Only Sweeter 3/5
Part 1
Part 2
“No offense,” Dean began, which was always worrisome, “but do you have any music that was recorded sometime after you were born?”
Sam avoided a double-take only because the traffic near Chicago was heavy enough that he couldn’t even look once at Dean. “These were my brother’s tapes,” he said, signalling a lane change, then realized how that must have sounded. “I mean, I don’t really like-I’m not going to throw them away, but we don’t have to-What do you want to listen to?”
“I’m not sure,” Dean said, which Sam supposed was fair enough. He would have expected the cock-rock preferences to persist, the way the love of Corona and the dislike of green peppers had, but maybe Dean’s music had always been more about Dean’s view of himself than the deathless musicality of arena bands. And now Dean’s view of himself was-unfixed.
“Tell you what, you get radio control for the next week,” Sam suggested as he hit the stop button on the tape player. “Maybe by then we’ll have a better idea.”
“Thanks,” Dean said, and gave him another one of those supernova smiles, the ones Sam had mostly seen from an angle. After Stanford, Dean had seemed to think that Sam didn’t need Dean to be his cheerleader anymore, so the Category 5 grins had all gone to pretty girls, or to people who had useful information. Then after Hell, of course, they’d barely hit Category 1.
Sam shifted in his seat. “No big deal.” He didn’t know what they’d do about whatever Dean’s musical tastes turned out to be. Satellite radio maybe, if he could figure out how to pay for it.
An iPod jack was out of the question. It would be exploiting Dean’s rebirth.
As it happened, Dean preferred jazz, especially instrumental, and Jack radio, the one where they threw all sorts of different songs at you without much in the way of an announcer. Those were easy enough to find on the radio dial, so Sam tried not to worry overmuch about it.
****
Coming off a successful hunt in Potomac, Maryland, they stumbled into a wedding reception, three hundred cheerful faces at least. Even though they were two out of only five people who didn’t seem to speak Hindi, they were swept up in the dancing. The girls were wrapped in rich silks and embroidery, colors so rich and true they seemed to come from another world than the Winchesters’ ghosts and graves, and they laughed when they grabbed onto Sam and Dean’s hands and showed them the steps. Dean was just as terrible as Sam at it, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone.
There was a whole table full of desserts, jellies and candies and puddings and something like a donut hole soaked in sugar syrup. Dean ate five of those before Sam turned away, his own stomach lurching, and when Sam looked back Dean was already dancing again, a girl on each elbow, laughing at himself.
Sam thought about getting in the car and just driving, because Dean could make himself a new life anywhere. But he couldn’t be sure Dean was all right, not unless he was watching over Dean. And, he could admit to himself now, it wasn’t just that he couldn’t trust Dean’s safety to anyone else. Sam didn’t have anyone else left either. He was as much of an orphan as Dean. His own memories weren’t doing him any favors. They needed to make their own society.
So he waited until Dean stumbled off the dancefloor, flushed and sticky-fingered, and beelined over to Sam, asking “Where to next?” He smeared syrup all over Sam’s wrist when he grabbed Sam to drag him off, but Sam couldn’t make himself mind.
****
“You’re bleeding,” Dean snapped, as if Sam could have missed that fact. “You need to get that sewn up.”
“When we get back to the room,” Sam grunted out. He had to pause before he could work up the breath to continue. “Show up in an ER with a cut like this, cops get nervous.”
Dean’s lip curled, reflexive contempt. Since the amnesia, they’d yet to be arrested, but something of Sam’s stories of FBI misinterpretations must have stuck with him.
Sam pressed the rag harder down on his thigh. “Just a couple more minutes,” he gasped.
And Dean always could make the Impala move like a bullet train, so it was no surprise that even this first time Sam gave him the keys he brought them back to the motel faster than Sam could have done on Sam’s best day. Sam also had reason to appreciate Dean’s field-medic skills. When he was looking after Sam, his stitches were as neat as a sewing machine’s.
But Sam had fucked up badly. Dean cut away his jeans to get at the wound, and that wasn’t a problem. That was SOP. No, the fuckup was that it was only accident-luck, really-that the flying glass had sliced his thigh and not his chest. Dean would have stitched that wound up too, no doubt, but then he’d have wanted a chat about why Sam happened to have an identical tattoo.
The next morning, still limping and a little zoned on painkillers, he made Dean head out to the library. One of the great benefits of Dean’s reboot, other than the small fact of eliminating Dean’s death wish, was that Dean no longer resisted doing his share of the research. Sam suspected that Dean felt the need to prove himself. Dean thought that the amnesia was the reason he didn’t remember the basic facts of the supernatural, and no doubt there was a fair amount of truth to that, but Dean had never known the shit he was picking up now.
While Dean was furthering his education on the varieties of incubus, Sam headed to a tattoo parlor that had gotten good reviews on the web. The artist wasn’t thrilled about Sam’s request because the original was in such good shape, but Sam had come in with very specific designs and he was good at talking people into doing what he wanted.
That night, after dinner, he showed Dean. With the skin around the new work sore and red, and the old lines still solid black underneath, there was no way Dean could tell that the basic protective design had already been there, and no reason for him to think of it.
“You had to one-up me, didn’t you?” Dean asked, looking at the red flames curling around the circle, and the runes surrounding it. Sam just smirked and shrugged, which stung his overstretched skin.
The runes might even buy Sam some more armor against evil. In fact, if all went well, he might drag Dean in to have the work repeated.
“Can I?” Dean asked, and Sam realized he was asking permission to touch.
Sam nodded; he’d put the bandage back on when Dean was done. Dean ran his fingers over one of the runes, making Sam shiver involuntarily, but Dean didn’t stop. His touch was feather-light, almost indistinguishable from the puffs of breath hitting Sam’s chest as Dean bent to look more closely. Sam’s instinct was to pull back, but he forced himself still.
The rune Dean traced was algiz: protection in dangerous endeavors.
****
Sam started to forget which places he’d been in with Dean-before and Dean-after. He kept a very careful record in his journal, though, a new one like Dad’s, always stashed in the car. And he made sure to consult it before every hunt. He wasn’t going to take Dean anywhere he might get recognized.
Dean didn’t notice Sam’s careful chivvying. It was a big country and there were always hunts. Dean loved traveling, too-when Sam broke down and gave him On the Road, Dean read it in a couple of days and then spent the next few weeks quoting it nonstop and calling Sam ‘Sal’ just to watch Sam twitch.
Sam couldn’t stop watching him. Whether he was tired and sweaty, covered with grit or bits of sticks and leaves, or fresh from his shower, skin damp and pinked with heat, he was incandescent. This was Dean as he deserved to have been all along, a thoroughbred in his prime. Castiel had taken away the physical scars, as if they mattered at all, but left so much damage behind.
****
They were coming off a grueling hunt that had left them both bruised all the colors of the rainbow, driving through the night because there was a werewolf in Tulsa and still three nights of the cycle left to go. “Your brother, John,” Dean said, and Sam stuffed the automatic wince down into the deepest reaches of his soul, “it’s his stuff I’m using, right?”
Sam nodded shortly, figuring that it was totally okay to not want to talk about his poor dead brother. Even Ruby had ordinarily hesitated to bring him up, back when it had been true.
But Dean was apparently made of sterner stuff. “Why’d you keep it?”
Sam looked down at his hands on the wheel. “I couldn’t,” he said. “It was too soon.” When Dean had died on the Trickster’s Wednesday, Sam hadn’t bothered to take anything out of the car. It would have been inefficient, and Sam didn’t really notice when an empty fast-food cup rolled up against his foot in the driver’s seat anyway.
