SPN: Only Sweeter 1/5
Brought to you by procrastination over estates in land. Read the whole story.
Only Sweeter
Summary: Dean gets amnesia; Sam tries to use it to fix him. Sam/Dean for certain values of Sam/Dean. Mild R for sexual situations.
Notes: for coffeeandink. giandujakiss was a huge help. Lots of amnesia stories are about who the amnesiac character really is. Those can be a ton of fun, but eventually I figured out that this story was actually about Dean’s very first question.
They’d been fighting with each other for five days straight when they cornered the fairy.
You’d think saving the world would lead to a little relaxation. But Dean’s nightmares hadn’t gone away, nor had the drinking. Aside from the apocalypse, the only thing that had gone away was Castiel, and Sam was beginning to miss the angel’s steadying hand, because Sam had no idea how to get Dean under control.
Even Castiel’s parting gift-the promise that Dean was no longer Hellbound, all debts erased-was jagged-edged. Dean had still done all those things in Hell, and he thought he deserved to be punished. If Heaven wasn’t prepared, then Dean himself had to be the one to do it. He wouldn’t listen and he wouldn’t wait and he wouldn’t let Sam help him. When he turned his back to Sam the line of his shoulders said ‘no’ and when he deigned to meet Sam’s eyes the set of his mouth said the same. They went on hunts and plans disintegrated like bones going to ash when Dean charged on ahead.
Which was how Sam ended up pinioned by the fairy-fucker had to be hovering, because Sam had at least two feet on it-gasping for breath against the wall of the abandoned warehouse. The place was dark, but the fairy seemed to give off a glow that allowed Sam, too late, to see it clearly.
They’d found the hunt because something had stolen the memories of seven people in Ashton, Kentucky and looked to have settled in for more. They’d never hunted a fairy before, and Sam’s flare of hope that Dean would express some glee about the new addition to their bestiary had been extinguished even before they’d found its trail. All Sam had wanted was to kill it without spilling more Winchester blood.
So much for that plan.
“Well, just look at you,” the fairy said, tilting its head. Its straw-yellow hair spilled over its shoulders, fine as cornsilk but crackling with energy. Its eyes were dusk-violet, and would have been beautiful if they hadn’t been slit-pupilled. “A hunter. I hate you people.”
“Feeling’s mutual, sweetheart,” Dean said from ten feet away, over to the side. The fairy hissed and threw up its other hand. Dean groaned and was silent.
“But two of you,” the fairy mused. “That ought to be good for some fun. How’s this, hunter-boy: you pick which one of you I take.”
Sam snarled and thrashed uselessly, not paying much attention to the threat. He heard Dean thump just out of his line of sight; alive, still alive.
“Choose, or I’ll kill you both.” The fairy leered at him, its cool fingers like snakes against his throat. “Three, two-”
Instinct, and an impulse he couldn’t yet name, forced the answer from his mouth. “Dean!” he said again, different this time. “Take Dean. Not me. Please.”
“Sammy-!” Now he was glad he couldn’t see Dean’s face.
The fairy chuckled. “You’re all cowards, in the end, aren’t you?” It swiveled its head towards Dean, eyes narrowing in concentration. “It’s a good last memory, betrayal by your buddy.”
Dean whimpered, a kicked-dog sound.
Sam wrapped his fingers around the handle of the thrice-blessed blade hidden in the back of his jeans and tugged it free. His vision was going to sparkles with oxygen deprivation.
Dean’s breaths came loud and wet, like he was being squeezed to death.
Sam swung his arm in an abbreviated arc into the fairy’s stomach. The fairy didn’t even have time to look surprised before it collapsed into a heap, giving out a foul, choking smell as it died.
Sam pushed off of the wall and stumbled over to where Dean was sprawled on the ground. He was pale and his eyes were closed. Please, Sam thought, even though he knew better than any other human that there was no one in a mind to listen. Please.
“Hey,” he said, kneeling to touch Dean’s shoulder. “Hey, are you all right?”
Dean blinked, then stared. His usually-faint freckles stood out on his cheeks and his nose, like he’d lost a lot of blood. His eyes were the green of new leaves. “Who the hell are you?”
Two of the victims had been reduced to babyhood, not even toilet trained. The other five, though, had retained language and all their procedural memories, just nothing personal.
A new start, a blank slate, but with all the templates present and waiting to be filled.
Like that, fast as seeing the right angle to fire at or the weakness in an opponent’s guard, Sam knew what he had to do.
“What do you remember?” Sam asked.
Dean scrunched his face, pushing himself up until he was sitting on the cold, dirty concrete. “Not a damn thing.”
“I’m Sam Winchester,” Sam said, his heart pounding harder than when the fairy had grabbed him. “I found you here.” His vision was still going in and out, and it was a struggle to keep his balance, but he couldn’t allow a moment’s weakness.
He reached out and helped Dean to his feet, lifting his phone, his wallet, and the key to the Impala in the guise of brushing Dean off, getting it done before Dean could think to pat himself down for evidence of identity.
“What in God’s name is that?” Dean demanded, pointing at the remains of the fairy. Before Sam could stop him, he strode to it and turned over the corpse with the toe of his boot. It was quite obviously inhuman.
Sam could lie, but sticking close to the truth was usually the best way. He put on his best wide-eyed, sincere look, letting his shoulders round and spreading his hands a bit, projecting ‘I’m just here to help’ with every fiber. “I know this sounds crazy, but-it was a fairy. It’s what took your memories.”
“Took my memories?” Dean repeated, then paused, staring down at the fairy. “Hunh. I-I don’t think I know my name. How long’ve I been here?”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess killing it didn’t reverse what it had already done.”
Dean turned his head and inspected Sam, head to toe. “How come it didn’t get you, too?”
“Uh, you were-it was kind of distracted with you.”
Dean knelt down and prodded at the corpse with one finger. “Fuck, that’s ugly. I want my memories back, motherfucker.” It took Sam a second to realize that Dean was directing his invective at the fairy.
“I don’t know if that-I came here to kill it. I don’t know if there’s any way to fix it.” He’d better find out, though, because he needed to get Dean settled, and he wasn’t going to allow Dean to accidentally stumble right back into his recent spiral of despair and self-hatred.
“I bet I was here to kill it too,” Dean said confidently. “I feel like a real bad-ass.” Sam would have rolled his eyes, but Dean was carrying at least a knife and a gun, which was not going to help change his mind.
“Whatever you were, you don’t remember.” Sam thought hard about the next steps. If he handled this right, they could be free of the toxic waste that had been their lives so far. No more guilt, no more bondage to a life even Dean had admitted was terrible, locked into it because he couldn’t see any alternatives. No more collapsing in on themselves like a double star slowly turning into a black hole, all their light and energy subverted to destruction.
