i got termites in the framework
some more of that supernatural fic that's so popular with the kids these days.
Come My Way
By Candle Beck
It’s a routine job, and it doesn’t take much out of them.
Dean is burning, jittering as they drive away from the graveyard, putting the town to their heels. The black dirt grimed on his hands leaves marks like scorches on everything he touches: the wheel and the gearshift, the volume knob, Sam’s shirt when Dean grabs his shoulder. He’s talking non-stop, like the price of words is going through the roof tomorrow.
Sam likes adrenaline as much as the next man. His skin is crawling, thin sheen of panic sweat cooling and tightening. A taste like old pennies on his tongue and his eyes are bright red from the smoke, throat scoured raw from screaming at Dean to get down.
Mostly routine, anyway.
Miles from anywhere, Dean opens it up and instructs Sam to roll down his window. Sam obliges, and the world explodes in, whirling and tossing up crushed coffee cups and candy bar wrappers like a poltergeist. Dean whoops, wolf-howls out his own window. Sam laughs but it’s weak because he got an especially acrid lungful of smoke not too long ago, and he coughs, jamming his fist into his chest.
Sam’s happy the job went down so well. There was just one moment when he honestly feared for Dean’s life, and that’s better than average.
They tear across the desert for awhile. The wind takes up all the space between them, blows the lines of stress off Dean’s face, cleanses Sam of all wayward thoughts. It’s really a beautiful night.
Eventually, Dean turns down the tape a quarter turn, asks, “Food?”
Sam shrugs, which Dean knows means yes. Sam has turned down food in his lifetime, but only like twice.
They find a truck stop, a pool of sprawling white light in the darkness, and Dean asks Sam as he takes the jug-ear of the exit ramp like he’s on rails:
“Do you think they’ll put bourbon in my milkshake if I ask real nice?”
Sam’s clutching the door, fighting centrifugal force. “No.”
“Really?” Dean actually sounds surprised, kinda hurt.
“Buy some, spike your own damn drink.”
“Hello? Are there liquor stores open in Utah this late? Are there liquor stores in Utah at all?”
Sam blinks, staring out at the blank, ink-colored night. “We’re in Utah?”
“Hoo boy.” Dean’s wearing a huge grin. Sometimes he’s hard for Sam to look at directly. “Definitely don’t need to be getting you drunk, that’s for sure.”
Sam heaves a sigh, smiling a little bit. This is all as it should be. He closed his eyes for five minutes and now they’re in a different state. The Impala rumbles and flies, cracked speaker on Sam’s side bristling with comfortably dim static. He saved his brother’s life earlier tonight, killed something that had killed someone. He’s gonna get hashbrowns and probably pancakes that he’ll get sick of halfway through and Dean will have to finish for him. These are all normal things.
Sam is a rational guy, a fixer by nature, and he figured out early on that the way to survive this sort of rootless mercenary existence is to change his definition of normal. Count on different things, rougher shabbier things, but count on something. It works fairly well.
So they get some food. Dean is able to sweet-talk an Irish coffee out of Acacia the waitress who’s on her third straight shift. Saving money to visit her daughter in New York, she tells them, ever-tucking a stray piece of hair behind her ear with a pen only to have it fall back a few seconds later. Dean pays cash instead of one of the bogus cards, leaves the best tip of her week. His face is slightly flushed, half a buzz and kinda fucking glowing, and Sam can’t get enough of him like this.
Out in the parking lot, Dean shoves at him, hands momentarily hard against Sam’s ribs, asks, “I’m wired, Sammy, what’s next?”
“Next?” Sam echoes, starting to crash now that he’s been fed.
“We gotta pick a direction. Find a new case.”
“Should probably get some sleep first,” he says, yawning. Dean rolls his eyes.
“What’d I say? Wired. I wanna drive.”
Dean always wants to drive. Sam knows better than to get in his way. He sleeps better in the car, anyway, better when they’re in motion.
“East,” he proclaims, and a little smile quirks the corner of Dean’s mouth. Sam grins idiotically, a pavlovian response, and says the first stupid thing that comes into his head, because Dean has that effect on him sometimes. “See how fast you can get us to the other side of the country.”
Dean lights up then, bright as a city all alone in the middle of a desert, bright as the whole day, and Sam sticks around for stuff like this.
*
But three weeks later nothing’s right.
They chase down the sun until it comes rising out of the ocean, unreachable, and then they kick around the Mid-Atlantic for awhile. There’s a ghost drowning children in Delaware bathtubs and a black dog somewhere in Appalachia.
Dean almost gets eviscerated by the latter, three thread-thin red scratches etched on his stomach once the dirt and ink-colored blood are washed away. He looks cleanly surprised, shirtless in a gas station bathroom where they’re scrubbing the night off with coarse brown paper towels and hard water. Dean turns to Sam, his fingers flickering over the laddered claw marks, smiling crookedly and saying, “Look, Sam, motherfucker got this close.”
Sam doesn’t talk to him for four days, deeply shaken and so angry he can’t think straight.
Dean reacts characteristically and tries to annoy him out of it. He runs his mouth for hours at a time and steals so many of Sam’s fries that a fork through his hand is looking better and better. Sam wakes up to Dean caterwauling in the shower. He falls asleep to Dean’s comic snores, his false nightmares.
None of this helps. Sam gets bitter, worn down almost to nothing. All of this is Dean’s fault. They take to sparring more often, with less grace and more intent, and one night in late May they go too far and wind up beating the shit out of each other in a parking lot.
They’re somewhere in western Pennsylvania. They’re too irritated with each other to agree on their next move, and so they drift from bar to diner to motel to diner to bar, hidden behind sunglasses and sullenly sharing space. This particular night, Dean’s been drinking Wild Turkey since three in the afternoon, sniping at Sam’s contemptuous look, “Bottle’s better fuckin’ company than you are, dude.”
Sam catches up once the sun goes down, once they settle at a roadhouse with wagon-wheel tables and three hundred pound bartenders. Beers and shots arrive in his hand as if by conveyor belt. It’s been a long few days and he’s willing to surrender his control. He goes in headfirst, hearing a ghost-Dean in his head, if you’re gonna do something wrong, do it right.
But Dean’s advice has always been terrible and it’s because of him they end up like they do.
Walking back to the car, so drunk the streetlights shimmer and Sam can’t feel his face, Dean hooks his foot around Sam’s ankle like he’s done approximately seventeen thousand times since Sam learned to walk. Sam, always half on guard for it, is usually quick enough, awkward jump step with his hands thrust out to catch his balance, but he’s also not usually this drunk.
Sam trips full-out, doesn’t even get his hands up in time to break his fall. The wind’s knocked out of him and the skin’s flayed off his elbows and he scrambles to his feet even though he can’t breathe, he can’t see past the red. He punches Dean in the face as hard as he can.
Dean is wearing a smirk when Sam hits him, and he wants to disable the corner of Dean’s mouth, eradicate Dean’s terrible smirk for the rest of their lives. His brother’s face, always too neat and corroded at the edges, Sam wants to reconstruct it so that it means less to him, so that it won’t follow him into sleep and daydream anymore.
But even with blood dripping from his lip, his eyes huge and shocked and his hands balling into stones, even so Dean’s still sneering at Sam, spitting to the side and coming for him.
Sam’s not thinking. Too drunk, too late, too much wrapped up in feinting and ducking Dean’s first swing so it bounces harmlessly off Sam’s shoulder. Sam shows a sneer of his own and then Dean boxes his ear and stars explode. Sam goes stumbling to the side, clutching the side of his head and shouting curses, and somewhere in the staticky background he can hear Dean laughing at him.
So they fight for real. They fight like two guys who hate each other.
This is new.
*
Sam feels awful the next morning, worse than can be explained by his swollen-shut eye and debilitating hangover. He wakes up in the backseat of Dean’s car, his legs jackknifed against the door, sick grayish light filtered through the windows. Every part of him hurts.
He lies there staring upside-down at the trees, which loom over the car like sentinels. Blurry and one-eyed, everything looks sinister. A yellow bird wings from one branch to another, a little burst of color and movement that makes Sam feel even more nauseous. He knows he did something stupid last night; he’s trying to remember what.
All that liquor, his throat so slick and hot, and Sam is remembering things in bits and pieces, stray flip-book pages that don’t match up. The bartender’s tattoo, red-eyed snakes woven into a crucifix, and the sawdust on the floor that made Sam sneeze. The full bull’s-eye moon like a spotlight, long soft shadows in the parking lot when Sam was landing his fists on Dean’s body over and over again, the dig of gravel into his knees when Dean knocked him down.
Sam blinks fast a few times, his shiner throbbing, and a lone tear slips out of his good eye. He knuckles it away, disgusted with himself, angry at the world. He’d been furious with Dean, stupid thoughtless Dean who holds his safety so cheap, Dean who Sam has watched get millimeters from being killed a thousand times. Dean never takes care. He never thinks twice.
