Fic: Reliquary (1/1)
Title: Reliquary
Rating: R
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Word Count: 1,862
Summary: Dean’s not going to take this, sitting up or lying down. Spoilers through 6.01 - Exile On Main Street.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author’s Notes: Basically, janie_tangerine encouraged punching. So I went there a little bit.
Reliquary
“No.”
It’s a word Dean’s intimately familiar with; comfortable with. He knows the ins and the outs of that word.
He just isn’t particularly good at using it where his brother’s concerned, is all. Even now.
Sam turns, and there’s that fucking crinkle in his forehead that he gets -- that Dean had convinced himself he’d forgotten, except no, it’s just the same; he shifts his weight, puts his hands on his hips like he’s got a goddamn bone to pick and maybe he does, but Dean’s not interested in letting him get that far.
“No,” and the keys rattle in Sam’s pocket, in Dean’s hands, and there is broken glass and creature corpses and spilled fucking blood and that was never meant to come here, never meant to follow this far.
“You don’t get to just,” and Dean breathes it in, harsh and heavy and a little like gasping, grasping at straws as his gaze ricochets, catches on flat, lifeless versions of Lisa’s smile and Ben’s hairline and the cracks in frame-glass that didn’t shatter, not all the way.
“You don’t get to just walk away,” Dean finally manages, finally scrapes from the bottom of his throat in a rasp that won’t move any mountains, won’t fight any wars; maybe because he’s forgotten how, or maybe because he’s already lost, and there’s a fucking driver that’s shining in the way the moonlight’s dying, the sun’s just coming up -- it’s all blacks and whites that look the same as greys to Dean, because this is the kind of shit that he can’t think about. These are the things he had to let go of if he was going to survive.
And Sam, well, he looks like he wants to speak, but every time Dean hears that voice, something he thought was dead inside him springs back to life, intent on fire and destruction, and he’s had enough of it; he’s had enough.
“You don’t get off that easy,” he spits, the force hard against the sour taste beneath his tongue, the raw patch where he’d caught his cheek between his teeth on the way down, the way back; and Sam shuts the fuck up, because even at their worst, their best, their normal-that-could-never-be, Dean’s never looked at Sam like that. Some bridges just never got crossed.
So Dean breathes, collects himself; he’s re-fucking-spectable, and those are his goddamn golf clubs, and he’s got work in the morning and blood to scrub out of the damn carpet and they’re out of milk and Raisin Bran; he was supposed to pick some up -- he needs to remember who his is now; who he isn’t. “You don’t get to walk, Sam. Not this time.”
Sam sighs, lets out that low kind of hiss where the air collects in his chest so that his collarbones heave with it, where the breath comes out all at once and little by little and it’s like the world stops to watch and to listen for it, until it’s done, except Dean can’t. Dean won’t, because he’d waited for it for too fucking long and it had cut too fucking deep. “Dean-”
“Twelve fucking months, Sam. An entire goddamn year. You do not get to treat that like it’s nothing.”
“You were happy.” There was a record player, once, when they were kids; one of those huge set ups, all heavy and unwieldy, left by the previous owners of the shack they’d been squatting in while Dad checked up on some leads in a nameless Midwestern town that Dean knows was Bladensburg, Iowa -- not that it matters any, not that it ever did. But there was a record player, and it skipped, and Dean would play Cass Elliot and Peter, Paul and Mary because that’s all that was there, just because the repetition -- the meaningless catch of words that should have held sway -- pissed the fuck out of Sam, and Dean took his laughs wherever he could get them.
He’d put good money on the fact that Sam doesn’t remember that, anymore. That he’d never bothered to remember in the first place.
There’s blood on his goddamn shoes.
“Happy?” he asks, incredulous, a little crazed, and his throat’s dry, and he needs a drink, and he’s caught between wondering if there’s whiskey above the sink from Before -- from the time Dean tries to ignore but can’t, not now, because the crux of it’s standing right in front of him complete with his ugly floppy hair -- and wondering whether anyone changed the cartridge in the Brita; and he’s smiling, almost smiling except not at all, and Sam would notice that if Sam still knew him.
He doesn’t know if Sam notices, before Dean pulls his arm back and sinks a left hook to his brother’s jaw. He doesn’t really care.
Of course he fucking cares.