But Dean was clearly going to be a pain in the ass to point in the right direction. No way could Sam let him wander off on his own at first. Even amnesiac, he was likely to attract trouble like a licked lollipop attracted dirt. “Listen, why don’t you come back with me, we can try to find someone who knows who you are. Maybe there’s even a way to reverse the fairy curse.”
“Fairy curse,” Dean said, making it into an obscenity. Ordinarily Sam would have agreed.
****
Two weeks before the fairy hunt began, Dean had taken a dive off a three-story building after a werefox. If it hadn’t been for the truck of dirt miraculously waiting below, the werefox would have escaped and Dean would have been a chalk outline. But Dean had just bounced back up, stabbed the thing through the heart, and slid down the mound of dirt, grinning in a way that made Sam’s heart lurch worse even than the fall had. It had been like seeing straight through to Dean’s skull.
Ten days before the fairy hunt began, Dean had nearly had his arm torn off by a yeti, or anyway that was what they’d taken to calling it, though Sam had had his doubts that it was the classic yeti. He’d shoved himself between Sam and the creature, when Sam would have been perfectly able to protect himself if not for Dean knocking him off balance, and they’d been so furious with each other that it felt like being a kid again, stuffed to bursting with rage at Dad’s orders and Dad’s unwillingness to listen to reason.
Five days before the fairy hunt began, Dean had nearly gotten himself decapitated by a basic, everyday angry spirit. He’d begged off the gravedigging with the excuse of his arm and stayed back at the house with the endangered family. The mother had given Sam the story later, involving a samurai sword that had been the grandfather’s prized heirloom. “I thought he wasn’t going to get out of the way in time,” she’d said. She’d been grateful, but she’d been worried when she looked at Dean, happy to have him out of her house and not just on account of her sixteen-year-old daughter.
The night before the fairy hunt began, Dean had used his eyes and his pool skills to taunt a frat boy into calling him a faggot. He hadn’t even dodged the first punch, and when the frat boy’s four friends had gotten involved, he’d thrown one of them into a table full of bikers. Sam wasn’t sure that the aim hadn’t been intentional. Matters had degenerated quickly and they’d been lucky to leave with nothing more than sore jaws and a few extra bruises.
Worst of all, there had been a moment before Sam waded into the fight when Sam had considered walking away, so sick of it all, and the guilt for putting Dean in danger was what had gotten him puking in their room the next morning, not the hangover. Dean had only grinned meanly at Sam when he’d raised his head from the toilet bowl and offered him the hair of the dog. Sam had snarled back that Dean was already drinking the whole dog, and Dean had stomped out to the car to wait for Sam to clean himself up.
So it wasn’t a matter of when (soon) or even how (painfully) Dean was going to go.
Sam had tried a thousand times to talk or just to hug Dean, both of which ended in shoves and Dean driving off in a huff, often to go after the latest bad thing on his own. Counterproductive.
A month back, Sam had even made up a hunt at the Grand Canyon. Dean’s eyes had shimmied over the view like he was looking at a sinkful of dirty dishes, and when the so-called hunt had proven to be a bust he’d given Sam the silent treatment for three days. Sam wouldn’t have thought Dean could be silent for three minutes, which was more evidence that Sam was so far out of his depth that he was practically in orbit.
****
As they drove back to the motel, Dean asked questions about Sam. Sam, squirming in the driver’s seat, explained hunting as simply as he could, but unfortunately Dean got excited by the whole concept, confident that he was out on the same hunt as Sam. “I guess you weren’t very good at it,” Sam snapped at last, which made Dean go quiet, forehead wrinkled and eyes tight, not much different from how he’d been that morning.
Sam ended up distracting him by asking a bunch of questions, testing out the edges of his memories.
Dean remembered a lot (how to tie his shoes, that he liked pancakes, his opinions on Brazilian waxes) despite all that was gone (name, education or lack thereof, family matters, profession). “That’s fucked up,” he opined. “How could a fairy take just parts like that?”
Sam shrugged uneasily. “It’s magic. Also, I think amnesia can sometimes work that way, though naturally occuring amnesia usually clears up over time, unless there’s permanent damage to short-term memory. But the fairy’s victims, they were mainly like you.”
“Mainly?” Dean asked warily.
“A couple were worse off,” Sam admitted. It had been a horrific risk to take, but Sam had been the one with the weapon and the position. And the payoff-Dean was freaked out, and rightly so, but he was also sprawling in the passenger seat, taking up space automatically, more relaxed than he’d been in the absence of alcohol since Lilith’s defeat.
If Sam had told him they were brothers, Dean would immediately have started reconstructing the narrative of their lives. Dean being Dean, he would have determined that it was his job to protect Sam, and they’d start all over again. That way only led back to the crossroads.
Now, Dean could get a chance to want something for himself, instead of submerging everything into hunting and family. And then Sam could stop, and do the same.
****
Back at the motel, Sam almost forgot to swing by the front office and get a new room. There was no way he could take Dean back to where their stuff was spread out over both beds. Once he got Dean settled, he dashed out to scoop up his duffel and move it, pretending he’d just been back out to the car. He’d return to the old room for Dean’s belongings once he had a better idea of what to do with Dean himself.
When he returned to their new location, Dean was flipping through TV channels. “Seinfeld sucks,” Dean announced, “and I kinda want to make the cheese thing on the Food Channel. Maybe I’m a chef. A chef who carries a gun.”
“Could be,” Sam said after a minute. “I, uh, once I set up my computer we can start looking for missing persons reports matching your description.”
Dean nodded, his eyes still fixed on the women in bikinis jiggling across the screen. It figured that Dean’s horndog nature was more fixed than anything else about him. “What kinda guy goes hunting fairies without ID?” he complained. “Friggin’ poor planning, you ask me.”
Sam winced. “If you are a hunter, and I’m not saying you are-it’s kind of a below-the-radar occupation.” It was weird, thinking of how to explain all this stuff to a novice. Sam could do the ‘yeah, ghosts are real, vampires too, not so sure about unicorns’ speech to a civilian caught up in a single hunt. But laying out the whole lifestyle was hard, especially when all Sam could hear in his head was the echo of teenaged Dean, telling him the facts like they’d come direct from Mt. Sinai.
“Anyway,” he said, when Dean didn’t react, “I’ll get started searching.”
Sam didn’t have to do anything to jigger the missing persons records, of course, though he wasn’t about to let Dean start searching criminal records with his own description. The main FBI file had been purged after their ‘deaths’ in custody, but there were places that didn’t always update their records, so Sam still needed to worry that Dean might accidentally find his own extremely misleading criminal record. But even that wasn’t a huge concern, since Dean wandered away from the computer to play with his newly discovered gun (not a euphemism). He could still break the Colt 1911 down faster than Sam-he didn’t even watch his hands, instead grinning at Sam like he was proving something, which Sam supposed he was.
