to examine backroads and small towns, or trail his fingers over routes he's taken on their big US map.
His favorite is through the White Mountains in New England, with the curling highways going up and down through tight forests.
"Want to go to New Hampshire or something after this?" Dean asks Sam, who is sitting next to him and watching the history channel. He picks up the New Hampshire atlas to find little one-horse towns hidden in pockets of trees.
"I guess we can," Sam says with a shrug. He's not necessarily thrilled, but fair is fair, Dean did come to California for him.
"Awesome. Those downeasters are crazy folk and they always have ghosts to burn."
The narrator is talking about submarines in World War II and Sam isn't really paying attention while Dean plots their route, planning detours as necessary to avoid three-based Interstates.
Sam watches him out of the corner of his eye. He's always watching, always has been watching, even though these days he's wanting too, desire so overwhelming is burns them.
"You checking me out, stud?" Dean asks and grins. He cuts his gaze over to look at Sam.
"Yeah," Sam says, kind of distracted. He's staring at Dean's rock-solid thighs that he loves to grip his fingers into, then looks up except then his eyes get stuck on the slight pull in the front of Dean's pants that doesn't really go away in Sam's presence. His mouth is watering and he bites his lip and he wants. "I'm thinking about how you haven't fucked me since yesterday morning. You gonna do something about that?"
Dean sweeps the maps off the bed. "Yes." He straddles Sam's legs in a couple smooth movements, gets right up into his space where he belongs. He kisses him reverently, runs his tongue along Sam's uneven bottom teeth because they're too endearing for words. They smile into each other's mouths, little happy puffs of laughter.
Sam is getting better at shielding his thoughts from him, because they're not as pervasive as they were at first. The big, important concepts are there as strong as ever, but Sam has been filtering out the mindless details. It's kind of nice.
Dean still feels him in the back of his mind at every moment of every day, filling all the lonely corners with living self. Sam helps him forget the coldness that's grown up with him, makes his obsessions seem a little less important.
In the end (which is only a couple days later), it's over so suddenly it feels like a dream. They wake up one morning and the curse is gone. Dean opens his eyes without moving and Sam is getting dressed, and half his vision is missing. There's a haunting silence in that empty space in his mind that used to be just for the numbers and patterns, then for weeks was filled with Sam's endless chatter and inane thoughts about laundry or old books, and now it's empty again.
Oh god, he's gone.
"Sam!" he says and sits up. Sam looks over in surprise, looks at him for a couple moments like he's trying to read him but he can't, of course he can't, because the damn curse he thought he hated has abandoned them with no warning.
Sam drops his shirt and runs over quickly, not quickly enough because Dean can't hurry him along. He touches Dean's shoulder and pinches it, way too hard until Dean flinches away. "You can't feel that. Sam, you can't."
Sam draws a deep breath and stands up. "Oh fuck." He puts on his shirt and walks out of the room into the bright morning, slams the door behind him. Once Dean can't see him, Sam is gone. He can't feel his footsteps or breathe with him or listen in on his running commentary on stupid rednecks living in backwoods California.
He's stuck in the same position: same gaped mouth, still clenching his fingers in the sheets. He doesn't know where Sam is, he could be in the parking lot or hotwiring a car to Oregon or on his way to the bottom of the sea for all he can sense him.
Dean chokes up bile at that but he can't vomit, not right now, he has to find Sam first and see if he's okay. If he's okay. If he's okay.
He runs out the door in his boxers and t-shirt and is about to yell for him except he's okay. Sam is just sitting on the hood of the Impala, smoking a cigarette and tapping his fingers against his leg (one of the patterns Dean taught him a few days ago). His little brother looks up at him with his mouth tight and grim, but Dean can tell how freaked he is.
The yell chokes in Dean's throat, he coughs on it and it hurts. "Sam."
Sam looks at him and shrugs, drags deeply from the cigarette like it's better than air. He's not so much tapping harmless patterns on his leg as clawing the muscle to a rhythm. His fingers are white from the force he's using and it looks uncomfortable. "I don't know. Dean, I don't know, I don't know. What the fuck. Why now? Why us, why this, why the dreams, why is it over, what's going on?"
Dean walks forward and sits next to him on the hood. "I don't know." He closes his eyes and it's like Sam isn't there, so he opens them and looks at him until Sam looks back. He touches Sam's stomach, still so warm and alive and Sam. Sam isn't any different; he's still nerdy Sam, still crazy-about-Dean Sam, but he's missing now.
Dean's mind is frantically looking for Sam. It's so empty, needs something to fill it where Sam rushed in and expanded it, but all he can find are numbers, more and more numbers, threes worse than poison, zeros as sweet as little brother. Sam is gone as suddenly as he had been there; things are back to normal, except his normal got reinvented and now it's shattered, so what's a man supposed to do with shattered normal?
"Oh god, Dean, what do we do?" Sam asks into his hands. He's so scared and it kills Dean to see.
"I don't know!" he snaps and punches the hood of the Impala because her steel is stronger than they are and she can take it. He has so many goddamn questions and of course, there's nobody to answer them, there's just the residue of a curse.
Dean breathes in one two three four, hold two two three four, out three two three four, hold four two three four and squares his thoughts. "No, I know what we do. We go to Bobby's and gather ourselves. If North Carolina isn't calling us anymore then we're safe from curse suicide, or whatever it was. You're still mine, I'm still yours; that hasn't changed, won't ever change, is still the most important part. The rest, we'll figure out."
But it's going to be so lonely now.
THE END
One | Two | Three
"Can we just get out of here?" Dean says in the morning over cups of coffee. "I'm itching to be gone, and you are too, don't lie." He wants to leave so bad it stings. There's an undertow of a compulsion to stay, to see this out, to wait around with their thumbs up their asses and let the insanity consume them drive them mad send them running for the waves, but Dean's ingrained desire to leave and move overpowers it easily.
"Only because of you though. You're driving me nuts."
"I aim to please."
They sit in silence for a little longer. "You're right," Sam says. "Let's take off. I'll keep looking for a cure, but I can do that on the road."
Dean breathes out a sigh of relief.
"What the hell are you so terrified of? Why do you need to move move move always going?" Sam won't look at him though, not really. He isn't looking forward to the answer.
"Because the stillness gets under my skin and eats me alive. Not running so much as I need change."
Sam nods. "I used to hate it. Dean you don't understand just how much I hated a new town every month, every other month. I like better now, I guess. I grew into it."
Dean clicks the TV on for background noise and packs up his portion of the room. He throws in clothes and dirty rags and odds and ends with no care for organization. He has it down to a quick system, one two three four items, grab another handful of things, so many things but when looked at in the scope of life they own such a bare minimum.
The sky outside is vibrant blue, same as every day they've been here. Dean is sick of it. Same color sky, same humid heat, same bitter coffee, same pretty sunsets. He goes out anyways, leaves the door open so he can hear the television, lights a cigarette and waits for Sam to finish packing.
