Break the lock if it don't fit (Sam/Dean, pg, 7200 words)
For giandujakiss as part of help_haiti! I do very much hope you like it! And thanks to those involved in beta'ing, ameripicking and the like - you know who you are. ♥
Break the lock if it don't fit
(Sam/Dean, pg, 7200 words)
Sam and Dean get soul-bonded. Dean doesn't cope well. Title from Florence and the Machine.
It took Sam three days to wake up after the ritual. All that time, he was lying in his hospital bed, as good as dead except for the little beep-beep-beep of the monitor at his side.
Dean didn't worry. He didn't have to. He could feel Sam was alive. The knowledge was more than a double-pulse; it was a second heart suddenly pushing blood around his body. He could feel Sam waking up, could hear it at the back of his head. The hum of silence was thickening, bubbling, like the sound as you swim upwards and approach the surface of the sea, where the thin, clear air is waiting for you.
Dean was impatient, nervous, definitely on edge, but not worried.
Bobby was there when Sam woke up, which was sheer luck. He'd put a lot of himself into working the ritual and was still weak. Dean was there too, which had nothing to do with luck, because Dean pretty much hadn't left Sam's bedside since the accident.
Sam's throat rolled as he swallowed. His eyes moved sluggishly behind his eyelids. And when he opened them, he looked straight at Dean, his gaze so focused it was as though he'd just blinked. The rest of the world faded into mute monochrome, indistinct and hazy, while Sam was painted with excruciating detail, the exact shade of his eyes and the flicker of muscle in his jaw so precise Dean could have written thousand-word essays on them.
"Hey there, kid," said Bobby, his voice a weak growl as he patted Sam's hand awkwardly. "You gave us a scare. How you feeling?"
Sam's face crumpled like he'd just been punched.
"You thought I was gonna die," Sam said to Dean. His hand flew to his chest, and the wire where he was fixed up to the machine snapped a little tauter. He moaned, eyes screwed shut. "You thought nobody would take your soul when you tried to sell it for me. Oh god, Dean."
"Stop it," Dean mumbled through numb lips.
Horror left him cold, sick inside. He felt stripped raw. The feedback loop of his own fear that he was going to lose Sam caught up in Sam's response to it and slammed right back at him. It leaked out of the little box in his mind he'd shoved it in, and Dean couldn't get it back inside because Sam wouldn't let him. Sam wanted to see it, wouldn't leave it alone, opened up the box and peered inside, put his hands in to touch it. And Dean couldn't stop him.
The hook was right inside him, hidden somewhere underneath his heart and sewn into his soul, and Sam had hold of the other end and wouldn't stop tugging it, jerking on it, just like he was tugging the wire from himself to the machine, until it was all going to come loose.
He was all spread open for Sam, all the neat compartments of horrible things straining and shifting, and Dean didn't have room in his mind for what was in his mind.
It emptied out, like something coming adrift inside.
Sam froze, his eyes big and full of light. "I can feel how much you love me," he said.
Dean ran.
:::
"I just… I just didn't want him to die. I thought I was just gonna take a little bit of him hurting and… y'know, take it away. So he could get better." Dean swallowed, flicked his tongue backwards and forwards over the cracked tooth at the back of his mouth, tracing the break. "I just wanted him to get better."
Bobby's breath left him like it was his last. "I said this could happen. Slim chance, but I said it could happen."
Dean was shaking his head before Bobby had even finished speaking. "I didn't know it would feel like this. That he'd feel it like this." His eyes stayed on the glass in front of him, empty except for the dull smear of leftover whiskey in the bottom.
"You were only trying to help," said Bobby.
Again, Dean shook his head. He lifted the glass to his lips and drained the last remnant of alcohol, and there wasn't nearly enough burn to take the taste of his own bile out of his mouth.
"He has to feel what I feel. I couldn't have done anything worse to him."
:::
Knowing where Sam was in the house was like knowing where his own arm was, an awareness so instinctive that Dean didn't even properly register knowing it.
The window was a square of colorless winter sunlight behind Sam, and in its light, he looked pale and a little weaker than he should, like the muscle that packed his body was still sleeping. His expression was miserable, and he didn't look up as Dean approached.
"What are you doing?" said Dean. Sam's lip twitched slightly at the corner, as though Dean bothering to ask was a bad joke.
"I'm thinking about how when you got back from Hell, you didn't know how to connect with me." Sam sniffed and swiped the back of his hand over his mouth. "Everything felt different. You couldn't say the right thing to me, couldn't make me be what you thought you remembered me being."
Dean flushed. "That's private, Sam." He didn't mean to sound so hard, but it wasn't like Sam cared anyway. Sam just shrugged, threw his hands up.
"I don't have a choice! I think about it because you think about it." He considered Dean a moment. "And you think about it a lot." Sam went quiet again, and the blood going through Dean's veins rippled, like someone breathing over the surface of water. "If you'd just said the right thing to me, I'd'a been okay. The fact you broke in Hell, and broke the First Seal with it, would'a been a fuck-up just for you, and not for me and for the rest of the world too. If you just hadn't let me down when I needed you…"
There'd been monsters that'd done this before, worn Sam's face to recite the epic tale of Dean's failures back at him. But it wasn't something Dean had ever gotten used to, and definitely not when it really was Sam saying it, Sam knowing how true it was because he was feeling it.
Dean didn't have anything to say. He never did when it was in his own head, so it wasn't like it being in Sam's head was going to make any damn difference. He thumbed the ring on his finger around in circles, and stared at the scuffed patch on the toe of his boot and at the dark paisley pattern that might be on the carpet under the dirt and dust, blood and alcohol, until his eyes began to sting with forced, aimless intensity.
"Jesus, Dean," said Sam. "Would you just look at me?"
Dean did look at him, and he saw Sam's lower lip wobbling dangerously.
"I'm such a fucking idiot," he said, low and final. "I should learn to just leave well enough alone. I should…" He put his hands up, something like surrender.
Leave.
The idea came to him so unexpectedly and ready-formed that he wasn't sure if it was him thinking of it or Sam.
"No," said Sam. "Don't. Dean-"
"Maybe if I'm further away you won't have to feel so much, you won't be able to pick it up."
His feet were carrying him towards the door, backing him away from Sam, and each inch told him it was a better idea than the one before. They just needed space. Lots of it.
:::
Even with six states between them, Dean still felt as though Sam was always just waiting for him at the next motel room. He drove to cold places, so that when his head started to fill up with feeling, he could get out and stand by the side of the road, until all his consciousness was taken up with quietly freezing to death. He went to big cities and thought carefully about the noise and the traffic and what he was going to have for dinner and how he was going to afford a place to stay tonight.
He hunted and he ate, and sometimes he slept, and he resisted feeling anything.
Sam's frustrated rage slowly disappeared, like the faded ink of an old letter. It was a deafness, an absence that Dean carried with him, tucked behind his heart. But if it was silent for him, then it must be silent for Sam, and better silence than the pathetic mewling of Dean's failures. Better Sam be alone in the silence, than with Dean and Dean's fucked-up feelings for company.
:::
There was a demon teaching fourth-grade in Eugene, Oregon. It fucked the children up without ever laying a hand on them. Its weapons of choice were pointed comments that needled nascent insecurities, and petty injustices that couldn't be fought. Children went through its class and came out the other side just a little bit nastier, just that little bit more twisted.
The man it wore had died six years ago and was rotting on the inside. When Dean pressed his knee into its chest to pin it to the floor, the flesh sagged just slightly, a sickening give.
"Oh man, I'm gonna hurl," said Dean. "You ever think of switching to something a little fresher?"
It stared up at him with its polished black-china eyes and a smile like this was a game and it was winning. "Oh come on, Dean. Not like I'm the only one with something icky on the inside. You're full of a lot worse than a few decomposing organs. And you stink of it. It leaks off you in waves."
"Lucky I got one hell of a pretty exterior," Dean said, voice dropping to a growl to hide the feeling in his voice.
"Lucky Sam," said the demon. "Standing permanently downwind of your stench. Every single worthless thought you have, you give to him. I don't think that's what Daddy meant when he taught you to share with your little brother."
It laughed through a gurgle of blood, black and glistening, as Dean slammed Ruby's knife into its throat.
"You don't even know you're doing it!" it shrieked. "You should just blow your brains out now, 'cause until your head's empty you're just gonna keep dumping this crap on Sam."