“I was shattered, man,” he wrenches, lips cracking and voice thin as he feels the pressure build behind his eyes again, and it’s almost second nature, at this point, that emotion turned physical like an ache, like a wound; he knows it. “I’d just lost my brother,” and Sam’s still reeling from the impact, jaw hung loose as he cups the point of contact, and Dean can see something dark collect just at the seam of Sam’s mouth, at the corners. It’s not satisfying, exactly, but he doesn’t feel any guilt.
“I’d just failed the only person I had left. I’d just let him walk into Hell, even when I knew,” and Sam doesn’t look up, doesn’t move forward or back when Dean takes a staggering step toward him, less intentional and more because he can’t keep his footing, his balance; has to move; “even when I knew exactly what he was in for, what was waiting. I watched him. I told him I was okay with it.” And he thinks maybe, just maybe, that Sam flinches, that he feels something; but he can’t be sure, and he doesn’t have the benefit of experience anymore, doesn’t have the assurance of knowing a man’s secrets and tells like the scars on his own soul.
One lie does not equal another.
His body shakes on the inhale, but the breath is steadier than he deserves.
“The only thing I’d ever known,” Dean grinds hard through clenched teeth, his eyes focused elsewhere when he feels Sam’s gaze shift to him, finally -- not soon enough; “taking care of your sorry ass,” and Dean knows it like a loss, like relief in his gut when Sam’s attention falls from him in the face of that truth, that reality; “and I’d fucked that up more than just royally.”
Dean wants to laugh, hysterically; it comes out more like a strangled hiccup, a choked little moan. “I might as well have damned your soul to Hell myself.”
He bites his lip until the beat in the blood below threatens to burst, and there’s silence around him and in him, but he cannot know it; he is not silent.
“So happy’s the last thing I was, you bastard,” he says, deflated, defeated, and he’s suddenly close, so close to Sam that he’s scared of it, raging with it, furious and frightened and teetering on the edge of oblivion because Jesus, things were fucked before, but this is something else. “Happy wasn’t even on my fucking radar.”
This is something else, because he has the only thing he’s wanted since wanting was worth a damn; he’s got his brother, like a fucking miracle, and he can’t even be happy. Can’t even bask in the glory of that gift; more like a curse. Like always.
He’s still, and Sam’s near enough that his eyes have to cross if he’s going to see anything more than a blur of the brother he’s lost, and found, and lost, and found, and lost and maybe found again, but Dean isn’t sure, won’t ever be sure because Dean’s not sure of anything anymore; not people, and not himself. He can breathe his brother in from the distance, the lack thereof; and they’re close, like maybe they once were, always had been -- or maybe never, maybe not like this before, because Dean doesn’t remember, won’t let himself recall.
The taste when he sucks the air, his brother’s breath, in -- it’s bitter, and Dean might have chalked it up to a whole fucking year of change and inevitability, except that he knows some things are constant. Some things weather time without giving away.
He knows.
“You’re different,” Dean says, and Sam’s jaw tightens, the bruise blossoming in the half-light, and maybe that’s the only way Dean can matter, now; the only way to leave a mark on this man he doesn’t know, can’t forget.
Won’t ever forget.
“It’s not just the Pit,” and Dean should shut the fuck up about the things he knows, doesn’t know, but he won’t. “It’s...” and Sam’s mouth opens, his eyes lidded heavy, lashes splayed and thick. “You’re not you.”
And then Sam looks up, like the flip of a switch, and his gaze is bright, inhuman; flushed black like dusk, and deeper -- and Dean swallows, hard, because maybe the monsters aren’t the only things breaking the rules, these days.
Because maybe there’s a poison running through his veins that’s less Djinn-juice and more something... else.
He blinks, and it’s gone; and where the spark of something vile, something vicious had been, there’s only blankness, only the hazel Dean knows, and just glimmer of the feeling he remembers -- the passion that made his brother special, that made him Sammy.
It’s faint, and it’s buried far; for all Dean knows, it’s wishful thinking and ill-cast shadows, taunting shaft of light -- but Dean’s only ever known faith in the faithless, whether he’ll admit it or not.
So he leans in, seeks out something familiar under all of the new and the strange and the wrong; and someone -- not quite Sam, maybe not ever Sam again -- kisses back. And Dean sighs, doesn’t pull away, even though he should. Fuck yes, he should.