The news station yammers on and on with dumb stories. A Wal Mart parking lot is getting expanded. A gift shop on the Cape had a shipment of key rings stolen. Dean scoffs. No mention of a grave robbery last night, so he tunes out.
"Help me pack up the car," Sam says, leaning out the open door.
Dean waves his cigarette like a badge of procrastination. "Once I smoke this."
Sam walks closer, has some sort of intent, but Dean doesn't know what for until Sam takes the cigarette out of his hand. "Go bring your stuff to the car. I'll finish it for you." He takes a drag and smirks around the filter. "Chop chop."
"You're a douchebag."
"So you tell me pretty much every day. I don't think I understand quite yet. Tell me again?"
"Douchebag."
"Okay, I think I get it now. Wait, what did you say?"
"You think you're so clever, wise guy?"
"What? I can't hear you. There's a buzzing in my ear, I think it's a mosquito."
Dean punches Sam on his shoulder. "You're a little bitch."
Sam laughs and cocks his head. "What?"
"Sam, I hate you," Dean says and goes to get his bags. "I'm going to leave you on the side of the road in Nowhere, Oregon or something, just you wait."
"It's dumb to tell me these things, Dean. You're giving me plenty of time to plan a mutiny, because we're pretty far from Oregon."
"You wouldn't know Oregon from Texas, what with your shitty navigation skills and how much you sleep, so I don't know what you're talking about." Dean picks up Sam's backpack while he's at it, and brings their total of four bags to the trunk of the Impala, which Sam has graciously opened for him. He arranges the bags towards the back so that they can still get to the false bottom in case they need quick access.
Sam steps up close, probably too close to an outsider's eye, but everything they are is too close, and it's all a matter of perspective anyways. He flicks the accumulated ash off the end of the cigarette and offers the last couple drags to Dean. "Kill it."
Dean shrugs and takes it. Why not.
"So where do you want to go? You're the one itching to leave. Any hunts to track down?"
There aren't any yet. He had found a couple other potentials in the area, but he wants to be gone of the place, so he'll call Bobby eventually and pass them on. No, he just wants to take off, go somewhere fast, and remind himself of the finer things in life.
"We could do that," Sam says. "The two of us against the world, and we'll always win, right?"
Blind optimism isn't their style, but sometimes, occasionally, rarely, he'll indulge in it. "Batman always wins, what are you thinking?" He wants to believe it so bad.
"Hey, I'll go check us out," Dean says moments later, spinning the room key around his finger. Spin and catch one, spin and catch two…
"Get out some David Bowie. I don't care which one," Dean says as they roar out of the parking lot.
Sam pulls the cardboard box out from under his seat and clicks around until he finds a Bowie cassette with all the tape on one side. His warm voice sings out "Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing" and Dean makes Sam fast forward to the next song because this one is in 6/8 which is a terrible way to start out a day of driving.
They stay on the road all day. Dean wants to drive with no purpose, soak in the ever-changing scenery, see things he's never seen before. So he drives for hours, passing through mostly sun and the occasional rain shower. The outside surroundings slowly shift from East Coast evergreen to dusty southern roads, and he is so glad to be away from the ocean.
Coffee and diner stops are brief but necessary. Dean gets them in and out efficiently and with little flirting with waitresses, cute they may be. They're just as in step with each other as ever, despite the way they can't quite meet each other's eyes or how Sam freezes if Dean touches him.
They aren't talking about it though, even if Sam is busy thinking about something. Denial has always worked fine for Dean, so he sees no need to alter a working system.
Instead, Dean focuses on the feel of the Impala, rumbling and vibrating and completely under his control. When it's like this, he owns the road; he points his car to the west and eats blacktop. There are miles left he hasn't seen, all that unimaginable potential buried under empty highways and a faraway horizon.
Sam is barely awake, with his head against the window and a broad stretch of sunshine across his legs for warmth. He laughs sleepily at Dean's thoughts and things are okay.
It's their second day on the road since leaving North Carolina. They've been driving all morning and all day and all afternoon. The sun is setting and Sam is dozing off again.
He can't get comfortable against the window though. He fidgets around, tries to shift his bundled-up sweatshirt into a better position, but his head keeps on falling back and straining his neck. He's so painfully sleepy though, and it's made disgustingly worse by the crick in his neck. His mind is filled with discomfort-induced thoughts of North Carolina and getting back there and solving their problem because they still might die or something might happen, this isn't over for good and there are going to be people in the future that have to deal with this. It'll kill most anybody else it seems but they're chickening out and running and now others will die because they couldn't solve it.
Dean shifts in his seat and rubs at the phantom pain in his own neck. "Sam," he says.
"What?" Sam mumbles back.
"Just stop fidgeting and get over here."
Sam looks at him through cracked open eyes. "Huh?"
Dean pulls on Sam's hair and Sam follows until he's laying horizontal with his head on Dean's thigh, Dean's hand still in his hair. "Just go to sleep. You're driving me mad with all your moving around." He has the muscles in his leg clenched past the point of comfort and he can't loosen them for the life of him. It's just that Sam is really fucking close, all up in his business, but he has nobody to blame but himself.
Sam feels his discomfort, of course he does, and he tries to sit up, get away, take avoidance into his own hands. "Sorry no I'm sorry it's still weird isn't it?"
"Ssh nope we still aren't discussing this." Dean thinks and shoves Sam back down. He relaxes his leg muscles by force of will and necessity. "Just go to sleep."
Sam smiles and submits and noses at Dean's jeans. "Fine, bossypants. When did you last wash these?" he asks.
"Shut up."
"No, it's a serious question. I don't want to end up with a grease rash or something dumb and unavoidable."
"For the last time, just sleep, you little bitch," Dean says and presses Sam's face down roughly into his leg. "I'm doing us a favor."
Dean lightly scratches Sam's scalp, one two one-one two, to the drumline of the Zeppelin song he has stuck in his head, one two three four one-and-two-and-one-and-two-and. Sam drifts off again without a problem, humming along as he loses consciousness.
It's a beautiful, lazy afternoon, still miles left to travel. Dean likes looking at the people in the cars he passes, wonders where they're going and why. He keeps a running tally of how many cars he's gone by, adding for each one he passes and subtracting for the ones that pass him.
Two cars pass him one after another, bringing him down to twelve. Dean tightens his grip in Sam's hair and guns it until he reaches up past seventeen. Sam shifts to a looser, more relaxed position and dreams about laying on the roof of the Impala while it hurtles down the highway.
They drive for a couple more days, chasing exhilaration, only stopping for a few hours a night in forgettable towns to sleep.
After a while, they end up in New Mexico. In the late afternoon, Dean pulls over into a dusty stretch of land with blood-red rocks and a wide, clear sky.
