Fic: Morning in the Evening (Supernatural)
Title: Morning in the Evening
Author: Ivy
Fandom: Supernatural
Wordcount: 10,500
Rating: R
Warning: Implied Wincest. ANGST. And a bit of angst. Did I mention angst?
A/N: Big thanks to trakkie for the beta.
Summary:
In retrospect, Dean knew it was a mistake. He could have anticipated the outcome, in all its ugliness, if he'd allowed himself to think at all instead of just acting. If he was more honest with himself than he ever had been in his life, he'd admit that he'd done it because he wanted to force Sam's hand. He thought he knew what Sam would choose if it came down to it, and maybe he just needed to know for sure.
But as plans went, this one sucked ass.
~*~
In retrospect, Dean knew it was a mistake. He could have anticipated the outcome, in all its ugliness, if he'd allowed himself to think at all instead of just acting. If he was more honest with himself than he ever had been in his life, he'd admit that he'd done it because he wanted to force Sam's hand. He thought he knew what Sam would choose if it came down to it, and maybe he just needed to know for sure.
But as plans went, this one sucked ass.
~*~
She had big boobs and a little nose. The plastic plate on her lapel said her name was "Kate," and gave Dean an excuse to stare a little. She was only staring at Sam.
Sam looked up from the laminated menu and ordered a patty melt, with well-done fries. They’d had an unfortunate incident not too long ago with undercooked french fries that looked and tasted like soggy shoe-laces.
When she walked back towards the kitchen, Dean kicked Sam’s foot under the table. "She’s cute, if you go in for that gum-snapping, acrylic-nail-wearing, teased hairdo Southern belle sort of thing."
Sam rolled his eyes. "She didn’t have big hair. Or acrylic nails."
"You noticed her nails? Bet you even know the color of the polish-cotton candy or princess sparkle or something?"
"Ha ha," Sam said flatly.
Dean grabbed a couple of the sweet-n-lo packets and started building a little house of cards with them. "I’m just saying-she was totally checking you out. And tits like that don't come around every day. You should take advantage of the opportunity."
"Dean!" Sam hissed, slamming his hand on the table. The vibration knocked down all of Dean’s sugar packets. Dean was just about to retaliate when he saw Sam plaster on a big smile as Kate came back with their food.
"You boys new in town?" she asked, with a Southern accent just pronounced enough to be charming without making her sound like a hick.
Sam started to shake his head. "We’re just passing through."
"Oh," Kate said with the beginnings of a pout.
"We’re visiting our uncle-he lives a few miles down the road. We’ll be around for a few days," Dean said and watched Kate’s face light up as she turned towards him. Sam stepped on his foot. He ignored it. "Uncle Fred, though, he’s old, gets tired real easy. We’ll probably end up spending most of our time in the motel watching cable."
"That’s too bad," Kate said, sneaking a look at Sam. "It’s just the start of peach season, here. It’s too pretty out there to stay cooped up in a motel. Why don’t you get your uncle to take you out?"
Sam was shooting him dire looks every time Kate looked away from him. Dean never got tired of winding his brother up. "No, I’m afraid he’s just not strong enough for that sort of thing."
"Bless his heart," Kate said. She hovered for a moment as if trying to decide if she should say something else or just get back to work.
"Hey, I know," Dean said, his tone rich with insincerity, "do you want to show us around? I don’t want to impose or anything," he rushed on, "but you sound like you’d know the best spots." He looked at Sam. "The most scenic."
"Oh, sure! Sure!" Kate bubbled. "We’ve got the best peaches in Georgia, if you know where to look. I’d love to take you. And your brother, of course." She looked at Sam and Dean almost laughed. Sam looked like he’d been caught by a spiderweb.
"Here, let me give you my number. I get off at eight, today, which is really too late to go to the orchard. But tomorrow’s my day off." She finished scribbling on her pad and ripped off the piece of paper, very deliberately handing it to Sam. "Just give me a call when you know where you’re staying."
When she was out of earshot in the kitchen, Dean leaned toward Sam over the table. "She’s definitely got the best peaches in Georgia." Sam kicked him again.
~*~
Sam let it drop when they got back in the car. Poor boy, Dean thought, totally unaware of what’s in store. They checked into the Motel Hi-Ho, whose beds were like rocks and gave Dean the sneaking suspicion that there’d be cockroaches as soon as the sun went down. They were on their way to Savannah to investigate a series of disappearances. Sam had flagged this one, but Dean was inclined to believe it was more likely they were dealing with a predatory john than a haunting. There was no reason not to stick around here a few days.
Dean waited till Sam was in the shower, then fished Kate’s number out of his brother’s jeans pocket.
The phone rang four times before it picked up. "Kate? Hi. This is-"
"Dean," Kate breathed, and damn if that Southern drawl didn’t sound even sexier over the phone.
"Yeah. Sam and I checked into the Motel Hi-Ho-"
"That dump?" Kate interrupted, and Dean chuckled.
"Well, I promised," he hesitated a second when he realized that he couldn’t remember if he'd given a name for their "uncle" that afternoon. Weak, he thought, weak. "Uh…our uncle I’d help him with a plumbing problem tonight, but it’s really only a one man job, so…"
"Sam’s not a plumber, huh?" Kate asked.
"No, well, yes. He’s very good with his hands, but I’m not going to need him tonight. Do you think you could keep him occupied for me?" Oh, this was just too much fun.
"Oh, no problem," Kate said. "Why don’t I come by around nine?"
"Sure," Dean answered.
By the time Sam came out of the shower he was flipping through the snowy channels on the TV, trying very hard not to snicker.
~*~
Sam was dicking around on the internet by the time nine o’clock rolled around. When the knock on the door came, Sam didn’t look up. "What, you order pizza or something?"
"Yeah, I ordered something," Dean said, getting up.
When Dean opened the door, Kate was smoking. Both literally and figuratively. She hadn’t gone for the skanky look Dean was so fond of. No, her low-cut crocheted top projected a certain wholesomeness, like she was a MILF twenty years too young.
"Kate!" Sam said somewhere behind Dean, and Dean heard the sound of something slipping to the floor and Sam banging his shin against the corner of the bed. Dean was going to take that as a sign of progress.
Before Sam could say something to ruin this perfect evening Dean had planned for him, Dean turned to Kate. "My brother’s not quite ready. Give us a minute?"
"Sure," she said, and Dean gently shut the door.
"What is she doing here? Dressed like-" Sam was rubbing his shin absently.
"Oh, come on, Sam, haven’t we been over the birds and the bees? Alright, I can give you a refresher, but only if you promise to take notes so you don’t forget anything this time."
"Jesus, Dean, I’m not an idiot."
"Well, you sure do a fine impression-"
"Screw you," Sam interrupted. "I mean, why is she here. You didn’t tell her we’d, um, entertain her tonight…"
"Why Sam! What a dirty mind you have! Straight to the gutter." He laughed at the way the red was climbing up Sam’s cheeks. He couldn’t help it. "I may have, possibly, told her that I’d be busy this evening and without my charming company you’d be a bit bored."
"You mean-me and her," Sam said.
"Oh, stop being such a pussy! Dude, she’s hot and the way she’s dressed-she’s definitely interested. Admit it: I’m the best older brother ever."
"You’re a dick," Sam said, but Dean could already tell the possibilities were running through his brother’s head.
"Get out there, tiger," Dean mocked, then walked out to the little cement balcony that ran along the front of their second story room.
"All set!" he said, and Kate turned back from where she’d wandered towards the staircase.
Sam only needed a little shove to get out the door. By the time Dean closed it after the two of them, things were going along swimmingly. Luckily Kate found his brother’s embarrassed stuttering charming. Things would go well tonight, he could tell. And in case his brother suffered from a case of cold feet- Dean threw the security chain on the door, then flopped back onto the bed to enjoy five channels of porn, all to himself.
~*~
Banging woke Dean up around two in the morning. "I’ve got a shotgun in here and I’m not afraid to use it!" Dean shouted at the door.
"Stop being a prick, Dean and open the damn door!" Sam yelled, and kicked a few more times at the flimsy door.
"Heyheyhey!" Dean said, sitting up. "You bust that open we’ll have to pay the deposit!"
"Open up, Dean, I’m serious!"
"Things didn’t go well tonight?" Dean asked insouciantly.
"What? What does that have to do with-"
"Sammy, you’ve got a perfectly good bed to sleep in tonight and this one ain’t it."
"Who the hell asked you to-"
"I have to do these things for you, it’s my sacred older brother duty."
"For fuck’s sake, Dean! It’s getting cold out here. Open the goddam door!"
"Shh! You’ll wake the neighbors," Dean yelled, then rolled over, back to the door. Sam banged and yelled for a good ten more minutes. Dean was glad his brother had too many scruples to do property damage with no imminent peril. If the roles had been reversed, Sammy’d be eating quilt by now. But if things went the way he expected them to, by the time the two of them hit the road tomorrow, Sam would be too damn happy to care about retribution.
~*~
The sun was watery coming through the blinds the next morning. Dean grabbed his watch from the bedside table-it was still early, not quite six. Hopefully Sam wouldn’t be back for a few hours yet, plenty of time for a quick run to Dunkin’ Donuts to smooth things over if necessary.
Dean opened the door and looked out over the balcony. Sam was leaning against the hood of the Impala in the parking lot below. Crap. Dean ducked back into the room. Luckily Hi-Ho had just enough pretensions to have a coffee maker and a packet of free grounds in the room. It was bound to be crap, but better to face Sam prepared.
A few minutes later he stepped out onto the balcony with two cups of freshly perked coffee. "Hey Sam," he said, leaning over the railing. Sam glared up at him and didn’t say anything at all. Dean took the flight of cement steps to the parking lot two at a time, feeling his brother’s eyes on him the whole time.
He pivoted quickly around the pillar at the bottom of the stairs and headed briskly to the car. Sam just leveled a stare at him that would have thrown him clear down the street had he been a poltergeist. "No, really, come near me with a hot cup of coffee. See what happens," he said.
"What?" Dean said innocently.
"You are a rotten slimy cock-sucking bastard. The only reason that you’re still in one piece is that you’re blood."
Dean stopped about ten paces from Sam, not willing to press his luck. Sam might sound calm now, but Dean had seen this often enough between Sam and his father to know this was just the eye of the hurricane. "Don’t tell me she didn’t invite you in?"
"I slept in the car you little shit. You expected me to drive right over to her house after I’d dropped her off and told her it was a lovely evening and tell her my big brother locked me out and did she maybe have some extra room in her big soft bed?"
"Well," Dean shrugged. "Yeah."
"You should write a book: ‘Dean’s Book of Lovin’: 101 Ways to Make the Chick Think You’re a Complete Skeeze.’" Sam stood up from the hood. "Give me the keys." Dean awkwardly tucked one cup of coffee into his elbow and fished out the room key from his hip pocket. When he tossed it to Sam, a little of the scalding coffee spilled, soaking into his sleeve.
Sam caught the keys gracefully and started past Dean to the stairs. "You-" he said, pointing a finger accusingly at Dean before Dean had barely gotten his mouth open, "shut your damn cakehole." When he was up on the balcony he added, "enjoy your coffee in the car."
~*~
The two cups of coffee had gone cold, sitting on the hood of the car. Dean had been right in his initial assessment-it was crap. He was just debating whether he should take a spin with the Impala or stick around until Sam came out of his snit when his brother emerged from the motel room with a bang. His hair hung in damp tendrils and he still looked pissed.
He was also carrying his duffel. "Get your crap," Sam said chucking his bag into the trunk of the car. "I'll check out."
"We're not sticking around so you can get another chance at some lovin'?"
Sam just pointed a finger accusingly at him and headed toward the office. "Hey, I didn't know she wasn't a first date kinda girl!" Dean yelled after him.
Sam was sitting in the passenger seat, arms crossed, when Dean got back. He looked over at his brother a second, wondering if he should keep pressing. "Are we going to Savannah or are you going to play Dr. Phil some more?" Sam interrupted his thoughts.
"Guess we're going to Savannah," Dean said and started the car. He swung by the diner on the way out of town, though.
