[fic] Three Blind Men and an Elephant (Sam/Dean, PG-13)
Title: Three Blind Men and an Elephant
Summary: John and Ellen and Bobby find out.
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13
Kindly betad by tigriswolf, who has the patience of a saint.
Author's Notes: Written for lizzypaul for the spn_holidays challenge. Concrit is, as always, welcome.
November, 2000
For once in his life, John got a lucky break, and the hunt that should have taken a week wound up taking three hours. He was finished and free to go home by evening. And, of course, that was a good thing. Of course.
He thought about going back to the library and trying to dig up a new hunt, but he'd already been through forty years of old newspapers, and a new case wasn't going to magically appear just because he stared at the front page long enough. He tried calling some contacts from the payphone outside the town hall, but Caleb was out and Bobby had nothing new. He had a sudden impulse to find a dark bar somewhere, drink slowly, let four o'clock turn into six turn into ten, like his life couldn't find him if he just stayed still enough and stared at the right spot on the bar top. He ignored it. He wasn't going to be that kind of man, not while his boys thought he was out saving the world. He turned the car home.
It was eight o'clock when he pulled into the driveway. The house was dark -- they were in this town until the end of Sam's school year, which meant they would actually have to pay the electric bill -- and quiet except for the sound of the shower running in the back.
Dean was out, then. He'd probably stumble back in at three in the morning as usual, bruised and disoriented and reeking of cheap alcohol and cheaper perfume. John'd tear him a new one, of course, but it was a relief to have at least one son he understood. He'd been a little wild himself at twenty. Maybe Dean was a little more reckless, maybe he got into more fights than John ever had, but he was acting out just like any normal kid. It was proof this life hadn't changed them all too much, no matter what Sam said.
John wandered to the kitchen and dug through the fridge, eventually settling on a grey sludge that might once have been sloppy joe mix. By the time he'd heated it up and made himself a cup of coffee, the shower had been running for over fifteen minutes. He didn't want to deal with Sam right then, but he couldn't let that go. Paying rent on this place was a strain on their budget as it was, and Sam needed to understand that, not just nod and agree and then run the hot water for half an hour behind John's back. He could have called through the door, or at least knocked -- Sam was almost certainly jerking off in there -- but he figured a little emotional trauma might be the one thing he needed to finally drive the point home, so he shoved the door open without warning.
Dean was standing naked under the shower, pressed back against the tiles, and Sam was wrapped around him like an amoeba digesting its lunch.
John slammed the door shut. Inside the bathroom he could hear the sound of the shower turning off, and, in the relative silence that followed, muffled swearing, bodies knocking into one another as they tried to climb out of the too-small shower, and the sound of someone taking deep, panicked breaths. That was Dean, probably, and he fucking *should* be scared, he should be--
John let go of the doorknob and walked back to the kitchen table. As he passed the stove he breathed in the smell of week-old reheated stew and had to sit down suddenly to wait for the wave of nausea to pass.
It couldn't be what he thought he saw. He couldn't accept the idea of Dean talking Sam (coercing Sam) into something that sick, because that would mean Dean wasn't simple, uncomplicated, reliable Dean, wasn't his son, wasn't anyone he knew or wanted to.
And it couldn't be both of them. There was no way they could both want that, because that would mean they were turning into something new and strange, something not-quite-human, something that belonged to this shadow world John had always promised they were only visiting.
It wasn't that. He wouldn't accept that. So it had to be something else.
After a few minutes Sam and Dean filed in without needing to be told and sat down on the other side of the table. Dean kept his shoulders squared and his gaze steady, like a soldier at a court martial. Sam hunched over and wrapped his arms around himself, managing to look scornful and terrified at the same time. Since he had left the bathroom, he appeared to have put on every item of clothing he owned, including three sweaters and a ridiculously oversized orange windbreaker that resembled a hazmat suit. It made him look very young.
John inhaled, laid the sentence out in his mind, and spoke.
"Sometimes, kids... experiment."
Christ, he sounded like a guidance counselor. And it hadn't looked like any goddamn experiment, not the way Sam had his eyes closed and his head tipped back, not the way Dean had his fingers tangled in Sam's hair. John kept going anyway.
"You're young, you're figuring things out, you don't have that many opportunities. I can understand that." Sam got redder and redder as John spoke until he looked ready to explode with righteous indignation, but right then John could give a fuck about how grown-up Sam thought he was.
"It'll have to stop, of course. Dean's getting a little old for this sort of thing." And what a joke that was, Sam was almost eighteen, but there was no good in bringing that up now. He spoke carefully, trying to force the right answer into their brains by sheer power of will. "If that's all it is, though, it's okay. Kids fool around. It doesn't have to mean anything. If that's all it is."