Sam has always sworn that he will not bear witness to Dean’s death. He won’t carry that frozen image in his mind for the rest of his life. It was one of the demands he required of himself when he took up hunting again. He’s got Dean’s back no matter what, and he’ll go wherever Dean needs him, but when the moment comes that Sam can’t reach him, when there’s no hope, he believes he’ll be able to shut his eyes.
This whole thing started because Sam can’t stand to see Dean hurt. But Sam’s the one who bloodied Dean’s lip last night, cracked an elbow into his throat, pounded his fists into Dean’s stomach. Sam’s the one this time.
Sam rolls his head to the side and it makes him moan, his half-curled hands sliding over his bruised ribs. From the driver’s seat, he hears a vinyl shift and a small groan and Sam breathes out. At least Dean’s still alive.
Long moments pass, heat pushing into the car as the sun rises above the trees. Sam has both hands over his heart, working on breathing.
A rusty cough from the front, and then Dean’s voice, withered and sere, quiet as a prayer, “Sam?”
Sam swallows painfully, presses his hands down hard. “Yeah.”
Dean sighs, sounding mostly asleep still, “y’okay?”
And Sam squeezes his eyes shut, welcoming the dull prodding pain, the fresh break in his heart, telling his brother, “Yeah Dean I’m fine.”
*
They catch wind of a haunted rollercoaster outside of Montgomery and set out, forging an uneasy truce with each other. Civil and polite as the bruises on their faces turn yellow at the edges, talking as rarely as possible and letting Megadeth and the Scorpions do the rest, Sam and Dean are two strangers sharing a car and the occasional side of onion rings.
They go through cycles, the two of them. Or maybe it’s just Sam, who sometimes can’t sleep for days on end, Sam who still experiences a claustrophobic panic every now and then, Sam who lives his whole life with one foot perpetually out the door. Sam is eroded by all these months on the road, and he imagines himself denuded like a tree after a storm, stripped bare and vulnerable.
Dean is the best person Sam’s ever known but Sam only believes that about a quarter of the time. Dean never changes and he always has something wiseass to say and he makes the days and jobs and towns melt together; he makes time pass like streetlights at seventy miles an hour. Sam looks up and another three months have passed, another twenty thousand miles further away from where he started, and he can’t stand Dean then.
It comes and goes. Sam has stopped bothering to trace it. There’s no pattern, no elusive clue that might solve the mystery of why Sam hasn’t left again.
The farther south they drive, the thicker the air, the more virulent the mosquitoes, and the cheaper the motels. They live out of vending machines and buy towels at Wal-Mart after Sam finds a sigil-like cluster of cigarette burns in the one folded on the rack. The television never works for long, and they occupy themselves chucking pennies at the cockroaches scurrying along the base of the wall.
Sam catches Dean sneaking looks at him, sees the way Dean jerks his eyes away as his throat ducks. Dean looks kinda pissed-off and like he’s fuckin’ well ready for things to stop being weird. Sam finds himself staring at the tense muscle in Dean’s jaw, the hard line of Dean’s mouth, and he makes himself look away.
The rollercoaster is in an abandoned amusement park, of all the recycled Scooby Doo plots for them to wander into, and it had a habit of gruesomely murdering a few riders a decade. Since the park went under (Sam’s a bit shocked it stayed open as long as it did, considering the fatality rate), the victims have been vagrants and local teenagers who snuck in after dark, found battered or dismembered, dead of shock among crushed beer cans and ancient carnival debris.
They stand at the open trunk, in the pure black of a rural night. The amusement park hulks against the sky, broken flags and skeletal rides rotting slowly. Dean loads the shotgun and hands Sam a pair of extra magazines that Sam puts in his pocket. Sam tucks a beat-up imitation black leather Bible into his belt, slings a vial of holy water around his neck.
“We don’t have enough gasoline,” Dean says quietly.
Sam starts, unused to Dean’s voice. “What?”
“We’re gonna have to burn the whole thing, right?”
“Well. Maybe. I was gonna try and exorcise it.”
Dean snorts. “Yeah, okay.”
Sam’s affronted. “What?”
“You’re better at people and animals. Fucker’s too big. It doesn’t have a soul except for the evil one. Nothing for you to save, and I know how you love that shit.”
Sam glares at him, pulls the Bible out of his belt and holds it up. “‘And these signs shall follow them that believe: In My name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues.’”
Dean rolls his eyes. “Whatever, dude. Quit trying to exorcise me.”
“You quit trying to burn down huge structures, pyro.”
Dean starts to say something, then stops, tips his head to the side and almost smiles at Sam. Something flickers in Sam’s stomach, small and hot as a candle flame.
Dean shakes his head, says, “Watch your hands,” before slamming the trunk shut. “Let’s go see and then argue some more.”
Sam stops himself from smiling. It’s fragile sometimes, you don’t want to push it. They head across the cracked asphalt, and Sam weaves his fingers to give Dean a leg up the fence, Dean’s boot familiarly heavy and thickly ridged, caked with mud that Sam bangs off his hands once they’re both safely on the far side.
The shadows are oddly shaped, black as tar. The midway is grown over with pale weeds that glow ice-gray in the moonlight, and there are tumbleweed bolls of cotton blowing and snagging. A stuffed animal massacre, Sam thinks, those giant grand prizes for the rigged games, hacked apart in a last-minute sacrifice kinda way.
He rubs his forehead, feeling strange. He follows Dean’s straight shoulders, the clean back of his neck. There’s a bad taste in the air, and Sam wonders if it’s just him.
The rollercoaster is packed in on itself, a rat’s warren of tracks contained in a rough oval. Its angles and depths come clear as Sam and Dean approach, and it looks like a maw, crowded with jagged teeth.
“Promising,” Dean mutters, obviously a little freaked out himself. Sam has a hand half-raised to clap Dean’s shoulder in freaked-out solidarity, but he hesitates at the last moment, pulls it back.
The path goes into the rollercoaster, under an archway and a steep curve of track, and there’s a fair-sized space inside, completely surrounded by the wicked dips and rises, the maze of planked gridwork supporting it. Sam stands as close to the middle as he can manage, caged and dwarfed and finding himself unable to stop checking on Dean every few seconds.
Dean is investigating the wide set of splintered steps leading to the embarkation point, and the passage looms hugely above him from where Sam’s standing, a black hole that has Dean mesmerized.
Sam calls his name, wincing at how his voice echoes. Dean turns and is back at Sam’s side almost immediately. He asks what’s the matter, alert with his gun out, pressed to his thigh. Sam can’t explain it, latches onto Dean’s shoulder and that kind of helps, but then his hand jumps to the side of Dean’s neck, his dirty fingers curling back on bare skin, and Dean sorta gasps. His eyes are ablaze all of a sudden, sea-colored and merciless; he could wreck ships looking like this.
“Stay here for a second,” Sam tells him. “Just while I do this. This is important.”
Dean nods minutely, shifting against Sam’s hand but for once keeping his mouth shut.
Sam sketches a protective symbol in the ash-like dust with the toe of his shoe, and takes the Bible out again. He starts speaking in Latin, timing it to the beat of Dean’s pulse, pounding into the palm of Sam’s hand.
The exorcism doesn’t work. The rollercoaster shivers, a cacophony of shrieking joints, and something in its recesses collapses. The oversized Christmas lights strung along the tracks and step railings glow faintly red despite no longer having a power source, and Sam’s head starts to ache magnificently, but that’s it.
Dean doesn’t even say I told you so, keeping too close to Sam but not really looking at him as they head for the exit. Sam can’t quantify the feeling in his stomach, the bizarre swooning thing happening in his chest. He’d really like to get out of this place; it’s fucking with him.
Dean says there’s no way to torch it without risking a forest fire, and then he says, “I think we’re gonna have to blow it up.”
They’re under the cramped archway, and Sam has just enough time to think that that’s an incredibly stupid thing for Dean to say right now. Then a piece of timber as thick as his chest comes swinging down from above, a massive fist hurtling at Dean’s head, and Sam can hear the howl of the ghosts in this machine, the decayed ravenous spirit of the demon within.
He throws himself at Dean, knocks him flat on the ground. The timber chips off Sam’s shoulder, ripping a flap in his shirt and propelling him to crash atop his brother. Pain fills his shoulder and makes it huge, a chunk of flesh torn out, a black-edged dent that Sam will have to carry with him forever.
Dean’s shouting beneath him, “Move, Sam, hurry,” and Sam’s clutching at his shoulder and moaning and half-crawling. His other hand is wound in Dean’s shirt and he’s trying to drag him, his ears ringing and whistling. They’re not getting anywhere. Dean wrestles out from under Sam and gets unsteadily to his feet, grabbing Sam’s arm and hauling him out of the archway.
They sprint for the fence, dust exploding under their boots, and Sam is staggering, trying to breathe against the pain in his shoulder. He looks back just once and he can see the lights flaring softly red once again, the rollercoaster malevolent and smug under the blanket of stars.
