Knowledge of Dead Secrets (9 of 10)
Dean drives Kate back to Belle Rose; he can’t think of anything else to do and she needs to get home. In the back of his mind, he knows he’s doing this because it was the last thing Sam asked of him, but he pushes that thought away. He likes Kate, they’ve gotten to know each other after living on the road together for two weeks with nothing but each other for company-them and Sam, though neither of them mention him.
The first night back, Dean stays at her apartment, and she wakes him up halfway through the night, sobbing, hair flying every which way. He sits up on the couch, holds out his arms, and she crawls into his lap, soaks his t-shirt with her tears. Neither of them go back to sleep.
The second night’s better, but it’s too quiet, the couch is too small, he feels like he’s trapped in a nightmare he can’t get out of. Dean ends up getting in the Impala and driving to the Mississippi, sitting on the bank and watching boats leave for the Gulf as the sun’s waking up. It’s hot and he’s not dressed for the weather, sweat gliding down his back like water, the same as if he’d jumped in the river, held his breath and ducked his head under.
He goes back to Kate’s house, walks in and sees her sitting at the table, staring at a carton of rainbow sherbet.
“I’m gonna get going,” he says, and Dean knows she’s hearing what he’s not saying, that it’s too strange being here without Sam, that he can’t stay, that he has to go find his brother, can’t sit here and just take Sam leaving without a fight, not this time.
“What’re you gonna fucking do?” Kate asks, looking up at him with her red-rimmed and bloodshot eyes. How are you going to find him?
Dean shrugs, turns a chair around and straddles it, reaches over and takes the lid off of the carton, runs his finger through the quickly melting mess. “Dunno,” he says, licking off lime and lemon flavouring, leaving his skin sticky. “I’ll start with Lissa and go from there.”
Kate tries to smile, but it’s not a pretty expression, doesn’t work. “Good fucking luck,” she mutters.
--
Lissa doesn’t tell him a thing. Not about Sam, at any rate; he can’t step on to her porch, he starts yelling, and she finally yanks open the door and stands there yelling back at him, hands on her hips, something in French Dean can’t understand and is pretty sure he wouldn’t want to anyway.
“Just tell me where to find him,” he asks, getting desperate, and when she smiles, he says, “No, come on.”
She doesn’t listen, just says, “Va te faire foutre!” and slams the door hard enough for Dean to feel the ground under him shake.
“Fucking bitch,” he mutters under his breath as he’s stomping back to the car.
“I heard that, you trou duc’!” Lissa screams from inside the house, and as the grass around Dean starts hissing, he remembers that it’s never a good thing to insult a hoodoo witch. He runs to the car, peals out of the street, and sees snakes slithering across the road behind him in his rear-view mirror.
--
Over the next four weeks, Dean crosses the country five times, picking up jobs when he stumbles across them, hustling every chance he can get, calling in every favour he’s owed by everyone he’s ever helped in order to find his brother. Sam’s gone to ground like a fucking guerrilla; either people have seen him everywhere at the same time or he’s nowhere at all, worse than a ghost.
Others, as soon as they realise they’re getting close to the edges of something related to vodou, back away quicker than a werewolf from silver shot, like they’d be willing to take on a demon but the vodou’s got everyone terrified, unwilling to mess with it.
Dean half-expects that from the civilians, but then he calls Bobby and asks for help, and as soon as Dean mentions Kirklin, Bobby says he can’t do anything, sounds skittish, worried. Dean wouldn’t have expected that from hunters, but something’s apparently got a bunch of them spooked, something that wasn’t there a month and a half ago, and Dean’s left scrambling to try and figure out what Sam’s done.
He drives into Bobby’s parking lot early one morning, sees the older hunter out in the junkyard with his latest dog, and Bobby’s shaking his head as soon as Dean steps out of the Impala.
“You know I like you, Dean, but you better leave,” Bobby says, one hand tight around the handle of a coffee cup, the other holding a loaded shotgun. “Turn around and go on, now.”