When Dean had died at the end of his year, Sam had cleaned out Dean’s clothes immediately-no point in cluttering up the car when he had so much ritual paraphernalia to collect, so many books to read. Clothes could always be replaced. Dean had never said anything about having to buy a whole new wardrobe in the nearest Wal-Mart (the grave clothes with their stink of rot, somehow not made whole by Castiel’s otherwise thorough resurrection, abandoned as soon as Dean had an alternative), but Sam had known he’d felt it. After that, it would always be too soon.
Enough of that must have showed on his face that Dean didn’t speak for another few minutes. “You keep saying I should quit. But why don’t you?”
Weirdly, he hadn’t asked himself that question in a while, not even when he’d had Lilith’s head on a plate, just as requested. Of course there’d been Dean, falling apart, to deal with at the time. Killing evil things was the only way he’d known how to keep Dean remotely functional. Now, though-
“I think about it,” he said. “Maybe we’ve done enough. It’s not that easy to start a new life, but-I think about it.”
His world had narrowed a lot since Stanford, which was kind of funny when you thought about all the places they’d been and how none of them had offered a way out. On the other hand, everybody made choices that cut off other options, not just hunters. If Sam had somehow avoided Azazel and had been working as an associate now at some white-shoe law firm, hoping to make partner, he would have lived with the knowledge that Dean was out in the world with no backup. Or, more likely, he would have lived with the knowledge that he was the last Winchester standing.
“Maybe-” Dean said, but even after Sam waited five minutes, he didn’t finish the sentence, and then he fell asleep, head smushed against the glass, stubbled jaw angled towards Sam and legs splayed carelessly. The periodic highway lights brought him in and out of shadow, reappearing from blackness again and again. Sam kept glancing over, checking to make sure his breathing was still untroubled and noting the way his fingers twitched rhythmlessly against his thighs, like a dog chasing cats in its dreams.
There was more in the world, but Sam needed to remember how much he already had.
****
Mixed in with Dean’s research about recent deaths by misadventure in Topanga was a printout about a haunted fire station in Chicago. In 1924, a fireman had been killed in a burning building right after predicting his own death. He’d left a handprint on the window of his firehouse that resisted all attempts to clean it. But the window had been shattered in 1944 and the firehouse itself torn down in the 1970s.
Sam didn’t say anything about the story to Dean, who seemed perfectly willing to focus on the poltergeist of the moment.
****
Gravedigging was a good workout. Not that it wasn’t grimy and tough enough to deserve some bitching, too, but it wasn’t dangerous and progress was easily measured, which was not something that could be said of most of their endeavors. Dean passed the time by recounting, or exaggerating, stories he’d read in his researches. When they’d been kids, Dean had always possessed the knack of making characters come to life, and Sam was pretty sure he embroidered just as much these days, even if he was no longer focused on the goal of tormenting Sam with tall tales.
Sam just chuckled along and countered with yarns of his own, some he’d read but most he’d lived through. He wasn’t sure whether the hunts he’d done during the Trickster’s half year counted as real or not, so he told Dean about them as if they’d happened to some other hunter, like he’d heard the stories at the Roadhouse. If he concentrated hard enough, he could imagine that slightly different life, the one where they’d been welcome among other hunters, where Sam hadn’t needed to watch out for the ones convinced that he was the Antichrist in training.
Sam had too many stories to tell and Dean had too few. He felt the gap every time Dean got distracted by something new, trying it to figure out whether he liked it: romance novels, no; flip-flops, no; cigarettes, yes, but Sam threatened to make him eat the whole pack and that was the end of that experiment. Except that now he’d sneak them in bars while Sam had his back turned and justify himself on the ground that they both stank of smoke after a bar crawl anyway. Dean had never smoked in front of Sam, not even when they were kids-filthy habit, Dad had always said, and expensive to boot-but Sam thought maybe Dean had tried it when he was out on his own, given how natural a cigarette looked dangling from Dean’s lips or held in Dean’s always-moving hands.
When Dean had defended his filthy cravings on that ground, though-“C’mon, Sam, obviously I smoked before!”-Sam had argued him into compliance, pointing out that he hadn’t gone through withdrawal right after the fairy curse, not to mention the lack of stained fingers, teeth, et cetera. Plus the health consequences; hunters who couldn’t run without huffing were properly defined as prey, not hunters. And anyway, Sam had continued, Dean remembered all sorts of minor preferences, so what was the point of all the experimentation?
Dean had stopped and thought it out. “’Cause all the stuff I know about myself, it’s a percent of what somebody normal knows,” he’d said. “I don’t even know what I don’t know, so I might as well try it all. Even if I didn’t know about Thai food or whatever before, well, maybe this is my chance to find something I like even better.”
Sam had felt a little queasy about that, for reasons that were too hard to untangle in his own head. But when he thought about it as a kind of mid-life crisis, without the mid-life part, it made more sense. There was no harm in trying new things as long as the new things weren’t likely to draw blood.
Still, he half wished that Dean didn’t feel quite as much of a compulsion to fill the silence as they dug. It was too easy to hear the need in Dean’s voice as he told every history but his own. There was no way that Dean was in as much pain as before the amnesia, but Sam still couldn’t fix it.
In time, Sam swore to himself, there’d be enough stories between them to satisfy Dean.
****
Dean carried three kids to safety, one under each arm and one clinging to his back, while Sam took out the dire wolf that had been using their campground as a butcher’s block. Afterwards, when the weeping parents couldn’t stop thanking them, and Dean grew shy and pink under their effusiveness, Sam wanted to go back in time and show Dean-then that this was who he’d been all along.
Dean had pretty much stopped talking about Hell after the siren. The last time he’d said anything about it, he hadn’t even been aware that Sam was listening. It had been the night after they’d put Lilith down, and Dean had been shitfaced. Sam had been jumping out of his skin with a combination of relief, the remnants of his terror, and anger at his complete inability to imagine the future when he was supposed to be glorying in his triumph. He’d needed to get away from Dean’s drunken bellicosity before he broke every bone in Dean’s stupid face, so he’d taken a walk.
He’d returned to find Castiel, his hands on Dean’s shoulders, holding him back as Dean lunged uselessly at him. Sam had stopped in the open doorway and neither of them had seemed to notice him. Castiel’s tone was as even as ever, telling Dean that he wasn’t headed back to Hell.
Dean’s face had been contorted like a gargoyle’s. When Castiel promised him safety from the Pit, he’d stopped struggling and stumbled backwards, crumpling onto the bed. “You know,” he’d slurred, “ all my life, all I ever wanted was someone I-someone to say I was good enough. An’ here’s the punchline: even Alastair never said it.”
“God does not require perfection,” Castiel had said, looking distressed, or as close to it as the angel got. Sam had known even before Dean tried to get up and take another swing that Castiel hadn’t given the right answer.
Sam had wondered, later, how much longer it would have taken before Dean would have become a demon for Alastair’s approval, how close Castiel had cut it. At the time, he’d been frozen inside and out, his thoughts as blank as Lilith’s eyes. He’d stood and watched Dean spit curses and tell Castiel to get out, get the fuck out, until Castiel had finally complied; that was the last time they’d seen an angel.
When Castiel had winked out of sight, Dean had managed to get himself into the bathroom and started throwing up. Sam had walked back out. Defeating Lilith was supposed to have been the end of his troubles, and he’d been incapable of dealing with Dean just then.
Dean wouldn’t have believed him if he’d said what Dean wanted to hear, anyway. And it wouldn’t have been true. Back then, he’d thought that telling Dean he was good enough would mean endorsing every shitty thing about their lives, giving up on anything better. With the benefit of hindsight, he thought that maybe Dean had just wanted to know that he was a good enough Dean.
The only thing Sam could think to do was to get Dean-now tipsy at the nearest bar. That entailed some drinking on his own part, so he ended up leaning against Dean, nearly pushing him off his stool, telling him over and over that he was a hero. Dean clapped Sam on the shoulder and said, “Dude, for such an enormous guy, you are a total lightweight,” but Dean still smiled at him, relaxed and golden, and it was almost, almost enough.