Afterwards, Dean wiped the knife clean on the corner of the formerly oatmeal rug. He got to his feet and stepped over the body on his way to the door.
It was dark outside, and the night air was thick and wet, curling instantly inside his mouth and around the back of his neck, lying cold over his sweat. He went down the street and his gait was awkward, clumsy, like someone had switched his ankles over without warning him. He climbed into the Impala, rested his hands on the steering wheel and stared for a second at how they trembled. Hesitantly, he lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror. His own face looked back at him, and it was nothing like company.
"Need to be empty," he said to his reflection.
"Not like you can be better," his reflection agreed.
:::
In San Francisco, Caro tried to teach Dean to meditate. Caro's earrings never matched and she moved as if subject to different laws of human anatomy.
Dean sat in a block of afternoon sunshine, cross-legged on the floor with retired old men, and housewives, and students. He ignored the strange looks angled at him, knew that he seemed absurdly out of place, and concentrated on Caro.
"Empty your mind," said Caro. "Let it all go. Each time a thought enters your head, let it go with your next breath out." Her hands turned inwards and outwards as though she were demonstrating a dance move. "Find the quiet inside yourself."
One of the old men coughed. A student's jewelry rattled as she settled. Outside, the sun moved and the room filled up with bright stillness.
Dean closed his eyes. He felt warm, his skin tingling where the sunlight touched it.
Sam would probably laugh at him for trying this hippie, New Age, crystals and scented candles bullshit.
Dean jerked away from thinking about Sam. He tried to fill his head with the blank white page Caro kept on about, the blank white page and the peaceful field and the beautiful beach and the glittering spread of night stars, tried one image after another until he'd left Sam's name behind, lost in the distance with Sam himself.
He took a deep breath.
"Every breath fills you with golden light," said Caro. "Feel it light and pure inside your lungs."
Dean didn't even let his lips twitch. He approached it with the same single-minded determination he'd brought to every one of Dad's drills, because this was necessary. This was for Sam. This would save Sam from all the crap sharing Dean's psyche would put on him.
Golden light in my lungs, he told himself, and he pictured it being drawn inside his body, concentrated on how it washed through his blood and reached every stretched-out point of him.
Occasionally a stray thought would drift into Dean's mind, and he would sweep it away without even allowing himself to consider what it was. He was aware of the raw pinkness of the insides of his eyelids, lit up by sunshine, and the whispering murmur of everyone else breathing, and far away there was the smooth hum of downtown traffic. And then even that consciousness whited out, until there was only himself.
The rhythm of his own breathing moved through him. He felt sleepy, and yet alert. The muscles in his body relaxed but were not heavy. He was completely at peace, hollowed out by the golden light, empty.
Breathe in, and breathe out. Breathe in, and-
"Dean!"
Dean's eyes flew open and he jerked around, a half-formed curse on his lips. But Sam wasn't there. The impression was so intense that, for a second, Dean couldn't actually believe that Sam wasn't there. He scanned the room frantically, expecting Sam to stop fucking hiding at any minute.
The rest of the class was staring at him. Caro had taken a tentative step towards him, wringing her hands together.
But Sam wasn't there.
:::
Even hours later, back at the motel, Dean felt rattled, over-sensitive, like he'd lost a layer of skin. And then he got angry and guilty for feeling like that because obviously the bond between him and Sam was still functioning, and it was yet more of his angst he was shoveling onto Sam. Not like Sam didn't have enough to deal with as it was. And then the anger and guilt for feeling like that would be leaking on to Sam too and Dean just. Just wanted it to stop.
He didn't know what he dared do, what he could do that wouldn't recoil back onto Sam. He was still frozen in indecision when his cellphone buzzed. It was Sam. Halfway across the room from his phone, Dean knew it was Sam.
"You didn't do it on purpose, then," said Sam, by way of greeting. "I've been leaving you alone because I thought that was what you wanted, and, 'cause, well, I didn’t deal too well with it at first, I know. But this afternoon, when you reached out, I thought…" He sighed. "You still need time, I guess." It could have been a question, but if it was, Dean didn't answer.
Sam sighed again, an irritated huff of breath. "I don't know what you think it was like before. You didn't do the bang-up job of keeping your feelings under wrap that you seem to think you did. I saw when you were hurting, Dean. I saw it. Even if you wouldn't tell me why, I saw it. Every time. All that's changed is you can't shut me out anymore."
He hung up and left Dean with the numb recognition of having failed again.
:::
Sam called again the next night. Dean was two hundred miles out of San Francisco, leaning up against the Impala on the roadside, with no destination in mind and barely enough money for gas.
Dean only answered the phone because he felt a strange thrill of anticipation, impatience, and even if he wasn't convinced the emotion had started with him, it was hard to ignore.
"That guy at the diner checked you out, and you thought 'maybe'. Then you thought 'no', because you thought I'd be there too." Sam said it in a child-like rush, vicious and eager. "In your head. In the bed with you."
"Threesomes never were my thing," said Dean lightly, as his stomach rolled. "Someone always feels a little left out." He swallowed and gazed out at the scratchy, yellow sunset. "How much do you… How much do you feel - feel me?"
Sam laughed. "Everything, Dean. I feel everything, like it's happening to me. I know a ghoul tore you up real good, and I know about that time you got drunk, and I know you were sleeping in the car for a few nights 'til that ankle you broke a few years back started aching during the day. And I know that you're breaking up inside to hear all this."
Dean's vision blurred with tears as a whole body shudder went through him.
"But do you know why you're not getting a shit-ton of angst from me about this? Why you're not feeling anything heavy from me? Because I don't mind it. I like it." He sounded almost savage, and Dean shook his head.
"No, I put this on you, and I thought I was helping but -"
"Dean, listen to me. You finally can't shut me out. You can't tell me you're fine when I can see you're not. And you can't not trust me because you'll know when I'm lying. I got what I wanted. I got you."
The unfamiliar shape of what Sam had just said pressed them both into silence.
A car swept by on the road and Dean swayed slightly in its wake. He wiped his hand over his dry mouth, and Sam laughed again.
"That freaks you out." He felt Sam's grin, felt its curve and its light. "It's okay, freaks me out too."
Something caught in Dean's throat, but he forced the words out all the same. "Good. It should freak you out. Because this is… this is not right, Sam. You'll see." He could hear Sam protesting, a new thread of alarm in his voice, but he kept talking. "Couple of years down the line, this thing'll go away and you'll realize how not right this all is. And you'll thank me for doing this."
He ended the call.
:::
Maybe Dean just hadn't gone far enough. The U.S. was big but maybe it wasn't big enough.
He spread a map out over the hood of the car, the highways rising up and dropping down like a roller coaster ride over the creases in the paper, and thought about how far he could go.
He'd cross oceans to get this - himself - away from Sam, to get somewhere it couldn't hurt his brother anymore. He'd get on a ship and he'd sail to the horizon and drop over the edge of it if he had to.
But there was still land Dean could put between them. Between finger and thumb, he measured the span between where he'd left Sam and the red border of South America. And there was more below the border, a whole landmass of countries to lose himself in.
That was Dean's destination: far enough away. He didn't know how far exactly that was, but he drove and figured he'd know it when he hit it.
He made it down to Hermosillo in the first day, and down to Torreón within the week. The thought occurred to him that, every time he looked at the map or read a signpost, he was effectively telling Sam exactly where he was, and he wondered how long it would be until the signal started to grow weak, until the radio between them crackled into snowy static.
He survived on his own halting Spanish and the much better English of the people he met along the way. Ate in cheap roadside diners and slept in cheaper hotels, while all the time he filled the blank page in his head with the abstract shapes of the shadows cast on the dusty road by the agaves.
In a town a few miles south of Veracruz, where the air smelled of orange blossoms and soda, and the hillside was purpled with pitcher sage, Dean found a wraith. He killed it, he was pretty sure he killed it - so much blood and ichor and the screaming sound it made caught in his ears like some catchy song he wanted to hum along to - but not before it got him right back.
He stumbled back into town, tripping over dust and bouncing between the line of cars parked on the road. It was only when he pushed himself back upright that he saw the bloody handprint on the hood of one car he'd touched, a smear of blood on another's window, and when he turned around, he saw the sprinkled trail of blood, like little black paw prints, gently pitter-pattering at his feet.