Sam, red-faced and full of adolescent fury, opened his mouth, and John felt the floor being torn out from under him. John, who had never struck his children in his life, who was not that man, suddenly wanted to reach across the table and wrap his hands around Sam's throat, choke him until there was no air left in his lungs to speak with.
"Yeah, Dad," Dean said.
Sam's head snapped towards Dean as though he'd been slapped, but Dean didn't acknowledge him. His voice cracked a little as he spoke, but he looked John straight in the eye.
"Yeah, that's all it was. That's exactly what it was."
John believed him.
January, 2006
The Winchesters showed up mid-afternoon, when the bar was empty. Sam immediately headed to the back room with Ash to discuss something Ellen didn't even pretend to understand, and Dean wandered over to the bar, where she was failing to scrub a mysterious stain out of the wood. He leaned over the bar to switch on the TV to some baseball game, then paused with his fingers hovering over the channel buttons, as though he could feel her glare on the back of his neck.
"This okay with you? I can --"
"Oh, don't mind me, make yourself at home." Dean slid back into his seat, appropriately chastised.
Honestly, she didn't mind. She didn't follow baseball, but any distraction at 3PM was a good thing, and Dean's joy at watching the Yankees get their asses kicked was beautiful to behold. Within fifteen minutes, she gave up on the stain and sat down next to him to harangue the umpire and cheer on -- some team she couldn't name if she had a gun to her head, but they were the underdogs and they were winning, and that was good enough for her. Dean was grinning as wide as she'd ever seen, and he even managed a few genuinely funny digs at the announcers that Ellen would later deny snickering at. At the end of the eighth inning, when Team Whasisface had obviously won and the ninth was just a formality, Dean leaned over and kissed her.
When Ellen had imagined this -- and yes, she had imagined this, so sue her -- she'd assumed Dean would be pushy and overconfident, and she was halfway prepared to find that endearing. As it turned out, though, he had a lot of finesse; even a suspicious amount of finesse, as though he knew he had twenty seconds to showcase every technique he had. See? I can do soft. I can do subtle. It was like being the sole audience for a "Yes, you really do want to sleep with Dean Winchester" infomercial. She could have told him he was wasting his energy, but it was... nice.
When Dean jerked away, she brought herself back to reality and started preparing her "we must never speak of this again" speech. Dean wasn't looking at her, though. He was looking over her shoulder, where Sam was standing, his mouth open.
"Sam," Dean said.
Sam snapped his mouth shut and swallowed. "Um," he said. Ellen could see the blush from where she sat, and even though she was the one who should be embarrassed, she winced in sympathy.
"Sam," Dean said again, "it's --"
"I'm sorry," Sam said, "it's none of my business. It's okay, and it's none of my business. And I'm... going to go now. Um." Sam turned and fled down the hall.
"Sam!" Dean yelled, and practically vaulted off his barstool, then turned back to Ellen. "I'll be right back, okay?" He raced after Sam without waiting for an answer.
Muffled voices came from the back room. "It's okay," Sam said, "It's really none of my business," and then more she couldn't make out, and then Sam was shouting, "I am *not upset*!" It reminded her of the endless phone conversations Jo had had with her ex-boyfriend in high school. Maybe Sam would threaten to take Zack to the prom in revenge.
After a few minutes, Dean walked back in. "So," he said, "this can't happen again." Because the remote possibility that Sam might be upset obviously outweighed the other half-billion reasons it was a stupid idea.
"No, it can't."
Dean looked relieved, as though he had actually expected an argument. "Okay," he said, and sat down two barstools away with an exhausted thump. "Sorry about... well, sorry. Sam's just a little, you know, puritanical." Sam hadn't had a problem with any of the other random women Dean had picked up at her bar in the past few months, but Ellen decided to take pity on him.
"Relax," she said. "You can mend my broken heart by scrubbing out this bloodstain."
Sam pulled her aside that afternoon before leaving. "Look," Sam said, and scrubbed his hand over his face, "I just want you to know that I don't have a problem with it."
"Sam," she said, "nothing's going on. It was just some dumb thing."
"No, really, it's okay. It's none of my business. I mean, it's not like I have an exclusive claim on his time or anything." Sam stopped, and she was pretty sure he hadn't meant to say exactly that. "Anyway. Just. If there were something going on. I wouldn't try to be a problem for you guys."