“The fuck’s wrong with everyone?” Dean asks, words bursting out of him. “Come on, Bobby, at least tell me why you won’t help me.”
Bobby looks at Dean, half-surprised, and says, “You haven’t heard?” When Dean shakes his head, Bobby lets out a deep breath, looks around, and says, “You better come inside, then.”
--
Dean sits down at the old kitchen table, ass thumping into a hard seat with no cushion, fingertips tracing out grooves on the table he carved there himself twenty-some years ago. Bobby slips a cup of coffee under Dean’s nose, and Dean looks up, nods his thanks before taking a sip. The liquid’s hot, strong, bitter, and it reminds him of Sam, the way his brother smells. Dean grimaces, the coffee churns in his esophagus, and he puts the cup down, pushes it away and rubs his eyes.
“What’s going on, Bobby?” he asks. “I’ve been trying to track Sam down for four weeks and everyone’s too scared to tell me anything.”
“There’s lots of talk out there,” Bobby says, lowering himself into the chair across the table from Dean. It doesn’t escape Dean’s attention that Bobby’s watching him, that the shotgun’s resting lightly across Bobby’s legs. “People aren’t sure what to think. Between Walker getting himself lost, killed, we think, and your brother disappearing, seems like something might’ve gone wrong with the demon hunting. Few people say its curses to talk to a Winchester, now more than ever before.”
Dean shakes his head, says, “They’re idiots and you know better. What else are they saying?”
Bobby hesitates, but Dean widens his eyes, silently asking, and Bobby says, “There’s talk of some vodou going on down south. Something big that no one knows everything about, but there was power, and a lot of it. And then you come out of Louisiana, asking about your brother, calling in favours all over the place, and someone mentions you had a charm with something on it, said they heard that from Gordon Walker, who’s gone missing.”
Dean swallows, doesn’t know what Bobby would do if he saw the two charms hanging next to Dean’s amulet, still around Dean’s neck. He resists the urge to make sure the charms are under his shirt, covered up, but he sees Bobby’s eyes flick downwards anyway, knows that Bobby can tell it’s not just an amulet hanging off the cord anymore.
“Now, hunters might be better at killing things, Dean, but we ain’t stupid,” Bobby says, going on, eyes meeting Dean’s again. “Vodouisantes all over the country acting jumpy, like there was a major power play inside the faith, no one knows what’s going on and you come waltzing out wearing vodou magic. Either you’re in it up to your eyeballs or Sam is, but talking to either of you about anything, even each other, might draw us into it, and we’ll be damned before we see that happen.”
Dean sits there, takes that all in, then nods, stands up. “Thanks for the info,” he says, knows he’s being gruff but he’s about ready to kill someone, himself, Sam, even resurrect Gordon and kill him again, for being so stupid, so arrogant, so foolish and stubborn and Winchester. Of course hunters would start getting suspicious, isn’t that why Sam fled California in the first place? And here he’s been, just making it worse, running around like an idiot, drawing attention to them both.
“Dean, you know I’d do anything for your family,” Bobby goes on after a minute, shifting in his chair, looking uncomfortable. “Hell, I helped John raise you and Sam. But this, I’m not a guy people come to for help with vodou. I respect it, I don’t mess with it, and you better not be either, you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”
Dean nods, says, “Yeah, I know what you’re saying,” sits there a moment longer before getting up, saying, “Thanks for the coffee. And the info.”
He stalks out of Bobby’s like a man possessed, except he’s not, thanks to his idiot of a brother, the same idiot who’s out there all by himself, prey for any hunter who thinks that taking a shot at a Winchester about now might be a good idea, and all of this has Dean pretty fucking pissed off.
Dean waves off whatever Bobby’s saying, mind too full of how he’s supposed to track down his brother, and drives away, heading for a liquor store.