~*~
They were an hour down the road and Sam was still glaring out the window. Dean knew he'd been a bit of a dick, but that didn't mean he was going to admit it to Sam. He popped in his Steve Miller Band tape and fast-forwarded through the first couple cuts. He pressed play on the final chords of "The Stake," which segued quickly into "The Joker." Dean couldn't resist singing along a bit when it reached the chorus, "Really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree."
"What is it with you?" Sam said, slapping his hand against the eject button. "What's your deal with this chick?"
"Hey, I'm just looking out for your best interests, here. Is it wrong of me to want my brother to experience all the wonders of the female form? That chick had Australian cleavage, man. She could've given you a tittyfuck-I bet she wouldn't even need a push-up bra." Dean leered a bit.
"God, Dean!" Sam said, exasperated. "Do you even listen to the words coming out of your mouth? Don't talk about her like she just a pair of…of-"
"Really nice knockers, Sammy." Sam just huffed and looked out the window. "Wait," Dean said. "You like her, don't you?"
"What do you care?"
"Sammy and Katie sitting in a tree-"
"Look, Dean," Sam cut him off, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "Maybe I'm being overly sentimental here, but I like to know a bit more about someone than that they have nice tits before I sleep with them. 'Hey, baby, the bathroom's free,' is not my idea of a pick up line."
"Ah," Dean said. "Good times."
"I'm just saying I like to care about a person before I have sex with them, all right?"
Dean sniffed. "Oh, Sammy, you talk so purty."
"Shut up," Sam said. "I don't know why you're so interested. Why's it so important to you that I sleep with her? Really?"
"I'm just trying to teach you about the birds and the bees, Sammy," Dean said, keeping his eyes on the road. "I'd just rather you learn about these things at home than out there with your hooligan friends."
Dean knew he'd screwed up as soon as the words left his mouth. Sam was silent. Dean didn't look at him, but he had a fair guess at the way his brother was looking at him. There were fault lines between them now, places he just had to make sure the conversation didn't go. And he'd just fallen into one of them.
"Dean," Sam said gently. Dean could see Sam's hand reach out towards Dean's thigh in his peripheral vision. "You know I-"
Dean popped the tape back in and cranked the volume so loud he had to roll down the window so the reverberations of the bass didn't hurt his ears. If Sam said anything else, he didn't hear it.
~*~
Dean had been right about Savannah. Nothing there that the police hadn't already sewed up. Sam didn't bring up Kate or their conversation on the way down and Dean didn't give him shit for picking a dud hunt.
They hung out in the humidity for a day, lazing in their motel room. Dean had to admit Savannah had something going for it-the room had its own balcony with iron grille-work-but he really wasn’t in the mood for all that Southern charm.
Dean lay on the bed, hands crossed behind his head, boots still on. "Anything?"
Sam kept tapping through websites on his laptop. "Woman sees Virgin Mary in her oatmeal?" Sam said apologetically.
"What? Are you looking at Weekly World News again? What did I tell you about that site. You’d think you learned your lesson after the Bat Boy incident."
"It could have been a wendigo-it looked sort of like one."
"I know there’s a lot of crazy shit on Off-Broadway, but I don’t think anyone’s put a wendigo on stage yet."
"They did do that musical version of Evil Dead."
"And I’m sure you wanting to drive to New York to see it was just to make sure they weren’t mistreating any Deadites," Dean shook his head, hairs prickling against the palms of his hands. He heard Sam slap close his laptop.
"I’ve got jack shit," he said. "You wanna hang around Savannah?"
"Not really," Dean said, already wondering how long they’d be on the road before Sam noticed he was taking them back to Kate’s diner.
~*~
"Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing," Sam said. They’d barely crossed the city limits out of Savannah, car pointed northwest. Dean mentally lost his bet with himself-sometimes he forgot how well Sam knew how his mind worked.
Dean made a "who, me?" face and kept driving.
~*~
Dean spotted Kate serving another table when they got to the diner. She waited until their server had taken their order before crossing over with an expression halfway between wariness and hope.
"Kate," Sam turned his smile to its highest wattage. "I was hoping you'd be here."
"You were?"
"Look, I'm sorry about having to run out a few days ago. It was a bit of a family emergency-"
"Oh," Kate said, tucking a stray lock behind her ear. "That's alright, you don't have to-"
"Let me make it up to you," Sam said. It was the polar opposite of the last time they'd been in this diner-Sam was flirting like a pro. Dean wondered just how good the date had gone if this was the result. "We're-" Sam looked over at Dean, meeting his eyes with determination, "going to be in town for a few days." He finished the sentence without looking away and, OK, yeah, Dean figured he owed his brother that.
While the two worked out the details, Dean pretended to look at the dust motes caught in the late afternoon sun. Seriously, it was like being in high school again.
They checked back into the Motel Hi-Ho (cheapest rates in town, and no leaks in the roof, which was always a plus). Sam immediately hit the shower. There were no fans in the bathroom, so Sam cracked the door afterwards to let the cooler air from the room defog the mirror enough so that he could see to shave. Dean looked at his brother standing in just a towel, chin jutted out as he ran a razor over his throat, and tried to think of some crack about Sam getting ready for a big date, but couldn't for the life of him come up with anything.
Dean turned on the TV and flipped aimlessly through the channels while Sam got dressed. When he headed for the door, snagging the car keys on the way, he looked at Dean challengingly but didn't say a word.
~*~
Apparently Kate was a second date kind of girl. Dean didn't hear the rumble of the Impala pulling into the parking lot until almost noon the next day. Dean was flipping idly through the local newspaper when Sam breezed in, yesterday's clothes a little wrinkled. He walked straight through to the shower without stopping, not even giving Dean the chance to smirk knowingly, which was probably the point. It wasn't every day Dean got to tease Sam about a walk of shame.
Dean stared at the door to the bathroom as he heard the spray of the shower. All of yesterday they'd felt weirdly out of synch. When Dean thought about it, they'd been out of synch since the drive down to Savannah. Before that Sam had been bitchy, but no more than usual. Maybe he'd pushed things a little too far. All growing up, Dean had pushed Sammy, and Sammy pushed right back. That's how it worked, how Dean knew things were OK between them. Now sometimes when he pushed, Sam didn't fight at all. It was like there was something new and fragile in his brother and Dean couldn't figure out how he should handle it. He'd never been a kid gloves kind of guy.
Whatever. Dean snapped the paper and folded it from the sports section over to the obituaries. They both just needed to blow off a little steam. Too many hours spent too close to each other. Especially since Salvation. Sam had barely let Dean out of his sight since then.
Sam'd make time with the waitress and they'd drive out in a day or two, back to the usual banter between them.
Sam stepped out of the steamy bathroom, ruffling his hair to shake most of the water out of it. He bent over his duffle bag to rifle through it for a shirt, sniffing a few in disgust before settling on a red button-down. "We need to do laundry."
"Not it," Dean said, putting his finger up to the side of his nose in a gesture from a childhood game the two of them had played.
Sam looked over at him, just his head visible above the bed as he crouched over his bag. "Who locked who out of a hotel room?"
Crap. Sam'd be playing that card for months. "Fine, fine." He looked back at the newspaper, the columns of tiny print unfocused. "You…have a good time last night?" He tried for his usual leer but his heart wasn't in it.
"Sure." Sam straightened up, running a belt through the loops on his pants. "It's Kate's day off. Don't wait up," he said, then grabbed the keys from where he'd dropped them on the bed and was out the door before Dean could think of anything else to say.
~*~
Dean did the laundry. He thought about throwing bleach in with Sammy's load, but didn't think that would go over too well right now. He walked along Main Street from one end of the town to the other, then back, which didn't take up as much time as he would've liked. He scoped out the only bar: pool table in the back. Good. They were low on funds. He surfed the net for awhile, refreshing his gmail account obsessively, even though he knew Sam would not be spending his time with his date emailing him. He watched Godzilla vs. Megalon on TV. When night fell, he hustled pool for a while. There wasn't a single girl worth looking at in the bar-damn him for letting Sam go after the one attractive girl in town. He had a few beers and headed back to their room and lay for far too long staring at the ceiling and thinking how nice it was not to have to listen to Sam's snoring.
~*~
Dean went to the library the next morning-not that there was anything he needed to look up, since they didn't have a hunt. The branch was small enough that it didn't have an online subscription to the New York Times, just a few cabinets full of microfilm. Those things always made him sea-sick. He pulled out Dad's notebook and turned to one of the many clippings stuck in the back: unexplained deaths that John had never had time to figure out. Maybe if Dean got lucky he'd find a pattern. Or get a splitting headache and waste most of a day.
He loaded one of the microfilms into the player, but only got halfway through skimming the date in question for a relevant article before he started zipping the film back and forth through the machine to the beat of "Back in Black." He eyed the librarian as she walked past, pushing a little cart for reshelving, and tried to get a sexy Marian librarian fantasy going, but the raw materials were just not there. He could picture Kate all buttoned up in a suit like that, though, with horn-rimmed glasses and her blond curls pinned back severely, just aching to be undone. But she was with Sam, doing…whatever it was his brother needed to get out of his system.
He rewound the microfilm, then dicked around with the photocopier until he ran out of dimes to feed it. By that point he'd managed to waste almost the whole morning, and headed back to the room.
When he opened the door, he smelled sugar, and immediately looked around for his brother. He found, instead, the source of the smell: a small bag of powdered doughnut holes with, "Don't wait up-S," written on it with Sharpie.
Dean grabbed the bag and flopped back on the bed, kicking his heels against the edge of the mattress. This was beginning to feel like those years with just him and Dad, when he'd wake up in the morning and his father would be gone, no telling when he'd come back. At least Dad usually left him a set of coordinates and a hunt to keep him occupied.
~*~
Dean woke up late the next morning, perpendicular across the bed, ankles and arms sticking off opposite ends of the mattress. The sheets were all on the floor. He couldn't remember what he'd dreamed about. He glanced at his watch. "Jesus, Sammy," he said and rolled onto his back. "Let the poor girl go back to work some time."
By noon he'd wandered out to the orchard on the edge of town and discovered that Kate knew what she was talking about with the peaches. "This is pathetic," he muttered and chucked the pit as hard as he could. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and thought about calling his brother and telling him to cut it out. He was starting to feel all jittery, the way he had after Sam'd hopped a bus for Palo Alto. Which was stupid, since Sam was in the same town, macking on some girl. That Dean had thrown him at, which made this whole thing his fault.
So.
He decided it would be better if he had a case, some destination in mind. By two o'clock he had something. Not much, just a few hikers gone missing in the Cascades, but it could be something. He'd have a few days to look for something better on the road. And at least it was three thousand miles from Kate's peaches.
Sam pulled up twenty minutes after Dean called him. Dean liked to believe that meant his brother was just waiting around for an excuse to leave, cause twenty minutes wasn't much time for a proper goodbye.
He walked out to the parking lot, his bag on one shoulder, Sam's on the other. The door squeaked familiarly as his brother unfolded himself from the front seat. Dean dumped the bags at his feet and turned to the hood of the Impala. He ran his fingers over it, feeling the heat from the engine and the August sun soaked into the black finish. "Ah, baby, it's good to see you. You miss daddy?"
Sam snorted. "You two need a room?"
Dean looked askance at his brother. "I'm sure she's seen plenty of action in the past two days." He straightened up and pointed a finger at Sam. "Just tell me you steam-cleaned the backseat."
"You're disgusting Dean," Sam said pleasantly. He popped the trunk and heaved the two bags in. "What are you thinking-wendigo?"
"Could be," Dean said. "Could be werewolf." He slid into the driver's seat, running his hands over the curve of the steering wheel. He turned the key. "Get in the car, Sam."
Dean didn't particularly want to tell Sam what he'd been doing the past three days, so he didn't push to hear any details about Sam and Kate. He knew his brother well enough to know that interrogations went both ways. Sam seemed cheerful and eager to get down to business, so Dean patted himself on the back for getting Sam to vent whatever fucked up thing was going through his head, and figured that was the end of it.
~*~
"Take your pick," Dean said, leaning back in his chair and extending three Twizzlers toward Sam. Sam pulled one, like drawing lots, and Dean let his chair land back on four legs, propelling him towards the laptop sitting on the table. "We've got a possible poltergeist, a series of accidental drownings, and three kids snatched from their backyards and returned two weeks later with no memory of the missing time."