When Dean found the knife strapped to his ankle, he nearly speared himself before he determined that no, he was not much of an artist with a blade. He still had the grip right, so Sam figured that was going to be okay.
Meanwhile, Sam continued to pretend to search for information, his mind racing with plans. The world was thick with possibility, brighter than it had been in years.
He’d held Dean back-they’d held each other back, conjoined twins in the freakshow that was hunting. The fairy curse was a surgeon’s knife, letting them breathe separately. Every bad thing that had happened to them had come from the serpent in the family tree, going back to Mom’s deal and for all Sam knew even further, back to her parents, the hunters who’d gone around attracting evil attention. Dean didn’t need to be contorted around all that pain any more, and maybe if he wasn’t, then Sam could free himself as well.
Bored with knifeplay, Dean stood and grinned at himself in the mirror, running his hands through his hair and shooting himself coy glances through his lashes. As Sam watched out of the corner of his eye, Dean tilted his head and pursed his lips like he was posing for an ad, that pouty look that always made people stop talking and stare. Then he bit his lips deliberately, teeth neatly digging into the flesh of first the lower, then the upper, so that they swelled a little, pink and shining. If Sam hadn’t been present he would have sworn Dean was freshly fucked.
Sonofabitch, Sam thought. He should have known Dean did that shit deliberately.
“Okay, there is no way somebody isn’t looking for me,” Dean told his reflection. “I’m just too damn pretty, am I right or am I right?”
Sam didn’t respond, figuring that pretending not to hear him was a reasonable reaction even for someone who wasn’t related to him.
Dean started unbuttoning his shirt. “Dude!” Sam objected. “If you’re gonna perv out on yourself, try the bathroom.” Even without his memories, Dean knew how to make himself a distraction.
Dean shrugged, unrepentant, and ambled out of Sam’s view.
“Fuck me!” Dean yelped a minute later, and Sam nearly broke the doorknob off getting inside the bathroom, where Dean was stripped to his boxer-briefs and looking at his shoulder. Dean was thinner than he should be, drawn in like his skeleton could barely hold on to his flesh.
Sam was doing the right thing.
“Whoa,” he said, as if he hadn’t gotten over the sight of Castiel’s cicatrix long ago. “That’s … quite a scar.”
“You think?” Dean had his head twisted, trying to see the whole thing. “Plus there’s the ink.”
Shit. He’d have to remember to keep covered until he could get Dean set up somewhere safe. “Let me see?”
Dean turned, giving Sam a full-on view of the anti-possession tattoo. “Do you recognize it?”
This was a failure point. The symbol was well-known enough that even a novice could probably find it, and then Dean might wonder why a supposedly experienced hunter had lied to him. Sam had to decide quickly. “It’s a protective symbol, guarding against possession by demons.”
“Hunh.” Dean looked at Sam’s reflection in the mirror; his face was almost Dean’s standard I-told-you-so-Sammy, but not quite as brash. “Score another one for the ‘hunter’ theory.”
“I guess so,” Sam said.
“And the scar, you know anything that could leave a scar like that?”
Sam shook his head. They’d never come up with any accounts resembling what had happened to Dean, probably because angels didn’t reach down and raise sinners from the Pit all that often. He thought about offering the fairy as a possible explanation, then remembered that none of the other victims had anything like that, and Dean might well go and check.
****
When Sam had been a senior in high school, he’d rented a PO Box in Blue Earth, using the allowance Dean gave him for clothes and food. He remembered resenting the charges for converting cash to money orders, because you couldn’t just stuff a couple of twenties into a college application.
The thing was, he hadn’t ever sat down and thought the matter through. He’d just filled out the forms and rented the box, and then right before early admissions came out he’d casually reminded Dad about some things Pastor Jim had mentioned, so that Dad decided that a trip to Minnesota was in order after they finished the latest hunt.
He’d chosen Stanford because it was famous and far, a golden land they’d rarely approached-there were too many hunts in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where the cold seemed to make ghosts cling to their histories. He’d wanted to go west, like every striving pioneer seeking to remake himself.
But he hadn’t admitted to himself that it was really happening, not when he’d filled out the financial aid forms and not when he’d stuffed the letter into the bottom of his pack and not even when he’d bought the bus ticket. It was easier to pretend that college was all a dream for someone else, when Dad and Dean might figure out a way to crush his future if he asserted that he had one.
He hadn’t thought that he’d decided to go for sure until the night before he left, reasoning that none of the outlay was huge just yet and that he was only keeping his options open, the way Dad always ordered him to make sure he had a fast exit available. Until junior year at Stanford, he’d told himself that he wouldn’t really have gone through with it if Dad hadn’t been such an asshole that last night.
He had never deliberately planned on leaving them flat like that, shock as bright and wet in Dean’s eyes as a jigger of whiskey. He just hadn’t been able to acknowledge, even to himself, that he intended to go.
So it was possible that he’d meant the fairy hunt to end like this all along.
****
When Dean dozed off-his body was always exhausted now, getting so little sleep, it had only been a matter of suggesting that he rest his eyes for a few minutes-Sam snuck out to pack up Dean’s possessions from the other room and stick them in the trunk. After that, he called Bobby. Sam explained what had happened; Bobby sighed and Sam could imagine him tugging at his cap. “You boys-trouble’s your third brother, ain’t it? I’ll start looking for a fix-”
“No!” Sam took a breath. “No, Bobby. This is-he’s done. He’s fine, he just doesn’t remember anything. He doesn’t remember Hell. The memories were killing him, and now they’re not. Giving them back would be a curse, not a fix.”
“Sam,” Bobby said, a kind of broken disappointment in his voice, softer than Dad’s disapproval ever had been but more powerful, “did you even tell him he’s your brother?”
Bobby knew him too well. “No, I didn’t,” he said defiantly, clutching the phone so hard his bones hurt. “He’s already got some ideas about hunting, and I don’t want him thinking he has to do this. The family business is bankrupt, Bobby. We’re getting out.”
Bobby chuffed disagreement. “You can’t just take away his whole life, your father, saving people, you. He chose Hell for you before.”
“Yeah? You ask him about that trade since he got back?” Sam kind of did mean to sound that angry. “What I need from you is some way to set him up: a new life, a job, a place to stay.”
The silence was long enough that Sam almost wondered if Bobby had hung up on him. “You’re not thinking right. I know-” Bobby sputtered to a halt.
Yeah, Bobby, tell me how much you know, Sam thought, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. And fuck if he wasn’t entitled to be a little bit damaged after everything that had been done to him, from the demon blood at six months down to the fairy throttling a couple of hours back. Dean was lucky. Dean deserved it more, but with Dean safe Sam wanted the blessing of forgetfulness too, Esau envying beautiful, careless Jacob.
He swallowed. He did need Bobby’s help. Bobby would see reason eventually. “I’ll call you later, okay?”