He took his hand away from his belly, and he wasn't sure what it was doing there in the first place. He looked at his fingers and, frowning, wiped the blood onto his jeans. Up ahead was a bar. Its doors stood open and Dean weaved towards its music and light. There was a girl coming out, her head tilted back to smile at someone still inside. Then she turned towards Dean and her eyes went wide.
Dean stretched out a hand and blood dripped freely from his fingers.
"A little help? " said Dean. He passed out.
:::
He was lying on the back seat of the Impala, and the roof had flown away so that he could watch the sun streaming along overhead, so bright he had to blink back its light and focus on its comet-tail instead, whiter against a white sky. The road was bumpy, juddering and shuddering underneath his back.
People were talking, but not to him, so Dean didn't interrupt. They sounded kind of busy anyway.
Something moved in his hand and Dean looked down, and saw fingers, fingers that didn't belong to him. He traced the fingers to a wrist and an arm, and finally to a pretty girl's face.
"You're gonna be okay," she told him. "Do you have someone you want me to call?"
Sam.
"No," said Dean. "Not anymore." The breath rushed out of him, leaving him wet and shivering inside. He said the words like the line of a poem that finally made sense. "I can never go home."
Poor screwed-in-the-head Constance Welch. Every night she was out in the nowhere nothingness, face turned to watch for the approach of headlights that could never take her where she wanted to go. Every night on her own, remembering what she'd done, and why she could never go home.
He clawed at the girl's hand, twisting off his back to get at her as much as he could, but something was holding him down.
"Am I wearing white?" he demanded. "Quick, am I wearing white? Don't make me go out on the road… Please, I don't wanna go out on the road."
He grasped at her hand but she slipped away, barred from him by the hustle of people in medical scrubs.
:::
Her name was Julia, and she told him that the first time he behaved inappropriately around her she would kick his ass. Dean believed her too.
"You can stay with me until you're feeling stronger," she said. She tossed his wallet down on the end of his hospital bed. "I looked through this. You have lots of IDs but not much money. So we should go now."
"You don't have to do this," said Dean. "I'll be fine once I get outta here."
She ignored him, holding up his cellphone instead. "And you have twenty-three missed calls from Sam. That's so far today. They've been calling a lot." She cocked her head at Dean. "So, is Sam your wife?"
Dean swung his legs over the side of the bed and concentrated on not letting the nauseous, wrong sensation in his stitched up belly make him vomit or pass out. He shook his head, eyes fixed on his bare toes. "Not married," he said.
Julia rolled her eyes, and Dean wasn't sure whether it was in response to his denial or his efforts to stand up. "Fine, long-term girlfriend then. I've been burned before. I've gotten pretty good at spotting the guys who are taken." She huffed again and then offered him her arm to get him upright.
"Your clothes are on the chair," she said. "I gave you a t-shirt that belonged to my ex-boyfriend, 'cause your one was all bloody."
She ducked out of the cubicle and pulled the curtain closed, but Dean could see her shadow, slender and tall, moving just the other side. He dressed carefully and quickly.
On the way out to Julia's car, Dean cast her a sidelong look. Her thin floral skirt fluttered like butterflies around her bronzed legs. A thin tassel of bells hung from her purse, making silvery music as she walked. She couldn't have been more than twenty.
"So how'd you know I'm not some crazy psycho who's gonna butcher you second you turn your back on me?" he said.
She cast him a pitying look. "State you're in, you couldn't butcher a doped up kitten. You almost died." She paused, midway through unlocking the car door. "I heard what you did. I heard they found that thing's body. Up in the hills. I think you saved a lot of people."
Dean lapsed in and out of sleep on the drive back into town. The radio turned up loud, Julia slipped fluidly between singing along to the music and cheerfully cursing the other drivers on the road. Sunshine stretched the cyan sky out wide, turned the dust in the hot, still air to gold and made the hilltops glow with unnatural color.
Here, Sam took on the unreal but insistent quality of a dream that stayed with you throughout the day, a moment of madness remembered in lucidity. And yet he was still more tangible than Julia. She was warm and beautiful and sitting right next to Dean, and she was flat, all exteriors, just a pretty paper cutout.
Dean could never go home.
His cellphone buzzed and Dean swallowed, jerked his face towards the window.
Julia tsked. "You should answer that. It's cruel not to."
"Crueler to answer," said Dean.
She tsked again and turned the music up louder.
:::
Julia was a bartender at the bar where Dean had stumbled into her. Whenever she went to work, she'd give Dean the TV remote and an invitation to help himself to something from the fridge if he got hungry.
This was fine for the first couple days, until Dean started to feel stronger, and decided that Julia's fridge was kind of bare to start with and that daytime TV sucked. There were still a few bills in his wallet and he figured some fresh air might hold back the rising tide of crazed desperation he was feeling. Either that or a bullet in the brainpan.
He didn't know his way around town, so he went to where he'd left the Impala.
It was gone. Just an empty space where he'd left it. And it seemed for the best. Just like if he went back to Bobby's, it'd be best if Sam were gone. Moved on without him. The fewer things he had to care about, the fewer things he'd damage with his fucking up. He took a deep breath and let it go, and he let the Impala go with it.
Standing in the parking lot, a barren space baked by the sun, Dean turned a slow circle, scanning the blocky line of buildings for anything that looked like a grocery store. His gaze caught on the old woman across the street who was staring back at him. He flashed a smile, which she didn't return.
"Hi," he called out. "You know where I can find the nearest store?"
"You have two shadows," she said.
Instantly, Dean's eyes dropped to the ground, twisting around like a dog trying to catch its tail, and she laughed at him.
"Stupid," she said. She clapped her chest, rings around her fat knuckles glinting in the light. "In here," she said. "There are two of you in here."
"How do you know that?" Dean said, crossing the street towards her. "What do you - do you know how to break it?"
She appraised him, cocking her head to look the whole length of him. "You almost did," she said.
"How?" Dean barked, and then he stopped, because he got it. He could feel the stitches running along his belly, holding him shut. He licked his lips. "If I die, it breaks?"
She pulled a face, and it was like an invisible hand carving her wrinkles deeper. "Stupid," she said again. "Doesn't death break most things?"
It was just them on the street, just them in the town, just them and the heat and the scratched ground for miles and miles, light years before you reached the only other thing that existed: Sam.
Dean's breath came a little fast, as though he was trying to do as much breathing as he could before he never did it again.
"Of course," said the old woman, "you die, he dies. He dies, you die." She twisted the gnarled finger of one hand around a finger on the other, and held them up for Dean to see. "You should be more careful."
Can never go home. Can't even die. The future rolled out in front of him, like projections of a plague's spread. He would live miserably and alone, and he would do everything he could to prolong that existence, because it belonged to Sam, too. Dean turned away from the old woman, into the sunlight, and let it blind him.
Then his cellphone began to buzz against his thigh and he saw Sam - phone against his ear and lips pursed, fingers tapping on the steering wheel as he waited for Dean to pick up, frustrated and angry. And Dean was angry and frustrated with himself too for not picking up, even if it was really Sam feeling it anyway. So he picked up.
"Okay," said Sam. "That's it. I've given you long enough."
A car rolled up alongside Dean, and it was the Impala, and somehow it had Sam in it, looking up at him through the rolled-down window. Tanned and healthy and in the flesh. Sam threw the cellphone down on the seat beside him and said, "Get in."
Dean didn't have a grip on the universe anymore. It was strange and unpredictable, and he only recognized it as the one he belonged in because it was all still centered on Sammy.
After a second, Dean lowered the cellphone from his ear. It was another second before he got in.
"I have tried to be patient," said Sam. "I know you and me, we're different. We process things differently. But I know how you're feeling, man, and giving you time and space just isn't gonna cut it this time."
Being with Sam again was almost too much to take. It was like the first day of feeling well again after a long sickness, where just being able to stand upright makes you feel superhuman. And after the first time he tried, Dean realized that looking straight at Sam made his head go funny and he kept his eyes on Sam's feet instead, which were bizarrely intriguing all by themselves.
"I've been right behind you since California, and you've just been getting worse. And I'm not even gonna discuss the Constance Welch crap because… dude, no."
Sam was still talking and Dean was still fascinated by the loop of the laces in his sneakers.
"You leave anything at that girl's place that you wanna go back for?"
It was a question. Dean understood that before he understood that he needed to answer it.
"Need to put food in her fridge," he said.
There was no raised eyebrow at that, no bewildered frown. Sam just nodded, like he understood perfectly, which of course he fucking did, because he was inside Dean's head.