A month after the breakup, Jo's ex-boyfriend had showed up to say, with all his fifteen-year-old emotional wisdom, that he loved Jo, and that it was okay if she was going out with someone else because he wanted her to be happy. Ellen didn't remember the kid's name, but she recognized the same miserable look on Sam's face. She knew he and Dean weren't actually sleeping together, even if -- and here was an ugly thought -- it was only because Dean hadn't figured out what Sam wanted from him. But she doubted actual incest could make this worse.
She didn't blame them for it. They grew up without a home or a family or human relationships, so of course they tried to recreate all those things using whatever they had at hand. Of course they'd focus all their energy on each other. Of course they'd get it a little wrong. And now Sam needed Dean's attention, needed it like John had needed alcohol and maybe worse. He'd moved halfway across the country trying to get away, got a job and an apartment and a pretty girlfriend, and now he was stuck right back in this hard, dingy life where he could have Dean's eyes on him every goddamn minute of the day, where he could fill up Dean's world until Dean couldn't see anyone else, couldn't connect with anyone beyond a few nameless one-night-stands.
She thought about that kiss, the twenty-second Dean Winchester Wonder, scientifically engineered to coax strange women out of their clothes in fifteen minutes or less before he had to go back to a cheap motel bed and a 3AM wakeup. She wanted something better for Dean. Something real.
But she wouldn't be the one to give it to him. This thing between him and Sam was too complicated, too dangerous, and she already knew she wasn't willing to let herself get involved. Her or her daughter.
"Don't worry," Ellen said. "I'm not going to take him away from you."
May, 2008
After their grand victory, Sam couldn't move for exhaustion, so Dean and Bobby hauled him to the upstairs bedroom together and laid him out. Dean sat down next to him and started working on Sam's clothes, lifting one arm and then the other to get Sam's jacket off. His hands shook. Sam was near delirious, but he was still smiling, and his hands made comically unsuccessful attempts to latch on to Dean's shirtfront. He was murmuring words Bobby was glad he couldn't make out. This wasn't his to see.
Bobby slipped out and made his way downstairs, through the wreckage that had once been his living room, and out to the porch, where Ellen was reclining in a rusty metal lawn chair with a cigarette. He pulled up a chair next to her.
"I thought you quit," Bobby said.
"Seemed like a good time to start back up," Ellen said. "Without something about to kill me, I don't know what to do with myself." When Bobby didn't laugh, she sighed and stubbed her cigarette out on the armrest of her lawn chair. "I'm leaving."
"Now?"
"Yeah."
"You don't want to stay until tomorrow, see the boys off --"
"No."
"Well, where're you headed to?"
"California. Jo's --" She made a perfunctory gesture with the hand holding the cigarette. "I've got a sister in Bakersfield who just got divorced. She wants me to move in with her."
"I'll be sorry to see you go," Bobby said, and waited.
"Look out for them, okay?"
"I will." He meant it, too. He hadn't planned on acquiring two grown kids at his age, but that seemed to be what he was doing, and of his own free will, no less.
"I know you will." She leaned back, and a few flecks of paint dislodged and caught in her hair. "Lord, those two need all the help they can get."
"Yep," Bobby said, and leaned back too. He thought about Sam upstairs, battered and exhausted and crazy with joy, reaching out for his brother.
He came down around seven the next morning, still feeling like the walking dead, to the sound of bickering coming from the kitchen. "Stop it," Dean was saying, "no, really, Sam, stop it, he's going to be down any minute now." If Sam was well enough to commit some minor crime, he was obviously much improved. Bobby felt magnanimous enough to tread loudly on a few damaged floorboards as he crossed the ex-living room, giving them time to hide any evidence.
When he opened the door, Sam was sitting at the kitchen table, the picture of innocence except for the way his mouth was twitching. Dean stood by the stove, grinning the grin of the not-quite-dead-yet.
"Morning, Bobby," he said. "You want breakfast?" Sam stood, wobbling only a little, and pulled three plates down from the cupboard without asking. He was still pale, but the corners of his mouth were tight like it was an effort to keep from smiling, and his eyes were actually sparkling, which Bobby was sure wasn't even possible in normal humans. Dean was smiling too, but it had the slightly manic edge Bobby remembered from the month after the deal, like he'd pulled a fast one and he knew that someone was coming to collect. They were both reasonable responses to a closer-than-usual brush with death, but Bobby felt like he was missing something.