He’s in so much deeper than he ever could have known.
Rating: R
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Word Count: 1,862
Summary: Dean’s not going to take this, sitting up or lying down. Spoilers through 6.01 - Exile On Main Street.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author’s Notes: Basically, janie_tangerine encouraged punching. So I went there a little bit.
Reliquary
“No.”
It’s a word Dean’s intimately familiar with; comfortable with. He knows the ins and the outs of that word.
He just isn’t particularly good at using it where his brother’s concerned, is all. Even now.
Sam turns, and there’s that fucking crinkle in his forehead that he gets -- that Dean had convinced himself he’d forgotten, except no, it’s just the same; he shifts his weight, puts his hands on his hips like he’s got a goddamn bone to pick and maybe he does, but Dean’s not interested in letting him get that far.
“No,” and the keys rattle in Sam’s pocket, in Dean’s hands, and there is broken glass and creature corpses and spilled fucking blood and that was never meant to come here, never meant to follow this far.
“You don’t get to just,” and Dean breathes it in, harsh and heavy and a little like gasping, grasping at straws as his gaze ricochets, catches on flat, lifeless versions of Lisa’s smile and Ben’s hairline and the cracks in frame-glass that didn’t shatter, not all the way.
“You don’t get to just walk away,” Dean finally manages, finally scrapes from the bottom of his throat in a rasp that won’t move any mountains, won’t fight any wars; maybe because he’s forgotten how, or maybe because he’s already lost, and there’s a fucking driver that’s shining in the way the moonlight’s dying, the sun’s just coming up -- it’s all blacks and whites that look the same as greys to Dean, because this is the kind of shit that he can’t think about. These are the things he had to let go of if he was going to survive.
And Sam, well, he looks like he wants to speak, but every time Dean hears that voice, something he thought was dead inside him springs back to life, intent on fire and destruction, and he’s had enough of it; he’s had enough.
“You don’t get off that easy,” he spits, the force hard against the sour taste beneath his tongue, the raw patch where he’d caught his cheek between his teeth on the way down, the way back; and Sam shuts the fuck up, because even at their worst, their best, their normal-that-could-never-be, Dean’s never looked at Sam like that. Some bridges just never got crossed.
So Dean breathes, collects himself; he’s re-fucking-spectable, and those are his goddamn golf clubs, and he’s got work in the morning and blood to scrub out of the damn carpet and they’re out of milk and Raisin Bran; he was supposed to pick some up -- he needs to remember who his is now; who he isn’t. “You don’t get to walk, Sam. Not this time.”
Sam sighs, lets out that low kind of hiss where the air collects in his chest so that his collarbones heave with it, where the breath comes out all at once and little by little and it’s like the world stops to watch and to listen for it, until it’s done, except Dean can’t. Dean won’t, because he’d waited for it for too fucking long and it had cut too fucking deep. “Dean-”
“Twelve fucking months, Sam. An entire goddamn year. You do not get to treat that like it’s nothing.”
“You were happy.” There was a record player, once, when they were kids; one of those huge set ups, all heavy and unwieldy, left by the previous owners of the shack they’d been squatting in while Dad checked up on some leads in a nameless Midwestern town that Dean knows was Bladensburg, Iowa -- not that it matters any, not that it ever did. But there was a record player, and it skipped, and Dean would play Cass Elliot and Peter, Paul and Mary because that’s all that was there, just because the repetition -- the meaningless catch of words that should have held sway -- pissed the fuck out of Sam, and Dean took his laughs wherever he could get them.
He’d put good money on the fact that Sam doesn’t remember that, anymore. That he’d never bothered to remember in the first place.
There’s blood on his goddamn shoes.
“Happy?” he asks, incredulous, a little crazed, and his throat’s dry, and he needs a drink, and he’s caught between wondering if there’s whiskey above the sink from Before -- from the time Dean tries to ignore but can’t, not now, because the crux of it’s standing right in front of him complete with his ugly floppy hair -- and wondering whether anyone changed the cartridge in the Brita; and he’s smiling, almost smiling except not at all, and Sam would notice that if Sam still knew him.
He doesn’t know if Sam notices, before Dean pulls his arm back and sinks a left hook to his brother’s jaw. He doesn’t really care.
Of course he fucking cares.