:::
It didn't escape Dean's notice that they were heading back up to the border. He tried to be irritated about it, but was blanketed in good feeling from Sam, like Dean was a sulky child being tucked into his bed by an indulgent mother.
Sam was relieved and confident, which was awesome, and he was something else too. Dean tried to explore that something else, to make some recognizable shape out of it. But Sam wasn't letting him. Which meant it wasn't awesome and that Sam was trying to protect him from it. And wasn't it just typical of Sam to get the hang of managing this soul-bleed quicker than Dean?
Sam smirked, and Dean hurriedly stopped exploring, filled his head with Led Zeppelin, and ignored Sam tapping his finger on the steering wheel in time to the beat.
:::
The motel was situated in the middle of the desert, dropped like litter in the dust and instantly forgotten.
While Sam went in to get a room, Dean sat in the car and watched the stars prick through the dusk sky. He thought about just driving, hitting the road and not looking back. Again. The car keys hung from the ignition and glinted silver. He could do a better job. He'd get on a plane this time, even if it killed him, and he'd change his name and never stay more than a few days together in one place.
Sam would still find him.
In the tiny square of the window of the manager's office, Sam's face was turned towards Dean.
Dean climbed out of the car, collected their bags from the backseat, and walked to meet Sam. He jogged up the stairs behind his brother and waited patiently as Sam fitted the key into the lock and opened the door to their room. The whole time, Dean managed not to look back at the car.
The room smelled of sweat and black coffee. It made a change from the rooms that smelled of sweat and cigarettes, or alcohol and sex, or cigarettes and piss. Otherwise, it was the same room Dean had been staying in since he was four years old.
He dumped his bag and shrugged off his leather jacket. "You want first shower?"
"I don't like the way you think, Dean," said Sam.
Dean nodded at the scratchy polyester bedcover, fingered a hole in the fabric curiously, and said, "Okay, but do you want the first shower?"
Sam moved in close, huge and looming, and being so deep inside Dean's head and now so close physically, Dean wondered if it were possible for Sam to just slip inside his skin, wondered if he'd be able to make himself small enough to fit Sam alongside his bones.
"You process everything by starting at the conclusion that it must be your fault. That it must be something you did wrong." Sam leaned in and his shadow crawled up the bedcover to swallow Dean's. "This isn't a mistake. This isn't something you did wrong. I like this."
Dean snapped around to face him. "You like being inside my head, sure. Y'know, you've said a lot of stupid shit in your life, Sam, but that's the stupidest."
It had been a mistake to turn around. Now, he was looking right in Sam's eyes, and he couldn't stop.
"Why?" said Sam. "Because you don't like being inside your head? Don't you get it?" He caught hold of Dean's shoulder before Dean could turn away again. Briefly, Dean's heartbeat lurched, rushed sideways to center on Sam's hand, like lightning striking the ground, and the sensation made him dizzy. "I've seen everything inside your head, Dean. And I'm not leaving."
"Because you can't."
"Because I don't want to." His grip on Dean's shoulder tightening slightly, Sam drew him in closer. "You put me inside you, Dean. And I'm not going anywhere."
The silence between them whistled, the whine of a radio receiving too strong a signal, and Dean watched helplessly as Sam swiped his tongue over his lips, as he leaned in towards him, mouth tilted towards Dean's. His expression was cautious, curious, and there was a whole wave of that hidden something coming from him, and Dean still couldn't figure out exactly what it was, but he thought he was getting a clue and it terrified him.
"Sam. Sam, stop," he said.
"You don't really want me to," said Sam, but he stopped all the same.
They held like that. Sam's hand on Dean's shoulder, lips dangerously close, and Dean trying to get a grip of what the hell he should do now.
"I'll let you go again, if you want," said Sam, and Sam's tone was neutral but Dean flinched at a sudden unexpected twinge of upset that didn't come from him.
It hurt Sam to say it.
Sam was still talking, still trying to smooth things over. "I'll give you time, if that's really what you want. But I don't know how to prove to you that I really am okay with this, with all of it-"
He broke off, surprised, as Dean slipped his hand under Sam's shirt, rumpled up his t-shirt to touch his belly. Sam hissed in a breath and the muscles clenched under Dean's hand. Jaw set, Dean lifted his own shirt and compared where the wraith had tried to gut him with the soft, pink soreness on Sam's belly.
He was looking in a mirror, and somehow it wasn't at all surprising to see Sam instead of his own reflection.
"I didn't mean to do this to you," said Dean, and he didn't clarify what he was referring to because he wasn't completely sure himself.
"I'm glad you did," said Sam, and he did sound sure.
"I could'a killed you," Dean said.
"You still could," said Sam, and he obviously felt Dean trying to retreat at that, because he held him tighter. "Guess you're gonna have to be more careful with yourself."
Sam wanted to kiss him. Sam's attention was on Dean's mouth and how it would feel under his and whether Dean would let him.
"I guess incest is a side effect of being soul-bonded then," said Dean, because he still wasn't quite able to work out what he wanted to do about Sam wanting to kiss him, because that was 'no going back' territory right there, and what if Sam did it once, and never ever again and they both had to live with the knowledge that Sam had kissed him and never wanted to again?
"I'll want to do it again," Sam murmured. "Often. 'Cause I don't think it's a side effect, Dean. Think it's just… it's just stupid to worry about what our bodies are doing when emotionally we're already…"
"When we're already what?" said Dean. His voice was low and shaky, a not particularly impressive growl.
Sam smiled, put his hand on Dean's face, and said, "This," and kissed him.
:::
Sam slept wrapped around Dean, like he knew how deeply rooted he was inside Dean's psyche and wanted to return the favor. The proximity of Sam's body around his was at odds with how hands-off the Winchesters tended to be as a family, but though Dean could recognize that it wasn't something they did, he couldn't work up the irritation or discomfort necessary to want to throw Sam off.
Instead, he studied the loose thread snaking from the button at the cuff of Sam's wrist, where his arm was slung over Dean's middle, and listened to the deeper thrum of their shared heartbeat.
He felt less like he was dangling from the hook beneath his heart, was reminded less of how his flesh had shredded under its own weight when Hell had him strung up. Felt more like gravity had hold of him.
Sam snuffled at the back of his neck and Dean patted his hand. "S'okay," he mumbled. "I'm here."
Sam's snuffling became a kiss, soft but wet, and Dean laughed awkwardly, even as he bowed his head forward for Sam to do it again.
"I meant it though," said Sam, still slow with sleep. "I don't like the way you think."
Dean went still. His sudden unease vibrated through to Sam, and Sam tucked Dean tighter against him while they waited for the emotion bouncing between them to fall away. Sam let out a shivering breath that was hot over the back of Dean's neck.
"And you gotta stop that, too," he said.
"Can't help the way I think," Dean said gruffly. "This is what I was talking about, Sam, this is what I've put on you, and why I should-"
"Stop it," said Sam. He kept Dean quiet with his own serenity, and Dean laid next to him and listened to Sam's thoughts drifting over him like a late summer breeze. Every time his heartbeat panicked and tried to get away, Sam's brought it back.
Just like gravity, Dean thought.
He kept still and quiet on the bed next to Sam, and idly catalogued the fixed characteristics of every low-rate motel room like this one: at least one broken loop on the drapes so they sagged too low, either a brownish stain on the carpet or cigarette burns in the bedcovers or both, ugly dated furniture that didn't match. This room had them all, and even the pinkish dawn light couldn't do it many favors.
"Stop interrupting," said Sam, and kissed the back of Dean's neck yet again, clingy and openly affectionate, just like he'd been as a kid, which totally screwed with Dean's head.
After a moment, Sam said, "Maybe you really can't help it. But it's still a problem."
Dean turned on the bed as much as he was able to look at Sam. "What is?"
"That you don't realize that… that, sure, you're a jerk a lot of the time but… you're also pretty awesome."
Dean laughed, but something sick twisted in his belly, and instantly Sam's lips were on his skin again.
And Dean was flooded with a feeling he didn't even know but which left no room for anything that wasn't good. The room burned away into light, like the sun coming up all at once right in front of him, and Dean tried to catch his breath, arched on the bed as the sensation kept growing. It felt like his heart had opened right up, the seams torn as all this unfamiliar emotion flowed in, and Dean knew he would never get it shut again, and it was all right.
Because nothing mattered so much as Sam's mouth pressed to the back of Dean's neck, their bodies tangled up together on the cheap motel bed.