*
Dean tears through the black trees, asking Sam every few seconds if he’s okay. Sam keeps saying it’s not so bad, but he’s curled up over his knees and sweating and trembling and it’s clear that Dean doesn’t believe him.
It’s not his shoulder, which has by now dulled to a bone-jarring throb, nauseating but not fatal. There’s nothing missing, his pound of flesh not yet repaid, but the bruise will be the color of spoiled plums, and it’ll last for months. But Sam can live with that.
He doesn’t know why he’s reacting like this. It’s like he’s lost his tolerance for terror after a lifetime of it. All the stuff they’ve taken for granted, these gruesome vigils and near escapes, the crystalline underworld of violence within which they were bred if not born, maybe a person can only stand so much of it before their better senses start to give.
The car comes to a sudden stop, and Sam is reminded, not Dean. Dean has seen twice what Sam’s seen, but he’s still fundamentally Dean, changeless and unscarred in all the ways that matter.
Dean jams on the overhead and puts his hand on Sam’s curved back carefully. “C’mon, sit up, take your shirt off. Lemme see.”
Sam shakes his head, swiping his forehead across his knees. “I’m really fine, Dean.”
“Oh yeah and you totally look it. C’mon, up.”
He hooks his hand around the front of Sam’s good shoulder and levers him up, and Sam goes where Dean wants compliantly. His head has stopped hurting so bad and now it’s just a mess, weird strains of regret and longing amid slivers of anger, all underscored by a ragged tailspinning adrenaline crash.
Dean says, “hey,” and Sam looks up. Dean’s got lines across his forehead and he looks kinda really worried, and for some reason that sparks the anger in Sam, fast as gasoline on a grassfire.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” he demands, and shoves Dean away.
Dean looks at him in disbelief, his mouth hanging open. He’s got no idea why Sam’s mad and that makes it worse.
“That was the moment you chose to tell me your plan? While we were surrounded by the thing, I mean fucking pinned, Dean, where the fuck was your head?”
Dean closes his mouth and retreats a bit, his eyes shuttering and darting. His face colors and Sam isn’t drawn to the flush on Dean’s neck the way he normally is. The welter of emotions that he suffered like a tempest has consolidated into a heated ache in Sam’s stomach, a mass of smoldering rage and this strange something else.
“I, I fucked up,” Dean says, and that shuts Sam up as neatly as anything could. He’s trying to think, has he ever heard Dean say that?
Dean fists his hands on the steering wheel, and Sam thinks about how Dean takes a measure of tactile strength from his car, how he holds on to it when he’s unsure. Dean shakes his head, his mouth twisted. He looks faintly amazed.
“I don’t know, my head was all fucked up, you had my head all fucked up.”
Sam’s eyes go wide. “What? This is my fault now?”
“No, I, I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t know.” Dean scrubs his face with his hands. “Why the hell did you need me there during the exorcism?”
Sam can’t even remember. He just needed a hand on Dean like Dean sometimes needs a hand on the Impala. He makes something up.
“You’re grounding. For something as big as the ‘coaster, that much evil. You were the only thing within thirty feet that I knew for sure was good. It helps.”
Keeping his eyes trained forward, Dean nods, not letting his expression reveal a thing. “I figured something like that. I just. I didn’t know.”
He falls silent and Sam is getting more and more frustrated with him, unnerved by this spooky quiet version of his brother, Dean’s innate confidence flensed and underneath he’s just like any other poor slob second-guessing everything. Sam doesn’t even know this guy.
“Hey,” he says sharply, and Dean glances up shiftily. “That still doesn’t answer my question, because what the fuck does the exorcism have to do with anything?” Sam doesn’t wait for an answer, pressing on, “And anyway, it’s not just tonight, you do this shit all the time and I’m so sick of it you wouldn’t believe. It’s driving me crazy.”
Dean moves his shoulders kind of helplessly and says, “I never really know what I’m doing that pisses you off so much.”
Sam scoffs out a laugh. “You, are you kidding?”
“Not tonight, obviously tonight I was a fucking idiot,” and there’s some of Dean come back, a brief glint. “But usually I don’t have a clue. And you just fuckin’ brood and glare and it sucks.”
“As much as it sucks to watch your brother almost get gutted in front of you? Or his skull almost used as a baseball by a bat the size of a fucking tree trunk?”
Dean flicks his hands through his hair in exasperation. “It’s our job, Sam!”
“You’re gonna get yourself killed, that’s not the fucking job!”
“Of course it is!” Dean’s eyes are huge, and Sam has his thought about shipwrecks again, his haunting dream of storms. “I mean, hopefully not. We’re pretty good, we’ve come pretty far. But it’s a possibility, which, duh. Firefighters and cops get themselves killed too.”
Sam shakes his head because Dean’s missing the point, this isn’t normal hunting stuff, it wouldn’t scare Sam so badly if it were. “But you invite it, you do the stupidest stuff and you, you don’t even notice. You almost got torn open by that black dog and you didn’t even know.”
Lifting his eyebrows like, what the hell do you want from me, Dean says, sounding strained, “Yeah, I was busy keeping it away from you. So you could get the shot off.”
“You could have gotten the shot off.”
“But then I wouldn’t have been keeping it away from you.”
And Sam stops. He looks at Dean and Dean is looking back at him and the light is back in Dean’s eyes but he doesn’t look quite the same. Dean usually wears a smirk or a sneer or that perfect combination of the two, and on good days Sam can make him grin, but almost never is his face clear like this, solemn-eyed and impossible to tell if it’s a new mask or finally the real thing.
Really just impossible, Sam thinks, made dizzy by the way Dean looks right now. He tries to remember what he was going to say.
“Dean, you can’t. Um. You can’t take risks so I won’t have to. We’re. We’re in this together.”
Dean nods, but Sam knows he doesn’t mean it. He exhales, passing a hand over his eyes. “I’m serious. Because, like, you’re worried about me getting hurt, which is kind of insulting, but whatever, you don’t get it. The worst thing that could happen to me wouldn’t happen to me, it would happen to you.”
Dean doesn’t say anything, and when Sam looks back at him, Dean has the oddest expression on his face, kinda desperate and tortured but also like he might bust out laughing. The way he’s staring at Sam makes it impossible to look away.
So Sam sees it coming, he sees it all. Dean says, “Sam,” in a wrenched voice and leans across the space between them. One hand flat on Sam’s chest and then Dean presses his mouth to Sam’s and his hand closes into a fist.
Sam doesn’t even recognize it as a kiss at first. Dean’s mouth is warm and sweet against his for a split second, and Sam’s face immediately heats, his stomach clenching, but then Dean’s pulling back.
Pulling back with a cast of pure shock on his face, and Sam almost laughs because Dean looks so stupid, gaping with his pretty mouth open, his eyes enormous and bleeding light. It’s only a moment before Dean slams the door, forcibly blanking his expression and slapping at the roof until he hits the light and the car darkens.
“Sorry,” Dean says, sounding choked, and starts the engine.
Sam touches his mouth. Licks his lips and thinks maybe he can taste it still. “Dean-”
“Shut up, Sammy.”
The please is unspoken, but Sam hears it. Sam lets it go for now. It’s been an extremely trying night. Sam has some new stuff to figure out.
He watches Dean’s hands on the wheel, the way moonlight and shadow play across his knuckles, and Sam thinks for awhile about his brother.
*
Dean pulls up in front of the motel office and doesn’t make a move to turn off the car. The neon sign is missing a handful of letters, and Sam mouths the deformed words to himself. Dean clears his throat, says without looking at Sam:
“Why don’t you get a room.”
“Where are you gonna be?”
Dean still doesn’t look over, and it’s too dark to really read his face. He bows his head slightly, shrugging. “I’m gonna go for a drive.”
For some reason it sends a slither of cold fear through Sam. If he lets Dean drive away right now, he’ll never see him again. Sam doesn’t know how he knows this, but it’s locked in him like the properties of gravity, an inviolable truth.
“I don’t think so,” Sam says.
Glancing over, Dean’s eyebrows hunch down in a brief scowl before he cleans it off. “I just wanna think for awhile, okay? Figure out what to do with this ‘coaster motherfucker,” he says, and anyone other than Sam would think he sounded fine, normal.
Sam knows him better than that. Better than anything, really, and maybe Sam’s starting to think that that’s not a bad way to be. Dean is all of Sam’s landmarks, and Sam never gets lost. Dean would do anything to protect Sam, but Sam isn’t gonna let him.
“Hey, Dean,” Sam says, low-pitched and making Dean twitch, making Sam stare, wondering what else he might be able to make Dean do. “I’ve been thinking.”
Dean turns a look on Sam like highbeams, white-eyed and terrified and Sam doesn’t know what Dean’s expecting him to say. He doesn’t know what awful scenarios are unraveling in Dean’s mind, after however long Dean has held his breath for this, however much this means to him.
Sam calls up that single warm kiss, the fist Dean had closed over his heart, and it spreads through him better than liquor or morphine, maybe one of the best things. And it was a stupid thing to think: Sam means everything to Dean, and he always has, and they’ve both always known it.