Sam held out the plates out to Dean one by one, and that was strange too: they should have been crowded together at the stove, shoving each other and arguing about who got the burnt pancakes. As Dean filled the plates he began to relate, with a poetry born of near-infinite retellings, an embarrassing anecdote involving maple syrup from Sam's infancy. Dean spoke a little too loud and too fast, not looking Sam or Bobby in the face, and Sam, instead of pressing his mouth shut and exhaling pointedly, was grinning up at Dean through his bangs. It was an impressive trick, given the height difference. Something was definitely wrong.
Dean reached out blindly for the maple syrup bottle Sam was holding, and accidentally covered Sam's hand with his own. He started back just a little before grabbing the bottom of the bottle, and just like that, Bobby knew. His first thought, even before shock and horror, was No wonder no one ever buys their cover stories.
He managed to get through breakfast by inserting monosyllabic grunts in the appropriate places, his glazed, shellshocked early-morning stare apparently only a little more glazed than usual. The sweetness of the pancakes was nauseating, and it stuck in his mouth after he left the table.
The idea disgusted him, but that wasn't where the dangerous roll in his belly was coming from. The thought of two guys together, period, made him a little queasy, and there were plenty of good people who seemed to enjoy that kind of thing, most of them better-adjusted than anyone in Bobby's address book. But this, this wasn't some arbitrary social taboo. This was dangerous.
Sam and Dean weren't going to settle down in clean suburban houses on opposite sides of the country and lead normal lives. They were stuck together now, probably forever, and he'd seen what they were willing to do to keep each other close. He couldn't imagine Dean asking Sam for something like this, but it was easy to imagine Dean giving Sam whatever he thought Sam wanted and not thinking about how hard it might be to keep giving in a month, or a year, or ten years, how it might wear on him harder than the endless drive from grave to grave. Even if they both wanted it right now, it was too easy to see them turning the best thing in their lives into something awful, binding each other with love and guilt and fear and dependence, turning inwards and inwards towards each other until there was no way out.
Sam was committed to this. Sam wanted this. He'd never been good at hiding his feelings, and he was doing a piss-poor job right now. Dean, on the other hand, was harder to read. Bobby agonized for hours, trying to assign meaning to every remembered breath and muscle tic, before finally accepting that he was going to have to talk to the kid.
He caught up with him around dinnertime, sitting on the porch with a bottle of beer in the same spot Ellen had been. Bobby settled down next to him, and Dean looked up and smiled tightly at a point over Bobby's left shoulder.
"So," Bobby said, and realized he still had no idea how to start this conversation. "So," he tried again. "This thing with you and Sam."
"Is this about that story?" Dean asked. "'Cause, dude, I was five. I didn't know he was going to try and bathe himself in the stuff."
Bobby glared at him, because if he thought that act actually worked, then people had been way too polite to him and Bobby intended to fix that right now. Dean swallowed and stared down at the beer in his hands. After a second he raised his head and looked Bobby in the eye.
"Look," he said, "I know this is wrong, okay? I know that it could fuck everything up, and I know that there's a good chance that Sam's going to wake up one morning and decide that I-- that I'm taking advantage of him or something and he never wants to see me again. But I want this. And Sam says he wants it too, and as long as he still wants it I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to lie to you or pretend it's something it's not." Dean's face was pale and his voice was getting rough, but his eyes didn't waver. "And if you don't want me around here anymore, then I'm sorry. You've been good to us. To me. You've been... important."
Bobby was not a violent man, but he had a momentary urge to punch out every person Dean Winchester had ever met, including himself. It was becoming a familiar sensation.
"You know that this is almost certainly going to blow up in your face?"
"Yeah," Dean said.
"You still think it's worth it?"
"Yeah."
"And there's no chance I could beat some sense into either one of you?"
"Well, you're welcome to try with Sam. No one else ever had much luck."
Bobby closed his eyes and sighed. "You both okay with this?"
"I -- Yeah."
"Well, then," Bobby said, "Don't go thinking this is over, but I guess that's all I need to know for now. And don't take it the wrong way if I tell you that's all the detail I want to know on this particular subject, either. Ever."
Dean made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Believe me," he said, "I'm just as happy to never have this conversation again."
They watched the sun set over the junk-filled school bus in Bobby's front yard. After a while, Sam came out, bringing more beers with him, and Bobby made his excuses and headed upstairs to bed. On the way, he crossed once more through the wreckage of the living room. The war might be over, but the reconstruction was just beginning, and from what he could see he was going to have to rebuild half the house just to make sure it was structurally sound. It was a big job, too big for him to do alone in his advancing years, and the pool of people he could ask for help had recently thinned. He wondered if Dean, or Sam and Dean, would be interested in a junior partnership in a marginally profitable reference library-slash-salvage yard.