"It's okay," Sam whispered. "I'll just have to think it loud enough for both of us."
~end
Break the lock if it don't fit
(Sam/Dean, pg, 7200 words)
Sam and Dean get soul-bonded. Dean doesn't cope well. Title from Florence and the Machine.
It took Sam three days to wake up after the ritual. All that time, he was lying in his hospital bed, as good as dead except for the little beep-beep-beep of the monitor at his side.
Dean didn't worry. He didn't have to. He could feel Sam was alive. The knowledge was more than a double-pulse; it was a second heart suddenly pushing blood around his body. He could feel Sam waking up, could hear it at the back of his head. The hum of silence was thickening, bubbling, like the sound as you swim upwards and approach the surface of the sea, where the thin, clear air is waiting for you.
Dean was impatient, nervous, definitely on edge, but not worried.
Bobby was there when Sam woke up, which was sheer luck. He'd put a lot of himself into working the ritual and was still weak. Dean was there too, which had nothing to do with luck, because Dean pretty much hadn't left Sam's bedside since the accident.
Sam's throat rolled as he swallowed. His eyes moved sluggishly behind his eyelids. And when he opened them, he looked straight at Dean, his gaze so focused it was as though he'd just blinked. The rest of the world faded into mute monochrome, indistinct and hazy, while Sam was painted with excruciating detail, the exact shade of his eyes and the flicker of muscle in his jaw so precise Dean could have written thousand-word essays on them.
"Hey there, kid," said Bobby, his voice a weak growl as he patted Sam's hand awkwardly. "You gave us a scare. How you feeling?"
Sam's face crumpled like he'd just been punched.
"You thought I was gonna die," Sam said to Dean. His hand flew to his chest, and the wire where he was fixed up to the machine snapped a little tauter. He moaned, eyes screwed shut. "You thought nobody would take your soul when you tried to sell it for me. Oh god, Dean."
"Stop it," Dean mumbled through numb lips.
Horror left him cold, sick inside. He felt stripped raw. The feedback loop of his own fear that he was going to lose Sam caught up in Sam's response to it and slammed right back at him. It leaked out of the little box in his mind he'd shoved it in, and Dean couldn't get it back inside because Sam wouldn't let him. Sam wanted to see it, wouldn't leave it alone, opened up the box and peered inside, put his hands in to touch it. And Dean couldn't stop him.
The hook was right inside him, hidden somewhere underneath his heart and sewn into his soul, and Sam had hold of the other end and wouldn't stop tugging it, jerking on it, just like he was tugging the wire from himself to the machine, until it was all going to come loose.
He was all spread open for Sam, all the neat compartments of horrible things straining and shifting, and Dean didn't have room in his mind for what was in his mind.
It emptied out, like something coming adrift inside.
Sam froze, his eyes big and full of light. "I can feel how much you love me," he said.
Dean ran.
:::
"I just… I just didn't want him to die. I thought I was just gonna take a little bit of him hurting and… y'know, take it away. So he could get better." Dean swallowed, flicked his tongue backwards and forwards over the cracked tooth at the back of his mouth, tracing the break. "I just wanted him to get better."
Bobby's breath left him like it was his last. "I said this could happen. Slim chance, but I said it could happen."
Dean was shaking his head before Bobby had even finished speaking. "I didn't know it would feel like this. That he'd feel it like this." His eyes stayed on the glass in front of him, empty except for the dull smear of leftover whiskey in the bottom.
"You were only trying to help," said Bobby.
Again, Dean shook his head. He lifted the glass to his lips and drained the last remnant of alcohol, and there wasn't nearly enough burn to take the taste of his own bile out of his mouth.
"He has to feel what I feel. I couldn't have done anything worse to him."
:::
Knowing where Sam was in the house was like knowing where his own arm was, an awareness so instinctive that Dean didn't even properly register knowing it.
The window was a square of colorless winter sunlight behind Sam, and in its light, he looked pale and a little weaker than he should, like the muscle that packed his body was still sleeping. His expression was miserable, and he didn't look up as Dean approached.
"What are you doing?" said Dean. Sam's lip twitched slightly at the corner, as though Dean bothering to ask was a bad joke.
"I'm thinking about how when you got back from Hell, you didn't know how to connect with me." Sam sniffed and swiped the back of his hand over his mouth. "Everything felt different. You couldn't say the right thing to me, couldn't make me be what you thought you remembered me being."
Dean flushed. "That's private, Sam." He didn't mean to sound so hard, but it wasn't like Sam cared anyway. Sam just shrugged, threw his hands up.
"I don't have a choice! I think about it because you think about it." He considered Dean a moment. "And you think about it a lot." Sam went quiet again, and the blood going through Dean's veins rippled, like someone breathing over the surface of water. "If you'd just said the right thing to me, I'd'a been okay. The fact you broke in Hell, and broke the First Seal with it, would'a been a fuck-up just for you, and not for me and for the rest of the world too. If you just hadn't let me down when I needed you…"
There'd been monsters that'd done this before, worn Sam's face to recite the epic tale of Dean's failures back at him. But it wasn't something Dean had ever gotten used to, and definitely not when it really was Sam saying it, Sam knowing how true it was because he was feeling it.
Dean didn't have anything to say. He never did when it was in his own head, so it wasn't like it being in Sam's head was going to make any damn difference. He thumbed the ring on his finger around in circles, and stared at the scuffed patch on the toe of his boot and at the dark paisley pattern that might be on the carpet under the dirt and dust, blood and alcohol, until his eyes began to sting with forced, aimless intensity.
"Jesus, Dean," said Sam. "Would you just look at me?"
Dean did look at him, and he saw Sam's lower lip wobbling dangerously.
"I'm such a fucking idiot," he said, low and final. "I should learn to just leave well enough alone. I should…" He put his hands up, something like surrender.
Leave.
The idea came to him so unexpectedly and ready-formed that he wasn't sure if it was him thinking of it or Sam.
"No," said Sam. "Don't. Dean-"
"Maybe if I'm further away you won't have to feel so much, you won't be able to pick it up."
His feet were carrying him towards the door, backing him away from Sam, and each inch told him it was a better idea than the one before. They just needed space. Lots of it.
:::
Even with six states between them, Dean still felt as though Sam was always just waiting for him at the next motel room. He drove to cold places, so that when his head started to fill up with feeling, he could get out and stand by the side of the road, until all his consciousness was taken up with quietly freezing to death. He went to big cities and thought carefully about the noise and the traffic and what he was going to have for dinner and how he was going to afford a place to stay tonight.
He hunted and he ate, and sometimes he slept, and he resisted feeling anything.
Sam's frustrated rage slowly disappeared, like the faded ink of an old letter. It was a deafness, an absence that Dean carried with him, tucked behind his heart. But if it was silent for him, then it must be silent for Sam, and better silence than the pathetic mewling of Dean's failures. Better Sam be alone in the silence, than with Dean and Dean's fucked-up feelings for company.
:::
There was a demon teaching fourth-grade in Eugene, Oregon. It fucked the children up without ever laying a hand on them. Its weapons of choice were pointed comments that needled nascent insecurities, and petty injustices that couldn't be fought. Children went through its class and came out the other side just a little bit nastier, just that little bit more twisted.
The man it wore had died six years ago and was rotting on the inside. When Dean pressed his knee into its chest to pin it to the floor, the flesh sagged just slightly, a sickening give.
"Oh man, I'm gonna hurl," said Dean. "You ever think of switching to something a little fresher?"
It stared up at him with its polished black-china eyes and a smile like this was a game and it was winning. "Oh come on, Dean. Not like I'm the only one with something icky on the inside. You're full of a lot worse than a few decomposing organs. And you stink of it. It leaks off you in waves."
"Lucky I got one hell of a pretty exterior," Dean said, voice dropping to a growl to hide the feeling in his voice.
"Lucky Sam," said the demon. "Standing permanently downwind of your stench. Every single worthless thought you have, you give to him. I don't think that's what Daddy meant when he taught you to share with your little brother."
It laughed through a gurgle of blood, black and glistening, as Dean slammed Ruby's knife into its throat.
"You don't even know you're doing it!" it shrieked. "You should just blow your brains out now, 'cause until your head's empty you're just gonna keep dumping this crap on Sam."
Afterwards, Dean wiped the knife clean on the corner of the formerly oatmeal rug. He got to his feet and stepped over the body on his way to the door.