"Mm, home sweet home!" Sam says as he gets out of the car and stretches until his fingers touch the sunset.
Dean shakes out his limbs and walks around the car a few times, partly to stretch further and partly to make sure nothing had happened in the past few hours to the Impala's paint job.
Sam looks at the tall, red mountains rising up in the distance. Big, endless expanses of desolate rock, towering over everything. He wants to run until he gets to them and then climb until he's at the top so he can shout down "Here I am!" to nobody except for Dean.
Instead, he pulls the cooler out of the back seat. They had made a beer and hot dog stop a couple hours back at Sam's insistence.
"Want to build the fire?" Sam asks.
Dean grins. "That's a silly question," he says. "You get to help me find wood though."
They strike off into the dust and rock, scavenging for branches and brush. They steadily build up a pile next to the Impala, separated into kindling and everything else.
"Help me carry this back," Sam thinks to Dean from a ways off.
Dean looks up. Sam is by the road toeing an old wooden flat. It's dry and battered, prime burning material. He lifts an edge of it to gauge its weight. It's not too heavy, but it's wide and flat and will probably give them splinters.
"You're a pussy," Dean thinks and walks over. "Do you need your brave, heroic big brother to swing by and save the day?"
"Har har," Sam thinks back.
The sun is still setting brilliantly when Dean sits down and starts to build the fire. He starts out with small kindling and an old newspaper from the passenger side footwell all stomped and flattened by Sam's sasquatch boots, feeding the little sticks and brush until it's almost self-sustainable.
Sam supervises. He's not as helpful as he'd like to believe. "You know, we have gasoline in the car if you're having trouble," he says with a shit-eating grin that Dean can't see but knows is there.
"But it's all about the art of it!" Dean says. He pokes at the little flame as it stutters out. And it had almost made it too. "Anybody can make a fire if they have enough gasoline at hand."
He tries again. Sam gets bored and wanders off to inspect a cactus, while Dean builds up another teepee of twigs and brush.
This one catches, bless the universe, so Dean hums some AC/DC in celebration and feeds the flames until they've reached a respectable strength. The burning wood twinkles and pops like crystal glasses shattering on the floor. It's a quiet, soothing sound that Dean closes his eyes to hear better. He zones Sam out like a radio in the background, paying only the barest attention to him.
The peacefulness of the desert breaks when Sam lets out an undignified shout and jumps back from his cactus. Dean startles and whips his eyes over to Sam, scanning for the danger.
Except there isn't actually any danger, so to speak, just a scorpion waving its tail threateningly at Sam. Dean shoots his brother a bitch face that could probably rival his own. "Are you serious?"
"It startled me," Sam says sheepishly. "So sue me." He sends it scurrying away with a flick of his boot then retreats back to the safety of the fire. "Yeah, this looks about hot enough to cook over. Do you have any long sticks for us?"
Dean shakes is head. "I didn't look for any. You should go get some."
"But there are probably scorpions waiting for me out there. You can go."
"Wuss. Your boots go up past your ankles."
"But what if they jump on me from up high?"
"They won't. I built the fire so you can go get the sticks. You'll be fine." Dean mentally pushes him away from the fire. "Into the wilderness with you, Indie Jones."
With a grumble, Sam takes off. It's hard to see anything clearly in the fading light, so Dean helps him look. Their combined efforts prove successful after a few minutes, and Sam returns with a small grin.
"Yes, yes, you win a prize," Dean says and takes one of the sticks. He puts it aside to rip open the pack of hot dogs with his teeth. Sam gets the buns out from the back seat, a rare set of New England hot dog rolls he didn't expect to find a hundred miles back.
They share the small cooler-cum-chair, pulled up close to the fire, and burn their hot dogs in silence, drinking their way through a case of PBR.
("Dean, no," Sam had protested back in the store, "that's gross." Dean shrugged, laughed, and refused to put it back, saying "some nights you need shitty beer to remind yourself of how good it can get." Sam tried to grab it out of his hands. "But not tonight!" Dean pulled it out of reach and went to the counter to pay anyways, throwing over his shoulder, "Then you're shit out of luck bud, because it's my pool winnings and this is what I want.")
"What is it about the outdoors that makes terrible beer taste okay?" Sam asks rhetorically.
Dean laughs at him. "See? It's growing on you. Knew it would."
Sam is obsessing over something, something to do with that night about a week ago, but he's suppressing his thoughts the sneaky bastard. Dean wants to avoid the subject for as long as he can, so he thinks "Sam, for god's sake quit it. Let it go."
It's quiet enough that they can hear each other breathing (a little faster than normal) and it's still enough that Dean feels his heart beating, sees his chest jump one two three four thump pump pulse. Sam is thinking hard despite Dean's protestations. He's anxious which is rubbing off on Dean, and it's making their hearts race.
Sam can't stop looking at him. Not staring, but compulsively glancing over and then away, as if nervous to look too long.
(Which is funny, because they've spent their entire lives staring at each other, learning each other, and only now they're wary of eye contact.)
The sun finally dips away after an eternal sunset. Stars and planets begin to poke through the darkening sky, starting with a pale Mars.
They relocate to the hood of the Impala. Dean pulled out an old wool blanket to drape over the cold steel but it barely cuts the chill.
"Why did we come out here to go car camping? At least back in North Carolina it stayed warm at night," Sam grouches.
Dean jostles their knees together. "Because you can't see the stars anywhere better than out here. It's been too long since I felt this small."
Sam smiles and hooks two of their ankles together. "Point taken."
More and more stars appear and the sky grows blacker. "Hi there, stars," Dean thinks at them absently. "It's been a long time." He turns his head to look at Sam. "Hey, do you think we'll ever get to watch one of them go supernova? That would be pretty sweet, huh?"
Sam nods and grins with him. "What's with us and explosions?" he wonders.
They watch each other laugh. "Let's blow something up sometime," Dean says with a smile.
"What do you have in mind?"
"Well, we could steal a car maybe, bring it out to the middle of nowhere, soak it in gasoline and light it up." He smirks, shows a little teeth, and Sam's stomach flips over.
"Or just find some C4 or dynamite or fucking anything that goes boom." Sam can't keep the excited grin off his face either despite his liberal college instinct that car theft is bad and blowing them up is worse.
"Wuss. I'll train you back out of that, don't worry Sammy. Ooh, we could do the gas thing still but then shoot at it with big guns until something exciting happens."
They laugh with each other, the potential for insanity driving them wild.
The moment passes, and Dean bumps his knee against Sam's to bring him down from the remaining thrill. Tap tap one and two and three and four, and then Sam taps both sets of his toes in two counter beats: one one-and two one-and three one-and four one-and five and so on.
"See that tiny cluster of stars right there, looks like a little little dipper?" Sam asks after a while and Dean sees it through Sam's eyes because it's so fucking small he never would have seen it otherwise.