When Bobby fell asleep, he could still hear them outside, talking low over the soft May rain.
Summary: John and Ellen and Bobby find out.
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13
Kindly betad by tigriswolf, who has the patience of a saint.
Author's Notes: Written for lizzypaul for the spn_holidays challenge. Concrit is, as always, welcome.
November, 2000
For once in his life, John got a lucky break, and the hunt that should have taken a week wound up taking three hours. He was finished and free to go home by evening. And, of course, that was a good thing. Of course.
He thought about going back to the library and trying to dig up a new hunt, but he'd already been through forty years of old newspapers, and a new case wasn't going to magically appear just because he stared at the front page long enough. He tried calling some contacts from the payphone outside the town hall, but Caleb was out and Bobby had nothing new. He had a sudden impulse to find a dark bar somewhere, drink slowly, let four o'clock turn into six turn into ten, like his life couldn't find him if he just stayed still enough and stared at the right spot on the bar top. He ignored it. He wasn't going to be that kind of man, not while his boys thought he was out saving the world. He turned the car home.
It was eight o'clock when he pulled into the driveway. The house was dark -- they were in this town until the end of Sam's school year, which meant they would actually have to pay the electric bill -- and quiet except for the sound of the shower running in the back.
Dean was out, then. He'd probably stumble back in at three in the morning as usual, bruised and disoriented and reeking of cheap alcohol and cheaper perfume. John'd tear him a new one, of course, but it was a relief to have at least one son he understood. He'd been a little wild himself at twenty. Maybe Dean was a little more reckless, maybe he got into more fights than John ever had, but he was acting out just like any normal kid. It was proof this life hadn't changed them all too much, no matter what Sam said.
John wandered to the kitchen and dug through the fridge, eventually settling on a grey sludge that might once have been sloppy joe mix. By the time he'd heated it up and made himself a cup of coffee, the shower had been running for over fifteen minutes. He didn't want to deal with Sam right then, but he couldn't let that go. Paying rent on this place was a strain on their budget as it was, and Sam needed to understand that, not just nod and agree and then run the hot water for half an hour behind John's back. He could have called through the door, or at least knocked -- Sam was almost certainly jerking off in there -- but he figured a little emotional trauma might be the one thing he needed to finally drive the point home, so he shoved the door open without warning.
Dean was standing naked under the shower, pressed back against the tiles, and Sam was wrapped around him like an amoeba digesting its lunch.
John slammed the door shut. Inside the bathroom he could hear the sound of the shower turning off, and, in the relative silence that followed, muffled swearing, bodies knocking into one another as they tried to climb out of the too-small shower, and the sound of someone taking deep, panicked breaths. That was Dean, probably, and he fucking *should* be scared, he should be--
John let go of the doorknob and walked back to the kitchen table. As he passed the stove he breathed in the smell of week-old reheated stew and had to sit down suddenly to wait for the wave of nausea to pass.
It couldn't be what he thought he saw. He couldn't accept the idea of Dean talking Sam (coercing Sam) into something that sick, because that would mean Dean wasn't simple, uncomplicated, reliable Dean, wasn't his son, wasn't anyone he knew or wanted to.
And it couldn't be both of them. There was no way they could both want that, because that would mean they were turning into something new and strange, something not-quite-human, something that belonged to this shadow world John had always promised they were only visiting.
It wasn't that. He wouldn't accept that. So it had to be something else.
After a few minutes Sam and Dean filed in without needing to be told and sat down on the other side of the table. Dean kept his shoulders squared and his gaze steady, like a soldier at a court martial. Sam hunched over and wrapped his arms around himself, managing to look scornful and terrified at the same time. Since he had left the bathroom, he appeared to have put on every item of clothing he owned, including three sweaters and a ridiculously oversized orange windbreaker that resembled a hazmat suit. It made him look very young.
John inhaled, laid the sentence out in his mind, and spoke.
"Sometimes, kids... experiment."
Christ, he sounded like a guidance counselor. And it hadn't looked like any goddamn experiment, not the way Sam had his eyes closed and his head tipped back, not the way Dean had his fingers tangled in Sam's hair. John kept going anyway.
"You're young, you're figuring things out, you don't have that many opportunities. I can understand that." Sam got redder and redder as John spoke until he looked ready to explode with righteous indignation, but right then John could give a fuck about how grown-up Sam thought he was.
"It'll have to stop, of course. Dean's getting a little old for this sort of thing." And what a joke that was, Sam was almost eighteen, but there was no good in bringing that up now. He spoke carefully, trying to force the right answer into their brains by sheer power of will. "If that's all it is, though, it's okay. Kids fool around. It doesn't have to mean anything. If that's all it is."