****
The engine overheated on I-95 just outside of Baltimore. This was clearly Sam’s fault. He hadn’t done any maintenance in months, Dean’s presence having made him forget that it was his job now.
Sam popped the hood and took a look. “What do you think?” he asked Dean, who was looking over his shoulder with a detached sort of interest that was as uncanny as any spirit they’d hunted. There was a sweetish, burnt scent, which he knew he should recognize.
Dean shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Do you know what that smell is?” He watched Dean’s face carefully. This felt like one of Dean’s tests, except that of course it couldn’t be.
Dean shook his head, and Sam could tell he wasn’t bluffing. “I got nothin’.”
Sam took a deep breath. He would have thought that the Impala’s innards would be as familiar to Dean as cleaning a gun.
Maybe he’d forgotten because the car was such a big part of his identity. In a lot of ways, the Impala was Dean’s biography. Most of what had happened to it was invisible, scars it should have borne replaced and rebuilt by Dean’s hands in place of God’s. Like Dean, it was so sleek and powerful that it could take your breath away, flashy and swaggering and packed to the brim with weaponry. And the car was Dean’s only home. When Sam thought of it like that, he wasn’t surprised that the Impala had been cut away with Dean’s other core memories, despite the fact that the trivia remained.
Once Sam forced his mind off of Dean and back to the car, it didn’t take him long to figure out that it was a radiator hose leak. Unpleasant to fix, but not impossible, not with what he’d learned during the long months without Dean.
Without Dean in a different way now, Sam was the one loosening the clamps and burning himself on the hot metal while Dean watched, crouched down, and occasionally offered color commentary. It was almost like they’d swapped bodies, Sam the mechanic and Dean the cool observer offering to look things up on the internet.
The repair took him three hours. Dean would have mocked him mercilessly. Under other circumstances.
****
Quitting had been his original idea right after Dean’s memories were lost, and it still had a lot of upsides. Hunting was a young man’s job, and Dean wasn’t getting any younger, even if the amnesia had removed the hundred-ton weight that had been smashing him flat. They could get jobs doing construction if nothing else. Sam could go to community college and work his way up some corporate ladder.
The problem was: what would be left of Dean then? Sam couldn’t see himself slaving in an office, tossing back beers at the end of the day as the highlight, but more than that he couldn’t see Dean if Dean wasn’t kicking ass and saving lives.
Twenty years ago, they could have managed IDs solid enough to get Dean on a major police force where many of his skills could have been put to use. Now, though, their choices were some small town where Dean would quietly rot and go crazy, or maybe an EMT job in a big city, as long as the city was inefficient about background checks. Sam didn’t think that Dean would last long as an EMT. He’d start resolving disputes and intervening to make sure battered women didn’t get hit a second time on his watch. Noble, but there’d be attention, and even the positive kind was too likely to end with some detail-oriented FBI agent noticing a picture in the paper.
It didn’t seem fair that this version of Dean was still paying for the comfortable lies about his earlier incarnation. But what could Sam do?
Anyway, the idea of abandoning hunting had appealed more when Dean was trying so very hard to get himself killed on the job. Now, when they were scything down evil like humanity’s own Reapers, Sam saw more clearly what they’d be sacrificing by quitting. He didn’t know exactly who’d die if they stopped, but there’d be a body count for sure, and Dean would never want that.
In a couple of years, they could settle down some, cut back. They’d earned the right to pick and choose, at least. But to stop now, when Dean wouldn’t have if he’d remembered - that seemed like it would be an abuse of power.
****
Dean still sang along to the music, but only with songs he’d learned recently. Without the automatic layer of ‘annoy Sam’ over everything Dean did, Sam thought that Dean actually had a pretty nice voice. And when Sam made fun of him for singing Fall Out Boy, Dean just stuck his tongue out and belted out “a loaded God complex, cock it and pull it” louder.
****
They took a break to see a county fair in the middle of Montana. “Are you sure?” Dean asked, wrinkling his nose as he examined the dusty, nearly full parking lot and the clots of pale humanity surging towards the gates.
“If the nagual sticks to its pattern, it isn’t going to hunt again for another three weeks,” Sam pointed out. “And we never got to go to one of these when I was a kid.”
“I don’t know,” Dean said, still dubious as Sam locked up the car. “Maybe I hate carnival rides.”
Sam closed his eyes, briefly enough that he could pretend it was just a stray bit of grit. “Let’s find out,” he said through the swelling in his chest.
Dean thought the ferris wheel was boring, which was anticlimactic given that Sam had half expected a full-on fear of heights freakout. He guessed it was just planes, then. But then Dean rode the Gravitron six times, eyes shining brighter each time. Sam stumbled off, sick to his stomach, after round four and watched the thing whirl.
This was a completely new memory, something they’d made together. Theirs.
Dean gave every appearance of enjoying winning stuffed animals at the ring toss that he then handed to the next child who blinked up at him. And once Sam swore up and down that the food wasn’t going to give him salmonella, he got into the spirit, sucking down sodas and stuffing his face with chili dogs, cotton candy, a deep-fried Oreo, and a couple of things Sam didn’t even want to know about.
Sam expected Dean to be on the demolition derby like smoke on fire, but he ignored the signs and dragged Sam towards the animal exhibitions. He loved the show horses, standing on the bottom rung of the wooden fence and leaning over it like a fourteen-year-old girl in the throes of her first crush. Sam watched Dean’s eyes light up with wonder and tried to remember, not all that successfully, not to look like he was humoring Dean.
One of the riders, a buxom blonde (naturally), saw Dean’s interest and brought her mount over so that Dean could examine it (yeah, right) close up. Dean cheerfully admitted that he knew nothing about horses, but Diana was more than happy to explain the various competitions to him, and to praise Dean’s apparently instantaneous feeling for horseflesh.
The grin on Dean’s face when the horse got its spit all over his hand while sucking off the sugar cubes Diana slipped him was as wide as any he’d ever had hunting. “That tickles!” Dean mock-complained while petting the horse’s enormous head with his free hand.
Sam edged further away. Its eyes were too human, and too black, for his comfort.
When Diana suggested that they could come visit her ranch, have a look around, maybe pick up some work if they were looking for it, Sam wasn’t so much shocked by the speculative look on Dean’s face as he was by the context. He was pretty sure that Dean didn’t care nearly as much about getting into Diana’s well-filled-out jeans as he did about playing cowboy.
Fortunately or not, Dean could read Sam’s signals when they were flaring this high, and he managed to extract himself with a phone number and a promise to drop by next time they were in the state. A couple of times on the way back to the car, Sam thought Dean was about to say something, maybe ask why Sam had gotten his back up about Diana after knowing her for all of ten minutes, at which point Sam would have agreed that, yes, all they knew about her was contained in ten minutes (and a tight top). But Dean just examined him, as if he were trying to figure something out, and didn’t ask.
****
“What was that, Dean?” Sam yelled. “Fucking amateur hour!” He slammed the door and wished that there was something in the room he could throw to make his point.
Of all the things he’d expected, Dean nearly getting them both killed by inattention on a hunt had been pretty low on the list.
Dean wouldn’t look at Sam as he headed towards the bathroom, but the hunch of his shoulders communicated that he understood how badly he’d fucked up.
“She said … she said she’d tell me who I was,” he managed after a minute, barely audible over the rush of water in the sink.
Sam was instantly rigid, anger flash-frozen to fear. He forced himself to talk. “She was a witch, Dean. She’d give you any lie to get you to come running.” Now that he was paying attention, he saw a patch of wetness on Dean’s shoulder, darker than the black of the shirt itself. “You’re hurt.”
Dean shrugged, then went pain-stiff. Sam hurried into the bathroom, nearly smashing Dean up against the sink in the tiny space, and batted Dean’s hands away as he investigated the wound. Small, but nasty-she’d had some sort of bone knife. Sam was betting she’d made it from a previous victim.