It was dark outside, and the night air was thick and wet, curling instantly inside his mouth and around the back of his neck, lying cold over his sweat. He went down the street and his gait was awkward, clumsy, like someone had switched his ankles over without warning him. He climbed into the Impala, rested his hands on the steering wheel and stared for a second at how they trembled. Hesitantly, he lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror. His own face looked back at him, and it was nothing like company.
"Need to be empty," he said to his reflection.
"Not like you can be better," his reflection agreed.
:::
In San Francisco, Caro tried to teach Dean to meditate. Caro's earrings never matched and she moved as if subject to different laws of human anatomy.
Dean sat in a block of afternoon sunshine, cross-legged on the floor with retired old men, and housewives, and students. He ignored the strange looks angled at him, knew that he seemed absurdly out of place, and concentrated on Caro.
"Empty your mind," said Caro. "Let it all go. Each time a thought enters your head, let it go with your next breath out." Her hands turned inwards and outwards as though she were demonstrating a dance move. "Find the quiet inside yourself."
One of the old men coughed. A student's jewelry rattled as she settled. Outside, the sun moved and the room filled up with bright stillness.
Dean closed his eyes. He felt warm, his skin tingling where the sunlight touched it.
Sam would probably laugh at him for trying this hippie, New Age, crystals and scented candles bullshit.
Dean jerked away from thinking about Sam. He tried to fill his head with the blank white page Caro kept on about, the blank white page and the peaceful field and the beautiful beach and the glittering spread of night stars, tried one image after another until he'd left Sam's name behind, lost in the distance with Sam himself.
He took a deep breath.
"Every breath fills you with golden light," said Caro. "Feel it light and pure inside your lungs."
Dean didn't even let his lips twitch. He approached it with the same single-minded determination he'd brought to every one of Dad's drills, because this was necessary. This was for Sam. This would save Sam from all the crap sharing Dean's psyche would put on him.
Golden light in my lungs, he told himself, and he pictured it being drawn inside his body, concentrated on how it washed through his blood and reached every stretched-out point of him.
Occasionally a stray thought would drift into Dean's mind, and he would sweep it away without even allowing himself to consider what it was. He was aware of the raw pinkness of the insides of his eyelids, lit up by sunshine, and the whispering murmur of everyone else breathing, and far away there was the smooth hum of downtown traffic. And then even that consciousness whited out, until there was only himself.
The rhythm of his own breathing moved through him. He felt sleepy, and yet alert. The muscles in his body relaxed but were not heavy. He was completely at peace, hollowed out by the golden light, empty.
Breathe in, and breathe out. Breathe in, and-
"Dean!"
Dean's eyes flew open and he jerked around, a half-formed curse on his lips. But Sam wasn't there. The impression was so intense that, for a second, Dean couldn't actually believe that Sam wasn't there. He scanned the room frantically, expecting Sam to stop fucking hiding at any minute.
The rest of the class was staring at him. Caro had taken a tentative step towards him, wringing her hands together.
But Sam wasn't there.
:::
Even hours later, back at the motel, Dean felt rattled, over-sensitive, like he'd lost a layer of skin. And then he got angry and guilty for feeling like that because obviously the bond between him and Sam was still functioning, and it was yet more of his angst he was shoveling onto Sam. Not like Sam didn't have enough to deal with as it was. And then the anger and guilt for feeling like that would be leaking on to Sam too and Dean just. Just wanted it to stop.
He didn't know what he dared do, what he could do that wouldn't recoil back onto Sam. He was still frozen in indecision when his cellphone buzzed. It was Sam. Halfway across the room from his phone, Dean knew it was Sam.
"You didn't do it on purpose, then," said Sam, by way of greeting. "I've been leaving you alone because I thought that was what you wanted, and, 'cause, well, I didn’t deal too well with it at first, I know. But this afternoon, when you reached out, I thought…" He sighed. "You still need time, I guess." It could have been a question, but if it was, Dean didn't answer.
Sam sighed again, an irritated huff of breath. "I don't know what you think it was like before. You didn't do the bang-up job of keeping your feelings under wrap that you seem to think you did. I saw when you were hurting, Dean. I saw it. Even if you wouldn't tell me why, I saw it. Every time. All that's changed is you can't shut me out anymore."
He hung up and left Dean with the numb recognition of having failed again.
:::
Sam called again the next night. Dean was two hundred miles out of San Francisco, leaning up against the Impala on the roadside, with no destination in mind and barely enough money for gas.
Dean only answered the phone because he felt a strange thrill of anticipation, impatience, and even if he wasn't convinced the emotion had started with him, it was hard to ignore.
"That guy at the diner checked you out, and you thought 'maybe'. Then you thought 'no', because you thought I'd be there too." Sam said it in a child-like rush, vicious and eager. "In your head. In the bed with you."
"Threesomes never were my thing," said Dean lightly, as his stomach rolled. "Someone always feels a little left out." He swallowed and gazed out at the scratchy, yellow sunset. "How much do you… How much do you feel - feel me?"
Sam laughed. "Everything, Dean. I feel everything, like it's happening to me. I know a ghoul tore you up real good, and I know about that time you got drunk, and I know you were sleeping in the car for a few nights 'til that ankle you broke a few years back started aching during the day. And I know that you're breaking up inside to hear all this."
Dean's vision blurred with tears as a whole body shudder went through him.
"But do you know why you're not getting a shit-ton of angst from me about this? Why you're not feeling anything heavy from me? Because I don't mind it. I like it." He sounded almost savage, and Dean shook his head.
"No, I put this on you, and I thought I was helping but -"
"Dean, listen to me. You finally can't shut me out. You can't tell me you're fine when I can see you're not. And you can't not trust me because you'll know when I'm lying. I got what I wanted. I got you."
The unfamiliar shape of what Sam had just said pressed them both into silence.
A car swept by on the road and Dean swayed slightly in its wake. He wiped his hand over his dry mouth, and Sam laughed again.
"That freaks you out." He felt Sam's grin, felt its curve and its light. "It's okay, freaks me out too."
Something caught in Dean's throat, but he forced the words out all the same. "Good. It should freak you out. Because this is… this is not right, Sam. You'll see." He could hear Sam protesting, a new thread of alarm in his voice, but he kept talking. "Couple of years down the line, this thing'll go away and you'll realize how not right this all is. And you'll thank me for doing this."
He ended the call.
:::
Maybe Dean just hadn't gone far enough. The U.S. was big but maybe it wasn't big enough.
He spread a map out over the hood of the car, the highways rising up and dropping down like a roller coaster ride over the creases in the paper, and thought about how far he could go.
He'd cross oceans to get this - himself - away from Sam, to get somewhere it couldn't hurt his brother anymore. He'd get on a ship and he'd sail to the horizon and drop over the edge of it if he had to.
But there was still land Dean could put between them. Between finger and thumb, he measured the span between where he'd left Sam and the red border of South America. And there was more below the border, a whole landmass of countries to lose himself in.
That was Dean's destination: far enough away. He didn't know how far exactly that was, but he drove and figured he'd know it when he hit it.
He made it down to Hermosillo in the first day, and down to Torreón within the week. The thought occurred to him that, every time he looked at the map or read a signpost, he was effectively telling Sam exactly where he was, and he wondered how long it would be until the signal started to grow weak, until the radio between them crackled into snowy static.
He survived on his own halting Spanish and the much better English of the people he met along the way. Ate in cheap roadside diners and slept in cheaper hotels, while all the time he filled the blank page in his head with the abstract shapes of the shadows cast on the dusty road by the agaves.
In a town a few miles south of Veracruz, where the air smelled of orange blossoms and soda, and the hillside was purpled with pitcher sage, Dean found a wraith. He killed it, he was pretty sure he killed it - so much blood and ichor and the screaming sound it made caught in his ears like some catchy song he wanted to hum along to - but not before it got him right back.
He stumbled back into town, tripping over dust and bouncing between the line of cars parked on the road. It was only when he pushed himself back upright that he saw the bloody handprint on the hood of one car he'd touched, a smear of blood on another's window, and when he turned around, he saw the sprinkled trail of blood, like little black paw prints, gently pitter-pattering at his feet.
He took his hand away from his belly, and he wasn't sure what it was doing there in the first place. He looked at his fingers and, frowning, wiped the blood onto his jeans. Up ahead was a bar. Its doors stood open and Dean weaved towards its music and light. There was a girl coming out, her head tilted back to smile at someone still inside. Then she turned towards Dean and her eyes went wide.