Bobby let him go, grumbling. If there was a way to restore Dean’s lost memories, Bobby would find it, and then Sam would know what he was up against. So it was smarter to let Bobby search through his books while Sam figured out how to convince him that this was one supernatural phenomenon that was all for the best.
****
When Dean finished his nap, Sam got him to the nearby diner with the promise of pie. Once there, Dean smiled at the waitresses with exactly the same gleam in his eye as he’d had when he was eighteen and full of hormones, and Sam felt one of the bands around his chest loosen.
“So what are we gonna call me?” Dean asked as he scooped another forkful of macaroni and cheese. “John’s kinda classic, I guess.”
“No!” Sam yelped, horrified by the thought.
Dean froze, his mouth hanging open, fork poised to enter. Sam could hear the noises of the other patrons, silverware scraping plates, ice rattling in glasses, idle chatter about weekend plans. It was a thousand different diners, all the places they’d passed through together, constant only because of constant change, and the only fixed point had ever been Dean.
Sam had just been extremely stupid. He didn’t even know why his reaction had been so violent. Dean had always wanted to be Dad anyway. But it was done, and he had to explain himself. “John was my brother’s name,” he said slowly, leaning forward and shutting out the rest of the world. “I-I used to hunt with him,” he continued, and didn’t need to feign the terrible sadness in his voice. “Not too long ago, he. Well. Hunting’s not a job that needs a retirement plan.”
“I’m real sorry,” Dean said, and he was, Sam could tell. He put his fork down and fiddled with his ring.
Sam needed to start steering, or this whole thing was going to careen into a ditch. “How about Dean?” Sam asked. “Like Dean Moriarty, from On the Road.”
“Uh, I think that mighta gotten erased,” Dean said, and took a drink of his coffee, still not meeting Sam’s eyes.
“It’s a good book. And he’s a tough customer, you’d like him.”
Dean smiled, almost shy. “Yeah? You think?”
Sam shrugged, trying to radiate reassurance. Dean wouldn’t have read Kerouac unless he’d been fooled into thinking it was necessary to some ritual, but it was as good a source of the name as any, and would cut down on the number of things Sam needed to remember.
“Okay,” Dean said, starting in on his mac and cheese again, “Dean it is.”
Sam watched him eat. Dean worked his way through the center of the mini casserole dish first, then around the sides, and only then started in on the brown, crisped top, cheese and pasta hardened until they crackled under his fork. Dean closed his eyes after each bite, blissed out, the fingers of his free hand curling against the chipped surface of their table.
Such a small thing, a hot meal on a chilly evening. Such a long time since Dean had been happy like this, since he’d even seemed to care about eating or any of the other sensual appetites that Sam had always thought were integral to his character. At first after his resurrection, there’d been moments when he’d seemed like pre-Hell Dean, but Sam had eventually realized that it was denial powering those smiles, and then even denial had fallen away, replaced by the grim determination that had kept them staggering towards the finish line.
Sam had lost Dean a long time ago. This was only-it was a repair, and it let Dean be more himself than he could otherwise be. Sam could live with no longer being known if it gave Dean back that fire at his center.
“This is awesome,” Dean said, catching Sam’s eye. “You want some?” He waved the fork invitingly.
Sam shook his head. “I’d hate to horn in on what seems like a fulfilling relationship.”
Dean snorted, as if it had never been a point of pride for him to ignore Sam’s stupid jokes, and Sam didn’t get how he could feel so happy and so destroyed at the same time.
****
Sam searched Dean’s duffel before he brought it into their new room. Fortunately, they’d just done laundry, so everything was clean, or as clean as Winchester clothes got. He found two notes in girls’ handwriting with phone numbers on them, and one in block letters that said, “DEAN-THANKS.” It had a number on the bottom too, not one Sam recognized. He threw the papers out, and then the bag could have been anyone’s.
It was hard to think that Dean had so little of a record in the world, when he’d been so vital to saving it. Sam, too, but Sam had given up on the whole fame and fortune thing years back.
“This is for you,” Sam said as soon as he was inside. He raised the bag, holding it out in front of him, the way Dad used to before he’d throw it at Dean. When Dad had done that, it had always meant that he and Dean were going on a hunt, sometimes with Sam, sometimes without. Dean had always grinned, either way, but when it had been the three of them he had practically gleamed.
Now, Dean only brought his head up from the laptop with a puzzled expression (Sam made a mental note to check the cache later; Dean had never bothered to clear his browsing history before and certainly wouldn’t have started now). “What’s that?”
“Clothes, some toiletries, I think there’s a knife or two.”
Dean’s eyebrows headed for the ceiling.
Sam strode to the bed nearest the door and plopped the bag down. “It was my brother’s.” He left it there and headed to the bathroom to splash some water on his face. It had been a long day, and he was grimy. He left the door open as he rinsed his hands in the sink.
“Anyway,” he continued, loud enough to be heard over the running water, “I couldn’t-you should use his stuff, it oughta fit you just fine and I-my brother would want it to see it used.”
He pushed his hair off of his forehead and looked at himself in the mirror. Pale, forehead creased, nose flaring, whip-ends of his bangs like a brace of needles. Keeping it together.
He heard Dean rise from his seat and cross the floor until he was standing in the doorway, taking up more space than he really should.
“You sure?” he asked, soft and careful. “That’s awful generous of you, but-”
Seeing Dean’s clothes on Dean wasn’t going to make distinguishing the two of them any easier. But outfitting Dean anew wouldn’t be cheap, and Sam hadn’t screwed up the story so far. He nodded.
“Okay then,” Dean said with finality. They wouldn’t need to talk about this again. Sam was grateful that this Winchester trait had persisted.
****
While Dean slept again, the sleep of the just and the new, Sam cleaned out the IDs in the Impala, sorting Dean’s from his own. It wasn’t like before, when he’d done it mechanically, hurting so much every time he saw one of those crappy little pictures of Dean that it was almost like not feeling at all. This was-it was spring cleaning. He hid Dean’s IDs in the secret panel that he hadn’t even known about until Dean had shown him a couple of months before his deal came due. He wasn’t ready to get rid of his records of Dean’s cocky face, even the Bikini Inspector grin.
Aside from the fake IDs, he had a couple of snapshots of Dean as a young boy. When he looked at Dean’s smile in those pictures, full of bravado, Sam remembered how it had been when those shots were taken. Back then, Sam had thought that Dean knew everything there was to know.
He also remembered how he’d looked at the same images a couple of years back, seeing Dean as a boy who knew too much, weighed down with a lifetime’s worth of grief and anger before he hit his teens.
Now, after all they’d survived, those same pictures showed him a Dean fresh and untouched. Never damned, never resurrected. Innocent.
There was no reason for Dean to connect the dots even if he somehow came across Sam’s stash of pictures of them as kids, so Sam didn’t bother concealing those photos other than to shove them to the back of the trunk.