“Let’s get this off,” he said, conciliatory, as he unbuttoned the shirt and helped Dean slide it off his shoulders. Dean always did need to learn his lessons with his body. He’d be more careful now. And there was a small, shameful part of Sam that liked the idea of a scar Dean would recognize, securing him more firmly in this life.
****
“I’ve been researching my amulet,” Dean told him after they finished up a hunt for a water sprite in Kentucky. “It’s so strange, I think it has to mean something. Maybe if I figure it out-”
“Lots of people wear symbols without knowing what they mean,” Sam interrupted, because as far as he knew the amulet was unique. If there was a picture of it out there, it would be attached to a picture of Dean. And some of the people Dean might consult could recognize him. “Goths with crosses and ankhs, tons of Egyptian and Greek crap. I don’t-you shouldn’t get your hopes up.”
Dean threw his hands up and increased his pace. They were wet and the night wasn’t getting any warmer. “This isn’t a freaking cross, Sam! It’s a weird bull-thing with horns. I haven’t found anything like it in any of the books.”
Sam let Dean get a step ahead, in case something was showing on his face. “Maybe that just means it’s some, I don’t know, craft-fair thing you picked up.”
“Do I look like a guy who goes to craft fairs?” Dean demanded, totally serious, and Sam couldn’t help but crack up.
“No,” he wheezed, barely keeping pace. “You look like the guy who hits on the girls at the craft fairs. And the girls not at the craft fairs.”
Dean’s step hitched and he turned back, his expression curious. “You really think I need to hit on them? I don’t know what I was like before, but I’m pretty sure a face like this doesn’t have to work that hard.”
Sam flushed. It was true that Dean without his memories was far less brash, and girls still threw themselves into his lap at the first excuse. So far, he hadn’t taken any of them up on their offers, even though his physical skills would surely return there as readily as they had in other areas of life.
Dean’s relative monkishness made him wonder: how much of Dean’s constant stream of pickups in the past had been about filling an emotional need, not a physical one? Sam had always assumed that the girls were meaningless because they were always being left behind, and that the point was to avoid any real connection. But maybe Dean’s braggadoccio about being good in bed was about some kind of validation he couldn’t get other ways. Or maybe new Dean was just as horny, but was being abstemious because he was sticking so close to Sam, the only quasi-familiar person in his world.
****
The next time a girl grabbed Dean and took him over to her friends, Sam tried to suggest with his raised bottle and his smile that Dean was welcome to meet him back in the room later. Dean didn’t go off with her, though, just finished his drink and returned to collect Sam.
Sam hated to do it, but talking was actually required. He waited until they had finished the latest hunt, a cakewalk (with a riverside pyre instead of candles, and sadly lacking in actual cake), and Dean was checking the supplies as Sam cleaned the shovels preparatory to returning them to the trunk. “You know, if you wanted to hook up tonight, we could find a place,” Sam suggested.
Dean didn’t look up from the shells. “That’s sweet, Sam, but don’t you think you oughta buy me dinner first?”
Sam fumbled the shovel he was holding, nearly dropping it back into the dirt. “I meant-” Dean was already chuckling, though, so Sam gave him the finger, as much as he could while hanging on to the shovel. “It’s just-you know, if you want to find a girl, it’s not like I have any moral objections.”
“Doesn’t seem to be your thing, though.” Dean rubbed his fingers over the curves of the ammunition, gold dimmed by the night.
“Every once in a while,” Sam admitted. “But yeah, I don’t usually see the point when it’s someone I won’t see again. If you do, seriously, you shouldn’t hold back on my account.” He shivered a little in the chill night air, glad that for once he hadn’t been dumped into the water.
Dean paused. “On your account, hunh?”
Sam opened his mouth, then closed it, not entirely sure where the conversation was headed.
Dean waited a minute, then closed the box with a loud clank. “I’ve got two good hands myself, Sam, it’s not a big deal.” He headed for the front seat, ending the conversation, and not a moment too soon.
****
Except that two nights later, Dean said, “Samuel,” and his voice was as thick as Turkish coffee, dark and sweet. Sam froze like a spirit trapped in salt, then made himself turn away from his laptop, because his instinctive reaction was crazy--
Sam hadn’t noticed his approach, but Dean was only a few feet away, and he closed the distance too fast for Sam to think. Fight-quick, he straddled Sam’s lap, settling his weight down as he put his hands on Sam’s shoulders and leaned forward until their faces were less than an inch apart.
“I want to hook up tonight,” Dean said, low and almost growling into Sam’s mouth, which had dropped open.
“Unnh,” Sam said, staring into Dean’s eyes, which were wide with arousal. The freckles over the bridge of his nose were darker from the six days they’d spent on the river. Dean moved forward, tilting his head as he went, until Sam felt a feather-light touch on his lips.
He jerked backwards until he was stopped by the chairback. “Dean!” he gasped, sounding like an outraged virgin even in his own ears. His hands flailed at his sides. He could stand up, dump Dean off, push him away if necessary, but he couldn’t seem to make his muscles move.
“C’mon,” Dean coaxed, the tone Sam had heard a hundred times in bars or through too-thin walls. “I’ve seen you looking. You watch me like you’ve been at fat camp for six weeks and I’m a chocolate cake.”
Sam shifted, trying to get his groin further away from Dean’s, but Dean wriggled to keep up. His thighs were heavy brands on top of Sam’s, his breath even hotter as it hit Sam’s face. “This is a bad idea,” Sam said, too breathlessly, and continued with the first thing that came into his head. “You, you could be married.”
Dean held up his left hand, conspicuously ringless.
“Not all guys wear rings,” Sam said, knowing it was pathetic.
“Yeah, ‘cause clearly I don’t like jewelry,” Dean told him, smiling almost tenderly, forgiving Sam’s idiocy.
“You don’t even know if you like guys,” he tried, but Dean just rolled his eyes and thrust his hips, demonstrating exactly how much Dean liked guys.
“Sam,” Dean whispered, his lips an inch from Sam’s ear, “I want this. You want this. I’ll be good, I promise.”
Sam’s stomach flipped over, but unfortunately it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation. “You don’t know that,” he said, a clear challenge, which wasn’t at all what he’d meant to say.
He could feel the heat of Dean’s smile against his cheek. “I got a feeling.” Dean’s hand slipped under his shirt, just the lightest touch of fingertips against his stomach and chest. Sam gasped. “Remember how I was at target practice? Let me show you what I can do with your gun.”
It was so terrible that Sam laughed, but the sound turned into a moan when Dean dug his fingers into Sam’s skin, squeezing a handful of flesh, and followed up by plunging his tongue straight into Sam’s mouth. His other hand cupped Sam’s cheek, turning his face into the kiss.
He tasted like beer and under that, something sweet and clean.
Panting, Sam wrenched his head back, breaking the kiss. Dean’s hand dropped away and Sam’s cheek was instantly cold. “No,” he said, shaky. “There are-we don’t even know why this could be a bad idea.”
“Sam,” Dean told him, his eyes forest-shadowed, “if you don’t want this, stop talking about me and start talking about you.”
Sam inhaled. “I don’t want this.” Every word felt forced through concrete.
Dean swung his leg off of Sam and stood, turning stiffly. “Liar,” he said, before he strode to the door and slammed himself out.
You have no idea, Sam thought.
The Dean he’d grown up with wouldn’t have let it go at that. He would have ignored the words in favor of what Sam’s body was screaming, which was ‘yes’ in any language. Sam wasn’t sure whether that difference made things better or worse.
Old Dean would have stomped back in the next morning, smelling like liquor and pussy. But apparently that had changed too. When Dean returned after two, he was quiet and, as far as Sam could tell, both sober and untouched.