--
Dean buys two bottles of rum, dark as molasses and thick like honey. The guy behind the counter gives him an odd look when Dean adds a pack of playing cards to the bill, but doesn’t say anything, rings Dean’s purchases up and sends him on his way. After another stop, at a tobacco store, Dean checks into a motel, goes online and searches out a pattern, and then sleeps for a couple hours.
Once it’s dark, he finds the nearest cemetery and lugs the tobacco, cards, and rum out to the middle of the grounds, keeping an eye out for other people but not seeing anyone. He’s twitchy, doesn’t like this one bit, but he needs help and the loa liked him, argued with him and chastised him, but liked him, Dean thinks, and if anyone, anything, would know where Sam is, Baron La Croix would.
Dean sets up a small altar out of rocks in the middle of the cemetery, opening both bottles of rum, pouring half of one over the rocks and the ground around the makeshift altar before setting the bottles behind the rocks, taking out the cards and laying the ace of spades on top of the altar, opening the pouch of tobacco and placing that next to the card.
This whole thing, the altar, the place, the reason for calling Baron La Croix, it’s not traditional, definitely not smart, he’s not even calling Legba first to open the way, but Dean uses a piece of chalk to trace out the baron’s vévé on the grass and then steps back, takes a deep breath.
“Lakwa, get your ass out here,” Dean says, words echoing in the darkness, bouncing off of headstones, around trees and through plastic flowers, heavy with the air of mourning that lurks around the gravesite. Dean shudders, says, “Come on, you damn loa, get out here and talk to me. I need to find my brother.”
One of the bottles of rum, the half-full bottle, cracks, shatters like someone’s thrown a rock at it, startling Dean. The rum drips over the ace of spades, over the tobacco, and then Dean smells smoke, like someone’s just lit up a cigar. The two smells collide in the air, thick rum and thicker smoke, and surround him until Dean’s coughing, eyes watering. He drops to one knee outside of the vévé, loses his balance as fumes practically blind him, and one hand touches the chalk outline.
A barrage of images zoom across Dean’s vision, too fast for him to make out, lots of red and black, some yellow, and he ends up shaking his head, thinking that this isn’t helping, doesn’t make any sense. Like Lakwa heard him, the images slow, start cycling at a slower rate, and Dean watches, tries to memorise everything.
A huge spreading oak covered in Spanish moss, next to a lake. A cavern in the middle of the mountains, with a fire blazing at the centre. A shop selling weapons, knives, custom-made. Someone bowing, someone else calling down curses, someone else dying, throat slit and choking as the light in their eyes fades.
Dean doesn’t understand, doesn’t get whatever the baron’s trying to show him, and he can almost feel the loa’s frustration when he says, “Come on, I need more than that. This is fucking ridiculous. Just, I don’t care, damn it. Just ride me if you have to,” and it’s like that’s a talisman, a magical invocation.
“Poto mitan done gone and blocked you up but good, boy,” Lakwa says. “Ain’t seen nothing tighter than your head since I be fucking my way into a virgin’s cunt.”
“That’s an image I was fine living without,” Dean drawls, relieved and panicked at the same time. He’ll get some answers now, now that he can talk to the baron, but he remembered what happened the last time he was ridden, some of it, and the thought of another loa in his head terrifies him.
Lakwa must hear that or sense it, because he moves in the back of Dean’s head and says, gruff, “I ain’t nothing like her, boy, so just you relax. Your body’s your own, I ain’t taking it over. Couldn’t if I be wanting to, not with the charms your brother be laying on your head. Only way in’s if you ask, and nothing more than talking even after. So you sit back, ‘cause I just be here to talk about the poto mitan, since you be asking so nicely. What you wanna know?”
Dean shifts, doesn’t take his hand off the vévé, and says, finding this one of the surrealist things he’s ever done before, “I need to find Sam. He took off after that thing down in Kirklin and he’s impossible to track down. I thought you’d be able to help.”
“Heya, I can help,” Lakwa says. “Just you answer me one question, Dean Winchester. After it be happening, he take any drugs? When the other chwal come for their orders, he take anything?”
