Only Sweeter 4/5
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
The thing was, Dean had moves, and Sam had never known, even after years watching him get into girls’ pants with a few drinks and a well-timed smile.
He leaned over Sam to look at the laptop screen, just a bit too close, his breath ruffling Sam’s hair, warm and tempting and in exactly the right place that leaning away would have been awkward and obvious. He stripped down to his undershirt when they dug and when he did pushups and crunches in the motel rooms, showing off his arms and his chest where the shirt clung, sweat-heavy, the amulet swaying in the center. He brought Sam breakfast, the coffee sugared just right and always somehow the best egg biscuits around. He watched Sam, openly appreciative, and smiled slow and promising whenever Sam met his eyes.
Sam knew he was being courted. He just didn’t know how to make it stop.
Worse, he liked it. Dean’s full attention had always been a physical weight, oppressive and comforting by turns. Now, he felt Dean’s gaze like gravity, tugging him off course, altering his already erratic orbit.
When Sam put his hands at the small of his back and groaned through the stretch, aching from two and a half hours spent crouched to get at the bricked-in body under the Death House (as the local tabloid called it), Dean asked if he wanted a backrub.
It was the oldest trick in the book, so blatant that only Dean could have made the offer without blinking or blushing.
But Sam recognized the strategem, and fuck if his lower back wasn’t cramped and sore, so he shrugged-that hurt too-and laid down on the bed, toeing his shoes off to thud on the floor. He didn’t bother to take his clothes off.
Dean took a few minutes coming over, and when he did, Sam could smell cinnamon and sandalwood. He’d stocked up on supplies, and at that point Sam should have rethought his acceptance. But Dean’s hands were already smacking together, rubbing the oil warm against his palms, and it would have been rude to change his mind now.
Dean’s fingers were warm and slick when he slid them under Sam’s shirts, skimming up over the waistband of Sam’s jeans and onto his skin, the heat instantly soaking into Sam’s back. Dean’s hands were as strong as a gorilla’s, years of target practice and car repair and digging up graves all aimed at kneading into Sam’s twisted muscles. Sam moaned without meaning to, and Dean only increased the pressure until it was deliciously painful. He was straddling Sam’s thighs, the heat of him soaking through Sam’s jeans.
After the third time Dean’s hands jerked to a halt, tangled up in Sam’s shirts, Dean grunted and swung himself off of Sam. “Take these off,” he ordered, tugging back, and it was true that Dean was stretching the cotton, likely to tear them at the seams, so Sam lifted himself up on his knees long enough to unbutton and strip, then collapsed forward into the pillows again, already chilled with the loss of Dean’s touch. He couldn’t suppress a quick shudder when Dean returned to his place on Sam, the backs of his thighs newly sensitized to Dean’s weight and warmth.
Dean worked on Sam’s lower back for a while, until all the muscles were warm and loose. Then he moved upwards, skimming along Sam’s spine, working his way to Sam’s shoulders, then the tired biceps. He didn’t let up, just kept kneading and pressing, the oil smoothing out his touches until Sam felt as pliable as uncooked dough.
He hadn’t realized that he was making sounds until Dean chuckled, cocky and intimate. “If I’d’ve known you liked having your back rubbed this much, I would’ve been doing it all along.”
Sam blushed and raised his head, his hands fisting on the pillow to either side. “Uh, thanks.” He got why girls put out after massages, getting half-naked aside. It was like dancing, a way of showing off what you could do with your body if you were only allowed. And if there’d been an Olympic medal in backrubs, Dean would have brought the gold home to America.
“Anywhere else you want me to rub?”
Sam closed his eyes and swallowed. Dean’s thumbs traced the line of his shoulderblades, hot and smooth. “No, uh. I’m good.”
Dean leaned down, the hem of his T-shirt falling away from his body to brush Sam’s lower back, the fabric coarse and still warm from Dean’s skin. His amulet rested just below Sam’s neck, a concentrated nugget of heat. It had never gotten this warm while Sam was wearing it during the months Dean was gone, like Dean ran at a higher temperature. Sam shivered.
“Sam,” Dean said, his breath ruffling the ends of Sam’s hair, the moist puff of Sam’s name sending a spike of pleasure straight to Sam’s dick, “I wanna suck you.”
Sam shuddered, whole-body, but Dean just pressed him further into the bed. Sam could smell the spice of the massage oil and his own sweat, ground into the sheets.
“I can’t,” Sam moaned. He’d meant to shut things down before they got this far. He’d meant a lot of things.
“Why not?” Dean’s mouth was closer now, his lips brushing across the hairs on the nape of Sam’s neck.
Sam pushed back, because he couldn’t not move, and Dean rolled smoothly off, pulling Sam towards the center of the bed with him. Now Sam was on his back, Dean pressed up against his side, leaning over him with one hand cupping his jaw, Dean’s thumb rubbing down Sam’s cheek.