Part 2.
Only Sweeter
Summary: Dean gets amnesia; Sam tries to use it to fix him. Sam/Dean for certain values of Sam/Dean. Mild R for sexual situations.
Notes: for coffeeandink. giandujakiss was a huge help. Lots of amnesia stories are about who the amnesiac character really is. Those can be a ton of fun, but eventually I figured out that this story was actually about Dean’s very first question.
They’d been fighting with each other for five days straight when they cornered the fairy.
You’d think saving the world would lead to a little relaxation. But Dean’s nightmares hadn’t gone away, nor had the drinking. Aside from the apocalypse, the only thing that had gone away was Castiel, and Sam was beginning to miss the angel’s steadying hand, because Sam had no idea how to get Dean under control.
Even Castiel’s parting gift-the promise that Dean was no longer Hellbound, all debts erased-was jagged-edged. Dean had still done all those things in Hell, and he thought he deserved to be punished. If Heaven wasn’t prepared, then Dean himself had to be the one to do it. He wouldn’t listen and he wouldn’t wait and he wouldn’t let Sam help him. When he turned his back to Sam the line of his shoulders said ‘no’ and when he deigned to meet Sam’s eyes the set of his mouth said the same. They went on hunts and plans disintegrated like bones going to ash when Dean charged on ahead.
Which was how Sam ended up pinioned by the fairy-fucker had to be hovering, because Sam had at least two feet on it-gasping for breath against the wall of the abandoned warehouse. The place was dark, but the fairy seemed to give off a glow that allowed Sam, too late, to see it clearly.
They’d found the hunt because something had stolen the memories of seven people in Ashton, Kentucky and looked to have settled in for more. They’d never hunted a fairy before, and Sam’s flare of hope that Dean would express some glee about the new addition to their bestiary had been extinguished even before they’d found its trail. All Sam had wanted was to kill it without spilling more Winchester blood.
So much for that plan.
“Well, just look at you,” the fairy said, tilting its head. Its straw-yellow hair spilled over its shoulders, fine as cornsilk but crackling with energy. Its eyes were dusk-violet, and would have been beautiful if they hadn’t been slit-pupilled. “A hunter. I hate you people.”
“Feeling’s mutual, sweetheart,” Dean said from ten feet away, over to the side. The fairy hissed and threw up its other hand. Dean groaned and was silent.
“But two of you,” the fairy mused. “That ought to be good for some fun. How’s this, hunter-boy: you pick which one of you I take.”
Sam snarled and thrashed uselessly, not paying much attention to the threat. He heard Dean thump just out of his line of sight; alive, still alive.
“Choose, or I’ll kill you both.” The fairy leered at him, its cool fingers like snakes against his throat. “Three, two-”
Instinct, and an impulse he couldn’t yet name, forced the answer from his mouth. “Dean!” he said again, different this time. “Take Dean. Not me. Please.”
“Sammy-!” Now he was glad he couldn’t see Dean’s face.
The fairy chuckled. “You’re all cowards, in the end, aren’t you?” It swiveled its head towards Dean, eyes narrowing in concentration. “It’s a good last memory, betrayal by your buddy.”
Dean whimpered, a kicked-dog sound.
Sam wrapped his fingers around the handle of the thrice-blessed blade hidden in the back of his jeans and tugged it free. His vision was going to sparkles with oxygen deprivation.
Dean’s breaths came loud and wet, like he was being squeezed to death.
Sam swung his arm in an abbreviated arc into the fairy’s stomach. The fairy didn’t even have time to look surprised before it collapsed into a heap, giving out a foul, choking smell as it died.
Sam pushed off of the wall and stumbled over to where Dean was sprawled on the ground. He was pale and his eyes were closed. Please, Sam thought, even though he knew better than any other human that there was no one in a mind to listen. Please.
“Hey,” he said, kneeling to touch Dean’s shoulder. “Hey, are you all right?”
Dean blinked, then stared. His usually-faint freckles stood out on his cheeks and his nose, like he’d lost a lot of blood. His eyes were the green of new leaves. “Who the hell are you?”
Two of the victims had been reduced to babyhood, not even toilet trained. The other five, though, had retained language and all their procedural memories, just nothing personal.
A new start, a blank slate, but with all the templates present and waiting to be filled.
Like that, fast as seeing the right angle to fire at or the weakness in an opponent’s guard, Sam knew what he had to do.
“What do you remember?” Sam asked.
Dean scrunched his face, pushing himself up until he was sitting on the cold, dirty concrete. “Not a damn thing.”
“I’m Sam Winchester,” Sam said, his heart pounding harder than when the fairy had grabbed him. “I found you here.” His vision was still going in and out, and it was a struggle to keep his balance, but he couldn’t allow a moment’s weakness.
He reached out and helped Dean to his feet, lifting his phone, his wallet, and the key to the Impala in the guise of brushing Dean off, getting it done before Dean could think to pat himself down for evidence of identity.
“What in God’s name is that?” Dean demanded, pointing at the remains of the fairy. Before Sam could stop him, he strode to it and turned over the corpse with the toe of his boot. It was quite obviously inhuman.
Sam could lie, but sticking close to the truth was usually the best way. He put on his best wide-eyed, sincere look, letting his shoulders round and spreading his hands a bit, projecting ‘I’m just here to help’ with every fiber. “I know this sounds crazy, but-it was a fairy. It’s what took your memories.”
“Took my memories?” Dean repeated, then paused, staring down at the fairy. “Hunh. I-I don’t think I know my name. How long’ve I been here?”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess killing it didn’t reverse what it had already done.”
Dean turned his head and inspected Sam, head to toe. “How come it didn’t get you, too?”
“Uh, you were-it was kind of distracted with you.”
Dean knelt down and prodded at the corpse with one finger. “Fuck, that’s ugly. I want my memories back, motherfucker.” It took Sam a second to realize that Dean was directing his invective at the fairy.
“I don’t know if that-I came here to kill it. I don’t know if there’s any way to fix it.” He’d better find out, though, because he needed to get Dean settled, and he wasn’t going to allow Dean to accidentally stumble right back into his recent spiral of despair and self-hatred.
“I bet I was here to kill it too,” Dean said confidently. “I feel like a real bad-ass.” Sam would have rolled his eyes, but Dean was carrying at least a knife and a gun, which was not going to help change his mind.
“Whatever you were, you don’t remember.” Sam thought hard about the next steps. If he handled this right, they could be free of the toxic waste that had been their lives so far. No more guilt, no more bondage to a life even Dean had admitted was terrible, locked into it because he couldn’t see any alternatives. No more collapsing in on themselves like a double star slowly turning into a black hole, all their light and energy subverted to destruction.