Sam tugged on the Twizzler. "Where're the drownings?"
Dean quickly clicked to the appropriate browser window. "Uh…Lake George, Florida."
"Let's go there."
"It's probably not anything-just some gators."
"Then why'd you bring it up? And don't tell me you've always wanted to go to Disney World."
"Florida it is, then. But if it's gators, you wrassle 'em, I'll take pictures."
"Oh, fuck you," Sam said and got up to dump his tray in the trash. Dean didn't think anything of it when Sam offered to drive.
~*~
The sun was just disappearing over the mountains when Dean blinked his eyes open to see that Sam had pulled in to a hotel for the night. It was a bit early to pack it in and Dean was about to say so until he looked up and saw the neon sign for the Motel Hi-Ho. Sam was rather furtively making his way to the motel office.
Sam emerged from the office just as Dean was stretching the cricks out of his back. Sam tossed him the room key and Dean wondered if he'd gotten a second room for himself. "Four hundred miles for a booty call, Sam? I know you have a hard time picking up chicks, but I'm sure I could have found you someone nice back in West Virginia."
"It's on the way, Dean," Sam said.
"On the way? It's still daylight-almost," he amended before Sam could interrupt. "Only reason you stopped here was that waitress…Kate or something."
Sam rolled his eyes. "I didn't bitch when you drove us all the way to Missouri so you could see Cassie."
"Yes, you did! Besides-" Dean stopped himself. He'd meant to say I was in love with her. He suddenly wondered if that was the reason Sam had brought it up, if Sam was trying to tell him something.
"Besides what?"
"Besides, that was a case." Dean finished.
"You didn't believe it at the time. You just went cause you wanted to see your girlfriend."
"Ex-girlfriend," Dean said. There was an edge in Sam's voice and Dean didn't like the implications. "And we all know how well that ended."
Dean grabbed his bag from the trunk and headed up to the room, unreasonably pleased when Sam followed. He called over his shoulder when he entered the room, "Anyway we've got a hunt this time, so we leave in the morning."
"Fine," Sam said and headed for the shower. Dean noticed he didn't call Kate to see if she was free, which meant he must already know. Which meant he'd probably kept in touch with Kate for the past six months and that was just all kinds of wrong. Dean liked interacting with normal people fine but he knew he could never do a long-distance relationship with one, and neither should Sam. He'd break her heart or she'd break his and then he'd be sullen and depressed for weeks until he hooked up with someone else.
Sam was just kidding himself, Dean thought. He'd figure it out, sooner or later. Hell, if he'd been thinking about her for six months, he probably remembered the sex as being a whole lot better than it was, so maybe this would just sort itself out without Dean having to do anything.
So that's what Dean did until Sam showed up again the next morning, ready to hit the road-nothing.
~*~
"God, I wish it had been a gator," Sam whined from the passenger seat. "Stupid selkie. Who ever heard of a selkie on an inland lake? In the form of a manatee?"
"Well, she was kind of a cow," Dean quipped. It had taken a week to track down the pattern behind the killings, and another few days to trap her.
"Ha ha-ow!" Sam cried when Dean whacked his shoulder, hitting a few of the scratches from the selkie's nails. "I could sleep for a week."
"We've still got those missing kids and the poltergeist to look into."
"Where's the poltergeist?"
"Texas, I think."
Sam groaned and shifted on the seat. "Can't we take a few days off first?"
"Days off?" Dean asked. "What do you want, paid leave?"
"Hey, you're not the injured one here."
"You mean I'm not the one stupid enough to get between a pissed selkie and her skin." Dean glanced over at his brother. Sam had his best puppy dog eyes going, pout too. "Fine. I'll rochambeau you for it. On three. One, two," Dean looked over at his brother when he said three. Dean was holding a rock, Sam paper. Damn. Sam had always favored scissors, ever since they were little.
"Aw, yeah," Sam said, doing a little dance in his seat.
"Two outta three?" Dean asked.
"Not a chance."
"So, champ, where are we spending this two day sabbatical?"
Sam got still in that way that meant he didn't know how to broach a subject.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Sam, what is it with you and this chick?"
"You're the one who threw me at her!" Sam replied angrily.
"Yeah, well, I'm beginning to see the error of my ways."
~*~
The clerk at the motel knew his name when Dean walked in, or at least the one he'd given the last time. Dean saw that as the one-hundred-percent sure-fire way to know he'd overstayed his welcome. He was digging through the wallet, trying to find the card that matched the name when Sam walked in and plopped down cash for two nights-pretty much all the cash they had and the result of some pretty fine pool-playing if Dean said so himself.
"What the hell was that?" Dean yelled, as soon as he'd closed the door to the room.
"What?" Sam said, deliberately provocative.
"Don't use cash when plastic works just as well, Sammy, remember that? What are we supposed to do now if we get in a jam?"
"Come on, Dean, we've been here three times already. We keep paying with rubber cards, the owner's going to catch on! It's a miracle he hasn't already." Sam matched Dean's volume.
"Yeah, we've stayed here four times, and who's fault is that, huh? You so worried about landing us in jail, why do you keep driving back here?"
"I just don't want everyone in town to know we run credit card scams, that's all."
"No, you don't want one person in particular to know you're running credit card scams."
"Look, you're the one who-"
"So you could get laid, Sam, not so you could get married." The tone had more bitterness than he'd intended, but he wasn't pulling back now. "What's next, giving her your varsity letter jacket?"
"Oh, fuck you."
"You're twenty-four years old! You're not supposed to be going steady. You're supposed to be-spreading your wild oats."
"What? Dean, I've got friends from college who are married now. Dad got married when he was twenty-four. This isn't a hot-blooded macho man thing, you're pissed about something else."
"Yeah, I'm pissed. I'm pissed that you think you can keep this girl going on the side. What do you tell her about why you keep disappearing? What are you going to tell her tonight about the scratches on your shoulder?"
"Doesn't matter."
"Look, I can tell you from experience it's not going to work, Sam. You're just going to end up screwing things up. You can't get attached."
"God, is this about Cassie again? You couldn't do normal Dean, that doesn't mean I can't."
Dean turned his back on his brother, so mad he was starting to shake. It was like that time in Chicago when Sam had told him that when the demon was dead he'd walk out again. Since Dad died, Sam hadn't brought up normal again, and Dean had started to believe that maybe he didn't need to worry about it anymore, that Sam was going to stick around this time.
"Dean," Sam said, his voice quieter. Dean felt like ice water had been poured down his spine, his anger immediately slipping away into something he didn't want to admit was fear. Sam brushed his hand gently across Dean's shoulder, the tips of his fingers touching the nape of Dean's neck. It made him want to puke.
Dean jerked away, his whole body tensing. He didn't look, but he could feel his brother stepping close to him again. "It doesn't have to be this way," Sam said, still in that soft voice.
"Sammy!" Dean said, his voice as hard as a punch. "Don't bring this up again-we've been over this."
Dean turned around just in time to see Sam snatch his hand back. "No, Dean, we haven't. Every time I even hint at it, you turn on the radio or get in the shower or go to a bar. We haven't been over this, we haven't said anything at all." He sounded frustrated and pissy, throwing the type of temper tantrum he threw when Dad told them they had to move again. It was just such as Sammy reaction, his brother through and through, and Dean wanted to ask him if this is how he always sweet-talked people into the sack, but just the thought made him sick. In that moment he hated his brother more than he ever had in his life, more than he had when Sammy'd left for college. How dare he take this thing between them, this connection, and turn it into-
"Well, there are some things you should just never say, Sam! You think you'd have learned that after Dad."
"Dad has nothing to do with this! I just need to tell you-"
"No!" Dean shouted over him. Trust Sam to be stubborn now. He always was. Couldn't he see that if he kept pushing this time he'd destroy everything? "Don't you dare. Don't you dare say those words to me. You need to stop this, Sam. You-" he stumbled a bit and hated himself for letting some of the fear show through the anger. "You can't do this to me."
Sam's expression hardened. The eagerness, the hope, that had been written all over it a moment before was walled away. "Fine," Sam said. "Fine. I'll stop it."
He looked hurt and Dean wanted to help him, the way he always did. But he couldn't reach out his brother, Sam had taken that away from them. So he didn't do anything as Sam grabbed the keys to the Impala and tore out the hotel room, slamming the door behind him. He was still standing stock still when he heard the familiar engine noise pull out of the motel's parking lot and drive away.
He sat down on the bed but felt like he just kept falling. He told himself that Sam just needed to cool off a little and then they'd head out again and it would be fine. They were brothers; they knew just where the tender spots were on each other, just where to hit so it would hurt the most. They'd had their blow-outs before, probably always would. But Sam was his brother. That meant he'd always come back. They couldn't leave each other, not really.
Dean could believe that except for the one part of his brain that reminded him that Sam had left once before and stayed gone and there was no way for Dean to be sure the same thing hadn't just happened.
~*~
Dean didn't plan it. That's what he told himself later on when he couldn't fall asleep for thinking. There was no premeditation, no intent, just bad luck.
Dean sat in the hotel room for a few minutes after Sam left but felt like his skin would jump off if he didn't move. He wandered down the main street to the lone bar. It was actually familiar to him now, instead of one in a long line of anonymous, vaguely similar dives. He glanced back to the pool tables out of habit: there was no one there he hadn't hustled already. Something else to blame on his brother.
He sat down at the bar and set about drinking until this awful feeling in his stomach disappeared. He was well into his fifth beer when she sat down next to him. "Dean, right?"
Dean turned his head slowly. Wasn't that just icing on this perfect day-it was Sam's waitress. "You got me."
"I didn't know you two were back in town." She smiled and Dean remembered why he'd wanted to get this girl together with his brother in the first place. And hadn't that idea worked out so well. "Where's Sam?" she asked, feigning disinterest.
Dean had figured that Sam would let his girl know that he was coming, tell her to keep the candle burning. They must have been keeping in touch, right? Dean had figured that Sam would go straight to Kate after their fight. There was nothing like fucking to work off energy. Clearly he'd been wrong on both counts. Which meant that he had no idea where his brother was or what he was doing. A little of the edge he'd just been managing to dull came back.
Dean shrugged. "Oh," Kate said. She settled in to the stool and waited for the bartender to come over with her usual-some fruit drink that you shouldn't be able to buy in a place like this. "He talks about you a lot, you know," She said.
"Really," Dean said flatly. He wanted to ask her if Sam ever called out his name during sex, but he doubted he'd be able to pass that off as the alcohol speaking.
"Yeah, he's always going on about his older brother." She rested her hand briefly on the arm of his leather jacket. "Feels like I already know you."
Dean turned to her and put on the smile that was almost automatic. "And what do you know about me?"
"That you're a jerk."
Dean laughed, sharp and sudden, surprising both of them. In spite of everything else, he liked this girl. The future played out in his mind, Sam falling for this girl and spending more and more time diverting them to western Georgia. He might tell her everything and convince her to come on the road, but more likely he'd slowly let Dean go on more and more hunts on his own and then there'd be a ring and a house and Dean swinging by on Christmases and birthdays. It's what he wanted for his brother. This girl could give him a life better than anything Dean could offer.
~*~
A few hours and quite a few more drinks for both of them later, they were still sitting at the bar. Kate had talked about her waitressing job, her high school classmate that just had her second kid, her mother. She didn't talk about Sam, which surprised Dean. Isn't that what chicks did when having a few drinks with their boyfriend's brother? Try to get all the embarrassing stories they could?
She finished telling some story about skinny dipping and giggled, leaning against Dean's arm. She turned towards him with a smile. Her pink lips inched towards his; he could see the outline of the lip gloss where it had smudged, smell the alcohol on her breath. "Hey," Dean said, jerking away. "Don't you save that stuff for Sam?"
"You know," Kate said, winding a lock of her hair that had fallen out of her braid around her finger. "Sam's not here right now. But you are." She leaned in again.
"OK, I'm going to stop you there. I think we've both had a little too much to drink." He tried to disentangle himself and stand up, but the floor wasn't staying level like a floor was supposed to.
"I'm not a child, you know," Kate said with a pout that completely contradicted her words. "I know the score. Your brother and you, you're drifters. You just blow on through whenever you feel like it. Your brother's sweet and all, but a couple of dirty weekends doesn't make me his girl."