“What?” Dean asks in a whisper. He looks doomed, utterly without hope.
Sam smiles. “That was a good idea you had.”
Dean shakes his head, teeth dug into his lip and his eyes flashing. “When? You hate my ideas.”
“Not all,” Sam tells him, and then pauses. “Come here.”
Immediately on his guard, Dean eyes him warily. “Why?”
“Dean, c’mere,” Sam says almost too soft to be heard.
Dean leans forward and then stops, blinking fast and looking helpless, dumbfounded. “What. What are you,” he starts to ask, but falters because Sam has put his hand on Dean’s cheek, and Dean swallows hard, finishes in a hoarse whisper, “What’re you doing to me, Sam?”
Sam kisses him in answer. Fits his mouth to Dean’s and presses in and lets Dean fist a hand in his hair, lets Dean lick his lips apart and suck on his tongue. Dean’s face is sandpaper-rough under Sam’s hand, and Sam slides his fingers under the collar of Dean’s shirt, smooth hollow of his collarbone and Sam is astounded.
It’s your brother, it’s Dean, he keeps hearing shouted in his head, but it doesn’t work as any kind of a deterrent. It’s his brother and he would do anything for his brother. It’s Dean and he can’t say no to Dean. Sam is stunned to find that he loves every part of this, the drag of Dean’s hands through his hair and the way he bites at Sam’s mouth, the incredulous sounds wrung from Dean in between blasphemy and his brother’s name, the clean feel of his skin under Sam’s fingers.
Dean’s glowing, alight and so hot it almost hurts to touch him. Sam is barely able to pull himself away, gasping, “Fuck.”
“No, no, get back here,” Dean orders, his eyes hazy and lust-drunk and his mouth swollen and Sam almost sways back in before getting his wits about him.
“Room, Dean, c’mon.”
“Right. Right. Smart.” Dean still looks kinda heartbroken when Sam gets out of the car, and he quickly scrambles out to follow, hurrying to Sam’s side. “Really smart, Sam.”
Sam grits his teeth, forcing himself back under control. He feels like the top of his head has come off. His eyes skitter over Dean and stick on the sleek line of his neck, the frayed tears across the back pockets of his jeans, his quick fingers with that cold ring that Sam can already almost feel.
He’s staring and he doesn’t even know where they are or what he’s doing. He grabs Dean and pulls him into the little alley between the office and the start of the block of rooms. Sam’s head is full of arched pictures, his brother on white sheets, Dean’s red mouth and clever hands, and he can’t shake any of it.
“Yeah,” Dean says, grinning huge as Sam pushes him against the wall, but Sam leans back when Dean leans forward.
“Dean, did you know?”
“Yes, yeah, I knew. What are you talking about?”
Sam waves between the two of them, feeling out of control. He wants to touch Dean so badly his palms ache. “I, like this, did you know it’d be like this?”
Dean shakes his head, jittering and tugging at Sam’s belt. He keeps licking his lips, staring at Sam’s mouth. “Like what, what’re you talking about. C’mon, gimme a kiss.”
Sam does, because it proves his point and also because it might be the only thing he wants to do for the rest of his life. He presses flush up against Dean and tucks his thumbs under Dean’s jaw, lifting his face and kissing him for the longest time. Sam is half scared to death, because he doesn’t want to ever stop.
When he pulls away, they’re both panting.
“Like that,” Sam manages. “I never even-I didn’t know. And now it’s like, fuck. I never-”
Dean cuts him off, pulling Sam’s head back and licking up Sam’s neck. Sam clutches at him, moaning low in the back of his throat, unable to believe how fast this has overtaken him.
“Quit thinking so much, Sammy,” Dean mumbles, nosing against Sam’s jaw. “It’s just you and me. This is what it’s like.”
*
The next morning, Sam and Dean wake up under the same sheet, and Sam only panics briefly, just a minute or two before Dean mutters at his pillow and slings an arm across Sam’s stomach. Sam holds perfectly still, learning how to breathe against the weight of it, watching Dean’s eyelashes flicker, his mouth moving soft and muted.
Nothing has changed in the night and Dean’s skin against his own still makes Sam lightheaded. It wasn’t a fever or a fugue or a psychotic episode; in the full light of day Sam is still struck dumb by Dean.
Dean wakes already pulling Sam closer, scuffing his cheek on Sam’s shoulder. He mumbles, “Sam?” and Sam pushes a hand through Dean’s hair so it spikes up between his fingers.
“Right here, Dean,” Sam says, and Dean smiles without opening his eyes.
They actually get out of bed about an hour later. Sam can’t stop grinning and neither can Dean and anytime they meet each other’s eyes it only gets worse. Dean wears a perpetual blush and Sam keeps wondering how far down it goes, if the taste of overheated skin is any different.
They go to the store to pick up the ingredients for the homemade pipe bombs that Dean has determined are their best method of attack. Sam’s having trouble paying attention to the job or the shopping list, more concerned with finding excuses to touch Dean. Dean shoots him foreign smiles, shy like Dean never is, confused like he still doesn’t have a clue why Sam took him up on it.
Sam can’t explain it either, but he’s less inclined to care. Wherever this came from, it’s here now. It makes Dean so happy. Sam is already having trouble imagining a different life.
They go back to the motel and make the bombs and then fuck around until dark. Sam pins Dean’s hands above his head at one point and Dean loses it, gnashing and begging and hotter than anything Sam’s ever seen. They’re in the shower until Dean is short of breath from the steam and his wrinkled fingers are as white as snow pulling through Sam’s soaked-black hair. Sam says Dean’s name so many times it starts to lose all meaning.
Sam asks Dean, “How long?” and Dean shrugs, says, “I dunno, a really long time.” Sam doesn’t know why, but he really likes hearing that.
Back out at the rollercoaster, they’re more careful. Working out the plan in advance, they’re Indian-quiet once they’re over the fence. Sam finds himself even more aware of Dean now, trailing him and never losing sight, the same tight feeling in his heart, but it’s less fear now, more obscure.
Dean picked out the load-bearing sections of the ‘coaster the night before, and they circumnavigate the beast, tossing the glow-painted pipe bombs under the braces where they glimmer like lost moons. Without going through the archway into the belly of the thing, the bad vibes don’t do as much damage to Sam and he’s able to keep his head.
They get all the bombs placed without being attacked by a single stray board, and Sam theorizes out loud that the ‘coaster only actually has power over those inside it. Dean thinks that sounds right, but isn’t very interested, what with the explosions to look forward to.
They retreat to the midway booths, ducking behind a splintered wooden counter and crouching there as Dean unslings the rifle from his back. He sights over the counter at the alien gobs of light just visible under the dense shadows of the ‘coaster.
Sam slides his hand up Dean’s back, stopping when his four fingers are lined up just under Dean’s hairline, and Dean lets out a careful breath.
“Oh Sam,” he says in the quietest possible voice, and pulls the trigger. The first bomb immolates, an instant supernova that forces them into squints.
The rollercoaster shrieks, all the lights incarnadine, and shapes struggle in the black smoke, fighting for the sky.
“You,” Dean says, and shoots two bombs placed next to each other in quick succession, a double wallop of heat blowing their hair back. “You’ll never know.”
Parts of the rollercoaster begin to collapse like a house built of burnt matchsticks. Demon faces swirl, long tongues of flame, a thousand bloody eyes, black-smoke soul and Sam watches them fly with his heart in his throat.
“What?” he asks, low and right in Dean’s ear. Dean shivers and takes a moment to re-aim.
“There’s nothing,” Dean starts to tell him, and then cracks another shot, misses. “Shit. Hold still.” He doesn’t shrug Sam off his back. It doesn’t even seem to occur to him.
Another shot and this one hits, a new flower of orange and yellow, another dying sun. Dean grins. The ‘coaster is crumbling, the flames smothered as the huge hills collapse. It’s getting harder to pick out the bombs in the wreckage.
Sam’s throat is rough from the smoke, eyes tearing and his constant smile tasting faintly of soot, and he rests his head on Dean’s shoulder, still deeply moved by this whole thing.
“Nothing better than this,” Dean finishes at last, and Sam can hear the joy in his voice and see the fire dancing in his eyes. “Never has been. Today is the best day.”
Sam smiles, pushing his fingers under Dean’s collar and never doubting him for a second.
THE END
Endnotes: Sam quotes Mark 16:17.
The inspiration for the rollercoaster was the Grizzly ‘coaster at Paramount’s Great America, down in Santa Clara. Enjoy some pics. It is a classic of my childhood, and I didn’t know until I read on the Wik that it has scored as the Worst Rollercoaster in America for three years running. Obviously ripe for demonic possession.
Also, I wrote the first half of it over like a week and the second half in one night, which was whoa. Weird.
Also, my painful inability to come up with decent story titles is on full display, and this one is all Buddy Holly.
Every day, it’s getting closer
Going faster than a rollercoaster
A love like yours will surely come my way.