Dean was as intense as he’d been when he’d rescued Sam or asked him to stay. But his eyes were brighter than Sam had ever seen them. Sam thought it was hope, because Dean thought he might really get what he wanted. “Give me one good reason we shouldn’t do this.”
Sam stared up at him, unable to surrender the truth, and the thing he should have been able to say in its place was an obvious lie.
“I’m afraid,” he said, when Dean looked like he was half a second from deciding not to wait any longer and just lean down to claim Sam’s mouth. “What if-I don’t want to lose you.” Everyone I love goes away, he thought.
“Samuel,” Dean said, so fond that something in Sam’s chest clenched and released, a flower blooming in stop-motion, “we could get killed tomorrow, or a fairy could come along and take our memories. But we’ve got here, now. What good’s it do to say no to the fun stuff?” Dean’s thumb was still moving, tracing the line where Sam’s beard would grow in if he let it, down over his cheek to his upper lip.
Sam couldn’t catch his breath. Dean was everywhere, hard and strong and alive, alive, alive, a miracle ten times over, and the rest of the world could go fuck itself; what had it ever done for him?
“No good at all,” Sam said, and closed his eyes.
Afterwards, he stared at the ceiling, white tiles pockmarked with tiny holes, a starfield in reverse, the same as a thousand other cheap motels across the country. Sometimes Sam thought that there was really only one motel room, and little sprites moved it around, redecorating on occasion, faster than the Impala could travel. Sometimes he wondered whether, if he left a pair of socks in a drawer in Peoria, he might find them again in Tempe.
Beside him, Dean snuffled, almost a snore. He was grinning slightly in his sleep, the sheet pulled up only to his waist so that his bare chest and arms gleamed faintly in the light from the parking lot outside. His amulet was a dark spot in the middle of his chest, the bull-god seeming to smile at Sam.
Okay, Sam thought, this can’t be as bad as it seems. Yes, Dean was Dean, but not exactly. This Dean was what Dean could have been, should have been, without Sam’s cursed existence warping him. Dean was innocent, regardless of what he could do with his tongue, which Sam was not going to think about; Sam would never know where that skill came from, anyway, so it didn’t matter.
If there was any guilt, it was Sam’s, and that was nothing new.
****
The old Carbon County Prison in Pennsylvania had a hanged man’s handprint embedded in the wall, over a hundred and thirty years old. It had survived repainting and replastering and every other attempt to eliminate it; the story went that the condemned man had put it there just before his execution, as testimony to his innocence.
It gave off EMF, no shock there, but there were no mysterious deaths or other ominous portents associated with the handprint. After a week spent in the area, Dean agreed that there was no job, and no understandable connection to his own scar.
They moved on to a black dog in Northbrook, Illinois.
****
“Look at me,” Dean said, his thumb moving back and forth, rubbing a spot just above Sam’s hip. “Look at me, Sam. Sam,” demanding, coaxing, like he used to be when he was trying to get Sam to close his books and come practice target shooting, only this time the physical activity Dean was promoting was quite different.
Sam shuddered and turned his head until it was pressed into the pillow. Dean, solid and heavy above him as if he were made of gold, leaned down and mouthed at the line of his neck, biting gently, then worrying the skin until Sam gasped.
“Sam,” Dean said, moving towards pleading, and Sam realized that Dean wasn’t just being sexy. If Sam kept his eyes closed, Dean would think that Sam was-well, pretending.
And if there was anything he should have known by now, it was to commit to a side. He’d made his choice.
“Dean,” he breathed, and opened his eyes.
Dean was beautiful.
****
They found a hunt in West Virginia that required a ritual cleansing performed in a charmed circle every night through an entire moon cycle. Dean might have mumbled something about a honeymoon, but Sam didn’t hear it properly.
They camped out in a show house-the developer had gone under in the recession and the rest of the planned community was just markers and string, nobody around. It was hot enough that having only cold water-the heaters hadn’t been installed-was no bother. Sam woke up every morning already sweating, showered off the night’s grime, then immediately got soggy again even before any sparring. Sam knew he looked like a wet dog most of the time, and smelled not much better, whereas Dean just gleamed like he’d been dipped in bronze, and he didn’t even have the decency to stink. Though actually that fact had its benefits; by the end of each day Dean was irresistible, magnetic. After the first three days, Sam dug a bottle of tequila out of the trunk and they did body shots, sans lime or additional salt, while the sun went down.
No internet, so Sam read George R.R. Martin while Dean worked his way through the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler novels that the decorator had stocked in the master bedroom. As Sam might have predicted, Dean loved hard-boiled detectives. He’d even interrupt whatever Sam was doing to read out choice phrases, which Sam wanted to find annoying.
Dean also spent some time playing with the abandoned construction equipment, teaching himself how to use a backhoe, which was mostly hilarious except when it was terrifying. But apart from the one time Dean got covered with mud, nothing untoward happened, so Sam just rolled with it.