Dean frowns, thinks back, finally says, “I don’t think so. I don’t know. Why?” The weirdest sensation comes over Dean, like his stomach and throat are changing places but not because of him. Lakwa’s upset, almost sickened, and Dean doesn’t understand why. “He needs the drugs when none of you are,” he says, puzzling things out, but stops, because if Sam’s not taking drugs and the baron’s not there, “He’s always got one of you with him now. Whatever he did, he’ll never be able to get rid of you all.”
He feels the baron’s agreement, sadness and horror, and understands when the baron says, “He ain’t never got one of the Rada or guédé vévé on him. Symbols, ayah, bones for me, hearts for ‘Zulie, snakes for Damballah, some of them curling lines for Ati, hard-to-pin-down bastard, but no vévé.”
“He’s got Petro vévé, though,” Dean whispers, starting to understand why Baron La Croix’s worried. “Black magic Petro. He’s, what, he’s bound himself to them? Not just to save me, but for good?”
“Them and Danny, mebbe, she always had a soft spot for ‘im,” Lakwa says after a moment. “But that ain’t good, boy. All Petro bindings, and making himself a Petro trinity, and the vévés drawn on his skin, that ain’t good. You gotta find him, and fast.”
Dean swallows, licks his lips, and asks, “Why? What’s so important about this, why now and not before?”
Lakwa’s restless, feels reluctant as he moves in the back of Dean’s skull, and after Dean pushes a little, the loa says, “Petro loa, they be fighters. They be warriors. Karrefour and Ti-Jean, they mix magic when they kill, violent and blood-crazed.”
It’s not an answer, is by no means at all an answer, but Dean says, “Being bound to them, having them there, all the time, it’s going to drive him crazy, isn’t it?”
“You find him, and you do what you gotta do, boy,” the baron says. “You keep him with you and keep him grounded, you hear me? A’cause if the other chwal ever think he be losing it, if they think he be pulling a Marinette-horse, they’ll be killing him like he be tying her up. No matter how much they be respecting him, they ain’t gonna let a Petro-bound run buckaloose. You hear ol’ Lakwa?”
Dean pulls his hand from the vévé, feels Lakwa sliding out of his head, leaving an address in his mind on the way out, and he stands up, brushing his knees. “Yes, sir,” he mutters, picking up the full bottle of rum and heading for the Impala, leaving the cards and tobacco for the baron, scattering the chalk vévé with his heel of his boot on his way out. “Yes, sir, I hear you.”
The rum gets thrown in the backseat, starts rolling on the floor as Dean drives out of the cemetery and heads in the direction of Savannah, Georgia.
--
The windows are down when Dean rolls into the city and the air’s heavy, clinging to Dean’s skin like a second set of clothes, his first dripping with sweat and getting wetter with every second he’s stopped at a light, looking around. He remembers coming here back with John a couple years ago, when Sam was in California, when they thought Sam was at school and on his way to being something normal, something average and everyday.
It had been a plantation home just outside the city then, haunted by the ghosts of some slaves and the slave-owner who killed them; the man had been a son of a bitch, terrorising people even after his death, and Dean hadn’t felt at all bad about setting the bastard on fire when they dug up his bones.
Now, though, coming into the city with one thing on his mind, it feels different, feels larger, somehow, and smaller at the same time. Old town in the south, it would normally make his skin crawl, just as much from the living as the dead; people who build up tours around the supernatural, who live with it day and night, it changes something about a person, changes the way they view things, like their eyes see farther, like their bones go back longer.
Dean doesn’t like it, never has, and Sam knows it, Sam who’s never felt that way, who’s apparently had vévés in his head since birth, and now that part of it, why he liked the south when Dean and John hated it, why he seemed to fit in down here when the other two never did, makes more sense. Dean doesn’t like it, but he accepts it, and when the light changes, he turns left.