“I was shattered, man,” he wrenches, lips cracking and voice thin as he feels the pressure build behind his eyes again, and it’s almost second nature, at this point, that emotion turned physical like an ache, like a wound; he knows it. “I’d just lost my brother,” and Sam’s still reeling from the impact, jaw hung loose as he cups the point of contact, and Dean can see something dark collect just at the seam of Sam’s mouth, at the corners. It’s not satisfying, exactly, but he doesn’t feel any guilt.
“I’d just failed the only person I had left. I’d just let him walk into Hell, even when I knew,” and Sam doesn’t look up, doesn’t move forward or back when Dean takes a staggering step toward him, less intentional and more because he can’t keep his footing, his balance; has to move; “even when I knew exactly what he was in for, what was waiting. I watched him. I told him I was okay with it.” And he thinks maybe, just maybe, that Sam flinches, that he feels something; but he can’t be sure, and he doesn’t have the benefit of experience anymore, doesn’t have the assurance of knowing a man’s secrets and tells like the scars on his own soul.
One lie does not equal another.
His body shakes on the inhale, but the breath is steadier than he deserves.
“The only thing I’d ever known,” Dean grinds hard through clenched teeth, his eyes focused elsewhere when he feels Sam’s gaze shift to him, finally -- not soon enough; “taking care of your sorry ass,” and Dean knows it like a loss, like relief in his gut when Sam’s attention falls from him in the face of that truth, that reality; “and I’d fucked that up more than just royally.”
Dean wants to laugh, hysterically; it comes out more like a strangled hiccup, a choked little moan. “I might as well have damned your soul to Hell myself.”
He bites his lip until the beat in the blood below threatens to burst, and there’s silence around him and in him, but he cannot know it; he is not silent.
“So happy’s the last thing I was, you bastard,” he says, deflated, defeated, and he’s suddenly close, so close to Sam that he’s scared of it, raging with it, furious and frightened and teetering on the edge of oblivion because Jesus, things were fucked before, but this is something else. “Happy wasn’t even on my fucking radar.”
This is something else, because he has the only thing he’s wanted since wanting was worth a damn; he’s got his brother, like a fucking miracle, and he can’t even be happy. Can’t even bask in the glory of that gift; more like a curse. Like always.
He’s still, and Sam’s near enough that his eyes have to cross if he’s going to see anything more than a blur of the brother he’s lost, and found, and lost, and found, and lost and maybe found again, but Dean isn’t sure, won’t ever be sure because Dean’s not sure of anything anymore; not people, and not himself. He can breathe his brother in from the distance, the lack thereof; and they’re close, like maybe they once were, always had been -- or maybe never, maybe not like this before, because Dean doesn’t remember, won’t let himself recall.
The taste when he sucks the air, his brother’s breath, in -- it’s bitter, and Dean might have chalked it up to a whole fucking year of change and inevitability, except that he knows some things are constant. Some things weather time without giving away.
He knows.
“You’re different,” Dean says, and Sam’s jaw tightens, the bruise blossoming in the half-light, and maybe that’s the only way Dean can matter, now; the only way to leave a mark on this man he doesn’t know, can’t forget.
Won’t ever forget.
“It’s not just the Pit,” and Dean should shut the fuck up about the things he knows, doesn’t know, but he won’t. “It’s...” and Sam’s mouth opens, his eyes lidded heavy, lashes splayed and thick. “You’re not you.”
And then Sam looks up, like the flip of a switch, and his gaze is bright, inhuman; flushed black like dusk, and deeper -- and Dean swallows, hard, because maybe the monsters aren’t the only things breaking the rules, these days.
Because maybe there’s a poison running through his veins that’s less Djinn-juice and more something... else.
He blinks, and it’s gone; and where the spark of something vile, something vicious had been, there’s only blankness, only the hazel Dean knows, and just glimmer of the feeling he remembers -- the passion that made his brother special, that made him Sammy.
It’s faint, and it’s buried far; for all Dean knows, it’s wishful thinking and ill-cast shadows, taunting shaft of light -- but Dean’s only ever known faith in the faithless, whether he’ll admit it or not.
So he leans in, seeks out something familiar under all of the new and the strange and the wrong; and someone -- not quite Sam, maybe not ever Sam again -- kisses back. And Dean sighs, doesn’t pull away, even though he should. Fuck yes, he should.
He’s in so much deeper than he ever could have known.