But Dean was clearly going to be a pain in the ass to point in the right direction. No way could Sam let him wander off on his own at first. Even amnesiac, he was likely to attract trouble like a licked lollipop attracted dirt. “Listen, why don’t you come back with me, we can try to find someone who knows who you are. Maybe there’s even a way to reverse the fairy curse.”
“Fairy curse,” Dean said, making it into an obscenity. Ordinarily Sam would have agreed.
****
Two weeks before the fairy hunt began, Dean had taken a dive off a three-story building after a werefox. If it hadn’t been for the truck of dirt miraculously waiting below, the werefox would have escaped and Dean would have been a chalk outline. But Dean had just bounced back up, stabbed the thing through the heart, and slid down the mound of dirt, grinning in a way that made Sam’s heart lurch worse even than the fall had. It had been like seeing straight through to Dean’s skull.
Ten days before the fairy hunt began, Dean had nearly had his arm torn off by a yeti, or anyway that was what they’d taken to calling it, though Sam had had his doubts that it was the classic yeti. He’d shoved himself between Sam and the creature, when Sam would have been perfectly able to protect himself if not for Dean knocking him off balance, and they’d been so furious with each other that it felt like being a kid again, stuffed to bursting with rage at Dad’s orders and Dad’s unwillingness to listen to reason.
Five days before the fairy hunt began, Dean had nearly gotten himself decapitated by a basic, everyday angry spirit. He’d begged off the gravedigging with the excuse of his arm and stayed back at the house with the endangered family. The mother had given Sam the story later, involving a samurai sword that had been the grandfather’s prized heirloom. “I thought he wasn’t going to get out of the way in time,” she’d said. She’d been grateful, but she’d been worried when she looked at Dean, happy to have him out of her house and not just on account of her sixteen-year-old daughter.
The night before the fairy hunt began, Dean had used his eyes and his pool skills to taunt a frat boy into calling him a faggot. He hadn’t even dodged the first punch, and when the frat boy’s four friends had gotten involved, he’d thrown one of them into a table full of bikers. Sam wasn’t sure that the aim hadn’t been intentional. Matters had degenerated quickly and they’d been lucky to leave with nothing more than sore jaws and a few extra bruises.
Worst of all, there had been a moment before Sam waded into the fight when Sam had considered walking away, so sick of it all, and the guilt for putting Dean in danger was what had gotten him puking in their room the next morning, not the hangover. Dean had only grinned meanly at Sam when he’d raised his head from the toilet bowl and offered him the hair of the dog. Sam had snarled back that Dean was already drinking the whole dog, and Dean had stomped out to the car to wait for Sam to clean himself up.
So it wasn’t a matter of when (soon) or even how (painfully) Dean was going to go.
Sam had tried a thousand times to talk or just to hug Dean, both of which ended in shoves and Dean driving off in a huff, often to go after the latest bad thing on his own. Counterproductive.
A month back, Sam had even made up a hunt at the Grand Canyon. Dean’s eyes had shimmied over the view like he was looking at a sinkful of dirty dishes, and when the so-called hunt had proven to be a bust he’d given Sam the silent treatment for three days. Sam wouldn’t have thought Dean could be silent for three minutes, which was more evidence that Sam was so far out of his depth that he was practically in orbit.
****
As they drove back to the motel, Dean asked questions about Sam. Sam, squirming in the driver’s seat, explained hunting as simply as he could, but unfortunately Dean got excited by the whole concept, confident that he was out on the same hunt as Sam. “I guess you weren’t very good at it,” Sam snapped at last, which made Dean go quiet, forehead wrinkled and eyes tight, not much different from how he’d been that morning.
Sam ended up distracting him by asking a bunch of questions, testing out the edges of his memories.
Dean remembered a lot (how to tie his shoes, that he liked pancakes, his opinions on Brazilian waxes) despite all that was gone (name, education or lack thereof, family matters, profession). “That’s fucked up,” he opined. “How could a fairy take just parts like that?”
Sam shrugged uneasily. “It’s magic. Also, I think amnesia can sometimes work that way, though naturally occuring amnesia usually clears up over time, unless there’s permanent damage to short-term memory. But the fairy’s victims, they were mainly like you.”
“Mainly?” Dean asked warily.
“A couple were worse off,” Sam admitted. It had been a horrific risk to take, but Sam had been the one with the weapon and the position. And the payoff-Dean was freaked out, and rightly so, but he was also sprawling in the passenger seat, taking up space automatically, more relaxed than he’d been in the absence of alcohol since Lilith’s defeat.
If Sam had told him they were brothers, Dean would immediately have started reconstructing the narrative of their lives. Dean being Dean, he would have determined that it was his job to protect Sam, and they’d start all over again. That way only led back to the crossroads.
Now, Dean could get a chance to want something for himself, instead of submerging everything into hunting and family. And then Sam could stop, and do the same.
****
Back at the motel, Sam almost forgot to swing by the front office and get a new room. There was no way he could take Dean back to where their stuff was spread out over both beds. Once he got Dean settled, he dashed out to scoop up his duffel and move it, pretending he’d just been back out to the car. He’d return to the old room for Dean’s belongings once he had a better idea of what to do with Dean himself.
When he returned to their new location, Dean was flipping through TV channels. “Seinfeld sucks,” Dean announced, “and I kinda want to make the cheese thing on the Food Channel. Maybe I’m a chef. A chef who carries a gun.”
“Could be,” Sam said after a minute. “I, uh, once I set up my computer we can start looking for missing persons reports matching your description.”
Dean nodded, his eyes still fixed on the women in bikinis jiggling across the screen. It figured that Dean’s horndog nature was more fixed than anything else about him. “What kinda guy goes hunting fairies without ID?” he complained. “Friggin’ poor planning, you ask me.”
Sam winced. “If you are a hunter, and I’m not saying you are-it’s kind of a below-the-radar occupation.” It was weird, thinking of how to explain all this stuff to a novice. Sam could do the ‘yeah, ghosts are real, vampires too, not so sure about unicorns’ speech to a civilian caught up in a single hunt. But laying out the whole lifestyle was hard, especially when all Sam could hear in his head was the echo of teenaged Dean, telling him the facts like they’d come direct from Mt. Sinai.
“Anyway,” he said, when Dean didn’t react, “I’ll get started searching.”
Sam didn’t have to do anything to jigger the missing persons records, of course, though he wasn’t about to let Dean start searching criminal records with his own description. The main FBI file had been purged after their ‘deaths’ in custody, but there were places that didn’t always update their records, so Sam still needed to worry that Dean might accidentally find his own extremely misleading criminal record. But even that wasn’t a huge concern, since Dean wandered away from the computer to play with his newly discovered gun (not a euphemism). He could still break the Colt 1911 down faster than Sam-he didn’t even watch his hands, instead grinning at Sam like he was proving something, which Sam supposed he was.
When Dean found the knife strapped to his ankle, he nearly speared himself before he determined that no, he was not much of an artist with a blade. He still had the grip right, so Sam figured that was going to be okay.