The place he’s heading for, the address Baron La Croix gave him, is in the poorer section, cheap and probably has a leaking roof, Dean thinks, but he stops and looks at a map, raises an eyebrow when he sees the street right downtown. When he pulls up in front of a row of townhomes, he raises both eyebrows, because these places can’t be at all affordable.
Still, this is where Lakwa said Sam was, so Dean parks and walks up the door with the address the baron gave him, and picks the lock. Dean pushes the door open, steps inside, and closes the door behind him. He’s in a small foyer, just a little space, tiled before the carpet begins, and he’s looking around, not watching where he’s stepping, when he gets stopped, can’t put his foot down onto the carpet. Dean looks down, doesn’t see anything, but there’s a five-spot painted into the waist-high wallpaper on his left and a five-spot rug on the right.
“Well, fuck,” he mutters, then shakes his head and decides he apparently doesn’t have a choice whether or not to announce his presence. “Sam?” he calls out, lush furniture and wall-hangings soaking up the echo of his voice. “Sam? Get your ass down here!”
Footsteps, coming from the right, so Dean leans as far as he can to the left, peering around the corner to where he thinks the staircase is. It’s dark over there, no lights, but the footsteps keep coming, so Dean moves backwards, puts his back to the wall, and draws a gun.
Floorboards creak, then Sam’s standing in front of him, on that carpet, arms crossed and a lazy, sensual smile dripping from his lips. “Ayizan, Dean Winchester in the flesh,” he says, the sound of his voice matching his smile, somewhere between a drawl and a croon. The sound, rather than calming Dean, makes him shiver, makes warning bells go off in his head, and he looks at Sam’s eyes, doesn’t see his brother.
“Which one are you?” Dean asks, carefully, because he’s already met Erzulie Dantor, and he’s not keen on annoying either of the other two.
“I’m Karrefour, boy, and you owe me your sanity, so don’t go getting smart on me, y’hear?” Karrefour says, but then Sam’s eyes are shifting, breaking apart and refocusing, and it’s Sam, but with a hint of something else, something Dean hopes isn’t madness, because if the price of his rescue from Marinette was Sam’s sanity, that was too high and he’ll take it all back, take her back.
“Dean,” Sam says, and he sounds almost puzzled, sounds tired. “How’d you find me?”
Dean doesn’t answer, just looks down at the edge where tile meets carpet and then looks up, gives Sam a pointed look.
Sam looks confused, but then his expression clears and he waves a hand. “Come on in. I’ll. You want some tea? Something to drink?” he asks, and heads away, back around the corner, before Dean says anything.
Dean frowns, lifts his foot and steps onto the carpet, gives the five-spots a glare before following the sound of his brother, walking through a townhouse that feels more like a show home than a place where his brother lives. He gets to the kitchen and leans against the wall, watches as Sam glides around, pouring two glasses of sweet tea and taking out beignets from a Tupperware container, expression blank. Sam doesn’t seem overly aggressive, doesn’t seem like he’s about ready to go on this mass magical killing spree that the baron hinted at, which leaves Dean back at square one, trying to figure out what’s going on.
“Why’d you run here?” he asks, once Sam’s gestured at the table and put a glass of tea and a plate of beignets in front of Dean’s chair. Dean sits down, hoping that Sam will tell Dean why he ran and not necessarily why he ran here, and picks up a beignet, bites into it and lets sugar cling to the sweat on his upper lip.
Sam sits on the counter, feet barely skimming across the floor, sipping his tea and looking, for all that he’s practically a giant, like a child. “Own this place,” Sam says, shrugging. “Have for a year. I come here when I want to relax,” and he looks puzzled for a moment, like he did at the door, before something wipes the look off of his face and leaves him, not smiling, but more peaceful than he was a second before. “I put a down payment on it with some of the earnings from the café, have a decent enough mortgage.”
Dean gives Sam a crooked look before he parrots back, “Earnings from the café. Why would you get earnings from the café?”