Dean stretched out a hand and blood dripped freely from his fingers.
"A little help? " said Dean. He passed out.
:::
He was lying on the back seat of the Impala, and the roof had flown away so that he could watch the sun streaming along overhead, so bright he had to blink back its light and focus on its comet-tail instead, whiter against a white sky. The road was bumpy, juddering and shuddering underneath his back.
People were talking, but not to him, so Dean didn't interrupt. They sounded kind of busy anyway.
Something moved in his hand and Dean looked down, and saw fingers, fingers that didn't belong to him. He traced the fingers to a wrist and an arm, and finally to a pretty girl's face.
"You're gonna be okay," she told him. "Do you have someone you want me to call?"
Sam.
"No," said Dean. "Not anymore." The breath rushed out of him, leaving him wet and shivering inside. He said the words like the line of a poem that finally made sense. "I can never go home."
Poor screwed-in-the-head Constance Welch. Every night she was out in the nowhere nothingness, face turned to watch for the approach of headlights that could never take her where she wanted to go. Every night on her own, remembering what she'd done, and why she could never go home.
He clawed at the girl's hand, twisting off his back to get at her as much as he could, but something was holding him down.
"Am I wearing white?" he demanded. "Quick, am I wearing white? Don't make me go out on the road… Please, I don't wanna go out on the road."
He grasped at her hand but she slipped away, barred from him by the hustle of people in medical scrubs.
:::
Her name was Julia, and she told him that the first time he behaved inappropriately around her she would kick his ass. Dean believed her too.
"You can stay with me until you're feeling stronger," she said. She tossed his wallet down on the end of his hospital bed. "I looked through this. You have lots of IDs but not much money. So we should go now."
"You don't have to do this," said Dean. "I'll be fine once I get outta here."
She ignored him, holding up his cellphone instead. "And you have twenty-three missed calls from Sam. That's so far today. They've been calling a lot." She cocked her head at Dean. "So, is Sam your wife?"
Dean swung his legs over the side of the bed and concentrated on not letting the nauseous, wrong sensation in his stitched up belly make him vomit or pass out. He shook his head, eyes fixed on his bare toes. "Not married," he said.
Julia rolled her eyes, and Dean wasn't sure whether it was in response to his denial or his efforts to stand up. "Fine, long-term girlfriend then. I've been burned before. I've gotten pretty good at spotting the guys who are taken." She huffed again and then offered him her arm to get him upright.
"Your clothes are on the chair," she said. "I gave you a t-shirt that belonged to my ex-boyfriend, 'cause your one was all bloody."
She ducked out of the cubicle and pulled the curtain closed, but Dean could see her shadow, slender and tall, moving just the other side. He dressed carefully and quickly.
On the way out to Julia's car, Dean cast her a sidelong look. Her thin floral skirt fluttered like butterflies around her bronzed legs. A thin tassel of bells hung from her purse, making silvery music as she walked. She couldn't have been more than twenty.
"So how'd you know I'm not some crazy psycho who's gonna butcher you second you turn your back on me?" he said.
She cast him a pitying look. "State you're in, you couldn't butcher a doped up kitten. You almost died." She paused, midway through unlocking the car door. "I heard what you did. I heard they found that thing's body. Up in the hills. I think you saved a lot of people."
Dean lapsed in and out of sleep on the drive back into town. The radio turned up loud, Julia slipped fluidly between singing along to the music and cheerfully cursing the other drivers on the road. Sunshine stretched the cyan sky out wide, turned the dust in the hot, still air to gold and made the hilltops glow with unnatural color.
Here, Sam took on the unreal but insistent quality of a dream that stayed with you throughout the day, a moment of madness remembered in lucidity. And yet he was still more tangible than Julia. She was warm and beautiful and sitting right next to Dean, and she was flat, all exteriors, just a pretty paper cutout.
Dean could never go home.
His cellphone buzzed and Dean swallowed, jerked his face towards the window.
Julia tsked. "You should answer that. It's cruel not to."
"Crueler to answer," said Dean.
She tsked again and turned the music up louder.
:::
Julia was a bartender at the bar where Dean had stumbled into her. Whenever she went to work, she'd give Dean the TV remote and an invitation to help himself to something from the fridge if he got hungry.
This was fine for the first couple days, until Dean started to feel stronger, and decided that Julia's fridge was kind of bare to start with and that daytime TV sucked. There were still a few bills in his wallet and he figured some fresh air might hold back the rising tide of crazed desperation he was feeling. Either that or a bullet in the brainpan.
He didn't know his way around town, so he went to where he'd left the Impala.
It was gone. Just an empty space where he'd left it. And it seemed for the best. Just like if he went back to Bobby's, it'd be best if Sam were gone. Moved on without him. The fewer things he had to care about, the fewer things he'd damage with his fucking up. He took a deep breath and let it go, and he let the Impala go with it.
Standing in the parking lot, a barren space baked by the sun, Dean turned a slow circle, scanning the blocky line of buildings for anything that looked like a grocery store. His gaze caught on the old woman across the street who was staring back at him. He flashed a smile, which she didn't return.
"Hi," he called out. "You know where I can find the nearest store?"
"You have two shadows," she said.
Instantly, Dean's eyes dropped to the ground, twisting around like a dog trying to catch its tail, and she laughed at him.
"Stupid," she said. She clapped her chest, rings around her fat knuckles glinting in the light. "In here," she said. "There are two of you in here."
"How do you know that?" Dean said, crossing the street towards her. "What do you - do you know how to break it?"
She appraised him, cocking her head to look the whole length of him. "You almost did," she said.
"How?" Dean barked, and then he stopped, because he got it. He could feel the stitches running along his belly, holding him shut. He licked his lips. "If I die, it breaks?"
She pulled a face, and it was like an invisible hand carving her wrinkles deeper. "Stupid," she said again. "Doesn't death break most things?"
It was just them on the street, just them in the town, just them and the heat and the scratched ground for miles and miles, light years before you reached the only other thing that existed: Sam.
Dean's breath came a little fast, as though he was trying to do as much breathing as he could before he never did it again.
"Of course," said the old woman, "you die, he dies. He dies, you die." She twisted the gnarled finger of one hand around a finger on the other, and held them up for Dean to see. "You should be more careful."
Can never go home. Can't even die. The future rolled out in front of him, like projections of a plague's spread. He would live miserably and alone, and he would do everything he could to prolong that existence, because it belonged to Sam, too. Dean turned away from the old woman, into the sunlight, and let it blind him.
Then his cellphone began to buzz against his thigh and he saw Sam - phone against his ear and lips pursed, fingers tapping on the steering wheel as he waited for Dean to pick up, frustrated and angry. And Dean was angry and frustrated with himself too for not picking up, even if it was really Sam feeling it anyway. So he picked up.
"Okay," said Sam. "That's it. I've given you long enough."
A car rolled up alongside Dean, and it was the Impala, and somehow it had Sam in it, looking up at him through the rolled-down window. Tanned and healthy and in the flesh. Sam threw the cellphone down on the seat beside him and said, "Get in."
Dean didn't have a grip on the universe anymore. It was strange and unpredictable, and he only recognized it as the one he belonged in because it was all still centered on Sammy.
After a second, Dean lowered the cellphone from his ear. It was another second before he got in.
"I have tried to be patient," said Sam. "I know you and me, we're different. We process things differently. But I know how you're feeling, man, and giving you time and space just isn't gonna cut it this time."
Being with Sam again was almost too much to take. It was like the first day of feeling well again after a long sickness, where just being able to stand upright makes you feel superhuman. And after the first time he tried, Dean realized that looking straight at Sam made his head go funny and he kept his eyes on Sam's feet instead, which were bizarrely intriguing all by themselves.
"I've been right behind you since California, and you've just been getting worse. And I'm not even gonna discuss the Constance Welch crap because… dude, no."
Sam was still talking and Dean was still fascinated by the loop of the laces in his sneakers.
"You leave anything at that girl's place that you wanna go back for?"
It was a question. Dean understood that before he understood that he needed to answer it.
"Need to put food in her fridge," he said.
There was no raised eyebrow at that, no bewildered frown. Sam just nodded, like he understood perfectly, which of course he fucking did, because he was inside Dean's head.
:::
It didn't escape Dean's notice that they were heading back up to the border. He tried to be irritated about it, but was blanketed in good feeling from Sam, like Dean was a sulky child being tucked into his bed by an indulgent mother.