"Yeah what about them?"
"Nothing, really, I've just always liked them. The Seven Sisters, daughters of Titan or something. Zeus made them into stars to protect them from some guy that was chasing them down."
"You learn that at your fancy college, college boy?" Dean asks with a laugh.
"Yep. Took a Mythology and Folklore class and man they got some things wrong."
"Like what?"
Sam has to think for a moment because the memories have been fading away and it's getting harder to find them again. "Well, my professor was under the impression that wendios were a kind of mutated werewolf, but I managed to straighten him out."
"That's a relief."
"Tell me about it. Hell, I even managed to score a TA position with him my sophomore year. I got a couple credits to grade tests and papers and to help confused students and-" Sam suddenly bursts out laughing as he lets himself remember, "-there was this one kid who obviously hadn't done any of the readings and she tried to write one of her papers about the Baba Yaga except she only knew the bit about her house standing on chicken legs and then ended up pulling the rest from Howl's Moving Castle which isn't Baba Yaga at all, and then I got to give her a D on it and it was so satisfying." He can't stop laughing as he drags up the faint residues of memory.
Dean laughs too because amusement spreads between them faster than the flu. Sam gets up after another moment to pee on the coals.
Dean is just finishing his fifth beer by now, and is at the point where the alcohol is buzzing through his blood and making him lightheaded and horny. He also has to pee like a racehorse.
"Don't break the seal!" Sam say with a tipsy laugh. He's halfway done with his seventh and the last PBR. "It was a terrible decision on my part and I don't recommend it to anybody! Oh damn I have to go again. Fuck you Dean."
"Fuck you too, motormouth."
"Hey! That is an unfair accusation, asshole. For your information, my voice is melodious and my words are as riveting as--"
"A politician's? Yeah, you're right."
Sam intends to reach a hand over and tickle Dean's stomach in retaliation, but he's not very sneaky when he's drunk so Dean sees it coming a mile away. He rolls out of the way and off the hood of the Impala, and tries not to think about having Sam's hands all over him.
"You're a jerk," Sam says with a pout.
Dean pisses on the back tire, marking their territory against any wayward scorpions.
Sam practically giggles. ("Whoah I don't giggle!") "Okay I take it back. You're a great brother, protecting me from all the scary scorpions in the night." He slides off the hood and onto his feet as well. "I'll get the other side." He sways a bit and Dean has to steady his feet. Sam looks over the top of the car at him and smiles.
Sam is concentrating too hard on being coordinated, and Dean wants to mess him up.
"Hey Sam," he says conversationally. "Remember that time in Texas, you were probably just a freshman or something, and I had a girl over? I knew you were watching us, getting off to us."
Shock makes Sam freeze up and trip over his own feet. He knows immediately what Dean is talking about.
Dean laughs triumphantly. Sam is always too composed; panic looks good on him.
"What? I mean -- how -- you -- I was just --"
"Shut up and calm down."
Sam close his mouth and looks away, but his fingers are trembling as he zips himself up, and he's too involved in his little freak out to recognize how much Dean is enjoying himself.
"Sam," Dean says after a couple more moments. "As fun as it is to see you like this, I have no idea why you think I'd be angry at you over something that happened more than ten years ago, especially given the things we've done in the past month."
Sam nods and takes a deep breath, but his heart is still racing. "You're cruel."
Dean cackles. "You'd be lost without me."
Sam forces himself to look back at Dean. "Well, did you know I jerked off to that for years?"
Dean feels like he's been punched in the gut. "Jesus, Sam!" he says.
Sam laughs at him, a bright, silly laugh. "And that's payback, fucker." Sam is laughing, but he's nervous and isn't sure where this is going, is wary to assume anything in favor of what he wants. He twists his fingers together and remembers looking through the crack in the door at Dean (his perfect, idolized, adored big brother) making love to his girl of the week like she was the only thing in the world.
"It wasn't like that, Sammy. Not like that," Dean thinks and chokes on a moan as the arousal that's been teasing the edge of his consciousness all night trips into full force with the old memories. "I knew you were there and I put on a show because you hadn't gotten laid yet and didn't watch enough porn. God, Sammy, it drove me crazy, you watching. I could hear you jerking yourself, you didn't know how to stay completely quiet and oh fuck, Sammy, the way you sounded." Dean leans against the drivers side door and widens his legs a little so he can rub himself through his jeans.
"You fucking exhibitionist," Sam thinks. He unbuttons his jeans and slides his hand inside before he can convince himself that it's a lousy idea. "The sad thing is, I never should have expected any different." He jerks himself to Dean's memory of getting off on him watching, what it was like to have his little brother's eyes on him.
"What are we even doing?" Dean wonders, mostly rhetorically, before slipping his hand down his pants. He drops his head back onto the top of the car and moans loudly, all real but emphasized for Sam's benefit.
"Now isn't the time for philosophy, but I believe the beer made us bold," Sam says and giggles at his alliteration. He looks at Dean, looks as hard as he can because he's allowed to now, because Dean likes it. He remembers, in as clear detail as he can manage, the smooth roll of Dean's hips, his flexing thighs, his hitched breaths, the way he kissed her mouth neck face and made her choke on pleasure.
"And this isn't really the time for word play, Sam," Dean thinks back with a mental eye roll. He gorges himself on Sam's attention, lets it curl through him possessively and he can't absorb it fast enough. They've spent their entire lives watching each other but never knowing the other was watching back just as closely, so this confirmation of pretty much everything he's ever wanted is enough to leave him a strung-out mess held up by just his car and his little brother's will.
"Sammy, Sammy," Dean gasps inside his head because keeping it bottled up means the words get tangled with the numbers get caught and kept and can never slip away. He slides his other hand under his shirt, drags it over the tight, hot skin of his stomach and digs his finger tips in between two of his ribs because Sam likes a little pain to amp up the pleasure.
Sammy, little Sammy little brother, who wants to come around the car and get on his knees in front of him and worship his body with his mouth and teeth, who wants to rip welts in his back to declare him "Mine, you're mine, you're mine," who wants to suck bruises into his chest and arms. Sam wants to bite him until he bleeds and then feed on the blood and secondhand pain. He wants to stay on his knees before him for hours until he's stiff and sore so that Dean puts his hands in his hair and looks down at him and doesn't see anything else and is pleased by what he sees.
There's also a part of Sam that's whispering how much he'd like to draw Dean's pants down and run his nose through his pubic hair, tug at it with his teeth little pinpricks of pain, get his mouth and tongue on his hard dick so he can lick it suck it taste it.
But it's just a quiet whisper, a veiled desire that Sam tries to keep hidden away, as if it's significantly worse than his louder thoughts.
Dean can't stop the sounds that are tearing out of his mouth because he wants Sam like that, wants him to need him. He's a selfish son-of-a-bitch for it, greedy and aching for whatever Sam is willing to give, but Sam wants it too. Sam wants it too.