She stood up too, tipping forward until Dean was forced to catch her, her arms winding around his neck. "Girls just want to have fun," she said coyly. She ran her hands across the hair at the back of his neck against the grain, giving him goose bumps. He could feel her every breath through the full breasts pressed against his chest. "And you look like a lot of fun." Then she kissed him.
~*~
The motel was closer than her apartment. That's what he told her as they stumbled down the road, pressed close against each other. Her arm was wrapped around his waist, under the jacket-huddling against the February cold, Dean told himself. The halos around the streetlights blurred and doubled, refusing to stay still. He let the heat of the body beside him burn through him, convincing himself that it was inevitable.
They tumbled onto the nearest bed when he finally got the door shut behind them. Sam's bed. Or would have been if Sam hadn't torn out of there. Kate was soft and warm and that dizzy feeling of falling had come back but he had her to hold onto now. The alcohol swirled through his brain, making everything feel distant and unreal. He didn't even get his pants all the way off before he was inside her. She didn't seem to mind.
Afterwards they collapsed into each other, tangled in clothes and the long tendrils of her hair, tugged out of her braid. Sometime in the night, they woke enough to struggle out of their clothes and under the covers, rocking into each other again. Dean wasn't a cuddler by nature-sticking around after sex was just not something he did, not since high school. But when she turned in his arms, her breasts like warm pillows against his side, he was too wrung out and weary to move away.
~*~
Dean didn't hear the door open, but he heard it slam shut again. The weak light of early morning poured like molasses through his brain. Everything moved slowly and happened all at once, both at the same time.
Sam was standing inside the door, limned by the lights coming in through the blinds. His face was indistinct, for which Dean was grateful. What he could see was hurt, gut-wrenching pain written across every muscle of Sam's body.
Kate bolted out of the bed, dragging the prickly comforter with her, leaving Dean only partly hidden by the dirty sheets. She moved like a startled rabbit through the frozen tableau that was Dean and his brother. She pulled on her skirt and blouse facing the corner, not bothering with her underwear first. When she'd gathered up the rest of her clothes and slipped on her sneakers, she paused a moment to glance between Sam and Dean. Her eyes were bloodshot and shadowed underneath with a ring of mascara, like a raccoon. For the life of him, Dean couldn't remember why he'd brought her here. Sam didn't even look at her.
The sound of the door shutting behind her set off the headache that Dean had been too startled to notice before. Sam continued to stand there, his expression changing into one of pure anger. Sam moved towards him, and for a moment Dean was afraid Sam would punch him. Then he was afraid Sam would kiss him, and he didn't know which would be worse right now.
Dean stood up, holding the sheet around his waist, and backed toward the wall. Sam stalked up, right into his personal space, then darted his arm out to grab the lamp on the bedside table and hurl it across the room. Dean could feel the impact of each broken shard of porcelain inside his head.
"Dude," he said. "Hangover."
Sam turned back to him. "Get out."
"Look, Sammy, this wasn't, well, it was what it looks like, but it was an accident." Sam turned away from him and started picking up the clothing Dean had left strewn around the room. "We both got really drunk, and sure I was pissed at you, but I wouldn't-I wouldn't steal your girl. You know that, right?" Sam kept picking up pieces of clothing like some neat-freak housewife and Dean suddenly realized he was packing. He was packing Dean's stuff. "Look, she wasn't even your girl, right? You've only seen her a couple of times you know? And she came on to me, OK? Hey-Sammy, look at me!" He grabbed Sam's arm to stop him hurriedly shoving things into Dean's duffle. Sam kept going, like the weight of Dean's grip was nothing. When Dean tugged harder, Sam flailed at him, knocking Dean flat on his ass. The sheet slipped out of his grip and he found himself on his back in front of his brother, naked and still smelling like Kate. Sam had never seemed so tall in his entire life.
Sam's lip curled up and he threw a pair of dirty jeans and a shirt roughly into Dean's lap. "Don't be that way, Sammy," Dean said. "Come on, just talk to me."
Sam huffed something under his breath that sounded like, "that's rich." Dean stood and shimmied into the pants. Sam continued to mutter. "Now he wants to talk." He was breathing hard in that way that Dean knew meant he was trying not to cry.
"I'm sorry, Sammy." He said. "Look, I'm sorry. I knew it was a bad idea I just-I always seem to fuck things up."
Sam's head snapped around to him. "Yeah, you do." Sam grabbed Dean's duffle and tossed it to him. "You need to leave now."
"Sammy…"
Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out the keys to the Impala, holding them out until Dean reluctantly took them. "You just need some time to cool down," Dean said. "Then we can work through this."
"No, we really can't." Sam just stood there looking at Dean. Dean knew this expression: it was the one that had been on his own face when Cassie had shown him the door.
He'd broken Sam's heart.
~*~
Dean drove out of the motel parking lot with absolute serenity, made it all the way out of town driving at a reasonable pace, obeying every traffic law. The whole world felt like glass, blown too thin, ready to crack at the gentlest breeze. He couldn't even blame it on the hangover.
Ten miles down a winding two-lane road past barren orchards and frost-covered farmland, Dean pulled over and punched the steering wheel. He didn't feel like he was falling anymore. He felt like he'd hit the ground.
~*~
Dean slept curled in on himself in the backseat. He'd parked the car sloppily, half on the road, half on the gravel, so that it tipped sideways, making his blood rush to his head. With the engine off, the cold outside seeped into the car, drafts like breaths creeping underneath his clothes. He just curled himself tighter against the leather seat and squeezed his eyes shut.
When the sun was shining brightly from overhead Dean couldn't pretend to be asleep anymore. He climbed into the front seat and turned the car around, driving blindly back to where he'd come from, the horrible feeling that it was too late and he'd already lost getting worse and worse.
~*~
Dean still had the key to their motel room, but he knew it was empty even before he opened the door. The manager told him the nice young man had settled up for the damaged property a few hours ago and headed out. Dean didn't know what to do next. He drove to the diner to find Kate. She blushed beet red when she saw him, but she hadn't seen Sam. She might have looked hurt when that was all Dean asked, but Dean wasn't paying attention.
He drove through town after that, zig-zagging along the roads that spread out into fields, empty except for the occasional farmhouse. He found Sam by pure luck an hour later, walking along the gravel at the side of a road, duffel slung over his shoulder. Dean thought he'd choke from relief.
Dean rolled down his window and yelled across the empty lane between them. "Sam!" Sam kept walking resolutely away from him, readjusting the duffel on his uninjured shoulder. "Sam, come on. Get in the car." Dean was rolling along now, pacing Sam. He pulled into the left hand lane, close enough to his brother that he could reach out and grab his jacket. "Get in the car, Sammy!"
"No," Sam said. He wouldn't stop walking. Dean pulled over to the side of the road angrily and hopped out the car, leaving the door cocked open. He trotted up to his brother. "You need some time to cool down and I get that, but just get in the car." Sam rolled his eyes but kept walking. "Hey!" Dean jumped into Sam's path. "I'm talking to you." For a moment it looked like Sam would just sidestep him and keep going. Then he dropped the duffel onto the gravel and brought both his hands up to run through his hair.
"What? What, Dean." Sam was gesturing wildly, making Dean half afraid this would turn into a brawl. But maybe it would work out better that way-the times growing up when they were most civil towards each other were always after they'd gotten into a fight. "What?" Sam said again, and Dean wasn't quite sure what he wanted to say. All he could think was that he just needed to get Sam into the car and it would be OK.
"God, you still don't get it," Sam said, finally tired of Dean's silence. "You think we can just forget about this and keep going like nothing's changed."
"Look, I know I fucked up-"
"Yeah, you really did."
"But I've fucked up before, man. I just, I gotta know you're still with me."
Sam looked away. "I really don't think I am." Dean looked at his brother, really looked at him. He looked like he hadn't slept either, still in the clothes he'd been wearing yesterday. And he looked like he felt the same way Dean had been trying not to feel since yesterday, like they were standing at the end of things. Sam looked like he'd just lost the only family he had left.
"I'm sorry," Dean said. It was all he could say.
"I know you are." Sam kept his eyes focused on the road stretching out in front of him. "But you just don't know what- I know you don't…" Sam stopped for a moment, and Dean could tell all those times he had told Sam to shut up had taken their toll. Now Sam was trying to get the words out and he barely could. "I know we can't be together the way I want, and I'm not going to say I'm OK with that, but I was going to be." He finally looked at Dean. "But I try to get over this in my own way, I try to move on, and you have to take that away from me too."
"I-"
"What do you want from me? You want me to be with you all the time, but only feel what you want me to feel. I can't fuck somebody else and then come back to you, Dean, I just don't work that way." Sam shook his head. "I'm trying to be the brother you want me to be, but you won't let me!" Sam was speaking through clenched teeth, the tears Dean felt prickling behind his own eyes as well threatening to fall.
"I just don't want you to leave, Sammy."
"God, Dean. I think about the future, and how you want us to go on and on, just like before. You don't ever want anything to change, but Dean, it has to. I can't keep doing this. I thought I could find some balance, maybe. I thought maybe with Kate, maybe with someone else, but you won't let me have that."
"We'll figure something out, Sam, if that's what you want. Look, I know I'm a stubborn son of a bitch, but if that's what you want, we'll figure it out."
"You say that, Dean, but you won't. This will just happen again. I'm just too tired to keep going in circles."
"Sam…" Dean wanted to touch his brother and this time he let himself, despite knowing what Sam wanted and where it might lead. He thought at that moment that maybe it was worth it to keep Sam from leaving. His hand reached out and squeezed Sam's shoulder, feeling fine tremors through the jacket.
Dean thought about his brother leaving, about driving away from here on his own, and about what Sam had been trying to tell him for months. What Sam needed if he was going to stay. Dean forced himself to curl his hand around the back of Sam's neck, tug his head down. Sam looked at him curiously, focused on his face until they were too close and his eyes crossed. Dean could feel Sam's breath on his mouth. He stopped, swallowed nervously, and squeezed his eyes shut. Then he pushed their lips together.
It was-awkward. They both had morning breath and Sam's lips were chapped. Dean had had a lot of experience kissing, thought himself quite good at it, but this was like his first kiss under the bleachers when he was fourteen and didn't know what he was supposed to do with his lips. It was like, well, it was like kissing his brother. He wanted to pull away but didn't, he had to prove to Sam he could do this. Sam moved first, his lips giving Dean the sweetest caress. And the sound he made-it hurt Dean to hear it.
Then Sam put his hands gently on the front of Dean's jacket and pushed him back. Dean looked at him, surprised. Wasn't this what Sam wanted? Sam was looking at the ground. He ran his hand over his lips, wiping away the feeling of the kiss.
"Dean," he sighed quietly, sounding like he had no strength left for anger. "You were right. I can't do this to you."
"Sammy, if this is what you need-" Dean's voice was shaking. He'd put everything he had out there, Sam couldn't just not take it.
"I need you to want me, and you don't." Sam looked up at him. "God, Dean. Do you think I would blackmail you into it? Threaten to leave unless you put out?"
"Isn't that what this is?" Dean's hands were still on Sam's shoulders. He couldn't make himself let go.
"Dean!" Sam sounded more hurt than shocked. "I wouldn't hurt you like that! I can't-God."
Sam looked at Dean, straight in the eyes, holding his gaze until Dean was shaking too, and said the words that Dean had been trying so hard to keep Sam from saying. "I love you." They didn't feel like Dean thought they would. Whenever he'd thought about it before, the words had twisted in his gut, made him restless and angry and afraid. Now they just sounded like losing. "I love you, Dean. You're all I have. But it can't stay like this. I have to have something else, something just for me. And as long as I stay with you, that's never going to happen."
Dean wanted to deny it, but he knew it was true. He'd do anything for his brother, give him anything he needed. Now Sammy needed his freedom, and Dean could give him that.
He let his arms drop and tucked both his hands into his pockets. He nodded. Later he would think about it, and wonder what else he could have done, how if Sam had just taken what he offered, they would have stayed together. Or whether it would always have ended this way, from the moment Dean picked him up from Stanford-if it was inevitable that someday Sam would go back to that life and leave Dean behind.
For now he just said, "I love you too, Sammy," and watched his brother walk away.