Part 4
Part 2
“No offense,” Dean began, which was always worrisome, “but do you have any music that was recorded sometime after you were born?”
Sam avoided a double-take only because the traffic near Chicago was heavy enough that he couldn’t even look once at Dean. “These were my brother’s tapes,” he said, signalling a lane change, then realized how that must have sounded. “I mean, I don’t really like-I’m not going to throw them away, but we don’t have to-What do you want to listen to?”
“I’m not sure,” Dean said, which Sam supposed was fair enough. He would have expected the cock-rock preferences to persist, the way the love of Corona and the dislike of green peppers had, but maybe Dean’s music had always been more about Dean’s view of himself than the deathless musicality of arena bands. And now Dean’s view of himself was-unfixed.
“Tell you what, you get radio control for the next week,” Sam suggested as he hit the stop button on the tape player. “Maybe by then we’ll have a better idea.”
“Thanks,” Dean said, and gave him another one of those supernova smiles, the ones Sam had mostly seen from an angle. After Stanford, Dean had seemed to think that Sam didn’t need Dean to be his cheerleader anymore, so the Category 5 grins had all gone to pretty girls, or to people who had useful information. Then after Hell, of course, they’d barely hit Category 1.
Sam shifted in his seat. “No big deal.” He didn’t know what they’d do about whatever Dean’s musical tastes turned out to be. Satellite radio maybe, if he could figure out how to pay for it.
An iPod jack was out of the question. It would be exploiting Dean’s rebirth.
As it happened, Dean preferred jazz, especially instrumental, and Jack radio, the one where they threw all sorts of different songs at you without much in the way of an announcer. Those were easy enough to find on the radio dial, so Sam tried not to worry overmuch about it.
****
Coming off a successful hunt in Potomac, Maryland, they stumbled into a wedding reception, three hundred cheerful faces at least. Even though they were two out of only five people who didn’t seem to speak Hindi, they were swept up in the dancing. The girls were wrapped in rich silks and embroidery, colors so rich and true they seemed to come from another world than the Winchesters’ ghosts and graves, and they laughed when they grabbed onto Sam and Dean’s hands and showed them the steps. Dean was just as terrible as Sam at it, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone.
There was a whole table full of desserts, jellies and candies and puddings and something like a donut hole soaked in sugar syrup. Dean ate five of those before Sam turned away, his own stomach lurching, and when Sam looked back Dean was already dancing again, a girl on each elbow, laughing at himself.
Sam thought about getting in the car and just driving, because Dean could make himself a new life anywhere. But he couldn’t be sure Dean was all right, not unless he was watching over Dean. And, he could admit to himself now, it wasn’t just that he couldn’t trust Dean’s safety to anyone else. Sam didn’t have anyone else left either. He was as much of an orphan as Dean. His own memories weren’t doing him any favors. They needed to make their own society.
So he waited until Dean stumbled off the dancefloor, flushed and sticky-fingered, and beelined over to Sam, asking “Where to next?” He smeared syrup all over Sam’s wrist when he grabbed Sam to drag him off, but Sam couldn’t make himself mind.
****
“You’re bleeding,” Dean snapped, as if Sam could have missed that fact. “You need to get that sewn up.”
“When we get back to the room,” Sam grunted out. He had to pause before he could work up the breath to continue. “Show up in an ER with a cut like this, cops get nervous.”
Dean’s lip curled, reflexive contempt. Since the amnesia, they’d yet to be arrested, but something of Sam’s stories of FBI misinterpretations must have stuck with him.
Sam pressed the rag harder down on his thigh. “Just a couple more minutes,” he gasped.
And Dean always could make the Impala move like a bullet train, so it was no surprise that even this first time Sam gave him the keys he brought them back to the motel faster than Sam could have done on Sam’s best day. Sam also had reason to appreciate Dean’s field-medic skills. When he was looking after Sam, his stitches were as neat as a sewing machine’s.
But Sam had fucked up badly. Dean cut away his jeans to get at the wound, and that wasn’t a problem. That was SOP. No, the fuckup was that it was only accident-luck, really-that the flying glass had sliced his thigh and not his chest. Dean would have stitched that wound up too, no doubt, but then he’d have wanted a chat about why Sam happened to have an identical tattoo.
The next morning, still limping and a little zoned on painkillers, he made Dean head out to the library. One of the great benefits of Dean’s reboot, other than the small fact of eliminating Dean’s death wish, was that Dean no longer resisted doing his share of the research. Sam suspected that Dean felt the need to prove himself. Dean thought that the amnesia was the reason he didn’t remember the basic facts of the supernatural, and no doubt there was a fair amount of truth to that, but Dean had never known the shit he was picking up now.
While Dean was furthering his education on the varieties of incubus, Sam headed to a tattoo parlor that had gotten good reviews on the web. The artist wasn’t thrilled about Sam’s request because the original was in such good shape, but Sam had come in with very specific designs and he was good at talking people into doing what he wanted.
That night, after dinner, he showed Dean. With the skin around the new work sore and red, and the old lines still solid black underneath, there was no way Dean could tell that the basic protective design had already been there, and no reason for him to think of it.
“You had to one-up me, didn’t you?” Dean asked, looking at the red flames curling around the circle, and the runes surrounding it. Sam just smirked and shrugged, which stung his overstretched skin.
The runes might even buy Sam some more armor against evil. In fact, if all went well, he might drag Dean in to have the work repeated.
“Can I?” Dean asked, and Sam realized he was asking permission to touch.
Sam nodded; he’d put the bandage back on when Dean was done. Dean ran his fingers over one of the runes, making Sam shiver involuntarily, but Dean didn’t stop. His touch was feather-light, almost indistinguishable from the puffs of breath hitting Sam’s chest as Dean bent to look more closely. Sam’s instinct was to pull back, but he forced himself still.
The rune Dean traced was algiz: protection in dangerous endeavors.
****
Sam started to forget which places he’d been in with Dean-before and Dean-after. He kept a very careful record in his journal, though, a new one like Dad’s, always stashed in the car. And he made sure to consult it before every hunt. He wasn’t going to take Dean anywhere he might get recognized.
Dean didn’t notice Sam’s careful chivvying. It was a big country and there were always hunts. Dean loved traveling, too-when Sam broke down and gave him On the Road, Dean read it in a couple of days and then spent the next few weeks quoting it nonstop and calling Sam ‘Sal’ just to watch Sam twitch.
Sam couldn’t stop watching him. Whether he was tired and sweaty, covered with grit or bits of sticks and leaves, or fresh from his shower, skin damp and pinked with heat, he was incandescent. This was Dean as he deserved to have been all along, a thoroughbred in his prime. Castiel had taken away the physical scars, as if they mattered at all, but left so much damage behind.
****
They were coming off a grueling hunt that had left them both bruised all the colors of the rainbow, driving through the night because there was a werewolf in Tulsa and still three nights of the cycle left to go. “Your brother, John,” Dean said, and Sam stuffed the automatic wince down into the deepest reaches of his soul, “it’s his stuff I’m using, right?”
Sam nodded shortly, figuring that it was totally okay to not want to talk about his poor dead brother. Even Ruby had ordinarily hesitated to bring him up, back when it had been true.
But Dean was apparently made of sterner stuff. “Why’d you keep it?”
Sam looked down at his hands on the wheel. “I couldn’t,” he said. “It was too soon.” When Dean had died on the Trickster’s Wednesday, Sam hadn’t bothered to take anything out of the car. It would have been inefficient, and Sam didn’t really notice when an empty fast-food cup rolled up against his foot in the driver’s seat anyway.