Meanwhile, Sam continued to pretend to search for information, his mind racing with plans. The world was thick with possibility, brighter than it had been in years.
He’d held Dean back-they’d held each other back, conjoined twins in the freakshow that was hunting. The fairy curse was a surgeon’s knife, letting them breathe separately. Every bad thing that had happened to them had come from the serpent in the family tree, going back to Mom’s deal and for all Sam knew even further, back to her parents, the hunters who’d gone around attracting evil attention. Dean didn’t need to be contorted around all that pain any more, and maybe if he wasn’t, then Sam could free himself as well.
Bored with knifeplay, Dean stood and grinned at himself in the mirror, running his hands through his hair and shooting himself coy glances through his lashes. As Sam watched out of the corner of his eye, Dean tilted his head and pursed his lips like he was posing for an ad, that pouty look that always made people stop talking and stare. Then he bit his lips deliberately, teeth neatly digging into the flesh of first the lower, then the upper, so that they swelled a little, pink and shining. If Sam hadn’t been present he would have sworn Dean was freshly fucked.
Sonofabitch, Sam thought. He should have known Dean did that shit deliberately.
“Okay, there is no way somebody isn’t looking for me,” Dean told his reflection. “I’m just too damn pretty, am I right or am I right?”
Sam didn’t respond, figuring that pretending not to hear him was a reasonable reaction even for someone who wasn’t related to him.
Dean started unbuttoning his shirt. “Dude!” Sam objected. “If you’re gonna perv out on yourself, try the bathroom.” Even without his memories, Dean knew how to make himself a distraction.
Dean shrugged, unrepentant, and ambled out of Sam’s view.
“Fuck me!” Dean yelped a minute later, and Sam nearly broke the doorknob off getting inside the bathroom, where Dean was stripped to his boxer-briefs and looking at his shoulder. Dean was thinner than he should be, drawn in like his skeleton could barely hold on to his flesh.
Sam was doing the right thing.
“Whoa,” he said, as if he hadn’t gotten over the sight of Castiel’s cicatrix long ago. “That’s … quite a scar.”
“You think?” Dean had his head twisted, trying to see the whole thing. “Plus there’s the ink.”
Shit. He’d have to remember to keep covered until he could get Dean set up somewhere safe. “Let me see?”
Dean turned, giving Sam a full-on view of the anti-possession tattoo. “Do you recognize it?”
This was a failure point. The symbol was well-known enough that even a novice could probably find it, and then Dean might wonder why a supposedly experienced hunter had lied to him. Sam had to decide quickly. “It’s a protective symbol, guarding against possession by demons.”
“Hunh.” Dean looked at Sam’s reflection in the mirror; his face was almost Dean’s standard I-told-you-so-Sammy, but not quite as brash. “Score another one for the ‘hunter’ theory.”
“I guess so,” Sam said.
“And the scar, you know anything that could leave a scar like that?”
Sam shook his head. They’d never come up with any accounts resembling what had happened to Dean, probably because angels didn’t reach down and raise sinners from the Pit all that often. He thought about offering the fairy as a possible explanation, then remembered that none of the other victims had anything like that, and Dean might well go and check.
****
When Sam had been a senior in high school, he’d rented a PO Box in Blue Earth, using the allowance Dean gave him for clothes and food. He remembered resenting the charges for converting cash to money orders, because you couldn’t just stuff a couple of twenties into a college application.
The thing was, he hadn’t ever sat down and thought the matter through. He’d just filled out the forms and rented the box, and then right before early admissions came out he’d casually reminded Dad about some things Pastor Jim had mentioned, so that Dad decided that a trip to Minnesota was in order after they finished the latest hunt.
He’d chosen Stanford because it was famous and far, a golden land they’d rarely approached-there were too many hunts in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where the cold seemed to make ghosts cling to their histories. He’d wanted to go west, like every striving pioneer seeking to remake himself.
But he hadn’t admitted to himself that it was really happening, not when he’d filled out the financial aid forms and not when he’d stuffed the letter into the bottom of his pack and not even when he’d bought the bus ticket. It was easier to pretend that college was all a dream for someone else, when Dad and Dean might figure out a way to crush his future if he asserted that he had one.
He hadn’t thought that he’d decided to go for sure until the night before he left, reasoning that none of the outlay was huge just yet and that he was only keeping his options open, the way Dad always ordered him to make sure he had a fast exit available. Until junior year at Stanford, he’d told himself that he wouldn’t really have gone through with it if Dad hadn’t been such an asshole that last night.
He had never deliberately planned on leaving them flat like that, shock as bright and wet in Dean’s eyes as a jigger of whiskey. He just hadn’t been able to acknowledge, even to himself, that he intended to go.
So it was possible that he’d meant the fairy hunt to end like this all along.
****
When Dean dozed off-his body was always exhausted now, getting so little sleep, it had only been a matter of suggesting that he rest his eyes for a few minutes-Sam snuck out to pack up Dean’s possessions from the other room and stick them in the trunk. After that, he called Bobby. Sam explained what had happened; Bobby sighed and Sam could imagine him tugging at his cap. “You boys-trouble’s your third brother, ain’t it? I’ll start looking for a fix-”
“No!” Sam took a breath. “No, Bobby. This is-he’s done. He’s fine, he just doesn’t remember anything. He doesn’t remember Hell. The memories were killing him, and now they’re not. Giving them back would be a curse, not a fix.”
“Sam,” Bobby said, a kind of broken disappointment in his voice, softer than Dad’s disapproval ever had been but more powerful, “did you even tell him he’s your brother?”
Bobby knew him too well. “No, I didn’t,” he said defiantly, clutching the phone so hard his bones hurt. “He’s already got some ideas about hunting, and I don’t want him thinking he has to do this. The family business is bankrupt, Bobby. We’re getting out.”
Bobby chuffed disagreement. “You can’t just take away his whole life, your father, saving people, you. He chose Hell for you before.”
“Yeah? You ask him about that trade since he got back?” Sam kind of did mean to sound that angry. “What I need from you is some way to set him up: a new life, a job, a place to stay.”
The silence was long enough that Sam almost wondered if Bobby had hung up on him. “You’re not thinking right. I know-” Bobby sputtered to a halt.
Yeah, Bobby, tell me how much you know, Sam thought, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. And fuck if he wasn’t entitled to be a little bit damaged after everything that had been done to him, from the demon blood at six months down to the fairy throttling a couple of hours back. Dean was lucky. Dean deserved it more, but with Dean safe Sam wanted the blessing of forgetfulness too, Esau envying beautiful, careless Jacob.
He swallowed. He did need Bobby’s help. Bobby would see reason eventually. “I’ll call you later, okay?”