"Yes," Sam agrees. "Yesyesyes." He watches Dean fall apart and wishes for more. "You have it all, anything, everything you want."
Dean locks his knees straight to keep from falling over as he nears the edge. He gasps breaths of hot air into the cold night and comes all over his hand. He shakes through it so hard he accidentally slams his elbow into the door.
It's that unexpected hot flare, burning through their pain receptors that makes Sam double over and come in long, wet pulses. Their second orgasm shreds through Dean and he shivers in submission as his body tries to come again.
They don't move for a few minutes, catching their breath and letting the cold air register. Eventually Dean pulls his hand out of his pants. He looks at it with a twisted face of disgust and shakes off what he can, wiping the rest on his jeans.
"Hey, Dean?" Sam asks in a quiet voice.
He wants to talk about this.
Dean gulps in air. "Not now, okay?"
Sam is a little hurt, shrinks back into himself. "Um. Okay."
Dean pulls himself back together and looks at Sam, at his guarded, tight face. "Just let me absorb it all, okay? I'm not saying no or shutting you out, but let's sleep on it and think in the morning."
Sam nods and smiles, is so relieved he could fall over.
Dean pushes away from the Impala. He sways on his feet, still kind of drunk. Goddamn.
"Go ahead and sleep, Dean," Sam says. "I want some time to think on my own."
Dean nods. He grabs the blanket off the hood and another from the trunk then settles into the front. Sam tidies up while he waits for Dean to fall asleep, thinking about North Carolina and the jutting cape and the deep waters.
Dean wakes up early as the sky is turning a smoky light blue, the sun just a hint of light under the horizon. It's fucking cold out.
He sits up and pushes his blankets over the seat back and spreads them out over Sam. He slips on his leather jacket which he'd used as a pillow and puts on his boots before getting out of the car as quietly as possible.
Dean paces in laps around the Impala and tries to figure out what the fuck is happening between him and Sam. To start with, it's pretty obvious by now that his little brother can get him off harder and hotter than anyone else he's been with, and they haven't even--
Oh god.
Dean makes himself focus, makes himself think the thoughts he's never been able to approach before. His knee-jerk reaction is to scream or cough or gag because of the way his stomach twists and churns in horror at the thought of putting his mouth all over Sam, touching him, tasting him.
It's the inborn fear of being too close to his brother. It's an intoxicating fear. Sam was always his to look after and now he wants to mess him up bring him down to his level, down and down. He wants Sam so bad it's smothering him, but more than his own desire he wants Sam to want him just as much.
It was easier before this stupid curse, back when he thought Sam was planning on running back to school any day. Now that he knows Sam is here for keeps, he wants the rest, everything Sam promised him last night.
Sam isn't supposed to be willing to give him all that, which means he fucked up somewhere.
No, Dean thinks and stops that train of thought right there since it wasn't going to help.
He takes a deep breath and looks at the sun rising over the desert for a few minutes. He counts up to ten over and over again until his mind is a blank slate once more and he can start all over.
He remembers the way Sam wanted him last night and his passion and his endless devotion, and he buries the doubt because he promised Sam he'd think about this.
Dean taps his fingers in an absent-minded rhythm as a way to distract that knee-jerk NO! INCEST! repulsion. He imagines reaching up and pressing his mouth to Sam's, softly at first, testing the whitewater.
Even just that makes him shudder and grit his teeth, but he knows he wants this to happen (and more importantly, he knows Sam wants this to happen), and when it finally does, there can't be any lingering incest freakouts laying in wait.
Dean pushes forward again. He pretends to kiss Sam. He'd lick Sam's closed mouth, tease his lips apart and breathe the carbon dioxide from his lungs. He would taste him and savor the taste and sink as close to him as he could get.
Dean blinks a few times and squares his shoulders. Okay so he isn't fully comfortable with the idea of being physically intimate with Sam, but the twisting in his stomach that's trying to warn him away can't stop him anymore.
It's time to do this, before he loses his nerve and slips back into second-guessing himself. He walks the few steps over to the door at Sam's feet. He raps loudly on the window. "Sammy! Wake up, it's time to do your talking thing."
Sam rolls onto his back and squints up at him. "Now? Dean, go away I'm sleeping."
Dean opens the door anyways. "Too bad," he says. "We're doing this now." He pulls the blankets off of Sam and tickles his toes until he squirms awake.
"Okay, okay, you ass. I'm up. What the fuck is so important?" Sam sits up and wants to brush the hours-old beer taste off his tongue.
"Just that I want to do this thing we've been doing," Dean says. "I mean, I can think about it now and I really really want it. I want you. This thing whatever it can and will be." He makes himself look at Sam because otherwise he'd be looking at the sunrise and the sunrise isn't as good as seeing the smile appear and spread over Sam's familiar beautiful face.
Sam smiles and it becomes a happy laugh and he grabs onto Dean's jacket. "Get your ass in here you dork." He pulls him in just this side of too rough. They end up crammed on top of each other, their thighs and elbows and shoulders knocking around.
"Hey you," Sam says. He reaches forward and brushes his fingers along Dean's neck then curls them into his hair, hardly believing Dean is letting him touch and isn't bolting away.
Dean bumps his knuckles on Sam's stomach. It's such a small touch but it's the first one after he's been given permission to do anything and it knocks him thoughtless. He splays his hand out and soaks in the body heat and the living warmth.
Sam purses his lips. "Yes I know my stomach is cool. Get the fuck over here and kiss me already." He pulls Dean to him with the hand that's still in his hair and kisses him. It's not as hesitant as Dean was imagining earlier. Sam moans and immediately opens his mouth to him, pulls him even closer as close as they can get. Sam spreads his legs and Dean slips forward between them. He tilts his head so he can kiss Sam harder deeper taste more of him, so much better than he could have ever imagined.
Sam puts his hands all over him, can't possibly touch him enough all at once. So much warm skin, so much time to account for. He bucks under him, a mess of needy moans and writhing desire, each of Dean's touches like explosives buried under his skin.
"Oh god, closer come closer," he says into Dean's mouth. He shifts until he has his thighs squeezed around Dean's waist and his ankles locked behind him.
Dean sinks in, closer closer like Sam wants (like Dean needs) and touches him with reverence. He breaks away for just a moment to look, to take in his little brother's floppy hair messed across his forehead, his flushed cheeks, his wet lips. Sam smirks up at him and is exactly where he wants to be.
"Shit," Dean says, dumbstruck. He rocks his hips against Sam's ass until the tight friction drives them mad. Sam tosses his head back against the window, displaying his long neck and then there's nothing Dean can do to stop himself from dipping down and finding his brother's pulse with his mouth and teeth. He presses his tongue flat to Sam's neck and waits until he can feel the blood pumping under his skin, reassurance of life. He sucks that one spot until Sam is incoherent, teases it between his teeth. He wonders if he opens his mouth wide enough could he swallow all of Sam right up and he could be a part of him, one body one mind, never apart.