Come My Way
By Candle Beck
It’s a routine job, and it doesn’t take much out of them.
Dean is burning, jittering as they drive away from the graveyard, putting the town to their heels. The black dirt grimed on his hands leaves marks like scorches on everything he touches: the wheel and the gearshift, the volume knob, Sam’s shirt when Dean grabs his shoulder. He’s talking non-stop, like the price of words is going through the roof tomorrow.
Sam likes adrenaline as much as the next man. His skin is crawling, thin sheen of panic sweat cooling and tightening. A taste like old pennies on his tongue and his eyes are bright red from the smoke, throat scoured raw from screaming at Dean to get down.
Mostly routine, anyway.
Miles from anywhere, Dean opens it up and instructs Sam to roll down his window. Sam obliges, and the world explodes in, whirling and tossing up crushed coffee cups and candy bar wrappers like a poltergeist. Dean whoops, wolf-howls out his own window. Sam laughs but it’s weak because he got an especially acrid lungful of smoke not too long ago, and he coughs, jamming his fist into his chest.
Sam’s happy the job went down so well. There was just one moment when he honestly feared for Dean’s life, and that’s better than average.
They tear across the desert for awhile. The wind takes up all the space between them, blows the lines of stress off Dean’s face, cleanses Sam of all wayward thoughts. It’s really a beautiful night.
Eventually, Dean turns down the tape a quarter turn, asks, “Food?”
Sam shrugs, which Dean knows means yes. Sam has turned down food in his lifetime, but only like twice.
They find a truck stop, a pool of sprawling white light in the darkness, and Dean asks Sam as he takes the jug-ear of the exit ramp like he’s on rails:
“Do you think they’ll put bourbon in my milkshake if I ask real nice?”
Sam’s clutching the door, fighting centrifugal force. “No.”
“Really?” Dean actually sounds surprised, kinda hurt.
“Buy some, spike your own damn drink.”
“Hello? Are there liquor stores open in Utah this late? Are there liquor stores in Utah at all?”
Sam blinks, staring out at the blank, ink-colored night. “We’re in Utah?”
“Hoo boy.” Dean’s wearing a huge grin. Sometimes he’s hard for Sam to look at directly. “Definitely don’t need to be getting you drunk, that’s for sure.”
Sam heaves a sigh, smiling a little bit. This is all as it should be. He closed his eyes for five minutes and now they’re in a different state. The Impala rumbles and flies, cracked speaker on Sam’s side bristling with comfortably dim static. He saved his brother’s life earlier tonight, killed something that had killed someone. He’s gonna get hashbrowns and probably pancakes that he’ll get sick of halfway through and Dean will have to finish for him. These are all normal things.
Sam is a rational guy, a fixer by nature, and he figured out early on that the way to survive this sort of rootless mercenary existence is to change his definition of normal. Count on different things, rougher shabbier things, but count on something. It works fairly well.
So they get some food. Dean is able to sweet-talk an Irish coffee out of Acacia the waitress who’s on her third straight shift. Saving money to visit her daughter in New York, she tells them, ever-tucking a stray piece of hair behind her ear with a pen only to have it fall back a few seconds later. Dean pays cash instead of one of the bogus cards, leaves the best tip of her week. His face is slightly flushed, half a buzz and kinda fucking glowing, and Sam can’t get enough of him like this.
Out in the parking lot, Dean shoves at him, hands momentarily hard against Sam’s ribs, asks, “I’m wired, Sammy, what’s next?”
“Next?” Sam echoes, starting to crash now that he’s been fed.
“We gotta pick a direction. Find a new case.”
“Should probably get some sleep first,” he says, yawning. Dean rolls his eyes.
“What’d I say? Wired. I wanna drive.”
Dean always wants to drive. Sam knows better than to get in his way. He sleeps better in the car, anyway, better when they’re in motion.
“East,” he proclaims, and a little smile quirks the corner of Dean’s mouth. Sam grins idiotically, a pavlovian response, and says the first stupid thing that comes into his head, because Dean has that effect on him sometimes. “See how fast you can get us to the other side of the country.”
Dean lights up then, bright as a city all alone in the middle of a desert, bright as the whole day, and Sam sticks around for stuff like this.
*
But three weeks later nothing’s right.
They chase down the sun until it comes rising out of the ocean, unreachable, and then they kick around the Mid-Atlantic for awhile. There’s a ghost drowning children in Delaware bathtubs and a black dog somewhere in Appalachia.
Dean almost gets eviscerated by the latter, three thread-thin red scratches etched on his stomach once the dirt and ink-colored blood are washed away. He looks cleanly surprised, shirtless in a gas station bathroom where they’re scrubbing the night off with coarse brown paper towels and hard water. Dean turns to Sam, his fingers flickering over the laddered claw marks, smiling crookedly and saying, “Look, Sam, motherfucker got this close.”
Sam doesn’t talk to him for four days, deeply shaken and so angry he can’t think straight.
Dean reacts characteristically and tries to annoy him out of it. He runs his mouth for hours at a time and steals so many of Sam’s fries that a fork through his hand is looking better and better. Sam wakes up to Dean caterwauling in the shower. He falls asleep to Dean’s comic snores, his false nightmares.
None of this helps. Sam gets bitter, worn down almost to nothing. All of this is Dean’s fault. They take to sparring more often, with less grace and more intent, and one night in late May they go too far and wind up beating the shit out of each other in a parking lot.
They’re somewhere in western Pennsylvania. They’re too irritated with each other to agree on their next move, and so they drift from bar to diner to motel to diner to bar, hidden behind sunglasses and sullenly sharing space. This particular night, Dean’s been drinking Wild Turkey since three in the afternoon, sniping at Sam’s contemptuous look, “Bottle’s better fuckin’ company than you are, dude.”
Sam catches up once the sun goes down, once they settle at a roadhouse with wagon-wheel tables and three hundred pound bartenders. Beers and shots arrive in his hand as if by conveyor belt. It’s been a long few days and he’s willing to surrender his control. He goes in headfirst, hearing a ghost-Dean in his head, if you’re gonna do something wrong, do it right.
But Dean’s advice has always been terrible and it’s because of him they end up like they do.
Walking back to the car, so drunk the streetlights shimmer and Sam can’t feel his face, Dean hooks his foot around Sam’s ankle like he’s done approximately seventeen thousand times since Sam learned to walk. Sam, always half on guard for it, is usually quick enough, awkward jump step with his hands thrust out to catch his balance, but he’s also not usually this drunk.
Sam trips full-out, doesn’t even get his hands up in time to break his fall. The wind’s knocked out of him and the skin’s flayed off his elbows and he scrambles to his feet even though he can’t breathe, he can’t see past the red. He punches Dean in the face as hard as he can.
Dean is wearing a smirk when Sam hits him, and he wants to disable the corner of Dean’s mouth, eradicate Dean’s terrible smirk for the rest of their lives. His brother’s face, always too neat and corroded at the edges, Sam wants to reconstruct it so that it means less to him, so that it won’t follow him into sleep and daydream anymore.
But even with blood dripping from his lip, his eyes huge and shocked and his hands balling into stones, even so Dean’s still sneering at Sam, spitting to the side and coming for him.
Sam’s not thinking. Too drunk, too late, too much wrapped up in feinting and ducking Dean’s first swing so it bounces harmlessly off Sam’s shoulder. Sam shows a sneer of his own and then Dean boxes his ear and stars explode. Sam goes stumbling to the side, clutching the side of his head and shouting curses, and somewhere in the staticky background he can hear Dean laughing at him.
So they fight for real. They fight like two guys who hate each other.
This is new.
*
Sam feels awful the next morning, worse than can be explained by his swollen-shut eye and debilitating hangover. He wakes up in the backseat of Dean’s car, his legs jackknifed against the door, sick grayish light filtered through the windows. Every part of him hurts.
He lies there staring upside-down at the trees, which loom over the car like sentinels. Blurry and one-eyed, everything looks sinister. A yellow bird wings from one branch to another, a little burst of color and movement that makes Sam feel even more nauseous. He knows he did something stupid last night; he’s trying to remember what.
All that liquor, his throat so slick and hot, and Sam is remembering things in bits and pieces, stray flip-book pages that don’t match up. The bartender’s tattoo, red-eyed snakes woven into a crucifix, and the sawdust on the floor that made Sam sneeze. The full bull’s-eye moon like a spotlight, long soft shadows in the parking lot when Sam was landing his fists on Dean’s body over and over again, the dig of gravel into his knees when Dean knocked him down.
Sam blinks fast a few times, his shiner throbbing, and a lone tear slips out of his good eye. He knuckles it away, disgusted with himself, angry at the world. He’d been furious with Dean, stupid thoughtless Dean who holds his safety so cheap, Dean who Sam has watched get millimeters from being killed a thousand times. Dean never takes care. He never thinks twice.