Sam was relieved and confident, which was awesome, and he was something else too. Dean tried to explore that something else, to make some recognizable shape out of it. But Sam wasn't letting him. Which meant it wasn't awesome and that Sam was trying to protect him from it. And wasn't it just typical of Sam to get the hang of managing this soul-bleed quicker than Dean?
Sam smirked, and Dean hurriedly stopped exploring, filled his head with Led Zeppelin, and ignored Sam tapping his finger on the steering wheel in time to the beat.
:::
The motel was situated in the middle of the desert, dropped like litter in the dust and instantly forgotten.
While Sam went in to get a room, Dean sat in the car and watched the stars prick through the dusk sky. He thought about just driving, hitting the road and not looking back. Again. The car keys hung from the ignition and glinted silver. He could do a better job. He'd get on a plane this time, even if it killed him, and he'd change his name and never stay more than a few days together in one place.
Sam would still find him.
In the tiny square of the window of the manager's office, Sam's face was turned towards Dean.
Dean climbed out of the car, collected their bags from the backseat, and walked to meet Sam. He jogged up the stairs behind his brother and waited patiently as Sam fitted the key into the lock and opened the door to their room. The whole time, Dean managed not to look back at the car.
The room smelled of sweat and black coffee. It made a change from the rooms that smelled of sweat and cigarettes, or alcohol and sex, or cigarettes and piss. Otherwise, it was the same room Dean had been staying in since he was four years old.
He dumped his bag and shrugged off his leather jacket. "You want first shower?"
"I don't like the way you think, Dean," said Sam.
Dean nodded at the scratchy polyester bedcover, fingered a hole in the fabric curiously, and said, "Okay, but do you want the first shower?"
Sam moved in close, huge and looming, and being so deep inside Dean's head and now so close physically, Dean wondered if it were possible for Sam to just slip inside his skin, wondered if he'd be able to make himself small enough to fit Sam alongside his bones.
"You process everything by starting at the conclusion that it must be your fault. That it must be something you did wrong." Sam leaned in and his shadow crawled up the bedcover to swallow Dean's. "This isn't a mistake. This isn't something you did wrong. I like this."
Dean snapped around to face him. "You like being inside my head, sure. Y'know, you've said a lot of stupid shit in your life, Sam, but that's the stupidest."
It had been a mistake to turn around. Now, he was looking right in Sam's eyes, and he couldn't stop.
"Why?" said Sam. "Because you don't like being inside your head? Don't you get it?" He caught hold of Dean's shoulder before Dean could turn away again. Briefly, Dean's heartbeat lurched, rushed sideways to center on Sam's hand, like lightning striking the ground, and the sensation made him dizzy. "I've seen everything inside your head, Dean. And I'm not leaving."
"Because you can't."
"Because I don't want to." His grip on Dean's shoulder tightening slightly, Sam drew him in closer. "You put me inside you, Dean. And I'm not going anywhere."
The silence between them whistled, the whine of a radio receiving too strong a signal, and Dean watched helplessly as Sam swiped his tongue over his lips, as he leaned in towards him, mouth tilted towards Dean's. His expression was cautious, curious, and there was a whole wave of that hidden something coming from him, and Dean still couldn't figure out exactly what it was, but he thought he was getting a clue and it terrified him.
"Sam. Sam, stop," he said.
"You don't really want me to," said Sam, but he stopped all the same.
They held like that. Sam's hand on Dean's shoulder, lips dangerously close, and Dean trying to get a grip of what the hell he should do now.
"I'll let you go again, if you want," said Sam, and Sam's tone was neutral but Dean flinched at a sudden unexpected twinge of upset that didn't come from him.
It hurt Sam to say it.
Sam was still talking, still trying to smooth things over. "I'll give you time, if that's really what you want. But I don't know how to prove to you that I really am okay with this, with all of it-"
He broke off, surprised, as Dean slipped his hand under Sam's shirt, rumpled up his t-shirt to touch his belly. Sam hissed in a breath and the muscles clenched under Dean's hand. Jaw set, Dean lifted his own shirt and compared where the wraith had tried to gut him with the soft, pink soreness on Sam's belly.
He was looking in a mirror, and somehow it wasn't at all surprising to see Sam instead of his own reflection.
"I didn't mean to do this to you," said Dean, and he didn't clarify what he was referring to because he wasn't completely sure himself.
"I'm glad you did," said Sam, and he did sound sure.
"I could'a killed you," Dean said.
"You still could," said Sam, and he obviously felt Dean trying to retreat at that, because he held him tighter. "Guess you're gonna have to be more careful with yourself."
Sam wanted to kiss him. Sam's attention was on Dean's mouth and how it would feel under his and whether Dean would let him.
"I guess incest is a side effect of being soul-bonded then," said Dean, because he still wasn't quite able to work out what he wanted to do about Sam wanting to kiss him, because that was 'no going back' territory right there, and what if Sam did it once, and never ever again and they both had to live with the knowledge that Sam had kissed him and never wanted to again?
"I'll want to do it again," Sam murmured. "Often. 'Cause I don't think it's a side effect, Dean. Think it's just… it's just stupid to worry about what our bodies are doing when emotionally we're already…"
"When we're already what?" said Dean. His voice was low and shaky, a not particularly impressive growl.
Sam smiled, put his hand on Dean's face, and said, "This," and kissed him.
:::
Sam slept wrapped around Dean, like he knew how deeply rooted he was inside Dean's psyche and wanted to return the favor. The proximity of Sam's body around his was at odds with how hands-off the Winchesters tended to be as a family, but though Dean could recognize that it wasn't something they did, he couldn't work up the irritation or discomfort necessary to want to throw Sam off.
Instead, he studied the loose thread snaking from the button at the cuff of Sam's wrist, where his arm was slung over Dean's middle, and listened to the deeper thrum of their shared heartbeat.
He felt less like he was dangling from the hook beneath his heart, was reminded less of how his flesh had shredded under its own weight when Hell had him strung up. Felt more like gravity had hold of him.
Sam snuffled at the back of his neck and Dean patted his hand. "S'okay," he mumbled. "I'm here."
Sam's snuffling became a kiss, soft but wet, and Dean laughed awkwardly, even as he bowed his head forward for Sam to do it again.
"I meant it though," said Sam, still slow with sleep. "I don't like the way you think."
Dean went still. His sudden unease vibrated through to Sam, and Sam tucked Dean tighter against him while they waited for the emotion bouncing between them to fall away. Sam let out a shivering breath that was hot over the back of Dean's neck.
"And you gotta stop that, too," he said.
"Can't help the way I think," Dean said gruffly. "This is what I was talking about, Sam, this is what I've put on you, and why I should-"
"Stop it," said Sam. He kept Dean quiet with his own serenity, and Dean laid next to him and listened to Sam's thoughts drifting over him like a late summer breeze. Every time his heartbeat panicked and tried to get away, Sam's brought it back.
Just like gravity, Dean thought.
He kept still and quiet on the bed next to Sam, and idly catalogued the fixed characteristics of every low-rate motel room like this one: at least one broken loop on the drapes so they sagged too low, either a brownish stain on the carpet or cigarette burns in the bedcovers or both, ugly dated furniture that didn't match. This room had them all, and even the pinkish dawn light couldn't do it many favors.
"Stop interrupting," said Sam, and kissed the back of Dean's neck yet again, clingy and openly affectionate, just like he'd been as a kid, which totally screwed with Dean's head.
After a moment, Sam said, "Maybe you really can't help it. But it's still a problem."
Dean turned on the bed as much as he was able to look at Sam. "What is?"
"That you don't realize that… that, sure, you're a jerk a lot of the time but… you're also pretty awesome."
Dean laughed, but something sick twisted in his belly, and instantly Sam's lips were on his skin again.
And Dean was flooded with a feeling he didn't even know but which left no room for anything that wasn't good. The room burned away into light, like the sun coming up all at once right in front of him, and Dean tried to catch his breath, arched on the bed as the sensation kept growing. It felt like his heart had opened right up, the seams torn as all this unfamiliar emotion flowed in, and Dean knew he would never get it shut again, and it was all right.
Because nothing mattered so much as Sam's mouth pressed to the back of Dean's neck, their bodies tangled up together on the cheap motel bed.
"It's okay," Sam whispered. "I'll just have to think it loud enough for both of us."
~end