Sam laughs, says, “Because I own it, Dean,” like Dean should have known that. “The one in San Francisco, a few places down around New Orleans and Baton Rouge, some in Mississippi,” and his face dips again, but only for a split-second, almost impossible to see.
Dean doesn’t like it, these changes in his brother, so he asks, “Can I speak to Danny, Sam?” and watches as Sam’s eyes shift, circle and cycle, break apart and come together, quicker than he could blink.
“You came back, child,” Erzulie says, and Dean’s almost worried about his own sanity, being able to tell the loa apart even when they’re all using his brother as their horse. “Just when I ain’t in the mood for talking, o’course. Want another fuck? Can’t say I’d mind, mm, not when your cock’s the one inside, can see why the boy wants it so much.”
Dean ignores that, the way that the casual offer makes his fingers itch to dig themselves in Sam’s skin, the way all the blood in his body has gone south and made him instantly, ashamedly hard, and asks, “What’re you doing to my brother?”
Erzulie frowns, dips her head, but even that action, bangs slipping over her face, can’t stop the way Dean’s body is heating up.
“We protecting him, child, keeping him safe. He don’t wanna think about things, we ain’t gonna make him, y’catch me?” she eventually says, looking at Dean through her eyelashes, soot-darkened and thick.
“You’ve been clouding his mind?” Dean asks, nearly in a whisper, because that’s too much to think of, too much to consider, that without him, Sam would rather let the loa have control, would rather not remember the past few weeks, the past couple months. “Why?”
“My chwal’s in pain, Dean,” Erzulie says, running a hand down her side and hip, as if she’s smoothing out a dress. “I’d do anything for him, anything to lessen the ache, and so would the others. People, other loa, they ain’t never thought much of us Petro, but we take care of our own.”
Dean can’t breathe, can only sit there and hold a half-eaten beignet, looking blankly at Erzulie Dantor riding his brother.
Erzulie sighs, rolls her eyes and stands up, runs both hands down the front of Sam’s jeans, smoothing out wrinkles in the denim. “Ayah, you don’t think much of us either, but my chwal, it’s been hard for ‘im.” She coughs, clears her throat and tilts her head, looks at Dean, frowning suddenly. “How’d you find us, anyways? Ain’t nobody know where we are, not even the old trinity. My chwal never told nobody ‘bout this place.”
Dean freezes, looks at her and then looks away, biting on his lower lip for a moment before muttering something, random noises, he thinks. Erzulie snaps at him, tells him to speak up, and for a split second, Dean hears violence in his brother’s voice, violence and a bloodlust that sets his spine tingling.
“I talked to Baron La Croix,” he says.
There’s a struggle in Erzulie’s eyes, like someone else is fighting her control of Sam’s body, and the next voice that comes from Sam’s mouth is thick like honey, spilling magic like water over Dean’s skin.
“I made sure that barrier was tight, boy,” someone says, Dean’s guessing Ti-Jean, and Dean feels phantom fingers ghosting over his head, nails scratching at his skull, calluses weaving their way through his hair. “Only way to break it, you gotta ask someone in. You do that?”
“Yes, sir,” Dean says, responding to Ti-Jean, the feeling of his power reminding him of Lakwa’s, the same source, different uses. He holds back a shudder, sees black amusement in the depths of Ti-Jean’s eyes. “I needed to find Sam,” and he stops.
Sam’s eyes, the loa in them, cycle through, as Sam’s body moves toward him. They’re acting in concert, the trinity, and Dean’s beginning to see why it’s so terrifying for that much power to be concentrated in one vessel, why even the mention of a trinity is enough to have the vodouisantes scared and fiercely protective at the same time, how splitting apart from something like that, spread out over three people, might have been enough to drive a lesser man than Sam insane.
As it stands, though, Dean’s not sure Sam escaped.