When Dean had died at the end of his year, Sam had cleaned out Dean’s clothes immediately-no point in cluttering up the car when he had so much ritual paraphernalia to collect, so many books to read. Clothes could always be replaced. Dean had never said anything about having to buy a whole new wardrobe in the nearest Wal-Mart (the grave clothes with their stink of rot, somehow not made whole by Castiel’s otherwise thorough resurrection, abandoned as soon as Dean had an alternative), but Sam had known he’d felt it. After that, it would always be too soon.
Enough of that must have showed on his face that Dean didn’t speak for another few minutes. “You keep saying I should quit. But why don’t you?”
Weirdly, he hadn’t asked himself that question in a while, not even when he’d had Lilith’s head on a plate, just as requested. Of course there’d been Dean, falling apart, to deal with at the time. Killing evil things was the only way he’d known how to keep Dean remotely functional. Now, though-
“I think about it,” he said. “Maybe we’ve done enough. It’s not that easy to start a new life, but-I think about it.”
His world had narrowed a lot since Stanford, which was kind of funny when you thought about all the places they’d been and how none of them had offered a way out. On the other hand, everybody made choices that cut off other options, not just hunters. If Sam had somehow avoided Azazel and had been working as an associate now at some white-shoe law firm, hoping to make partner, he would have lived with the knowledge that Dean was out in the world with no backup. Or, more likely, he would have lived with the knowledge that he was the last Winchester standing.
“Maybe-” Dean said, but even after Sam waited five minutes, he didn’t finish the sentence, and then he fell asleep, head smushed against the glass, stubbled jaw angled towards Sam and legs splayed carelessly. The periodic highway lights brought him in and out of shadow, reappearing from blackness again and again. Sam kept glancing over, checking to make sure his breathing was still untroubled and noting the way his fingers twitched rhythmlessly against his thighs, like a dog chasing cats in its dreams.
There was more in the world, but Sam needed to remember how much he already had.
****
Mixed in with Dean’s research about recent deaths by misadventure in Topanga was a printout about a haunted fire station in Chicago. In 1924, a fireman had been killed in a burning building right after predicting his own death. He’d left a handprint on the window of his firehouse that resisted all attempts to clean it. But the window had been shattered in 1944 and the firehouse itself torn down in the 1970s.
Sam didn’t say anything about the story to Dean, who seemed perfectly willing to focus on the poltergeist of the moment.
****
Gravedigging was a good workout. Not that it wasn’t grimy and tough enough to deserve some bitching, too, but it wasn’t dangerous and progress was easily measured, which was not something that could be said of most of their endeavors. Dean passed the time by recounting, or exaggerating, stories he’d read in his researches. When they’d been kids, Dean had always possessed the knack of making characters come to life, and Sam was pretty sure he embroidered just as much these days, even if he was no longer focused on the goal of tormenting Sam with tall tales.
Sam just chuckled along and countered with yarns of his own, some he’d read but most he’d lived through. He wasn’t sure whether the hunts he’d done during the Trickster’s half year counted as real or not, so he told Dean about them as if they’d happened to some other hunter, like he’d heard the stories at the Roadhouse. If he concentrated hard enough, he could imagine that slightly different life, the one where they’d been welcome among other hunters, where Sam hadn’t needed to watch out for the ones convinced that he was the Antichrist in training.
Sam had too many stories to tell and Dean had too few. He felt the gap every time Dean got distracted by something new, trying it to figure out whether he liked it: romance novels, no; flip-flops, no; cigarettes, yes, but Sam threatened to make him eat the whole pack and that was the end of that experiment. Except that now he’d sneak them in bars while Sam had his back turned and justify himself on the ground that they both stank of smoke after a bar crawl anyway. Dean had never smoked in front of Sam, not even when they were kids-filthy habit, Dad had always said, and expensive to boot-but Sam thought maybe Dean had tried it when he was out on his own, given how natural a cigarette looked dangling from Dean’s lips or held in Dean’s always-moving hands.
When Dean had defended his filthy cravings on that ground, though-“C’mon, Sam, obviously I smoked before!”-Sam had argued him into compliance, pointing out that he hadn’t gone through withdrawal right after the fairy curse, not to mention the lack of stained fingers, teeth, et cetera. Plus the health consequences; hunters who couldn’t run without huffing were properly defined as prey, not hunters. And anyway, Sam had continued, Dean remembered all sorts of minor preferences, so what was the point of all the experimentation?
Dean had stopped and thought it out. “’Cause all the stuff I know about myself, it’s a percent of what somebody normal knows,” he’d said. “I don’t even know what I don’t know, so I might as well try it all. Even if I didn’t know about Thai food or whatever before, well, maybe this is my chance to find something I like even better.”
Sam had felt a little queasy about that, for reasons that were too hard to untangle in his own head. But when he thought about it as a kind of mid-life crisis, without the mid-life part, it made more sense. There was no harm in trying new things as long as the new things weren’t likely to draw blood.
Still, he half wished that Dean didn’t feel quite as much of a compulsion to fill the silence as they dug. It was too easy to hear the need in Dean’s voice as he told every history but his own. There was no way that Dean was in as much pain as before the amnesia, but Sam still couldn’t fix it.
In time, Sam swore to himself, there’d be enough stories between them to satisfy Dean.
****
Dean carried three kids to safety, one under each arm and one clinging to his back, while Sam took out the dire wolf that had been using their campground as a butcher’s block. Afterwards, when the weeping parents couldn’t stop thanking them, and Dean grew shy and pink under their effusiveness, Sam wanted to go back in time and show Dean-then that this was who he’d been all along.
Dean had pretty much stopped talking about Hell after the siren. The last time he’d said anything about it, he hadn’t even been aware that Sam was listening. It had been the night after they’d put Lilith down, and Dean had been shitfaced. Sam had been jumping out of his skin with a combination of relief, the remnants of his terror, and anger at his complete inability to imagine the future when he was supposed to be glorying in his triumph. He’d needed to get away from Dean’s drunken bellicosity before he broke every bone in Dean’s stupid face, so he’d taken a walk.
He’d returned to find Castiel, his hands on Dean’s shoulders, holding him back as Dean lunged uselessly at him. Sam had stopped in the open doorway and neither of them had seemed to notice him. Castiel’s tone was as even as ever, telling Dean that he wasn’t headed back to Hell.
Dean’s face had been contorted like a gargoyle’s. When Castiel promised him safety from the Pit, he’d stopped struggling and stumbled backwards, crumpling onto the bed. “You know,” he’d slurred, “ all my life, all I ever wanted was someone I-someone to say I was good enough. An’ here’s the punchline: even Alastair never said it.”
“God does not require perfection,” Castiel had said, looking distressed, or as close to it as the angel got. Sam had known even before Dean tried to get up and take another swing that Castiel hadn’t given the right answer.
Sam had wondered, later, how much longer it would have taken before Dean would have become a demon for Alastair’s approval, how close Castiel had cut it. At the time, he’d been frozen inside and out, his thoughts as blank as Lilith’s eyes. He’d stood and watched Dean spit curses and tell Castiel to get out, get the fuck out, until Castiel had finally complied; that was the last time they’d seen an angel.
When Castiel had winked out of sight, Dean had managed to get himself into the bathroom and started throwing up. Sam had walked back out. Defeating Lilith was supposed to have been the end of his troubles, and he’d been incapable of dealing with Dean just then.
Dean wouldn’t have believed him if he’d said what Dean wanted to hear, anyway. And it wouldn’t have been true. Back then, he’d thought that telling Dean he was good enough would mean endorsing every shitty thing about their lives, giving up on anything better. With the benefit of hindsight, he thought that maybe Dean had just wanted to know that he was a good enough Dean.
The only thing Sam could think to do was to get Dean-now tipsy at the nearest bar. That entailed some drinking on his own part, so he ended up leaning against Dean, nearly pushing him off his stool, telling him over and over that he was a hero. Dean clapped Sam on the shoulder and said, “Dude, for such an enormous guy, you are a total lightweight,” but Dean still smiled at him, relaxed and golden, and it was almost, almost enough.