"You're so fucking weird," Sam laughs out. "Fucking hell just get back up here and get back to kissing me."
Dean does. "You're really goddamn pretty," Sam whispers to him between long kisses. "Like, gorgeous."
"I'm not a girl," Dean says and nips Sam's tongue hard enough to draw a few drops of blood. He shares the rich taste between them until it fade away. It's just an objection for the record; the flattery doesn't bother him as much as he wishes it would.
"Fine then." Sam continues anyways because he wants to despite not needing to prove his point. "Hot, too attractive for my own good, ruggedly handsome. Jesus, Dean, you make me want to peel off you skin and wear it."
Dean pulls back enough to look at Sam in shock. "And you think I'm weird? Dude."
Sam shrugs and laughs. "Whatever." He yanks Dean's hair. "Just kiss me again and again and again again again again Dean again." He repeats the word until it becomes gibberish and wrong, until the sounds melt together, so Dean does. He kisses him until they're stupid with it.
It's about fifty miles to the nearest town with a motel. Dean drives too fast and is filled with a frantic, desperate energy. He had stopped them from getting each other off in the back of the Impala with "No not here not in the back seat. Sam let's just get to a motel and I can fuck you right. I'm going to fuck you so hard and sweet, baby brother."
Sam is sitting pushed right up next to him in the car as Dean drives. He has the tips of his fingers under Dean's shirt then down his waistband then in his bellybutton, and he's thinking about the things he could make Dean do to him.
"You kinky son of a bitch," Dean says with a nervous laugh because he's never been into restraints or blindfolds or cock rings or wax play, but if Sam is then he could probably learn to be.
Sam presses his little smile into Dean's shoulder. "Yeah, we'll work up to that stuff."
They pull into the motel and check in quickly. They don't bother to bring in the bags yet, Dean just fumbles with the keys and gets them in the room as quickly as possible. He pushes Sam down on the closer bed and follows, kissing him speechless. "Sam my Sammy all mine forever," he thinks and takes off their shirts, too impatient to go slow and tease.
They rock into each other, steady and mindless while Dean takes a moment to enjoy how Sam looks under him, too blissed and ready to be fucked into the mattress to do more than blink and smile at him.
And well shit, they're so goddamn pretty like this, wanting each other and savoring every touch like it's the only ones they'll get. Maybe it's his narcissism or maybe it's Sam's hero-worshipping, rose-tinted vision, but he is fucking hot. Then again, so is Sam, and neither of them have any trouble accepting the fact.
"You're really full of yourself," Sam says. "Also, put your hands in my hair and pull it and move me around however you want. Put me where you want me then kiss me again, and get around to the sex sometime before tomorrow."
"When did you get so bossy?" Dean asks rhetorically and laughs, but twists a hand through Sam's hair and jerks his head back so he can bite that spot on his brother's pulse again.
"You're so good, you're so so good at doing what I want," Sam moans and starts to work Dean's pants off.
Later, they lie on top of the sheets next to each other, sweaty and relatively content. Dean feels a little twitchy, like his fight or flight reflexes are kicking in and he wants to flee. Sam is too distracted with wanting to ask him something to notice it.
"Dean?" Sam finally asks. He's trying to hide the thoughts until he gets the words out in proper sentences, but he's imagining home and hot and mountains.
Dean wants to take his flight instinct and run away with Sam to the safety of the East Coast, but instead he replies, "What's up?"
"Let's go to California--" Dean doesn't mean to cut him off, doesn't intend the vehement sense of NO, and Sam stops for a moment and stares at him a little too long before continuing. "Hear me out. Please. I'm not taking off. I'm not going to disappear into the hills and never see you again. I just want to drive through, see a few places. Dean, I lived in California for longer than anywhere else I've ever lived in my life and I miss it. We can't avoid that part of the country forever. I know you hate it there, it scares you, but please?"
Dean doesn't say anything, just scratches his fingernails against the grain of the sheets one two three four one two three four.
"We don't have to go to Palo Alto. Maybe just San Francisco, and then up North? We could see the redwoods."
Dean eventually nods. "Okay," because in the end it's all about what Sam wants and he's not leaving, Dean won't be left behind again. "Okay, we can go."
The blinding, ecstatic happiness he feels in response from Sam kind of makes it worth it, and it's catching. "You want to show big brother all your old haunts?" he asks with a laugh. He can't stay angry when Sam is like this.
Sam nods enthusiastically. "Yes! There's this coffee place I used to go to sometimes, an old book store, this pond in the park."
"Oh my god," Dean say incredulously. "You were such a college kid!"
Sam grins. "Yeah I know." He touches their toes together, thankful.
So, the next morning, after a long afternoon and night of fucking and kissing and learning what makes each other tick, Dean points the Impala to the West and towards California.
During his mid-morning nap, in between coffee and lunch, Sam dreams. It's night and he's standing on some shoreline, watching the waves break at his feet. The warm water tickles his bare toes, but a cold wind makes him shiver. There's mist over the stars and the moon is nowhere to be seen. It's so dark out. He wants to wade out into the water to see if it's any warmer than the air, power through the opposing force of the surf, wade out until his clothes are heavy and waterlogged and drag behind him. The ocean looks so black and inviting and quiet, so quiet, so deep and silent and peaceful. He wants to taste the salt water, dunk down and drink the brine, swirl away like discarded seaweed. The rushing in his ears would sound like silence.
Dean breathes out a shaken gasp and hits Sam on the knee to wake him up. "Dude that's some messed-up dream you're having. Been hitting the hard stuff already?"
Sam sits up and shakes off the dream-memory. "Let's just stop for coffee again soon. I don't want to sleep."
He can't stop thinking about the ocean for the rest of the day, even when Dean cranks Sam's favorite Jethro Tull tape or when he cracks lewd jokes or buys him a salad or pulls over onto the side of the highway and blows him. He can't stop thinking about the ocean and their curse and how he's scared of North Carolina but feels a sick pull to go back and examine those frothing waters where past example says they'll go drown themselves.
Dean tries to avoid routes and exits that add or multiply or subtract out to three because they make him nervous. He cuts his eyes away and holds his breath as they pass by those signs and resists the urge to scratch the itch out from under his skin. Sometimes three hurts, like a brain tumor, stealing away his sanity. He wants to purge it from his mind, rip it away and destroy it like it's destroyed him.
He takes a deep breath and stops thinking for a minute so he can calm his heart rate back to normal. Sam keeps to his side of their mind and lets him work through it on his own. Thank the universe for Sam, calm, understanding Sam.
They pull into San Francisco in the late evening. Sam knows a cheap hotel, relatively clean and pretty close to his favorite restaurant.