Sam, red-faced and full of adolescent fury, opened his mouth, and John felt the floor being torn out from under him. John, who had never struck his children in his life, who was not that man, suddenly wanted to reach across the table and wrap his hands around Sam's throat, choke him until there was no air left in his lungs to speak with.
"Yeah, Dad," Dean said.
Sam's head snapped towards Dean as though he'd been slapped, but Dean didn't acknowledge him. His voice cracked a little as he spoke, but he looked John straight in the eye.
"Yeah, that's all it was. That's exactly what it was."
John believed him.
January, 2006
The Winchesters showed up mid-afternoon, when the bar was empty. Sam immediately headed to the back room with Ash to discuss something Ellen didn't even pretend to understand, and Dean wandered over to the bar, where she was failing to scrub a mysterious stain out of the wood. He leaned over the bar to switch on the TV to some baseball game, then paused with his fingers hovering over the channel buttons, as though he could feel her glare on the back of his neck.
"This okay with you? I can --"
"Oh, don't mind me, make yourself at home." Dean slid back into his seat, appropriately chastised.
Honestly, she didn't mind. She didn't follow baseball, but any distraction at 3PM was a good thing, and Dean's joy at watching the Yankees get their asses kicked was beautiful to behold. Within fifteen minutes, she gave up on the stain and sat down next to him to harangue the umpire and cheer on -- some team she couldn't name if she had a gun to her head, but they were the underdogs and they were winning, and that was good enough for her. Dean was grinning as wide as she'd ever seen, and he even managed a few genuinely funny digs at the announcers that Ellen would later deny snickering at. At the end of the eighth inning, when Team Whasisface had obviously won and the ninth was just a formality, Dean leaned over and kissed her.
When Ellen had imagined this -- and yes, she had imagined this, so sue her -- she'd assumed Dean would be pushy and overconfident, and she was halfway prepared to find that endearing. As it turned out, though, he had a lot of finesse; even a suspicious amount of finesse, as though he knew he had twenty seconds to showcase every technique he had. See? I can do soft. I can do subtle. It was like being the sole audience for a "Yes, you really do want to sleep with Dean Winchester" infomercial. She could have told him he was wasting his energy, but it was... nice.
When Dean jerked away, she brought herself back to reality and started preparing her "we must never speak of this again" speech. Dean wasn't looking at her, though. He was looking over her shoulder, where Sam was standing, his mouth open.
"Sam," Dean said.
Sam snapped his mouth shut and swallowed. "Um," he said. Ellen could see the blush from where she sat, and even though she was the one who should be embarrassed, she winced in sympathy.
"Sam," Dean said again, "it's --"
"I'm sorry," Sam said, "it's none of my business. It's okay, and it's none of my business. And I'm... going to go now. Um." Sam turned and fled down the hall.
"Sam!" Dean yelled, and practically vaulted off his barstool, then turned back to Ellen. "I'll be right back, okay?" He raced after Sam without waiting for an answer.
Muffled voices came from the back room. "It's okay," Sam said, "It's really none of my business," and then more she couldn't make out, and then Sam was shouting, "I am *not upset*!" It reminded her of the endless phone conversations Jo had had with her ex-boyfriend in high school. Maybe Sam would threaten to take Zack to the prom in revenge.
After a few minutes, Dean walked back in. "So," he said, "this can't happen again." Because the remote possibility that Sam might be upset obviously outweighed the other half-billion reasons it was a stupid idea.
"No, it can't."
Dean looked relieved, as though he had actually expected an argument. "Okay," he said, and sat down two barstools away with an exhausted thump. "Sorry about... well, sorry. Sam's just a little, you know, puritanical." Sam hadn't had a problem with any of the other random women Dean had picked up at her bar in the past few months, but Ellen decided to take pity on him.
"Relax," she said. "You can mend my broken heart by scrubbing out this bloodstain."
Sam pulled her aside that afternoon before leaving. "Look," Sam said, and scrubbed his hand over his face, "I just want you to know that I don't have a problem with it."
"Sam," she said, "nothing's going on. It was just some dumb thing."
"No, really, it's okay. It's none of my business. I mean, it's not like I have an exclusive claim on his time or anything." Sam stopped, and she was pretty sure he hadn't meant to say exactly that. "Anyway. Just. If there were something going on. I wouldn't try to be a problem for you guys."