****
The engine overheated on I-95 just outside of Baltimore. This was clearly Sam’s fault. He hadn’t done any maintenance in months, Dean’s presence having made him forget that it was his job now.
Sam popped the hood and took a look. “What do you think?” he asked Dean, who was looking over his shoulder with a detached sort of interest that was as uncanny as any spirit they’d hunted. There was a sweetish, burnt scent, which he knew he should recognize.
Dean shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Do you know what that smell is?” He watched Dean’s face carefully. This felt like one of Dean’s tests, except that of course it couldn’t be.
Dean shook his head, and Sam could tell he wasn’t bluffing. “I got nothin’.”
Sam took a deep breath. He would have thought that the Impala’s innards would be as familiar to Dean as cleaning a gun.
Maybe he’d forgotten because the car was such a big part of his identity. In a lot of ways, the Impala was Dean’s biography. Most of what had happened to it was invisible, scars it should have borne replaced and rebuilt by Dean’s hands in place of God’s. Like Dean, it was so sleek and powerful that it could take your breath away, flashy and swaggering and packed to the brim with weaponry. And the car was Dean’s only home. When Sam thought of it like that, he wasn’t surprised that the Impala had been cut away with Dean’s other core memories, despite the fact that the trivia remained.
Once Sam forced his mind off of Dean and back to the car, it didn’t take him long to figure out that it was a radiator hose leak. Unpleasant to fix, but not impossible, not with what he’d learned during the long months without Dean.
Without Dean in a different way now, Sam was the one loosening the clamps and burning himself on the hot metal while Dean watched, crouched down, and occasionally offered color commentary. It was almost like they’d swapped bodies, Sam the mechanic and Dean the cool observer offering to look things up on the internet.
The repair took him three hours. Dean would have mocked him mercilessly. Under other circumstances.
****
Quitting had been his original idea right after Dean’s memories were lost, and it still had a lot of upsides. Hunting was a young man’s job, and Dean wasn’t getting any younger, even if the amnesia had removed the hundred-ton weight that had been smashing him flat. They could get jobs doing construction if nothing else. Sam could go to community college and work his way up some corporate ladder.
The problem was: what would be left of Dean then? Sam couldn’t see himself slaving in an office, tossing back beers at the end of the day as the highlight, but more than that he couldn’t see Dean if Dean wasn’t kicking ass and saving lives.
Twenty years ago, they could have managed IDs solid enough to get Dean on a major police force where many of his skills could have been put to use. Now, though, their choices were some small town where Dean would quietly rot and go crazy, or maybe an EMT job in a big city, as long as the city was inefficient about background checks. Sam didn’t think that Dean would last long as an EMT. He’d start resolving disputes and intervening to make sure battered women didn’t get hit a second time on his watch. Noble, but there’d be attention, and even the positive kind was too likely to end with some detail-oriented FBI agent noticing a picture in the paper.
It didn’t seem fair that this version of Dean was still paying for the comfortable lies about his earlier incarnation. But what could Sam do?
Anyway, the idea of abandoning hunting had appealed more when Dean was trying so very hard to get himself killed on the job. Now, when they were scything down evil like humanity’s own Reapers, Sam saw more clearly what they’d be sacrificing by quitting. He didn’t know exactly who’d die if they stopped, but there’d be a body count for sure, and Dean would never want that.
In a couple of years, they could settle down some, cut back. They’d earned the right to pick and choose, at least. But to stop now, when Dean wouldn’t have if he’d remembered - that seemed like it would be an abuse of power.
****
Dean still sang along to the music, but only with songs he’d learned recently. Without the automatic layer of ‘annoy Sam’ over everything Dean did, Sam thought that Dean actually had a pretty nice voice. And when Sam made fun of him for singing Fall Out Boy, Dean just stuck his tongue out and belted out “a loaded God complex, cock it and pull it” louder.
****
They took a break to see a county fair in the middle of Montana. “Are you sure?” Dean asked, wrinkling his nose as he examined the dusty, nearly full parking lot and the clots of pale humanity surging towards the gates.
“If the nagual sticks to its pattern, it isn’t going to hunt again for another three weeks,” Sam pointed out. “And we never got to go to one of these when I was a kid.”
“I don’t know,” Dean said, still dubious as Sam locked up the car. “Maybe I hate carnival rides.”
Sam closed his eyes, briefly enough that he could pretend it was just a stray bit of grit. “Let’s find out,” he said through the swelling in his chest.
Dean thought the ferris wheel was boring, which was anticlimactic given that Sam had half expected a full-on fear of heights freakout. He guessed it was just planes, then. But then Dean rode the Gravitron six times, eyes shining brighter each time. Sam stumbled off, sick to his stomach, after round four and watched the thing whirl.
This was a completely new memory, something they’d made together. Theirs.
Dean gave every appearance of enjoying winning stuffed animals at the ring toss that he then handed to the next child who blinked up at him. And once Sam swore up and down that the food wasn’t going to give him salmonella, he got into the spirit, sucking down sodas and stuffing his face with chili dogs, cotton candy, a deep-fried Oreo, and a couple of things Sam didn’t even want to know about.
Sam expected Dean to be on the demolition derby like smoke on fire, but he ignored the signs and dragged Sam towards the animal exhibitions. He loved the show horses, standing on the bottom rung of the wooden fence and leaning over it like a fourteen-year-old girl in the throes of her first crush. Sam watched Dean’s eyes light up with wonder and tried to remember, not all that successfully, not to look like he was humoring Dean.
One of the riders, a buxom blonde (naturally), saw Dean’s interest and brought her mount over so that Dean could examine it (yeah, right) close up. Dean cheerfully admitted that he knew nothing about horses, but Diana was more than happy to explain the various competitions to him, and to praise Dean’s apparently instantaneous feeling for horseflesh.
The grin on Dean’s face when the horse got its spit all over his hand while sucking off the sugar cubes Diana slipped him was as wide as any he’d ever had hunting. “That tickles!” Dean mock-complained while petting the horse’s enormous head with his free hand.
Sam edged further away. Its eyes were too human, and too black, for his comfort.
When Diana suggested that they could come visit her ranch, have a look around, maybe pick up some work if they were looking for it, Sam wasn’t so much shocked by the speculative look on Dean’s face as he was by the context. He was pretty sure that Dean didn’t care nearly as much about getting into Diana’s well-filled-out jeans as he did about playing cowboy.
Fortunately or not, Dean could read Sam’s signals when they were flaring this high, and he managed to extract himself with a phone number and a promise to drop by next time they were in the state. A couple of times on the way back to the car, Sam thought Dean was about to say something, maybe ask why Sam had gotten his back up about Diana after knowing her for all of ten minutes, at which point Sam would have agreed that, yes, all they knew about her was contained in ten minutes (and a tight top). But Dean just examined him, as if he were trying to figure something out, and didn’t ask.
****
“What was that, Dean?” Sam yelled. “Fucking amateur hour!” He slammed the door and wished that there was something in the room he could throw to make his point.
Of all the things he’d expected, Dean nearly getting them both killed by inattention on a hunt had been pretty low on the list.
Dean wouldn’t look at Sam as he headed towards the bathroom, but the hunch of his shoulders communicated that he understood how badly he’d fucked up.
“She said … she said she’d tell me who I was,” he managed after a minute, barely audible over the rush of water in the sink.
Sam was instantly rigid, anger flash-frozen to fear. He forced himself to talk. “She was a witch, Dean. She’d give you any lie to get you to come running.” Now that he was paying attention, he saw a patch of wetness on Dean’s shoulder, darker than the black of the shirt itself. “You’re hurt.”
Dean shrugged, then went pain-stiff. Sam hurried into the bathroom, nearly smashing Dean up against the sink in the tiny space, and batted Dean’s hands away as he investigated the wound. Small, but nasty-she’d had some sort of bone knife. Sam was betting she’d made it from a previous victim.