Dean tries to lay down on the springy bed with Sam and get him on top of him all over him, but Sam just laughs and kisses him and gets up. "Come on. Let's find some food and booze and enjoy this beautiful city."
Sam leads the way and Dean follows out the front of the hotel into the lively neighborhood. Sam remembers these winding streets and cramped buildings more vividly than almost anything else from his school years, from taking study breaks with Jess and coming out to the city for rampant adventures.
Sam pulls him around by the sleeve. He's full of happy excitement to share his city with Dean, the lights and people and salty air, and Dean is content to indulge him.
They get a table at a place Sam remembers, outdoors on the street so they can watch people flowing by. It's flashy like everything else but, not presumptuous (their menu is entirely in English, rather than some places he's seen where you need an English-to-Whatever dictionary to order because the owner thinks it makes them more "authentic"), and Sam is adamant they have the best pizza in the state.
Dean lights a cigarette as they wait for their beers. The first drag is like bitter coffee in the morning, the second not quite as good. Sam gestures over for it, so Dean offers him one of his own.
"No, the food should be here pretty soon. I just want some of yours. It tastes better stolen."
Dean gives it to him but can't help adding in, "God this is so gay."
"It doesn't matter here. You could get under the table and blow me and nobody would bat an eyelash." Sam smirks around the filter of the cigarette and imagines Dean doing just that, wishes he was yanking his brother's hair and fucking his mouth until spit dripped down his chin and he was close to coming in his jeans.
"You fucking dick," Dean says. "You can't think shit like that unless we can follow through!"
"It's called foreplay, Dean, and I promise you can do whatever you want to me later on. But first, it looks like the waiter is about here with our beer."
The beer is good and the pizza is as awesome as Sam promised, crisp and brick-oven cooked like he's never cared about before, but Sam distracts him by sucking on his greasy fingers like they're Dean's tongue and considers rimming him tonight.
"Could you think any more inappropriate dinner thoughts?" Dean asks, slightly aghast and getting hard against his volition. "That isn't a challenge, either." He waves his pizza crust at Sam as if it would prove his point, but Sam just takes it out of his hand and eats it, and isn't convinced. Instead he thinks about finger-fucking Dean with his cock down his throat until he comes in his mouth and Sam can feel him jerking against his tongue.
"Fucking hell, Sam. Let's finish eating and then we can go back to the room, whatever, but remember it was you that pushed us out the door half an hour ago."
Sam shrugs a little sheepishly. "Okay okay. And then after we'll come back out and find a bar, yeah?"
"Yeah that sounds good." Dean can't help grinning at him though, at his horny little brother and how they can't get enough of each other.
They smoke another cigarette on the way back, puff puff pass. Sam elbows him out of the way as they rush up the narrow stairs to their second-floor room (there hadn't been any left on the ground floor and the only other choices were on the third, which, no), but has to wait for Dean to follow with the key. Sam crowds behind him in the doorway with his fingers in his belt loops and rubs against his hip, then trips them into their room once Dean finally, finally (only a couple seconds, really) gets the door unlocked.
Dean yanks them together so he can kiss Sam, wet and needy because he's too aroused to think about technique. He gets them undressed quickly and down onto one of the beds. Their skin sticks together in the muggy heat, so Dean makes sure to touch as much of Sam as he can in this different atmosphere, learning what he feels like when he's silky with sweat.
He fucks him a little too rough, but Sam just whimpers and begs for it harder please harder and bucks into it. He wants him with the neediness of a younger sibling, and Dean gives it to him with the dedication of the older.
It's two more days before Dean can drag Sam away from San Francisco. It's not that he didn't like it (he was surprised by how much fun he had seeing the sights and being introduced to this chapter of Sam's past he missed out on), just that he's got the itch to leave again, to move, to go, and despite having fun, he's still scared that Stanford, less than an hour south, is going to tempt Sam away again.
So they roar away in their car and leave the Bay Area for another day, and head up up north to the rolling hills and endless orchards.
The nightmares are getting worse. Sam dreams about drifting away with the tide, chasing serenity in all the wrong places.
"Dying won't stop this, won't make it better," Dean thinks, trying to convince Sam's subconscious. Sam himself already believes him. He wants to beat the curse too, but Dean doesn't trust a mind that has had death visions before.
More often than not, Sam wakes up from these dreams in a clammy sweat and terrified. Drowning seems much more pleasant when he's asleep than when he's not; when Dean pinches him back into consciousness, the water is choking them instead of bringing them on a new adventure.
Terror feels different on each of them. For Dean, it's confining. He shrinks away and tries to hide from it. It's freezing cold and feels like three and it makes him still and indifferent. For Sam, like recently, he starts shaking and he can't think straight. He gags on it like seawater and it feels acidic in his stomach.
"You're not going to do this, I won't let you die, if you die, I die and that's just how the world works," Dean tells Sam and pulls his head down into his lap. He brushes his sweaty hair away from his forehead and rubs his fingers into his temples. "You're not drowning, I'm not drowning, this thing is just playing games with us. Dreams won't off us. We'll wait it out and then when the dreams stop we'll forget about them, because they can't hurt us." He keeps up a steady stream of reassurances until Sam can breathe properly again and close his eyes without seeing foaming water, and instead sees the passing surroundings like Dean does.
Sam watches the scenery raptly. The bouncing hills get in the way of the horizon and they want to climb one of them because it looks nice up there, a good place to knock back a few shots and watch the sunset. Then appear the hundreds upon hundreds of even rows of trees, acres of them, all lined up perfectly and when you look down in between you can't see their end. The two of them could walk into an orchard and not be found for months, far away from the ocean, and wait the night terrors out.
That night they stay in a nowhere hotel in a little truck stop town. Dean is too tired from the day of driving to do anything but watch a little TV and pass out, but Sam stays up for a while and tries to do some more research on ghost ship curses, but it's a hard subject to find anything on and his frustration makes Dean toss and turn.
He wakes up in the night from Sam's nightmare which is bleeding over into his own uneasy dreams. He's on the other bed shivering and breaking out in a cold sweat. The feeling of slipping under water makes Dean dreadfully still for a moment and the rushing in his ears is awful instead of gentle. But he snaps out of it and jumps between their beds to wake Sam up. "Ssh ssh it's okay. I'm here and they can't do anything when I'm around, right?"
Sam nods. "I'm okay." Even though it feels like there's still water in his lungs stomach nose eyes, salty and making him sick. "Could you just. Stay here, though?"
"Yeah I could do that." Dean slips into bed next to him under the comforter because Sam kicked away the sheet. "You know they never wash these things, right?"
"Yeah whatever. Go to sleep." Sam curls up on his side of the bed, facing Dean. The dreams are scary, but as long as Dean is in arm's reach, he'll always be bigger than them.