Sam has always sworn that he will not bear witness to Dean’s death. He won’t carry that frozen image in his mind for the rest of his life. It was one of the demands he required of himself when he took up hunting again. He’s got Dean’s back no matter what, and he’ll go wherever Dean needs him, but when the moment comes that Sam can’t reach him, when there’s no hope, he believes he’ll be able to shut his eyes.
This whole thing started because Sam can’t stand to see Dean hurt. But Sam’s the one who bloodied Dean’s lip last night, cracked an elbow into his throat, pounded his fists into Dean’s stomach. Sam’s the one this time.
Sam rolls his head to the side and it makes him moan, his half-curled hands sliding over his bruised ribs. From the driver’s seat, he hears a vinyl shift and a small groan and Sam breathes out. At least Dean’s still alive.
Long moments pass, heat pushing into the car as the sun rises above the trees. Sam has both hands over his heart, working on breathing.
A rusty cough from the front, and then Dean’s voice, withered and sere, quiet as a prayer, “Sam?”
Sam swallows painfully, presses his hands down hard. “Yeah.”
Dean sighs, sounding mostly asleep still, “y’okay?”
And Sam squeezes his eyes shut, welcoming the dull prodding pain, the fresh break in his heart, telling his brother, “Yeah Dean I’m fine.”
*
They catch wind of a haunted rollercoaster outside of Montgomery and set out, forging an uneasy truce with each other. Civil and polite as the bruises on their faces turn yellow at the edges, talking as rarely as possible and letting Megadeth and the Scorpions do the rest, Sam and Dean are two strangers sharing a car and the occasional side of onion rings.
They go through cycles, the two of them. Or maybe it’s just Sam, who sometimes can’t sleep for days on end, Sam who still experiences a claustrophobic panic every now and then, Sam who lives his whole life with one foot perpetually out the door. Sam is eroded by all these months on the road, and he imagines himself denuded like a tree after a storm, stripped bare and vulnerable.
Dean is the best person Sam’s ever known but Sam only believes that about a quarter of the time. Dean never changes and he always has something wiseass to say and he makes the days and jobs and towns melt together; he makes time pass like streetlights at seventy miles an hour. Sam looks up and another three months have passed, another twenty thousand miles further away from where he started, and he can’t stand Dean then.
It comes and goes. Sam has stopped bothering to trace it. There’s no pattern, no elusive clue that might solve the mystery of why Sam hasn’t left again.
The farther south they drive, the thicker the air, the more virulent the mosquitoes, and the cheaper the motels. They live out of vending machines and buy towels at Wal-Mart after Sam finds a sigil-like cluster of cigarette burns in the one folded on the rack. The television never works for long, and they occupy themselves chucking pennies at the cockroaches scurrying along the base of the wall.
Sam catches Dean sneaking looks at him, sees the way Dean jerks his eyes away as his throat ducks. Dean looks kinda pissed-off and like he’s fuckin’ well ready for things to stop being weird. Sam finds himself staring at the tense muscle in Dean’s jaw, the hard line of Dean’s mouth, and he makes himself look away.
The rollercoaster is in an abandoned amusement park, of all the recycled Scooby Doo plots for them to wander into, and it had a habit of gruesomely murdering a few riders a decade. Since the park went under (Sam’s a bit shocked it stayed open as long as it did, considering the fatality rate), the victims have been vagrants and local teenagers who snuck in after dark, found battered or dismembered, dead of shock among crushed beer cans and ancient carnival debris.
They stand at the open trunk, in the pure black of a rural night. The amusement park hulks against the sky, broken flags and skeletal rides rotting slowly. Dean loads the shotgun and hands Sam a pair of extra magazines that Sam puts in his pocket. Sam tucks a beat-up imitation black leather Bible into his belt, slings a vial of holy water around his neck.
“We don’t have enough gasoline,” Dean says quietly.
Sam starts, unused to Dean’s voice. “What?”
“We’re gonna have to burn the whole thing, right?”
“Well. Maybe. I was gonna try and exorcise it.”
Dean snorts. “Yeah, okay.”
Sam’s affronted. “What?”
“You’re better at people and animals. Fucker’s too big. It doesn’t have a soul except for the evil one. Nothing for you to save, and I know how you love that shit.”
Sam glares at him, pulls the Bible out of his belt and holds it up. “‘And these signs shall follow them that believe: In My name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues.’”
Dean rolls his eyes. “Whatever, dude. Quit trying to exorcise me.”
“You quit trying to burn down huge structures, pyro.”
Dean starts to say something, then stops, tips his head to the side and almost smiles at Sam. Something flickers in Sam’s stomach, small and hot as a candle flame.
Dean shakes his head, says, “Watch your hands,” before slamming the trunk shut. “Let’s go see and then argue some more.”
Sam stops himself from smiling. It’s fragile sometimes, you don’t want to push it. They head across the cracked asphalt, and Sam weaves his fingers to give Dean a leg up the fence, Dean’s boot familiarly heavy and thickly ridged, caked with mud that Sam bangs off his hands once they’re both safely on the far side.
The shadows are oddly shaped, black as tar. The midway is grown over with pale weeds that glow ice-gray in the moonlight, and there are tumbleweed bolls of cotton blowing and snagging. A stuffed animal massacre, Sam thinks, those giant grand prizes for the rigged games, hacked apart in a last-minute sacrifice kinda way.
He rubs his forehead, feeling strange. He follows Dean’s straight shoulders, the clean back of his neck. There’s a bad taste in the air, and Sam wonders if it’s just him.
The rollercoaster is packed in on itself, a rat’s warren of tracks contained in a rough oval. Its angles and depths come clear as Sam and Dean approach, and it looks like a maw, crowded with jagged teeth.
“Promising,” Dean mutters, obviously a little freaked out himself. Sam has a hand half-raised to clap Dean’s shoulder in freaked-out solidarity, but he hesitates at the last moment, pulls it back.
The path goes into the rollercoaster, under an archway and a steep curve of track, and there’s a fair-sized space inside, completely surrounded by the wicked dips and rises, the maze of planked gridwork supporting it. Sam stands as close to the middle as he can manage, caged and dwarfed and finding himself unable to stop checking on Dean every few seconds.
Dean is investigating the wide set of splintered steps leading to the embarkation point, and the passage looms hugely above him from where Sam’s standing, a black hole that has Dean mesmerized.
Sam calls his name, wincing at how his voice echoes. Dean turns and is back at Sam’s side almost immediately. He asks what’s the matter, alert with his gun out, pressed to his thigh. Sam can’t explain it, latches onto Dean’s shoulder and that kind of helps, but then his hand jumps to the side of Dean’s neck, his dirty fingers curling back on bare skin, and Dean sorta gasps. His eyes are ablaze all of a sudden, sea-colored and merciless; he could wreck ships looking like this.
“Stay here for a second,” Sam tells him. “Just while I do this. This is important.”
Dean nods minutely, shifting against Sam’s hand but for once keeping his mouth shut.
Sam sketches a protective symbol in the ash-like dust with the toe of his shoe, and takes the Bible out again. He starts speaking in Latin, timing it to the beat of Dean’s pulse, pounding into the palm of Sam’s hand.
The exorcism doesn’t work. The rollercoaster shivers, a cacophony of shrieking joints, and something in its recesses collapses. The oversized Christmas lights strung along the tracks and step railings glow faintly red despite no longer having a power source, and Sam’s head starts to ache magnificently, but that’s it.
Dean doesn’t even say I told you so, keeping too close to Sam but not really looking at him as they head for the exit. Sam can’t quantify the feeling in his stomach, the bizarre swooning thing happening in his chest. He’d really like to get out of this place; it’s fucking with him.
Dean says there’s no way to torch it without risking a forest fire, and then he says, “I think we’re gonna have to blow it up.”
They’re under the cramped archway, and Sam has just enough time to think that that’s an incredibly stupid thing for Dean to say right now. Then a piece of timber as thick as his chest comes swinging down from above, a massive fist hurtling at Dean’s head, and Sam can hear the howl of the ghosts in this machine, the decayed ravenous spirit of the demon within.
He throws himself at Dean, knocks him flat on the ground. The timber chips off Sam’s shoulder, ripping a flap in his shirt and propelling him to crash atop his brother. Pain fills his shoulder and makes it huge, a chunk of flesh torn out, a black-edged dent that Sam will have to carry with him forever.
Dean’s shouting beneath him, “Move, Sam, hurry,” and Sam’s clutching at his shoulder and moaning and half-crawling. His other hand is wound in Dean’s shirt and he’s trying to drag him, his ears ringing and whistling. They’re not getting anywhere. Dean wrestles out from under Sam and gets unsteadily to his feet, grabbing Sam’s arm and hauling him out of the archway.
They sprint for the fence, dust exploding under their boots, and Sam is staggering, trying to breathe against the pain in his shoulder. He looks back just once and he can see the lights flaring softly red once again, the rollercoaster malevolent and smug under the blanket of stars.