“Let’s get this off,” he said, conciliatory, as he unbuttoned the shirt and helped Dean slide it off his shoulders. Dean always did need to learn his lessons with his body. He’d be more careful now. And there was a small, shameful part of Sam that liked the idea of a scar Dean would recognize, securing him more firmly in this life.
****
“I’ve been researching my amulet,” Dean told him after they finished up a hunt for a water sprite in Kentucky. “It’s so strange, I think it has to mean something. Maybe if I figure it out-”
“Lots of people wear symbols without knowing what they mean,” Sam interrupted, because as far as he knew the amulet was unique. If there was a picture of it out there, it would be attached to a picture of Dean. And some of the people Dean might consult could recognize him. “Goths with crosses and ankhs, tons of Egyptian and Greek crap. I don’t-you shouldn’t get your hopes up.”
Dean threw his hands up and increased his pace. They were wet and the night wasn’t getting any warmer. “This isn’t a freaking cross, Sam! It’s a weird bull-thing with horns. I haven’t found anything like it in any of the books.”
Sam let Dean get a step ahead, in case something was showing on his face. “Maybe that just means it’s some, I don’t know, craft-fair thing you picked up.”
“Do I look like a guy who goes to craft fairs?” Dean demanded, totally serious, and Sam couldn’t help but crack up.
“No,” he wheezed, barely keeping pace. “You look like the guy who hits on the girls at the craft fairs. And the girls not at the craft fairs.”
Dean’s step hitched and he turned back, his expression curious. “You really think I need to hit on them? I don’t know what I was like before, but I’m pretty sure a face like this doesn’t have to work that hard.”
Sam flushed. It was true that Dean without his memories was far less brash, and girls still threw themselves into his lap at the first excuse. So far, he hadn’t taken any of them up on their offers, even though his physical skills would surely return there as readily as they had in other areas of life.
Dean’s relative monkishness made him wonder: how much of Dean’s constant stream of pickups in the past had been about filling an emotional need, not a physical one? Sam had always assumed that the girls were meaningless because they were always being left behind, and that the point was to avoid any real connection. But maybe Dean’s braggadoccio about being good in bed was about some kind of validation he couldn’t get other ways. Or maybe new Dean was just as horny, but was being abstemious because he was sticking so close to Sam, the only quasi-familiar person in his world.
****
The next time a girl grabbed Dean and took him over to her friends, Sam tried to suggest with his raised bottle and his smile that Dean was welcome to meet him back in the room later. Dean didn’t go off with her, though, just finished his drink and returned to collect Sam.
Sam hated to do it, but talking was actually required. He waited until they had finished the latest hunt, a cakewalk (with a riverside pyre instead of candles, and sadly lacking in actual cake), and Dean was checking the supplies as Sam cleaned the shovels preparatory to returning them to the trunk. “You know, if you wanted to hook up tonight, we could find a place,” Sam suggested.
Dean didn’t look up from the shells. “That’s sweet, Sam, but don’t you think you oughta buy me dinner first?”
Sam fumbled the shovel he was holding, nearly dropping it back into the dirt. “I meant-” Dean was already chuckling, though, so Sam gave him the finger, as much as he could while hanging on to the shovel. “It’s just-you know, if you want to find a girl, it’s not like I have any moral objections.”
“Doesn’t seem to be your thing, though.” Dean rubbed his fingers over the curves of the ammunition, gold dimmed by the night.
“Every once in a while,” Sam admitted. “But yeah, I don’t usually see the point when it’s someone I won’t see again. If you do, seriously, you shouldn’t hold back on my account.” He shivered a little in the chill night air, glad that for once he hadn’t been dumped into the water.
Dean paused. “On your account, hunh?”
Sam opened his mouth, then closed it, not entirely sure where the conversation was headed.
Dean waited a minute, then closed the box with a loud clank. “I’ve got two good hands myself, Sam, it’s not a big deal.” He headed for the front seat, ending the conversation, and not a moment too soon.
****
Except that two nights later, Dean said, “Samuel,” and his voice was as thick as Turkish coffee, dark and sweet. Sam froze like a spirit trapped in salt, then made himself turn away from his laptop, because his instinctive reaction was crazy--
Sam hadn’t noticed his approach, but Dean was only a few feet away, and he closed the distance too fast for Sam to think. Fight-quick, he straddled Sam’s lap, settling his weight down as he put his hands on Sam’s shoulders and leaned forward until their faces were less than an inch apart.
“I want to hook up tonight,” Dean said, low and almost growling into Sam’s mouth, which had dropped open.
“Unnh,” Sam said, staring into Dean’s eyes, which were wide with arousal. The freckles over the bridge of his nose were darker from the six days they’d spent on the river. Dean moved forward, tilting his head as he went, until Sam felt a feather-light touch on his lips.
He jerked backwards until he was stopped by the chairback. “Dean!” he gasped, sounding like an outraged virgin even in his own ears. His hands flailed at his sides. He could stand up, dump Dean off, push him away if necessary, but he couldn’t seem to make his muscles move.
“C’mon,” Dean coaxed, the tone Sam had heard a hundred times in bars or through too-thin walls. “I’ve seen you looking. You watch me like you’ve been at fat camp for six weeks and I’m a chocolate cake.”
Sam shifted, trying to get his groin further away from Dean’s, but Dean wriggled to keep up. His thighs were heavy brands on top of Sam’s, his breath even hotter as it hit Sam’s face. “This is a bad idea,” Sam said, too breathlessly, and continued with the first thing that came into his head. “You, you could be married.”
Dean held up his left hand, conspicuously ringless.
“Not all guys wear rings,” Sam said, knowing it was pathetic.
“Yeah, ‘cause clearly I don’t like jewelry,” Dean told him, smiling almost tenderly, forgiving Sam’s idiocy.
“You don’t even know if you like guys,” he tried, but Dean just rolled his eyes and thrust his hips, demonstrating exactly how much Dean liked guys.
“Sam,” Dean whispered, his lips an inch from Sam’s ear, “I want this. You want this. I’ll be good, I promise.”
Sam’s stomach flipped over, but unfortunately it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation. “You don’t know that,” he said, a clear challenge, which wasn’t at all what he’d meant to say.
He could feel the heat of Dean’s smile against his cheek. “I got a feeling.” Dean’s hand slipped under his shirt, just the lightest touch of fingertips against his stomach and chest. Sam gasped. “Remember how I was at target practice? Let me show you what I can do with your gun.”
It was so terrible that Sam laughed, but the sound turned into a moan when Dean dug his fingers into Sam’s skin, squeezing a handful of flesh, and followed up by plunging his tongue straight into Sam’s mouth. His other hand cupped Sam’s cheek, turning his face into the kiss.
He tasted like beer and under that, something sweet and clean.
Panting, Sam wrenched his head back, breaking the kiss. Dean’s hand dropped away and Sam’s cheek was instantly cold. “No,” he said, shaky. “There are-we don’t even know why this could be a bad idea.”
“Sam,” Dean told him, his eyes forest-shadowed, “if you don’t want this, stop talking about me and start talking about you.”
Sam inhaled. “I don’t want this.” Every word felt forced through concrete.
Dean swung his leg off of Sam and stood, turning stiffly. “Liar,” he said, before he strode to the door and slammed himself out.
You have no idea, Sam thought.
The Dean he’d grown up with wouldn’t have let it go at that. He would have ignored the words in favor of what Sam’s body was screaming, which was ‘yes’ in any language. Sam wasn’t sure whether that difference made things better or worse.
Old Dean would have stomped back in the next morning, smelling like liquor and pussy. But apparently that had changed too. When Dean returned after two, he was quiet and, as far as Sam could tell, both sober and untouched.
Part 4