Read on AO3.
sequel is Crazy Faith:
Part I
Part II
Author: Ivy
Fandom: Supernatural
Wordcount: 10,500
Rating: R
Warning: Implied Wincest. ANGST. And a bit of angst. Did I mention angst?
A/N: Big thanks to trakkie for the beta.
Summary:
In retrospect, Dean knew it was a mistake. He could have anticipated the outcome, in all its ugliness, if he'd allowed himself to think at all instead of just acting. If he was more honest with himself than he ever had been in his life, he'd admit that he'd done it because he wanted to force Sam's hand. He thought he knew what Sam would choose if it came down to it, and maybe he just needed to know for sure.
But as plans went, this one sucked ass.
~*~
In retrospect, Dean knew it was a mistake. He could have anticipated the outcome, in all its ugliness, if he'd allowed himself to think at all instead of just acting. If he was more honest with himself than he ever had been in his life, he'd admit that he'd done it because he wanted to force Sam's hand. He thought he knew what Sam would choose if it came down to it, and maybe he just needed to know for sure.
But as plans went, this one sucked ass.
~*~
She had big boobs and a little nose. The plastic plate on her lapel said her name was "Kate," and gave Dean an excuse to stare a little. She was only staring at Sam.
Sam looked up from the laminated menu and ordered a patty melt, with well-done fries. They’d had an unfortunate incident not too long ago with undercooked french fries that looked and tasted like soggy shoe-laces.
When she walked back towards the kitchen, Dean kicked Sam’s foot under the table. "She’s cute, if you go in for that gum-snapping, acrylic-nail-wearing, teased hairdo Southern belle sort of thing."
Sam rolled his eyes. "She didn’t have big hair. Or acrylic nails."
"You noticed her nails? Bet you even know the color of the polish-cotton candy or princess sparkle or something?"
"Ha ha," Sam said flatly.
Dean grabbed a couple of the sweet-n-lo packets and started building a little house of cards with them. "I’m just saying-she was totally checking you out. And tits like that don't come around every day. You should take advantage of the opportunity."
"Dean!" Sam hissed, slamming his hand on the table. The vibration knocked down all of Dean’s sugar packets. Dean was just about to retaliate when he saw Sam plaster on a big smile as Kate came back with their food.
"You boys new in town?" she asked, with a Southern accent just pronounced enough to be charming without making her sound like a hick.
Sam started to shake his head. "We’re just passing through."
"Oh," Kate said with the beginnings of a pout.
"We’re visiting our uncle-he lives a few miles down the road. We’ll be around for a few days," Dean said and watched Kate’s face light up as she turned towards him. Sam stepped on his foot. He ignored it. "Uncle Fred, though, he’s old, gets tired real easy. We’ll probably end up spending most of our time in the motel watching cable."
"That’s too bad," Kate said, sneaking a look at Sam. "It’s just the start of peach season, here. It’s too pretty out there to stay cooped up in a motel. Why don’t you get your uncle to take you out?"
Sam was shooting him dire looks every time Kate looked away from him. Dean never got tired of winding his brother up. "No, I’m afraid he’s just not strong enough for that sort of thing."
"Bless his heart," Kate said. She hovered for a moment as if trying to decide if she should say something else or just get back to work.
"Hey, I know," Dean said, his tone rich with insincerity, "do you want to show us around? I don’t want to impose or anything," he rushed on, "but you sound like you’d know the best spots." He looked at Sam. "The most scenic."
"Oh, sure! Sure!" Kate bubbled. "We’ve got the best peaches in Georgia, if you know where to look. I’d love to take you. And your brother, of course." She looked at Sam and Dean almost laughed. Sam looked like he’d been caught by a spiderweb.
"Here, let me give you my number. I get off at eight, today, which is really too late to go to the orchard. But tomorrow’s my day off." She finished scribbling on her pad and ripped off the piece of paper, very deliberately handing it to Sam. "Just give me a call when you know where you’re staying."
When she was out of earshot in the kitchen, Dean leaned toward Sam over the table. "She’s definitely got the best peaches in Georgia." Sam kicked him again.
~*~
Sam let it drop when they got back in the car. Poor boy, Dean thought, totally unaware of what’s in store. They checked into the Motel Hi-Ho, whose beds were like rocks and gave Dean the sneaking suspicion that there’d be cockroaches as soon as the sun went down. They were on their way to Savannah to investigate a series of disappearances. Sam had flagged this one, but Dean was inclined to believe it was more likely they were dealing with a predatory john than a haunting. There was no reason not to stick around here a few days.
Dean waited till Sam was in the shower, then fished Kate’s number out of his brother’s jeans pocket.
The phone rang four times before it picked up. "Kate? Hi. This is-"
"Dean," Kate breathed, and damn if that Southern drawl didn’t sound even sexier over the phone.
"Yeah. Sam and I checked into the Motel Hi-Ho-"
"That dump?" Kate interrupted, and Dean chuckled.
"Well, I promised," he hesitated a second when he realized that he couldn’t remember if he'd given a name for their "uncle" that afternoon. Weak, he thought, weak. "Uh…our uncle I’d help him with a plumbing problem tonight, but it’s really only a one man job, so…"
"Sam’s not a plumber, huh?" Kate asked.
"No, well, yes. He’s very good with his hands, but I’m not going to need him tonight. Do you think you could keep him occupied for me?" Oh, this was just too much fun.
"Oh, no problem," Kate said. "Why don’t I come by around nine?"
"Sure," Dean answered.
By the time Sam came out of the shower he was flipping through the snowy channels on the TV, trying very hard not to snicker.
~*~
Sam was dicking around on the internet by the time nine o’clock rolled around. When the knock on the door came, Sam didn’t look up. "What, you order pizza or something?"
"Yeah, I ordered something," Dean said, getting up.
When Dean opened the door, Kate was smoking. Both literally and figuratively. She hadn’t gone for the skanky look Dean was so fond of. No, her low-cut crocheted top projected a certain wholesomeness, like she was a MILF twenty years too young.
"Kate!" Sam said somewhere behind Dean, and Dean heard the sound of something slipping to the floor and Sam banging his shin against the corner of the bed. Dean was going to take that as a sign of progress.
Before Sam could say something to ruin this perfect evening Dean had planned for him, Dean turned to Kate. "My brother’s not quite ready. Give us a minute?"
"Sure," she said, and Dean gently shut the door.
"What is she doing here? Dressed like-" Sam was rubbing his shin absently.
"Oh, come on, Sam, haven’t we been over the birds and the bees? Alright, I can give you a refresher, but only if you promise to take notes so you don’t forget anything this time."
"Jesus, Dean, I’m not an idiot."
"Well, you sure do a fine impression-"
"Screw you," Sam interrupted. "I mean, why is she here. You didn’t tell her we’d, um, entertain her tonight…"
"Why Sam! What a dirty mind you have! Straight to the gutter." He laughed at the way the red was climbing up Sam’s cheeks. He couldn’t help it. "I may have, possibly, told her that I’d be busy this evening and without my charming company you’d be a bit bored."
"You mean-me and her," Sam said.
"Oh, stop being such a pussy! Dude, she’s hot and the way she’s dressed-she’s definitely interested. Admit it: I’m the best older brother ever."
"You’re a dick," Sam said, but Dean could already tell the possibilities were running through his brother’s head.
"Get out there, tiger," Dean mocked, then walked out to the little cement balcony that ran along the front of their second story room.
"All set!" he said, and Kate turned back from where she’d wandered towards the staircase.
Sam only needed a little shove to get out the door. By the time Dean closed it after the two of them, things were going along swimmingly. Luckily Kate found his brother’s embarrassed stuttering charming. Things would go well tonight, he could tell. And in case his brother suffered from a case of cold feet- Dean threw the security chain on the door, then flopped back onto the bed to enjoy five channels of porn, all to himself.
~*~
Banging woke Dean up around two in the morning. "I’ve got a shotgun in here and I’m not afraid to use it!" Dean shouted at the door.
"Stop being a prick, Dean and open the damn door!" Sam yelled, and kicked a few more times at the flimsy door.
"Heyheyhey!" Dean said, sitting up. "You bust that open we’ll have to pay the deposit!"
"Open up, Dean, I’m serious!"
"Things didn’t go well tonight?" Dean asked insouciantly.
"What? What does that have to do with-"
"Sammy, you’ve got a perfectly good bed to sleep in tonight and this one ain’t it."
"Who the hell asked you to-"
"I have to do these things for you, it’s my sacred older brother duty."
"For fuck’s sake, Dean! It’s getting cold out here. Open the goddam door!"
"Shh! You’ll wake the neighbors," Dean yelled, then rolled over, back to the door. Sam banged and yelled for a good ten more minutes. Dean was glad his brother had too many scruples to do property damage with no imminent peril. If the roles had been reversed, Sammy’d be eating quilt by now. But if things went the way he expected them to, by the time the two of them hit the road tomorrow, Sam would be too damn happy to care about retribution.
~*~
The sun was watery coming through the blinds the next morning. Dean grabbed his watch from the bedside table-it was still early, not quite six. Hopefully Sam wouldn’t be back for a few hours yet, plenty of time for a quick run to Dunkin’ Donuts to smooth things over if necessary.
Dean opened the door and looked out over the balcony. Sam was leaning against the hood of the Impala in the parking lot below. Crap. Dean ducked back into the room. Luckily Hi-Ho had just enough pretensions to have a coffee maker and a packet of free grounds in the room. It was bound to be crap, but better to face Sam prepared.
A few minutes later he stepped out onto the balcony with two cups of freshly perked coffee. "Hey Sam," he said, leaning over the railing. Sam glared up at him and didn’t say anything at all. Dean took the flight of cement steps to the parking lot two at a time, feeling his brother’s eyes on him the whole time.
He pivoted quickly around the pillar at the bottom of the stairs and headed briskly to the car. Sam just leveled a stare at him that would have thrown him clear down the street had he been a poltergeist. "No, really, come near me with a hot cup of coffee. See what happens," he said.
"What?" Dean said innocently.
"You are a rotten slimy cock-sucking bastard. The only reason that you’re still in one piece is that you’re blood."
Dean stopped about ten paces from Sam, not willing to press his luck. Sam might sound calm now, but Dean had seen this often enough between Sam and his father to know this was just the eye of the hurricane. "Don’t tell me she didn’t invite you in?"
"I slept in the car you little shit. You expected me to drive right over to her house after I’d dropped her off and told her it was a lovely evening and tell her my big brother locked me out and did she maybe have some extra room in her big soft bed?"
"Well," Dean shrugged. "Yeah."
"You should write a book: ‘Dean’s Book of Lovin’: 101 Ways to Make the Chick Think You’re a Complete Skeeze.’" Sam stood up from the hood. "Give me the keys." Dean awkwardly tucked one cup of coffee into his elbow and fished out the room key from his hip pocket. When he tossed it to Sam, a little of the scalding coffee spilled, soaking into his sleeve.
Sam caught the keys gracefully and started past Dean to the stairs. "You-" he said, pointing a finger accusingly at Dean before Dean had barely gotten his mouth open, "shut your damn cakehole." When he was up on the balcony he added, "enjoy your coffee in the car."
~*~
The two cups of coffee had gone cold, sitting on the hood of the car. Dean had been right in his initial assessment-it was crap. He was just debating whether he should take a spin with the Impala or stick around until Sam came out of his snit when his brother emerged from the motel room with a bang. His hair hung in damp tendrils and he still looked pissed.
He was also carrying his duffel. "Get your crap," Sam said chucking his bag into the trunk of the car. "I'll check out."
"We're not sticking around so you can get another chance at some lovin'?"
Sam just pointed a finger accusingly at him and headed toward the office. "Hey, I didn't know she wasn't a first date kinda girl!" Dean yelled after him.
Sam was sitting in the passenger seat, arms crossed, when Dean got back. He looked over at his brother a second, wondering if he should keep pressing. "Are we going to Savannah or are you going to play Dr. Phil some more?" Sam interrupted his thoughts.
"Guess we're going to Savannah," Dean said and started the car. He swung by the diner on the way out of town, though.