*
Dean tears through the black trees, asking Sam every few seconds if he’s okay. Sam keeps saying it’s not so bad, but he’s curled up over his knees and sweating and trembling and it’s clear that Dean doesn’t believe him.
It’s not his shoulder, which has by now dulled to a bone-jarring throb, nauseating but not fatal. There’s nothing missing, his pound of flesh not yet repaid, but the bruise will be the color of spoiled plums, and it’ll last for months. But Sam can live with that.
He doesn’t know why he’s reacting like this. It’s like he’s lost his tolerance for terror after a lifetime of it. All the stuff they’ve taken for granted, these gruesome vigils and near escapes, the crystalline underworld of violence within which they were bred if not born, maybe a person can only stand so much of it before their better senses start to give.
The car comes to a sudden stop, and Sam is reminded, not Dean. Dean has seen twice what Sam’s seen, but he’s still fundamentally Dean, changeless and unscarred in all the ways that matter.
Dean jams on the overhead and puts his hand on Sam’s curved back carefully. “C’mon, sit up, take your shirt off. Lemme see.”
Sam shakes his head, swiping his forehead across his knees. “I’m really fine, Dean.”
“Oh yeah and you totally look it. C’mon, up.”
He hooks his hand around the front of Sam’s good shoulder and levers him up, and Sam goes where Dean wants compliantly. His head has stopped hurting so bad and now it’s just a mess, weird strains of regret and longing amid slivers of anger, all underscored by a ragged tailspinning adrenaline crash.
Dean says, “hey,” and Sam looks up. Dean’s got lines across his forehead and he looks kinda really worried, and for some reason that sparks the anger in Sam, fast as gasoline on a grassfire.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” he demands, and shoves Dean away.
Dean looks at him in disbelief, his mouth hanging open. He’s got no idea why Sam’s mad and that makes it worse.
“That was the moment you chose to tell me your plan? While we were surrounded by the thing, I mean fucking pinned, Dean, where the fuck was your head?”
Dean closes his mouth and retreats a bit, his eyes shuttering and darting. His face colors and Sam isn’t drawn to the flush on Dean’s neck the way he normally is. The welter of emotions that he suffered like a tempest has consolidated into a heated ache in Sam’s stomach, a mass of smoldering rage and this strange something else.
“I, I fucked up,” Dean says, and that shuts Sam up as neatly as anything could. He’s trying to think, has he ever heard Dean say that?
Dean fists his hands on the steering wheel, and Sam thinks about how Dean takes a measure of tactile strength from his car, how he holds on to it when he’s unsure. Dean shakes his head, his mouth twisted. He looks faintly amazed.
“I don’t know, my head was all fucked up, you had my head all fucked up.”
Sam’s eyes go wide. “What? This is my fault now?”
“No, I, I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t know.” Dean scrubs his face with his hands. “Why the hell did you need me there during the exorcism?”
Sam can’t even remember. He just needed a hand on Dean like Dean sometimes needs a hand on the Impala. He makes something up.
“You’re grounding. For something as big as the ‘coaster, that much evil. You were the only thing within thirty feet that I knew for sure was good. It helps.”
Keeping his eyes trained forward, Dean nods, not letting his expression reveal a thing. “I figured something like that. I just. I didn’t know.”
He falls silent and Sam is getting more and more frustrated with him, unnerved by this spooky quiet version of his brother, Dean’s innate confidence flensed and underneath he’s just like any other poor slob second-guessing everything. Sam doesn’t even know this guy.
“Hey,” he says sharply, and Dean glances up shiftily. “That still doesn’t answer my question, because what the fuck does the exorcism have to do with anything?” Sam doesn’t wait for an answer, pressing on, “And anyway, it’s not just tonight, you do this shit all the time and I’m so sick of it you wouldn’t believe. It’s driving me crazy.”
Dean moves his shoulders kind of helplessly and says, “I never really know what I’m doing that pisses you off so much.”
Sam scoffs out a laugh. “You, are you kidding?”
“Not tonight, obviously tonight I was a fucking idiot,” and there’s some of Dean come back, a brief glint. “But usually I don’t have a clue. And you just fuckin’ brood and glare and it sucks.”
“As much as it sucks to watch your brother almost get gutted in front of you? Or his skull almost used as a baseball by a bat the size of a fucking tree trunk?”
Dean flicks his hands through his hair in exasperation. “It’s our job, Sam!”
“You’re gonna get yourself killed, that’s not the fucking job!”
“Of course it is!” Dean’s eyes are huge, and Sam has his thought about shipwrecks again, his haunting dream of storms. “I mean, hopefully not. We’re pretty good, we’ve come pretty far. But it’s a possibility, which, duh. Firefighters and cops get themselves killed too.”
Sam shakes his head because Dean’s missing the point, this isn’t normal hunting stuff, it wouldn’t scare Sam so badly if it were. “But you invite it, you do the stupidest stuff and you, you don’t even notice. You almost got torn open by that black dog and you didn’t even know.”
Lifting his eyebrows like, what the hell do you want from me, Dean says, sounding strained, “Yeah, I was busy keeping it away from you. So you could get the shot off.”
“You could have gotten the shot off.”
“But then I wouldn’t have been keeping it away from you.”
And Sam stops. He looks at Dean and Dean is looking back at him and the light is back in Dean’s eyes but he doesn’t look quite the same. Dean usually wears a smirk or a sneer or that perfect combination of the two, and on good days Sam can make him grin, but almost never is his face clear like this, solemn-eyed and impossible to tell if it’s a new mask or finally the real thing.
Really just impossible, Sam thinks, made dizzy by the way Dean looks right now. He tries to remember what he was going to say.
“Dean, you can’t. Um. You can’t take risks so I won’t have to. We’re. We’re in this together.”
Dean nods, but Sam knows he doesn’t mean it. He exhales, passing a hand over his eyes. “I’m serious. Because, like, you’re worried about me getting hurt, which is kind of insulting, but whatever, you don’t get it. The worst thing that could happen to me wouldn’t happen to me, it would happen to you.”
Dean doesn’t say anything, and when Sam looks back at him, Dean has the oddest expression on his face, kinda desperate and tortured but also like he might bust out laughing. The way he’s staring at Sam makes it impossible to look away.
So Sam sees it coming, he sees it all. Dean says, “Sam,” in a wrenched voice and leans across the space between them. One hand flat on Sam’s chest and then Dean presses his mouth to Sam’s and his hand closes into a fist.
Sam doesn’t even recognize it as a kiss at first. Dean’s mouth is warm and sweet against his for a split second, and Sam’s face immediately heats, his stomach clenching, but then Dean’s pulling back.
Pulling back with a cast of pure shock on his face, and Sam almost laughs because Dean looks so stupid, gaping with his pretty mouth open, his eyes enormous and bleeding light. It’s only a moment before Dean slams the door, forcibly blanking his expression and slapping at the roof until he hits the light and the car darkens.
“Sorry,” Dean says, sounding choked, and starts the engine.
Sam touches his mouth. Licks his lips and thinks maybe he can taste it still. “Dean-”
“Shut up, Sammy.”
The please is unspoken, but Sam hears it. Sam lets it go for now. It’s been an extremely trying night. Sam has some new stuff to figure out.
He watches Dean’s hands on the wheel, the way moonlight and shadow play across his knuckles, and Sam thinks for awhile about his brother.
*
Dean pulls up in front of the motel office and doesn’t make a move to turn off the car. The neon sign is missing a handful of letters, and Sam mouths the deformed words to himself. Dean clears his throat, says without looking at Sam:
“Why don’t you get a room.”
“Where are you gonna be?”
Dean still doesn’t look over, and it’s too dark to really read his face. He bows his head slightly, shrugging. “I’m gonna go for a drive.”
For some reason it sends a slither of cold fear through Sam. If he lets Dean drive away right now, he’ll never see him again. Sam doesn’t know how he knows this, but it’s locked in him like the properties of gravity, an inviolable truth.
“I don’t think so,” Sam says.
Glancing over, Dean’s eyebrows hunch down in a brief scowl before he cleans it off. “I just wanna think for awhile, okay? Figure out what to do with this ‘coaster motherfucker,” he says, and anyone other than Sam would think he sounded fine, normal.
Sam knows him better than that. Better than anything, really, and maybe Sam’s starting to think that that’s not a bad way to be. Dean is all of Sam’s landmarks, and Sam never gets lost. Dean would do anything to protect Sam, but Sam isn’t gonna let him.
“Hey, Dean,” Sam says, low-pitched and making Dean twitch, making Sam stare, wondering what else he might be able to make Dean do. “I’ve been thinking.”
Dean turns a look on Sam like highbeams, white-eyed and terrified and Sam doesn’t know what Dean’s expecting him to say. He doesn’t know what awful scenarios are unraveling in Dean’s mind, after however long Dean has held his breath for this, however much this means to him.
Sam calls up that single warm kiss, the fist Dean had closed over his heart, and it spreads through him better than liquor or morphine, maybe one of the best things. And it was a stupid thing to think: Sam means everything to Dean, and he always has, and they’ve both always known it.