Bobby let him go, grumbling. If there was a way to restore Dean’s lost memories, Bobby would find it, and then Sam would know what he was up against. So it was smarter to let Bobby search through his books while Sam figured out how to convince him that this was one supernatural phenomenon that was all for the best.
****
When Dean finished his nap, Sam got him to the nearby diner with the promise of pie. Once there, Dean smiled at the waitresses with exactly the same gleam in his eye as he’d had when he was eighteen and full of hormones, and Sam felt one of the bands around his chest loosen.
“So what are we gonna call me?” Dean asked as he scooped another forkful of macaroni and cheese. “John’s kinda classic, I guess.”
“No!” Sam yelped, horrified by the thought.
Dean froze, his mouth hanging open, fork poised to enter. Sam could hear the noises of the other patrons, silverware scraping plates, ice rattling in glasses, idle chatter about weekend plans. It was a thousand different diners, all the places they’d passed through together, constant only because of constant change, and the only fixed point had ever been Dean.
Sam had just been extremely stupid. He didn’t even know why his reaction had been so violent. Dean had always wanted to be Dad anyway. But it was done, and he had to explain himself. “John was my brother’s name,” he said slowly, leaning forward and shutting out the rest of the world. “I-I used to hunt with him,” he continued, and didn’t need to feign the terrible sadness in his voice. “Not too long ago, he. Well. Hunting’s not a job that needs a retirement plan.”
“I’m real sorry,” Dean said, and he was, Sam could tell. He put his fork down and fiddled with his ring.
Sam needed to start steering, or this whole thing was going to careen into a ditch. “How about Dean?” Sam asked. “Like Dean Moriarty, from On the Road.”
“Uh, I think that mighta gotten erased,” Dean said, and took a drink of his coffee, still not meeting Sam’s eyes.
“It’s a good book. And he’s a tough customer, you’d like him.”
Dean smiled, almost shy. “Yeah? You think?”
Sam shrugged, trying to radiate reassurance. Dean wouldn’t have read Kerouac unless he’d been fooled into thinking it was necessary to some ritual, but it was as good a source of the name as any, and would cut down on the number of things Sam needed to remember.
“Okay,” Dean said, starting in on his mac and cheese again, “Dean it is.”
Sam watched him eat. Dean worked his way through the center of the mini casserole dish first, then around the sides, and only then started in on the brown, crisped top, cheese and pasta hardened until they crackled under his fork. Dean closed his eyes after each bite, blissed out, the fingers of his free hand curling against the chipped surface of their table.
Such a small thing, a hot meal on a chilly evening. Such a long time since Dean had been happy like this, since he’d even seemed to care about eating or any of the other sensual appetites that Sam had always thought were integral to his character. At first after his resurrection, there’d been moments when he’d seemed like pre-Hell Dean, but Sam had eventually realized that it was denial powering those smiles, and then even denial had fallen away, replaced by the grim determination that had kept them staggering towards the finish line.
Sam had lost Dean a long time ago. This was only-it was a repair, and it let Dean be more himself than he could otherwise be. Sam could live with no longer being known if it gave Dean back that fire at his center.
“This is awesome,” Dean said, catching Sam’s eye. “You want some?” He waved the fork invitingly.
Sam shook his head. “I’d hate to horn in on what seems like a fulfilling relationship.”
Dean snorted, as if it had never been a point of pride for him to ignore Sam’s stupid jokes, and Sam didn’t get how he could feel so happy and so destroyed at the same time.
****
Sam searched Dean’s duffel before he brought it into their new room. Fortunately, they’d just done laundry, so everything was clean, or as clean as Winchester clothes got. He found two notes in girls’ handwriting with phone numbers on them, and one in block letters that said, “DEAN-THANKS.” It had a number on the bottom too, not one Sam recognized. He threw the papers out, and then the bag could have been anyone’s.
It was hard to think that Dean had so little of a record in the world, when he’d been so vital to saving it. Sam, too, but Sam had given up on the whole fame and fortune thing years back.
“This is for you,” Sam said as soon as he was inside. He raised the bag, holding it out in front of him, the way Dad used to before he’d throw it at Dean. When Dad had done that, it had always meant that he and Dean were going on a hunt, sometimes with Sam, sometimes without. Dean had always grinned, either way, but when it had been the three of them he had practically gleamed.
Now, Dean only brought his head up from the laptop with a puzzled expression (Sam made a mental note to check the cache later; Dean had never bothered to clear his browsing history before and certainly wouldn’t have started now). “What’s that?”
“Clothes, some toiletries, I think there’s a knife or two.”
Dean’s eyebrows headed for the ceiling.
Sam strode to the bed nearest the door and plopped the bag down. “It was my brother’s.” He left it there and headed to the bathroom to splash some water on his face. It had been a long day, and he was grimy. He left the door open as he rinsed his hands in the sink.
“Anyway,” he continued, loud enough to be heard over the running water, “I couldn’t-you should use his stuff, it oughta fit you just fine and I-my brother would want it to see it used.”
He pushed his hair off of his forehead and looked at himself in the mirror. Pale, forehead creased, nose flaring, whip-ends of his bangs like a brace of needles. Keeping it together.
He heard Dean rise from his seat and cross the floor until he was standing in the doorway, taking up more space than he really should.
“You sure?” he asked, soft and careful. “That’s awful generous of you, but-”
Seeing Dean’s clothes on Dean wasn’t going to make distinguishing the two of them any easier. But outfitting Dean anew wouldn’t be cheap, and Sam hadn’t screwed up the story so far. He nodded.
“Okay then,” Dean said with finality. They wouldn’t need to talk about this again. Sam was grateful that this Winchester trait had persisted.
****
While Dean slept again, the sleep of the just and the new, Sam cleaned out the IDs in the Impala, sorting Dean’s from his own. It wasn’t like before, when he’d done it mechanically, hurting so much every time he saw one of those crappy little pictures of Dean that it was almost like not feeling at all. This was-it was spring cleaning. He hid Dean’s IDs in the secret panel that he hadn’t even known about until Dean had shown him a couple of months before his deal came due. He wasn’t ready to get rid of his records of Dean’s cocky face, even the Bikini Inspector grin.
Aside from the fake IDs, he had a couple of snapshots of Dean as a young boy. When he looked at Dean’s smile in those pictures, full of bravado, Sam remembered how it had been when those shots were taken. Back then, Sam had thought that Dean knew everything there was to know.
He also remembered how he’d looked at the same images a couple of years back, seeing Dean as a boy who knew too much, weighed down with a lifetime’s worth of grief and anger before he hit his teens.
Now, after all they’d survived, those same pictures showed him a Dean fresh and untouched. Never damned, never resurrected. Innocent.
There was no reason for Dean to connect the dots even if he somehow came across Sam’s stash of pictures of them as kids, so Sam didn’t bother concealing those photos other than to shove them to the back of the trunk.
Part 2.