~*~
They were an hour down the road and Sam was still glaring out the window. Dean knew he'd been a bit of a dick, but that didn't mean he was going to admit it to Sam. He popped in his Steve Miller Band tape and fast-forwarded through the first couple cuts. He pressed play on the final chords of "The Stake," which segued quickly into "The Joker." Dean couldn't resist singing along a bit when it reached the chorus, "Really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree."
"What is it with you?" Sam said, slapping his hand against the eject button. "What's your deal with this chick?"
"Hey, I'm just looking out for your best interests, here. Is it wrong of me to want my brother to experience all the wonders of the female form? That chick had Australian cleavage, man. She could've given you a tittyfuck-I bet she wouldn't even need a push-up bra." Dean leered a bit.
"God, Dean!" Sam said, exasperated. "Do you even listen to the words coming out of your mouth? Don't talk about her like she just a pair of…of-"
"Really nice knockers, Sammy." Sam just huffed and looked out the window. "Wait," Dean said. "You like her, don't you?"
"What do you care?"
"Sammy and Katie sitting in a tree-"
"Look, Dean," Sam cut him off, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "Maybe I'm being overly sentimental here, but I like to know a bit more about someone than that they have nice tits before I sleep with them. 'Hey, baby, the bathroom's free,' is not my idea of a pick up line."
"Ah," Dean said. "Good times."
"I'm just saying I like to care about a person before I have sex with them, all right?"
Dean sniffed. "Oh, Sammy, you talk so purty."
"Shut up," Sam said. "I don't know why you're so interested. Why's it so important to you that I sleep with her? Really?"
"I'm just trying to teach you about the birds and the bees, Sammy," Dean said, keeping his eyes on the road. "I'd just rather you learn about these things at home than out there with your hooligan friends."
Dean knew he'd screwed up as soon as the words left his mouth. Sam was silent. Dean didn't look at him, but he had a fair guess at the way his brother was looking at him. There were fault lines between them now, places he just had to make sure the conversation didn't go. And he'd just fallen into one of them.
"Dean," Sam said gently. Dean could see Sam's hand reach out towards Dean's thigh in his peripheral vision. "You know I-"
Dean popped the tape back in and cranked the volume so loud he had to roll down the window so the reverberations of the bass didn't hurt his ears. If Sam said anything else, he didn't hear it.
~*~
Dean had been right about Savannah. Nothing there that the police hadn't already sewed up. Sam didn't bring up Kate or their conversation on the way down and Dean didn't give him shit for picking a dud hunt.
They hung out in the humidity for a day, lazing in their motel room. Dean had to admit Savannah had something going for it-the room had its own balcony with iron grille-work-but he really wasn’t in the mood for all that Southern charm.
Dean lay on the bed, hands crossed behind his head, boots still on. "Anything?"
Sam kept tapping through websites on his laptop. "Woman sees Virgin Mary in her oatmeal?" Sam said apologetically.
"What? Are you looking at Weekly World News again? What did I tell you about that site. You’d think you learned your lesson after the Bat Boy incident."
"It could have been a wendigo-it looked sort of like one."
"I know there’s a lot of crazy shit on Off-Broadway, but I don’t think anyone’s put a wendigo on stage yet."
"They did do that musical version of Evil Dead."
"And I’m sure you wanting to drive to New York to see it was just to make sure they weren’t mistreating any Deadites," Dean shook his head, hairs prickling against the palms of his hands. He heard Sam slap close his laptop.
"I’ve got jack shit," he said. "You wanna hang around Savannah?"
"Not really," Dean said, already wondering how long they’d be on the road before Sam noticed he was taking them back to Kate’s diner.
~*~
"Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing," Sam said. They’d barely crossed the city limits out of Savannah, car pointed northwest. Dean mentally lost his bet with himself-sometimes he forgot how well Sam knew how his mind worked.
Dean made a "who, me?" face and kept driving.
~*~
Dean spotted Kate serving another table when they got to the diner. She waited until their server had taken their order before crossing over with an expression halfway between wariness and hope.
"Kate," Sam turned his smile to its highest wattage. "I was hoping you'd be here."
"You were?"
"Look, I'm sorry about having to run out a few days ago. It was a bit of a family emergency-"
"Oh," Kate said, tucking a stray lock behind her ear. "That's alright, you don't have to-"
"Let me make it up to you," Sam said. It was the polar opposite of the last time they'd been in this diner-Sam was flirting like a pro. Dean wondered just how good the date had gone if this was the result. "We're-" Sam looked over at Dean, meeting his eyes with determination, "going to be in town for a few days." He finished the sentence without looking away and, OK, yeah, Dean figured he owed his brother that.
While the two worked out the details, Dean pretended to look at the dust motes caught in the late afternoon sun. Seriously, it was like being in high school again.
They checked back into the Motel Hi-Ho (cheapest rates in town, and no leaks in the roof, which was always a plus). Sam immediately hit the shower. There were no fans in the bathroom, so Sam cracked the door afterwards to let the cooler air from the room defog the mirror enough so that he could see to shave. Dean looked at his brother standing in just a towel, chin jutted out as he ran a razor over his throat, and tried to think of some crack about Sam getting ready for a big date, but couldn't for the life of him come up with anything.
Dean turned on the TV and flipped aimlessly through the channels while Sam got dressed. When he headed for the door, snagging the car keys on the way, he looked at Dean challengingly but didn't say a word.
~*~
Apparently Kate was a second date kind of girl. Dean didn't hear the rumble of the Impala pulling into the parking lot until almost noon the next day. Dean was flipping idly through the local newspaper when Sam breezed in, yesterday's clothes a little wrinkled. He walked straight through to the shower without stopping, not even giving Dean the chance to smirk knowingly, which was probably the point. It wasn't every day Dean got to tease Sam about a walk of shame.
Dean stared at the door to the bathroom as he heard the spray of the shower. All of yesterday they'd felt weirdly out of synch. When Dean thought about it, they'd been out of synch since the drive down to Savannah. Before that Sam had been bitchy, but no more than usual. Maybe he'd pushed things a little too far. All growing up, Dean had pushed Sammy, and Sammy pushed right back. That's how it worked, how Dean knew things were OK between them. Now sometimes when he pushed, Sam didn't fight at all. It was like there was something new and fragile in his brother and Dean couldn't figure out how he should handle it. He'd never been a kid gloves kind of guy.
Whatever. Dean snapped the paper and folded it from the sports section over to the obituaries. They both just needed to blow off a little steam. Too many hours spent too close to each other. Especially since Salvation. Sam had barely let Dean out of his sight since then.
Sam'd make time with the waitress and they'd drive out in a day or two, back to the usual banter between them.
Sam stepped out of the steamy bathroom, ruffling his hair to shake most of the water out of it. He bent over his duffle bag to rifle through it for a shirt, sniffing a few in disgust before settling on a red button-down. "We need to do laundry."
"Not it," Dean said, putting his finger up to the side of his nose in a gesture from a childhood game the two of them had played.
Sam looked over at him, just his head visible above the bed as he crouched over his bag. "Who locked who out of a hotel room?"
Crap. Sam'd be playing that card for months. "Fine, fine." He looked back at the newspaper, the columns of tiny print unfocused. "You…have a good time last night?" He tried for his usual leer but his heart wasn't in it.
"Sure." Sam straightened up, running a belt through the loops on his pants. "It's Kate's day off. Don't wait up," he said, then grabbed the keys from where he'd dropped them on the bed and was out the door before Dean could think of anything else to say.
~*~
Dean did the laundry. He thought about throwing bleach in with Sammy's load, but didn't think that would go over too well right now. He walked along Main Street from one end of the town to the other, then back, which didn't take up as much time as he would've liked. He scoped out the only bar: pool table in the back. Good. They were low on funds. He surfed the net for awhile, refreshing his gmail account obsessively, even though he knew Sam would not be spending his time with his date emailing him. He watched Godzilla vs. Megalon on TV. When night fell, he hustled pool for a while. There wasn't a single girl worth looking at in the bar-damn him for letting Sam go after the one attractive girl in town. He had a few beers and headed back to their room and lay for far too long staring at the ceiling and thinking how nice it was not to have to listen to Sam's snoring.
~*~
Dean went to the library the next morning-not that there was anything he needed to look up, since they didn't have a hunt. The branch was small enough that it didn't have an online subscription to the New York Times, just a few cabinets full of microfilm. Those things always made him sea-sick. He pulled out Dad's notebook and turned to one of the many clippings stuck in the back: unexplained deaths that John had never had time to figure out. Maybe if Dean got lucky he'd find a pattern. Or get a splitting headache and waste most of a day.
He loaded one of the microfilms into the player, but only got halfway through skimming the date in question for a relevant article before he started zipping the film back and forth through the machine to the beat of "Back in Black." He eyed the librarian as she walked past, pushing a little cart for reshelving, and tried to get a sexy Marian librarian fantasy going, but the raw materials were just not there. He could picture Kate all buttoned up in a suit like that, though, with horn-rimmed glasses and her blond curls pinned back severely, just aching to be undone. But she was with Sam, doing…whatever it was his brother needed to get out of his system.
He rewound the microfilm, then dicked around with the photocopier until he ran out of dimes to feed it. By that point he'd managed to waste almost the whole morning, and headed back to the room.
When he opened the door, he smelled sugar, and immediately looked around for his brother. He found, instead, the source of the smell: a small bag of powdered doughnut holes with, "Don't wait up-S," written on it with Sharpie.
Dean grabbed the bag and flopped back on the bed, kicking his heels against the edge of the mattress. This was beginning to feel like those years with just him and Dad, when he'd wake up in the morning and his father would be gone, no telling when he'd come back. At least Dad usually left him a set of coordinates and a hunt to keep him occupied.
~*~
Dean woke up late the next morning, perpendicular across the bed, ankles and arms sticking off opposite ends of the mattress. The sheets were all on the floor. He couldn't remember what he'd dreamed about. He glanced at his watch. "Jesus, Sammy," he said and rolled onto his back. "Let the poor girl go back to work some time."
By noon he'd wandered out to the orchard on the edge of town and discovered that Kate knew what she was talking about with the peaches. "This is pathetic," he muttered and chucked the pit as hard as he could. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and thought about calling his brother and telling him to cut it out. He was starting to feel all jittery, the way he had after Sam'd hopped a bus for Palo Alto. Which was stupid, since Sam was in the same town, macking on some girl. That Dean had thrown him at, which made this whole thing his fault.
So.
He decided it would be better if he had a case, some destination in mind. By two o'clock he had something. Not much, just a few hikers gone missing in the Cascades, but it could be something. He'd have a few days to look for something better on the road. And at least it was three thousand miles from Kate's peaches.
Sam pulled up twenty minutes after Dean called him. Dean liked to believe that meant his brother was just waiting around for an excuse to leave, cause twenty minutes wasn't much time for a proper goodbye.
He walked out to the parking lot, his bag on one shoulder, Sam's on the other. The door squeaked familiarly as his brother unfolded himself from the front seat. Dean dumped the bags at his feet and turned to the hood of the Impala. He ran his fingers over it, feeling the heat from the engine and the August sun soaked into the black finish. "Ah, baby, it's good to see you. You miss daddy?"
Sam snorted. "You two need a room?"
Dean looked askance at his brother. "I'm sure she's seen plenty of action in the past two days." He straightened up and pointed a finger at Sam. "Just tell me you steam-cleaned the backseat."
"You're disgusting Dean," Sam said pleasantly. He popped the trunk and heaved the two bags in. "What are you thinking-wendigo?"
"Could be," Dean said. "Could be werewolf." He slid into the driver's seat, running his hands over the curve of the steering wheel. He turned the key. "Get in the car, Sam."
Dean didn't particularly want to tell Sam what he'd been doing the past three days, so he didn't push to hear any details about Sam and Kate. He knew his brother well enough to know that interrogations went both ways. Sam seemed cheerful and eager to get down to business, so Dean patted himself on the back for getting Sam to vent whatever fucked up thing was going through his head, and figured that was the end of it.
~*~
"Take your pick," Dean said, leaning back in his chair and extending three Twizzlers toward Sam. Sam pulled one, like drawing lots, and Dean let his chair land back on four legs, propelling him towards the laptop sitting on the table. "We've got a possible poltergeist, a series of accidental drownings, and three kids snatched from their backyards and returned two weeks later with no memory of the missing time."
Sam tugged on the Twizzler. "Where're the drownings?"