“What?” Dean asks in a whisper. He looks doomed, utterly without hope.
Sam smiles. “That was a good idea you had.”
Dean shakes his head, teeth dug into his lip and his eyes flashing. “When? You hate my ideas.”
“Not all,” Sam tells him, and then pauses. “Come here.”
Immediately on his guard, Dean eyes him warily. “Why?”
“Dean, c’mere,” Sam says almost too soft to be heard.
Dean leans forward and then stops, blinking fast and looking helpless, dumbfounded. “What. What are you,” he starts to ask, but falters because Sam has put his hand on Dean’s cheek, and Dean swallows hard, finishes in a hoarse whisper, “What’re you doing to me, Sam?”
Sam kisses him in answer. Fits his mouth to Dean’s and presses in and lets Dean fist a hand in his hair, lets Dean lick his lips apart and suck on his tongue. Dean’s face is sandpaper-rough under Sam’s hand, and Sam slides his fingers under the collar of Dean’s shirt, smooth hollow of his collarbone and Sam is astounded.
It’s your brother, it’s Dean, he keeps hearing shouted in his head, but it doesn’t work as any kind of a deterrent. It’s his brother and he would do anything for his brother. It’s Dean and he can’t say no to Dean. Sam is stunned to find that he loves every part of this, the drag of Dean’s hands through his hair and the way he bites at Sam’s mouth, the incredulous sounds wrung from Dean in between blasphemy and his brother’s name, the clean feel of his skin under Sam’s fingers.
Dean’s glowing, alight and so hot it almost hurts to touch him. Sam is barely able to pull himself away, gasping, “Fuck.”
“No, no, get back here,” Dean orders, his eyes hazy and lust-drunk and his mouth swollen and Sam almost sways back in before getting his wits about him.
“Room, Dean, c’mon.”
“Right. Right. Smart.” Dean still looks kinda heartbroken when Sam gets out of the car, and he quickly scrambles out to follow, hurrying to Sam’s side. “Really smart, Sam.”
Sam grits his teeth, forcing himself back under control. He feels like the top of his head has come off. His eyes skitter over Dean and stick on the sleek line of his neck, the frayed tears across the back pockets of his jeans, his quick fingers with that cold ring that Sam can already almost feel.
He’s staring and he doesn’t even know where they are or what he’s doing. He grabs Dean and pulls him into the little alley between the office and the start of the block of rooms. Sam’s head is full of arched pictures, his brother on white sheets, Dean’s red mouth and clever hands, and he can’t shake any of it.
“Yeah,” Dean says, grinning huge as Sam pushes him against the wall, but Sam leans back when Dean leans forward.
“Dean, did you know?”
“Yes, yeah, I knew. What are you talking about?”
Sam waves between the two of them, feeling out of control. He wants to touch Dean so badly his palms ache. “I, like this, did you know it’d be like this?”
Dean shakes his head, jittering and tugging at Sam’s belt. He keeps licking his lips, staring at Sam’s mouth. “Like what, what’re you talking about. C’mon, gimme a kiss.”
Sam does, because it proves his point and also because it might be the only thing he wants to do for the rest of his life. He presses flush up against Dean and tucks his thumbs under Dean’s jaw, lifting his face and kissing him for the longest time. Sam is half scared to death, because he doesn’t want to ever stop.
When he pulls away, they’re both panting.
“Like that,” Sam manages. “I never even-I didn’t know. And now it’s like, fuck. I never-”
Dean cuts him off, pulling Sam’s head back and licking up Sam’s neck. Sam clutches at him, moaning low in the back of his throat, unable to believe how fast this has overtaken him.
“Quit thinking so much, Sammy,” Dean mumbles, nosing against Sam’s jaw. “It’s just you and me. This is what it’s like.”
*
The next morning, Sam and Dean wake up under the same sheet, and Sam only panics briefly, just a minute or two before Dean mutters at his pillow and slings an arm across Sam’s stomach. Sam holds perfectly still, learning how to breathe against the weight of it, watching Dean’s eyelashes flicker, his mouth moving soft and muted.
Nothing has changed in the night and Dean’s skin against his own still makes Sam lightheaded. It wasn’t a fever or a fugue or a psychotic episode; in the full light of day Sam is still struck dumb by Dean.
Dean wakes already pulling Sam closer, scuffing his cheek on Sam’s shoulder. He mumbles, “Sam?” and Sam pushes a hand through Dean’s hair so it spikes up between his fingers.
“Right here, Dean,” Sam says, and Dean smiles without opening his eyes.
They actually get out of bed about an hour later. Sam can’t stop grinning and neither can Dean and anytime they meet each other’s eyes it only gets worse. Dean wears a perpetual blush and Sam keeps wondering how far down it goes, if the taste of overheated skin is any different.
They go to the store to pick up the ingredients for the homemade pipe bombs that Dean has determined are their best method of attack. Sam’s having trouble paying attention to the job or the shopping list, more concerned with finding excuses to touch Dean. Dean shoots him foreign smiles, shy like Dean never is, confused like he still doesn’t have a clue why Sam took him up on it.
Sam can’t explain it either, but he’s less inclined to care. Wherever this came from, it’s here now. It makes Dean so happy. Sam is already having trouble imagining a different life.
They go back to the motel and make the bombs and then fuck around until dark. Sam pins Dean’s hands above his head at one point and Dean loses it, gnashing and begging and hotter than anything Sam’s ever seen. They’re in the shower until Dean is short of breath from the steam and his wrinkled fingers are as white as snow pulling through Sam’s soaked-black hair. Sam says Dean’s name so many times it starts to lose all meaning.
Sam asks Dean, “How long?” and Dean shrugs, says, “I dunno, a really long time.” Sam doesn’t know why, but he really likes hearing that.
Back out at the rollercoaster, they’re more careful. Working out the plan in advance, they’re Indian-quiet once they’re over the fence. Sam finds himself even more aware of Dean now, trailing him and never losing sight, the same tight feeling in his heart, but it’s less fear now, more obscure.
Dean picked out the load-bearing sections of the ‘coaster the night before, and they circumnavigate the beast, tossing the glow-painted pipe bombs under the braces where they glimmer like lost moons. Without going through the archway into the belly of the thing, the bad vibes don’t do as much damage to Sam and he’s able to keep his head.
They get all the bombs placed without being attacked by a single stray board, and Sam theorizes out loud that the ‘coaster only actually has power over those inside it. Dean thinks that sounds right, but isn’t very interested, what with the explosions to look forward to.
They retreat to the midway booths, ducking behind a splintered wooden counter and crouching there as Dean unslings the rifle from his back. He sights over the counter at the alien gobs of light just visible under the dense shadows of the ‘coaster.
Sam slides his hand up Dean’s back, stopping when his four fingers are lined up just under Dean’s hairline, and Dean lets out a careful breath.
“Oh Sam,” he says in the quietest possible voice, and pulls the trigger. The first bomb immolates, an instant supernova that forces them into squints.
The rollercoaster shrieks, all the lights incarnadine, and shapes struggle in the black smoke, fighting for the sky.
“You,” Dean says, and shoots two bombs placed next to each other in quick succession, a double wallop of heat blowing their hair back. “You’ll never know.”
Parts of the rollercoaster begin to collapse like a house built of burnt matchsticks. Demon faces swirl, long tongues of flame, a thousand bloody eyes, black-smoke soul and Sam watches them fly with his heart in his throat.
“What?” he asks, low and right in Dean’s ear. Dean shivers and takes a moment to re-aim.
“There’s nothing,” Dean starts to tell him, and then cracks another shot, misses. “Shit. Hold still.” He doesn’t shrug Sam off his back. It doesn’t even seem to occur to him.
Another shot and this one hits, a new flower of orange and yellow, another dying sun. Dean grins. The ‘coaster is crumbling, the flames smothered as the huge hills collapse. It’s getting harder to pick out the bombs in the wreckage.
Sam’s throat is rough from the smoke, eyes tearing and his constant smile tasting faintly of soot, and he rests his head on Dean’s shoulder, still deeply moved by this whole thing.
“Nothing better than this,” Dean finishes at last, and Sam can hear the joy in his voice and see the fire dancing in his eyes. “Never has been. Today is the best day.”
Sam smiles, pushing his fingers under Dean’s collar and never doubting him for a second.
THE END
Endnotes: Sam quotes Mark 16:17.
The inspiration for the rollercoaster was the Grizzly ‘coaster at Paramount’s Great America, down in Santa Clara. Enjoy some pics. It is a classic of my childhood, and I didn’t know until I read on the Wik that it has scored as the Worst Rollercoaster in America for three years running. Obviously ripe for demonic possession.
Also, I wrote the first half of it over like a week and the second half in one night, which was whoa. Weird.
Also, my painful inability to come up with decent story titles is on full display, and this one is all Buddy Holly.
Every day, it’s getting closer
Going faster than a rollercoaster
A love like yours will surely come my way.