A month after the breakup, Jo's ex-boyfriend had showed up to say, with all his fifteen-year-old emotional wisdom, that he loved Jo, and that it was okay if she was going out with someone else because he wanted her to be happy. Ellen didn't remember the kid's name, but she recognized the same miserable look on Sam's face. She knew he and Dean weren't actually sleeping together, even if -- and here was an ugly thought -- it was only because Dean hadn't figured out what Sam wanted from him. But she doubted actual incest could make this worse.
She didn't blame them for it. They grew up without a home or a family or human relationships, so of course they tried to recreate all those things using whatever they had at hand. Of course they'd focus all their energy on each other. Of course they'd get it a little wrong. And now Sam needed Dean's attention, needed it like John had needed alcohol and maybe worse. He'd moved halfway across the country trying to get away, got a job and an apartment and a pretty girlfriend, and now he was stuck right back in this hard, dingy life where he could have Dean's eyes on him every goddamn minute of the day, where he could fill up Dean's world until Dean couldn't see anyone else, couldn't connect with anyone beyond a few nameless one-night-stands.
She thought about that kiss, the twenty-second Dean Winchester Wonder, scientifically engineered to coax strange women out of their clothes in fifteen minutes or less before he had to go back to a cheap motel bed and a 3AM wakeup. She wanted something better for Dean. Something real.
But she wouldn't be the one to give it to him. This thing between him and Sam was too complicated, too dangerous, and she already knew she wasn't willing to let herself get involved. Her or her daughter.
"Don't worry," Ellen said. "I'm not going to take him away from you."
May, 2008
After their grand victory, Sam couldn't move for exhaustion, so Dean and Bobby hauled him to the upstairs bedroom together and laid him out. Dean sat down next to him and started working on Sam's clothes, lifting one arm and then the other to get Sam's jacket off. His hands shook. Sam was near delirious, but he was still smiling, and his hands made comically unsuccessful attempts to latch on to Dean's shirtfront. He was murmuring words Bobby was glad he couldn't make out. This wasn't his to see.
Bobby slipped out and made his way downstairs, through the wreckage that had once been his living room, and out to the porch, where Ellen was reclining in a rusty metal lawn chair with a cigarette. He pulled up a chair next to her.
"I thought you quit," Bobby said.
"Seemed like a good time to start back up," Ellen said. "Without something about to kill me, I don't know what to do with myself." When Bobby didn't laugh, she sighed and stubbed her cigarette out on the armrest of her lawn chair. "I'm leaving."
"Now?"
"Yeah."
"You don't want to stay until tomorrow, see the boys off --"
"No."
"Well, where're you headed to?"
"California. Jo's --" She made a perfunctory gesture with the hand holding the cigarette. "I've got a sister in Bakersfield who just got divorced. She wants me to move in with her."
"I'll be sorry to see you go," Bobby said, and waited.
"Look out for them, okay?"
"I will." He meant it, too. He hadn't planned on acquiring two grown kids at his age, but that seemed to be what he was doing, and of his own free will, no less.
"I know you will." She leaned back, and a few flecks of paint dislodged and caught in her hair. "Lord, those two need all the help they can get."
"Yep," Bobby said, and leaned back too. He thought about Sam upstairs, battered and exhausted and crazy with joy, reaching out for his brother.
He came down around seven the next morning, still feeling like the walking dead, to the sound of bickering coming from the kitchen. "Stop it," Dean was saying, "no, really, Sam, stop it, he's going to be down any minute now." If Sam was well enough to commit some minor crime, he was obviously much improved. Bobby felt magnanimous enough to tread loudly on a few damaged floorboards as he crossed the ex-living room, giving them time to hide any evidence.
When he opened the door, Sam was sitting at the kitchen table, the picture of innocence except for the way his mouth was twitching. Dean stood by the stove, grinning the grin of the not-quite-dead-yet.
"Morning, Bobby," he said. "You want breakfast?" Sam stood, wobbling only a little, and pulled three plates down from the cupboard without asking. He was still pale, but the corners of his mouth were tight like it was an effort to keep from smiling, and his eyes were actually sparkling, which Bobby was sure wasn't even possible in normal humans. Dean was smiling too, but it had the slightly manic edge Bobby remembered from the month after the deal, like he'd pulled a fast one and he knew that someone was coming to collect. They were both reasonable responses to a closer-than-usual brush with death, but Bobby felt like he was missing something.
Sam held out the plates out to Dean one by one, and that was strange too: they should have been crowded together at the stove, shoving each other and arguing about who got the burnt pancakes. As Dean filled the plates he began to relate, with a poetry born of near-infinite retellings, an embarrassing anecdote involving maple syrup from Sam's infancy. Dean spoke a little too loud and too fast, not looking Sam or Bobby in the face, and Sam, instead of pressing his mouth shut and exhaling pointedly, was grinning up at Dean through his bangs. It was an impressive trick, given the height difference. Something was definitely wrong.