Dean quickly clicked to the appropriate browser window. "Uh…Lake George, Florida."
"Let's go there."
"It's probably not anything-just some gators."
"Then why'd you bring it up? And don't tell me you've always wanted to go to Disney World."
"Florida it is, then. But if it's gators, you wrassle 'em, I'll take pictures."
"Oh, fuck you," Sam said and got up to dump his tray in the trash. Dean didn't think anything of it when Sam offered to drive.
~*~
The sun was just disappearing over the mountains when Dean blinked his eyes open to see that Sam had pulled in to a hotel for the night. It was a bit early to pack it in and Dean was about to say so until he looked up and saw the neon sign for the Motel Hi-Ho. Sam was rather furtively making his way to the motel office.
Sam emerged from the office just as Dean was stretching the cricks out of his back. Sam tossed him the room key and Dean wondered if he'd gotten a second room for himself. "Four hundred miles for a booty call, Sam? I know you have a hard time picking up chicks, but I'm sure I could have found you someone nice back in West Virginia."
"It's on the way, Dean," Sam said.
"On the way? It's still daylight-almost," he amended before Sam could interrupt. "Only reason you stopped here was that waitress…Kate or something."
Sam rolled his eyes. "I didn't bitch when you drove us all the way to Missouri so you could see Cassie."
"Yes, you did! Besides-" Dean stopped himself. He'd meant to say I was in love with her. He suddenly wondered if that was the reason Sam had brought it up, if Sam was trying to tell him something.
"Besides what?"
"Besides, that was a case." Dean finished.
"You didn't believe it at the time. You just went cause you wanted to see your girlfriend."
"Ex-girlfriend," Dean said. There was an edge in Sam's voice and Dean didn't like the implications. "And we all know how well that ended."
Dean grabbed his bag from the trunk and headed up to the room, unreasonably pleased when Sam followed. He called over his shoulder when he entered the room, "Anyway we've got a hunt this time, so we leave in the morning."
"Fine," Sam said and headed for the shower. Dean noticed he didn't call Kate to see if she was free, which meant he must already know. Which meant he'd probably kept in touch with Kate for the past six months and that was just all kinds of wrong. Dean liked interacting with normal people fine but he knew he could never do a long-distance relationship with one, and neither should Sam. He'd break her heart or she'd break his and then he'd be sullen and depressed for weeks until he hooked up with someone else.
Sam was just kidding himself, Dean thought. He'd figure it out, sooner or later. Hell, if he'd been thinking about her for six months, he probably remembered the sex as being a whole lot better than it was, so maybe this would just sort itself out without Dean having to do anything.
So that's what Dean did until Sam showed up again the next morning, ready to hit the road-nothing.
~*~
"God, I wish it had been a gator," Sam whined from the passenger seat. "Stupid selkie. Who ever heard of a selkie on an inland lake? In the form of a manatee?"
"Well, she was kind of a cow," Dean quipped. It had taken a week to track down the pattern behind the killings, and another few days to trap her.
"Ha ha-ow!" Sam cried when Dean whacked his shoulder, hitting a few of the scratches from the selkie's nails. "I could sleep for a week."
"We've still got those missing kids and the poltergeist to look into."
"Where's the poltergeist?"
"Texas, I think."
Sam groaned and shifted on the seat. "Can't we take a few days off first?"
"Days off?" Dean asked. "What do you want, paid leave?"
"Hey, you're not the injured one here."
"You mean I'm not the one stupid enough to get between a pissed selkie and her skin." Dean glanced over at his brother. Sam had his best puppy dog eyes going, pout too. "Fine. I'll rochambeau you for it. On three. One, two," Dean looked over at his brother when he said three. Dean was holding a rock, Sam paper. Damn. Sam had always favored scissors, ever since they were little.
"Aw, yeah," Sam said, doing a little dance in his seat.
"Two outta three?" Dean asked.
"Not a chance."
"So, champ, where are we spending this two day sabbatical?"
Sam got still in that way that meant he didn't know how to broach a subject.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Sam, what is it with you and this chick?"
"You're the one who threw me at her!" Sam replied angrily.
"Yeah, well, I'm beginning to see the error of my ways."
~*~
The clerk at the motel knew his name when Dean walked in, or at least the one he'd given the last time. Dean saw that as the one-hundred-percent sure-fire way to know he'd overstayed his welcome. He was digging through the wallet, trying to find the card that matched the name when Sam walked in and plopped down cash for two nights-pretty much all the cash they had and the result of some pretty fine pool-playing if Dean said so himself.
"What the hell was that?" Dean yelled, as soon as he'd closed the door to the room.
"What?" Sam said, deliberately provocative.
"Don't use cash when plastic works just as well, Sammy, remember that? What are we supposed to do now if we get in a jam?"
"Come on, Dean, we've been here three times already. We keep paying with rubber cards, the owner's going to catch on! It's a miracle he hasn't already." Sam matched Dean's volume.
"Yeah, we've stayed here four times, and who's fault is that, huh? You so worried about landing us in jail, why do you keep driving back here?"
"I just don't want everyone in town to know we run credit card scams, that's all."
"No, you don't want one person in particular to know you're running credit card scams."
"Look, you're the one who-"
"So you could get laid, Sam, not so you could get married." The tone had more bitterness than he'd intended, but he wasn't pulling back now. "What's next, giving her your varsity letter jacket?"
"Oh, fuck you."
"You're twenty-four years old! You're not supposed to be going steady. You're supposed to be-spreading your wild oats."
"What? Dean, I've got friends from college who are married now. Dad got married when he was twenty-four. This isn't a hot-blooded macho man thing, you're pissed about something else."
"Yeah, I'm pissed. I'm pissed that you think you can keep this girl going on the side. What do you tell her about why you keep disappearing? What are you going to tell her tonight about the scratches on your shoulder?"
"Doesn't matter."
"Look, I can tell you from experience it's not going to work, Sam. You're just going to end up screwing things up. You can't get attached."
"God, is this about Cassie again? You couldn't do normal Dean, that doesn't mean I can't."
Dean turned his back on his brother, so mad he was starting to shake. It was like that time in Chicago when Sam had told him that when the demon was dead he'd walk out again. Since Dad died, Sam hadn't brought up normal again, and Dean had started to believe that maybe he didn't need to worry about it anymore, that Sam was going to stick around this time.
"Dean," Sam said, his voice quieter. Dean felt like ice water had been poured down his spine, his anger immediately slipping away into something he didn't want to admit was fear. Sam brushed his hand gently across Dean's shoulder, the tips of his fingers touching the nape of Dean's neck. It made him want to puke.
Dean jerked away, his whole body tensing. He didn't look, but he could feel his brother stepping close to him again. "It doesn't have to be this way," Sam said, still in that soft voice.
"Sammy!" Dean said, his voice as hard as a punch. "Don't bring this up again-we've been over this."
Dean turned around just in time to see Sam snatch his hand back. "No, Dean, we haven't. Every time I even hint at it, you turn on the radio or get in the shower or go to a bar. We haven't been over this, we haven't said anything at all." He sounded frustrated and pissy, throwing the type of temper tantrum he threw when Dad told them they had to move again. It was just such as Sammy reaction, his brother through and through, and Dean wanted to ask him if this is how he always sweet-talked people into the sack, but just the thought made him sick. In that moment he hated his brother more than he ever had in his life, more than he had when Sammy'd left for college. How dare he take this thing between them, this connection, and turn it into-
"Well, there are some things you should just never say, Sam! You think you'd have learned that after Dad."
"Dad has nothing to do with this! I just need to tell you-"
"No!" Dean shouted over him. Trust Sam to be stubborn now. He always was. Couldn't he see that if he kept pushing this time he'd destroy everything? "Don't you dare. Don't you dare say those words to me. You need to stop this, Sam. You-" he stumbled a bit and hated himself for letting some of the fear show through the anger. "You can't do this to me."
Sam's expression hardened. The eagerness, the hope, that had been written all over it a moment before was walled away. "Fine," Sam said. "Fine. I'll stop it."
He looked hurt and Dean wanted to help him, the way he always did. But he couldn't reach out his brother, Sam had taken that away from them. So he didn't do anything as Sam grabbed the keys to the Impala and tore out the hotel room, slamming the door behind him. He was still standing stock still when he heard the familiar engine noise pull out of the motel's parking lot and drive away.
He sat down on the bed but felt like he just kept falling. He told himself that Sam just needed to cool off a little and then they'd head out again and it would be fine. They were brothers; they knew just where the tender spots were on each other, just where to hit so it would hurt the most. They'd had their blow-outs before, probably always would. But Sam was his brother. That meant he'd always come back. They couldn't leave each other, not really.
Dean could believe that except for the one part of his brain that reminded him that Sam had left once before and stayed gone and there was no way for Dean to be sure the same thing hadn't just happened.
~*~
Dean didn't plan it. That's what he told himself later on when he couldn't fall asleep for thinking. There was no premeditation, no intent, just bad luck.
Dean sat in the hotel room for a few minutes after Sam left but felt like his skin would jump off if he didn't move. He wandered down the main street to the lone bar. It was actually familiar to him now, instead of one in a long line of anonymous, vaguely similar dives. He glanced back to the pool tables out of habit: there was no one there he hadn't hustled already. Something else to blame on his brother.
He sat down at the bar and set about drinking until this awful feeling in his stomach disappeared. He was well into his fifth beer when she sat down next to him. "Dean, right?"
Dean turned his head slowly. Wasn't that just icing on this perfect day-it was Sam's waitress. "You got me."
"I didn't know you two were back in town." She smiled and Dean remembered why he'd wanted to get this girl together with his brother in the first place. And hadn't that idea worked out so well. "Where's Sam?" she asked, feigning disinterest.
Dean had figured that Sam would let his girl know that he was coming, tell her to keep the candle burning. They must have been keeping in touch, right? Dean had figured that Sam would go straight to Kate after their fight. There was nothing like fucking to work off energy. Clearly he'd been wrong on both counts. Which meant that he had no idea where his brother was or what he was doing. A little of the edge he'd just been managing to dull came back.
Dean shrugged. "Oh," Kate said. She settled in to the stool and waited for the bartender to come over with her usual-some fruit drink that you shouldn't be able to buy in a place like this. "He talks about you a lot, you know," She said.
"Really," Dean said flatly. He wanted to ask her if Sam ever called out his name during sex, but he doubted he'd be able to pass that off as the alcohol speaking.
"Yeah, he's always going on about his older brother." She rested her hand briefly on the arm of his leather jacket. "Feels like I already know you."
Dean turned to her and put on the smile that was almost automatic. "And what do you know about me?"
"That you're a jerk."
Dean laughed, sharp and sudden, surprising both of them. In spite of everything else, he liked this girl. The future played out in his mind, Sam falling for this girl and spending more and more time diverting them to western Georgia. He might tell her everything and convince her to come on the road, but more likely he'd slowly let Dean go on more and more hunts on his own and then there'd be a ring and a house and Dean swinging by on Christmases and birthdays. It's what he wanted for his brother. This girl could give him a life better than anything Dean could offer.
~*~
A few hours and quite a few more drinks for both of them later, they were still sitting at the bar. Kate had talked about her waitressing job, her high school classmate that just had her second kid, her mother. She didn't talk about Sam, which surprised Dean. Isn't that what chicks did when having a few drinks with their boyfriend's brother? Try to get all the embarrassing stories they could?
She finished telling some story about skinny dipping and giggled, leaning against Dean's arm. She turned towards him with a smile. Her pink lips inched towards his; he could see the outline of the lip gloss where it had smudged, smell the alcohol on her breath. "Hey," Dean said, jerking away. "Don't you save that stuff for Sam?"
"You know," Kate said, winding a lock of her hair that had fallen out of her braid around her finger. "Sam's not here right now. But you are." She leaned in again.
"OK, I'm going to stop you there. I think we've both had a little too much to drink." He tried to disentangle himself and stand up, but the floor wasn't staying level like a floor was supposed to.
"I'm not a child, you know," Kate said with a pout that completely contradicted her words. "I know the score. Your brother and you, you're drifters. You just blow on through whenever you feel like it. Your brother's sweet and all, but a couple of dirty weekends doesn't make me his girl."