Dean wakes up in the morning when Sam tosses his arm across his throat. He grumbles and moves it away from him and then curses his brother's existence because now he's awake. He's always hated sharing beds with people because they get into his space and end up sleeping too close; Sam is no exception to this distaste. So he pokes Sam's mind until he squints open his eyes.
"What the fuck do you want, asshole?"
Dean grins. "Just the pleasure of your company since you so nicely woke me up with your flailing not five minutes ago."
Sam scowls at him. He's still groggy and cranky with sleep, so Dean pulls faces at him until Sam finds himself amused against his will. He refuses to crack a smile though, which just makes Dean increase his efforts.
It's the scrunched nose and sneak tickle attack that finally makes Sam dissolve in quiet peals of laughter that Dean can't help joining. "I win this round."
"But I'm awesomer than you, so I just win at life," Sam says and rolls on top of him to kiss him slow and lazily like mornings suggest. "Hey, I have an idea. Want to run away into the hills and dig a hole in the west-facing side of one and we can live there like hobbits?" he asks, only mostly joking.
Dean laughs and kisses him one two three four. "No."
Sam sighs, but he didn't exactly expect that plan to be met with much enthusiasm. "Fine. I suppose we'll just keep on driving aimlessly around the country killing bad things."
"Yeah that sounds more like it."
Dean loves looking at their maps (so many maps, boxes of maps, maps to anywhere in the country). He likes to spread them out on his bed and flip through the pages of the atlases to examine backroads and small towns, or trail his fingers over routes he's taken on their big US map.
His favorite is through the White Mountains in New England, with the curling highways going up and down through tight forests.
"Want to go to New Hampshire or something after this?" Dean asks Sam, who is sitting next to him and watching the history channel. He picks up the New Hampshire atlas to find little one-horse towns hidden in pockets of trees.
"I guess we can," Sam says with a shrug. He's not necessarily thrilled, but fair is fair, Dean did come to California for him.
"Awesome. Those downeasters are crazy folk and they always have ghosts to burn."
The narrator is talking about submarines in World War II and Sam isn't really paying attention while Dean plots their route, planning detours as necessary to avoid three-based Interstates.
Sam watches him out of the corner of his eye. He's always watching, always has been watching, even though these days he's wanting too, desire so overwhelming is burns them.
"You checking me out, stud?" Dean asks and grins. He cuts his gaze over to look at Sam.
"Yeah," Sam says, kind of distracted. He's staring at Dean's rock-solid thighs that he loves to grip his fingers into, then looks up except then his eyes get stuck on the slight pull in the front of Dean's pants that doesn't really go away in Sam's presence. His mouth is watering and he bites his lip and he wants. "I'm thinking about how you haven't fucked me since yesterday morning. You gonna do something about that?"
Dean sweeps the maps off the bed. "Yes." He straddles Sam's legs in a couple smooth movements, gets right up into his space where he belongs. He kisses him reverently, runs his tongue along Sam's uneven bottom teeth because they're too endearing for words. They smile into each other's mouths, little happy puffs of laughter.
Sam is getting better at shielding his thoughts from him, because they're not as pervasive as they were at first. The big, important concepts are there as strong as ever, but Sam has been filtering out the mindless details. It's kind of nice.
Dean still feels him in the back of his mind at every moment of every day, filling all the lonely corners with living self. Sam helps him forget the coldness that's grown up with him, makes his obsessions seem a little less important.
In the end (which is only a couple days later), it's over so suddenly it feels like a dream. They wake up one morning and the curse is gone. Dean opens his eyes without moving and Sam is getting dressed, and half his vision is missing. There's a haunting silence in that empty space in his mind that used to be just for the numbers and patterns, then for weeks was filled with Sam's endless chatter and inane thoughts about laundry or old books, and now it's empty again.
Oh god, he's gone.
"Sam!" he says and sits up. Sam looks over in surprise, looks at him for a couple moments like he's trying to read him but he can't, of course he can't, because the damn curse he thought he hated has abandoned them with no warning.
Sam drops his shirt and runs over quickly, not quickly enough because Dean can't hurry him along. He touches Dean's shoulder and pinches it, way too hard until Dean flinches away. "You can't feel that. Sam, you can't."
Sam draws a deep breath and stands up. "Oh fuck." He puts on his shirt and walks out of the room into the bright morning, slams the door behind him. Once Dean can't see him, Sam is gone. He can't feel his footsteps or breathe with him or listen in on his running commentary on stupid rednecks living in backwoods California.
He's stuck in the same position: same gaped mouth, still clenching his fingers in the sheets. He doesn't know where Sam is, he could be in the parking lot or hotwiring a car to Oregon or on his way to the bottom of the sea for all he can sense him.
Dean chokes up bile at that but he can't vomit, not right now, he has to find Sam first and see if he's okay. If he's okay. If he's okay.
He runs out the door in his boxers and t-shirt and is about to yell for him except he's okay. Sam is just sitting on the hood of the Impala, smoking a cigarette and tapping his fingers against his leg (one of the patterns Dean taught him a few days ago). His little brother looks up at him with his mouth tight and grim, but Dean can tell how freaked he is.
The yell chokes in Dean's throat, he coughs on it and it hurts. "Sam."
Sam looks at him and shrugs, drags deeply from the cigarette like it's better than air. He's not so much tapping harmless patterns on his leg as clawing the muscle to a rhythm. His fingers are white from the force he's using and it looks uncomfortable. "I don't know. Dean, I don't know, I don't know. What the fuck. Why now? Why us, why this, why the dreams, why is it over, what's going on?"
Dean walks forward and sits next to him on the hood. "I don't know." He closes his eyes and it's like Sam isn't there, so he opens them and looks at him until Sam looks back. He touches Sam's stomach, still so warm and alive and Sam. Sam isn't any different; he's still nerdy Sam, still crazy-about-Dean Sam, but he's missing now.
Dean's mind is frantically looking for Sam. It's so empty, needs something to fill it where Sam rushed in and expanded it, but all he can find are numbers, more and more numbers, threes worse than poison, zeros as sweet as little brother. Sam is gone as suddenly as he had been there; things are back to normal, except his normal got reinvented and now it's shattered, so what's a man supposed to do with shattered normal?
"Oh god, Dean, what do we do?" Sam asks into his hands. He's so scared and it kills Dean to see.
"I don't know!" he snaps and punches the hood of the Impala because her steel is stronger than they are and she can take it. He has so many goddamn questions and of course, there's nobody to answer them, there's just the residue of a curse.
Dean breathes in one two three four, hold two two three four, out three two three four, hold four two three four and squares his thoughts. "No, I know what we do. We go to Bobby's and gather ourselves. If North Carolina isn't calling us anymore then we're safe from curse suicide, or whatever it was. You're still mine, I'm still yours; that hasn't changed, won't ever change, is still the most important part. The rest, we'll figure out."
But it's going to be so lonely now.
THE END
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