Dean reached out blindly for the maple syrup bottle Sam was holding, and accidentally covered Sam's hand with his own. He started back just a little before grabbing the bottom of the bottle, and just like that, Bobby knew. His first thought, even before shock and horror, was No wonder no one ever buys their cover stories.
He managed to get through breakfast by inserting monosyllabic grunts in the appropriate places, his glazed, shellshocked early-morning stare apparently only a little more glazed than usual. The sweetness of the pancakes was nauseating, and it stuck in his mouth after he left the table.
The idea disgusted him, but that wasn't where the dangerous roll in his belly was coming from. The thought of two guys together, period, made him a little queasy, and there were plenty of good people who seemed to enjoy that kind of thing, most of them better-adjusted than anyone in Bobby's address book. But this, this wasn't some arbitrary social taboo. This was dangerous.
Sam and Dean weren't going to settle down in clean suburban houses on opposite sides of the country and lead normal lives. They were stuck together now, probably forever, and he'd seen what they were willing to do to keep each other close. He couldn't imagine Dean asking Sam for something like this, but it was easy to imagine Dean giving Sam whatever he thought Sam wanted and not thinking about how hard it might be to keep giving in a month, or a year, or ten years, how it might wear on him harder than the endless drive from grave to grave. Even if they both wanted it right now, it was too easy to see them turning the best thing in their lives into something awful, binding each other with love and guilt and fear and dependence, turning inwards and inwards towards each other until there was no way out.
Sam was committed to this. Sam wanted this. He'd never been good at hiding his feelings, and he was doing a piss-poor job right now. Dean, on the other hand, was harder to read. Bobby agonized for hours, trying to assign meaning to every remembered breath and muscle tic, before finally accepting that he was going to have to talk to the kid.
He caught up with him around dinnertime, sitting on the porch with a bottle of beer in the same spot Ellen had been. Bobby settled down next to him, and Dean looked up and smiled tightly at a point over Bobby's left shoulder.
"So," Bobby said, and realized he still had no idea how to start this conversation. "So," he tried again. "This thing with you and Sam."
"Is this about that story?" Dean asked. "'Cause, dude, I was five. I didn't know he was going to try and bathe himself in the stuff."
Bobby glared at him, because if he thought that act actually worked, then people had been way too polite to him and Bobby intended to fix that right now. Dean swallowed and stared down at the beer in his hands. After a second he raised his head and looked Bobby in the eye.
"Look," he said, "I know this is wrong, okay? I know that it could fuck everything up, and I know that there's a good chance that Sam's going to wake up one morning and decide that I-- that I'm taking advantage of him or something and he never wants to see me again. But I want this. And Sam says he wants it too, and as long as he still wants it I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to lie to you or pretend it's something it's not." Dean's face was pale and his voice was getting rough, but his eyes didn't waver. "And if you don't want me around here anymore, then I'm sorry. You've been good to us. To me. You've been... important."
Bobby was not a violent man, but he had a momentary urge to punch out every person Dean Winchester had ever met, including himself. It was becoming a familiar sensation.
"You know that this is almost certainly going to blow up in your face?"
"Yeah," Dean said.
"You still think it's worth it?"
"Yeah."
"And there's no chance I could beat some sense into either one of you?"
"Well, you're welcome to try with Sam. No one else ever had much luck."
Bobby closed his eyes and sighed. "You both okay with this?"
"I -- Yeah."
"Well, then," Bobby said, "Don't go thinking this is over, but I guess that's all I need to know for now. And don't take it the wrong way if I tell you that's all the detail I want to know on this particular subject, either. Ever."
Dean made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Believe me," he said, "I'm just as happy to never have this conversation again."
They watched the sun set over the junk-filled school bus in Bobby's front yard. After a while, Sam came out, bringing more beers with him, and Bobby made his excuses and headed upstairs to bed. On the way, he crossed once more through the wreckage of the living room. The war might be over, but the reconstruction was just beginning, and from what he could see he was going to have to rebuild half the house just to make sure it was structurally sound. It was a big job, too big for him to do alone in his advancing years, and the pool of people he could ask for help had recently thinned. He wondered if Dean, or Sam and Dean, would be interested in a junior partnership in a marginally profitable reference library-slash-salvage yard.
When Bobby fell asleep, he could still hear them outside, talking low over the soft May rain.