She stood up too, tipping forward until Dean was forced to catch her, her arms winding around his neck. "Girls just want to have fun," she said coyly. She ran her hands across the hair at the back of his neck against the grain, giving him goose bumps. He could feel her every breath through the full breasts pressed against his chest. "And you look like a lot of fun." Then she kissed him.
~*~
The motel was closer than her apartment. That's what he told her as they stumbled down the road, pressed close against each other. Her arm was wrapped around his waist, under the jacket-huddling against the February cold, Dean told himself. The halos around the streetlights blurred and doubled, refusing to stay still. He let the heat of the body beside him burn through him, convincing himself that it was inevitable.
They tumbled onto the nearest bed when he finally got the door shut behind them. Sam's bed. Or would have been if Sam hadn't torn out of there. Kate was soft and warm and that dizzy feeling of falling had come back but he had her to hold onto now. The alcohol swirled through his brain, making everything feel distant and unreal. He didn't even get his pants all the way off before he was inside her. She didn't seem to mind.
Afterwards they collapsed into each other, tangled in clothes and the long tendrils of her hair, tugged out of her braid. Sometime in the night, they woke enough to struggle out of their clothes and under the covers, rocking into each other again. Dean wasn't a cuddler by nature-sticking around after sex was just not something he did, not since high school. But when she turned in his arms, her breasts like warm pillows against his side, he was too wrung out and weary to move away.
~*~
Dean didn't hear the door open, but he heard it slam shut again. The weak light of early morning poured like molasses through his brain. Everything moved slowly and happened all at once, both at the same time.
Sam was standing inside the door, limned by the lights coming in through the blinds. His face was indistinct, for which Dean was grateful. What he could see was hurt, gut-wrenching pain written across every muscle of Sam's body.
Kate bolted out of the bed, dragging the prickly comforter with her, leaving Dean only partly hidden by the dirty sheets. She moved like a startled rabbit through the frozen tableau that was Dean and his brother. She pulled on her skirt and blouse facing the corner, not bothering with her underwear first. When she'd gathered up the rest of her clothes and slipped on her sneakers, she paused a moment to glance between Sam and Dean. Her eyes were bloodshot and shadowed underneath with a ring of mascara, like a raccoon. For the life of him, Dean couldn't remember why he'd brought her here. Sam didn't even look at her.
The sound of the door shutting behind her set off the headache that Dean had been too startled to notice before. Sam continued to stand there, his expression changing into one of pure anger. Sam moved towards him, and for a moment Dean was afraid Sam would punch him. Then he was afraid Sam would kiss him, and he didn't know which would be worse right now.
Dean stood up, holding the sheet around his waist, and backed toward the wall. Sam stalked up, right into his personal space, then darted his arm out to grab the lamp on the bedside table and hurl it across the room. Dean could feel the impact of each broken shard of porcelain inside his head.
"Dude," he said. "Hangover."
Sam turned back to him. "Get out."
"Look, Sammy, this wasn't, well, it was what it looks like, but it was an accident." Sam turned away from him and started picking up the clothing Dean had left strewn around the room. "We both got really drunk, and sure I was pissed at you, but I wouldn't-I wouldn't steal your girl. You know that, right?" Sam kept picking up pieces of clothing like some neat-freak housewife and Dean suddenly realized he was packing. He was packing Dean's stuff. "Look, she wasn't even your girl, right? You've only seen her a couple of times you know? And she came on to me, OK? Hey-Sammy, look at me!" He grabbed Sam's arm to stop him hurriedly shoving things into Dean's duffle. Sam kept going, like the weight of Dean's grip was nothing. When Dean tugged harder, Sam flailed at him, knocking Dean flat on his ass. The sheet slipped out of his grip and he found himself on his back in front of his brother, naked and still smelling like Kate. Sam had never seemed so tall in his entire life.
Sam's lip curled up and he threw a pair of dirty jeans and a shirt roughly into Dean's lap. "Don't be that way, Sammy," Dean said. "Come on, just talk to me."
Sam huffed something under his breath that sounded like, "that's rich." Dean stood and shimmied into the pants. Sam continued to mutter. "Now he wants to talk." He was breathing hard in that way that Dean knew meant he was trying not to cry.
"I'm sorry, Sammy." He said. "Look, I'm sorry. I knew it was a bad idea I just-I always seem to fuck things up."
Sam's head snapped around to him. "Yeah, you do." Sam grabbed Dean's duffle and tossed it to him. "You need to leave now."
"Sammy…"
Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out the keys to the Impala, holding them out until Dean reluctantly took them. "You just need some time to cool down," Dean said. "Then we can work through this."
"No, we really can't." Sam just stood there looking at Dean. Dean knew this expression: it was the one that had been on his own face when Cassie had shown him the door.
He'd broken Sam's heart.
~*~
Dean drove out of the motel parking lot with absolute serenity, made it all the way out of town driving at a reasonable pace, obeying every traffic law. The whole world felt like glass, blown too thin, ready to crack at the gentlest breeze. He couldn't even blame it on the hangover.
Ten miles down a winding two-lane road past barren orchards and frost-covered farmland, Dean pulled over and punched the steering wheel. He didn't feel like he was falling anymore. He felt like he'd hit the ground.
~*~
Dean slept curled in on himself in the backseat. He'd parked the car sloppily, half on the road, half on the gravel, so that it tipped sideways, making his blood rush to his head. With the engine off, the cold outside seeped into the car, drafts like breaths creeping underneath his clothes. He just curled himself tighter against the leather seat and squeezed his eyes shut.
When the sun was shining brightly from overhead Dean couldn't pretend to be asleep anymore. He climbed into the front seat and turned the car around, driving blindly back to where he'd come from, the horrible feeling that it was too late and he'd already lost getting worse and worse.
~*~
Dean still had the key to their motel room, but he knew it was empty even before he opened the door. The manager told him the nice young man had settled up for the damaged property a few hours ago and headed out. Dean didn't know what to do next. He drove to the diner to find Kate. She blushed beet red when she saw him, but she hadn't seen Sam. She might have looked hurt when that was all Dean asked, but Dean wasn't paying attention.
He drove through town after that, zig-zagging along the roads that spread out into fields, empty except for the occasional farmhouse. He found Sam by pure luck an hour later, walking along the gravel at the side of a road, duffel slung over his shoulder. Dean thought he'd choke from relief.
Dean rolled down his window and yelled across the empty lane between them. "Sam!" Sam kept walking resolutely away from him, readjusting the duffel on his uninjured shoulder. "Sam, come on. Get in the car." Dean was rolling along now, pacing Sam. He pulled into the left hand lane, close enough to his brother that he could reach out and grab his jacket. "Get in the car, Sammy!"
"No," Sam said. He wouldn't stop walking. Dean pulled over to the side of the road angrily and hopped out the car, leaving the door cocked open. He trotted up to his brother. "You need some time to cool down and I get that, but just get in the car." Sam rolled his eyes but kept walking. "Hey!" Dean jumped into Sam's path. "I'm talking to you." For a moment it looked like Sam would just sidestep him and keep going. Then he dropped the duffel onto the gravel and brought both his hands up to run through his hair.
"What? What, Dean." Sam was gesturing wildly, making Dean half afraid this would turn into a brawl. But maybe it would work out better that way-the times growing up when they were most civil towards each other were always after they'd gotten into a fight. "What?" Sam said again, and Dean wasn't quite sure what he wanted to say. All he could think was that he just needed to get Sam into the car and it would be OK.
"God, you still don't get it," Sam said, finally tired of Dean's silence. "You think we can just forget about this and keep going like nothing's changed."
"Look, I know I fucked up-"
"Yeah, you really did."
"But I've fucked up before, man. I just, I gotta know you're still with me."
Sam looked away. "I really don't think I am." Dean looked at his brother, really looked at him. He looked like he hadn't slept either, still in the clothes he'd been wearing yesterday. And he looked like he felt the same way Dean had been trying not to feel since yesterday, like they were standing at the end of things. Sam looked like he'd just lost the only family he had left.
"I'm sorry," Dean said. It was all he could say.
"I know you are." Sam kept his eyes focused on the road stretching out in front of him. "But you just don't know what- I know you don't…" Sam stopped for a moment, and Dean could tell all those times he had told Sam to shut up had taken their toll. Now Sam was trying to get the words out and he barely could. "I know we can't be together the way I want, and I'm not going to say I'm OK with that, but I was going to be." He finally looked at Dean. "But I try to get over this in my own way, I try to move on, and you have to take that away from me too."
"I-"
"What do you want from me? You want me to be with you all the time, but only feel what you want me to feel. I can't fuck somebody else and then come back to you, Dean, I just don't work that way." Sam shook his head. "I'm trying to be the brother you want me to be, but you won't let me!" Sam was speaking through clenched teeth, the tears Dean felt prickling behind his own eyes as well threatening to fall.
"I just don't want you to leave, Sammy."
"God, Dean. I think about the future, and how you want us to go on and on, just like before. You don't ever want anything to change, but Dean, it has to. I can't keep doing this. I thought I could find some balance, maybe. I thought maybe with Kate, maybe with someone else, but you won't let me have that."
"We'll figure something out, Sam, if that's what you want. Look, I know I'm a stubborn son of a bitch, but if that's what you want, we'll figure it out."
"You say that, Dean, but you won't. This will just happen again. I'm just too tired to keep going in circles."
"Sam…" Dean wanted to touch his brother and this time he let himself, despite knowing what Sam wanted and where it might lead. He thought at that moment that maybe it was worth it to keep Sam from leaving. His hand reached out and squeezed Sam's shoulder, feeling fine tremors through the jacket.
Dean thought about his brother leaving, about driving away from here on his own, and about what Sam had been trying to tell him for months. What Sam needed if he was going to stay. Dean forced himself to curl his hand around the back of Sam's neck, tug his head down. Sam looked at him curiously, focused on his face until they were too close and his eyes crossed. Dean could feel Sam's breath on his mouth. He stopped, swallowed nervously, and squeezed his eyes shut. Then he pushed their lips together.
It was-awkward. They both had morning breath and Sam's lips were chapped. Dean had had a lot of experience kissing, thought himself quite good at it, but this was like his first kiss under the bleachers when he was fourteen and didn't know what he was supposed to do with his lips. It was like, well, it was like kissing his brother. He wanted to pull away but didn't, he had to prove to Sam he could do this. Sam moved first, his lips giving Dean the sweetest caress. And the sound he made-it hurt Dean to hear it.
Then Sam put his hands gently on the front of Dean's jacket and pushed him back. Dean looked at him, surprised. Wasn't this what Sam wanted? Sam was looking at the ground. He ran his hand over his lips, wiping away the feeling of the kiss.
"Dean," he sighed quietly, sounding like he had no strength left for anger. "You were right. I can't do this to you."
"Sammy, if this is what you need-" Dean's voice was shaking. He'd put everything he had out there, Sam couldn't just not take it.
"I need you to want me, and you don't." Sam looked up at him. "God, Dean. Do you think I would blackmail you into it? Threaten to leave unless you put out?"
"Isn't that what this is?" Dean's hands were still on Sam's shoulders. He couldn't make himself let go.
"Dean!" Sam sounded more hurt than shocked. "I wouldn't hurt you like that! I can't-God."
Sam looked at Dean, straight in the eyes, holding his gaze until Dean was shaking too, and said the words that Dean had been trying so hard to keep Sam from saying. "I love you." They didn't feel like Dean thought they would. Whenever he'd thought about it before, the words had twisted in his gut, made him restless and angry and afraid. Now they just sounded like losing. "I love you, Dean. You're all I have. But it can't stay like this. I have to have something else, something just for me. And as long as I stay with you, that's never going to happen."
Dean wanted to deny it, but he knew it was true. He'd do anything for his brother, give him anything he needed. Now Sammy needed his freedom, and Dean could give him that.
He let his arms drop and tucked both his hands into his pockets. He nodded. Later he would think about it, and wonder what else he could have done, how if Sam had just taken what he offered, they would have stayed together. Or whether it would always have ended this way, from the moment Dean picked him up from Stanford-if it was inevitable that someday Sam would go back to that life and leave Dean behind.
For now he just said, "I love you too, Sammy," and watched his brother walk away.
Read on AO3.
sequel is Crazy Faith:
Part I
Part II