Erzulie takes a step, hips swinging, smile on her face predatory and yet inviting, like she’d be a firecracker in bed, and Dean can’t take his eyes off of her. She swirls into Karrefour, and his look is vicious without Erzulie’s warm edge of sexuality, cold and calculating as he narrows his eyes and gives Dean a lazy smile. Dean’s frozen in place, doesn’t know if it’s a spell or if his muscles just aren’t responding, but when Ti-Jean takes the last step toward him, walking as if he might have a limp in another body, in another place, Dean swallows.
Ti-Jean reaches out a hand, smoothes his thumb over the bridge of Dean’s nose. “You want him back, full and whole?” he asks, words soft, almost inaudible. “You found him, boy. What you gonna do with him now? Now you know what he has in him, know you now what we be doing for our horse, what you gonna do with him?”
Dean searches for words, for something that can convince these loa that he needs his brother back more than he’s needed anything before, that he’s not going anywhere and he’ll be damned before he lets Sam run away again, not without a fight, not the way he’s let Sam go every time before.
“Whatever he needs,” Dean finally says, and Ti-Jean leaves Sam’s eyes. Dean can see the three loa there, circling, chunks of ice in a raging whirlpool, and he’s starting to panic, because he doesn’t know what they’re deciding, whether or not they believe him.
“Please,” he whispers, reaching out and moving bangs out of eyes, letting his fingertips graze across a forehead and down a solid cheekbone, sweeping across a strong jaw line and down the planes of a neck he wants to bury his teeth in. “I want my brother back.”
Sam’s eyes close, and all of his muscles loosen before they tense, and Sam shakes. Dean steps forward without thinking, wraps his arms around Sam, and says, “No chick-flick moments, okay? You need to sit down?”
“Why’d you follow me?” Sam asks, and even though Dean’s sure it’s his brother asking, he can still hear the others, still hear the trinity riding him.
“Because you’re my brother,” Dean says, “and I wanted to,” simple as that.
Sam chokes, catches a sob, maybe a laugh, in the back of his throat, and when he speaks, it’s Sam, not one of the loa, not the poto mitan, not the distant man Dean’s coming to think is more like John than Dean is, even with the hunting.
“You are such an idiot,” Sam says, and Dean reaches up, smacks the back of Sam’s head without letting go. Sam clings back, feels wrung out and worn out in Dean’s hold, an impression that only solidifies when Sam adds, “When’s the last time you slept?” because it doesn’t sound so much a question as the utterance of a desperate need.
“Too long ago,” Dean replies immediately, and lets go, takes Sam by the hand and entwines his fingers in Sam’s, clenching tightly. “Please tell me you have a bed big enough for both of us somewhere in this place,” he says, ignoring the way Sam freezes at the question.
“Dean,” Sam says.
Dean turns around, glares at his brother, and hisses, “We are not doing this, Sam. Mother fuck. I’ve been chasing you around for a goddamned month, we have hunters and crazy vodou people on our tracks, the whole fucking world knows something happened in Mississippi even when I don’t, and I’m tired. I’m tired, you’re tired, so we’re going to go sleep, and when we wake up, I am going to fuck you so hard you won’t be able to walk for a week and you’ll be a cranky little bitch about it, but if that’s the only way I can make sure you won’t run off on me, you better be damn sure I’m gonna do it. Understand?”
Sam’s grinning, a little, high spots of colour in his cheeks, and he doesn’t at all sound serious when he says, “A cranky little bitch, huh?” and leads Dean upstairs to the bedroom, to a king size bed.
Dean undresses them both quickly; though his eyes linger on Sam’s tattoos, on Sam’s hipbones and cock, his fingers are deft and nearly professional as he propels Sam to the bed. Dean doesn’t get in on the other side until Sam’s settled, and the second Dean lays down, Sam curls around him, tangles his legs in with Dean’s, throws one arm over Dean’s stomach.
“Get some rest, you crazy voodoo king,” Dean mutters, and Sam snorts in amusement before they both fall asleep in the middle of a Savannah afternoon, sounds of traffic and the smell of jasmine blowing in the open window.
Part Ten