At night they cooked out, their fire the brightest thing for miles in any direction, before heading out to do the night’s iteration of the ritual. Dean burned enough meat that even he had to concede that he probably hadn’t been a chef, and after the first week they started to make s’mores every night. Where he was terrible with the burgers, he was a genius with the marshmallows, each one plucked from the flames just as it started to swell and blush golden brown. Dean never could wait for them to cool down, smooshing his between the graham cracker and the chocolate and cursing incomprehensibly as the hot fluff burned his tongue each time.
When he leaned over so that Sam could kiss it better, he tasted like sugar and freedom.
****
The next five months were like that: in most ways, as happy as Sam had ever been. They were certainly a match for the other candidates. His blissful eighth summer, when they’d spent the entire time in Akron and Sam had gone to the library in the morning and the swimming pool in the afternoon, before Sam had understood that they were poor and itinerant in a world that favored neither of those things. His junior year at Stanford, when he’d finally learned to fit in and Jessica Moore asked him out and he aced every class.
Sam had learned to distrust happiness, but the lingering unease of what he was doing with Dean was enough to keep him from obsessing too much over how well things were going.
Dean, meanwhile, turned heads everywhere they went, like he was from a different dimension where people were more alive, more joyful than the real world. He smiled and people opened doors and mouths and hearts to him. He praised the pie in diners and ended up with extra pieces, which he usually split with Sam. He burned bones and threw his arm around Sam’s neck, pulling him down just to rub their cheeks together in affectionate victory.
One time, he made a dreamcatcher to reassure a little girl whose parents had been killed by a closet monster, and she hugged him and begged him not to go, but she listened when he knelt to talk to her and nodded seriously when he explained that it was her job to take care of her aunt and uncle now. Later, he sat on the grass by the side of the road while Sam was working on the car and looked out at the passing traffic, a beer in his hand and his ring glinting on his finger, radiating contentment like a tomcat.
At night he flipped back the sheets and gestured for Sam to get in bed, and no matter how crappy the mattresses or thin the pillows, Sam always slept through the night, because there were no more nightmares for either of them and Dean put out enough heat to rival an electric blanket.
Sam started to get used to the looks people gave him, the ones that said ‘good on you!’ and the ones that said ‘faggot.’
****
“How’d you get that scar?” Dean asked, rubbing his thumb across the raised flesh on Sam’s back. “Looks pretty bad.”
“It nearly killed me,” Sam said, glad that he didn’t have to watch Dean’s face. Dean had worked hard to avoid seeing Sam’s naked back after Cold Oak, ducking out of the bathroom when necessary or, if Sam stripped down in front of him, turning away as if the pattern on the wallpaper had suddenly started moving. Dean from before would never have stared at the scar, much less explored it with his hands, as if it was just one more thing about Sam that needed to be learned.
“My brother saved my life,” Sam told him, because that was important. “It-he got hurt pretty bad doing it. He was never really the same, after.”
“Wasn’t your fault,” Dean said, his clever fingers moving away, pressing hard against the tired muscles in Sam’s upper back.
“You can’t know that,” Sam said, struggling to keep his inappropriate and intense anger out of his voice.
Dean shifted his weight onto Sam, pressing down almost painfully and forcing Sam to stay still. “Sure I can. I know you.”
Except Dean didn’t.
If Sam had known, if he’d thought for one second that there was even a risk that Dean would have made a deal for Sam despite having rejected the same thing for Dad, Sam would have snapped Jake’s neck himself before the disaster had a chance to unfold. But Sam hadn’t known his brother well enough to understand that he was actually breathing for two. And on Dean’s side, Dean hadn’t figured out that saving Sam the way he did would only drag out the destruction. So in that way, Sam guessed, nothing had changed: they were still overconfident and reckless with each other.
All he could do was hope that he was the one who’d have to pay for it.
When Dean’s hands went from relaxing to seductive, Sam moaned gratefully and let himself stop thinking.
****
So, the zombie priest had a couple of defensive moves up his rotting sleeve. They made it past the phantom hounds guarding the perimeter of the old mansion by throwing them meat basted with a paste made of couch grass and other herbs, a variation on the drugged meat of a thousand heist flicks. Dean’s idea, and one he’d be justifiably crowing about for weeks, not that Sam would tell him that more than once.
After that there was a flight of poison darts-Sam saw the cobweb trigger line hovering over the creaking steps just in time to shove Dean down, both of them rolling painfully but not lethally onto the concrete of the walkway while the darts pattered uselessly above and past them.
Then there was a spell that moved the doors and windows around, so that kicking out the front door by the hinges just left them facing a brick wall. It was frankly creepy. Also painful on the kicking foot.
Dean began the incantation, an injunction to clear all paths, to open and hold the way, and Sam caught the rhythm quickly, going almost in a round. His blood fizzed in his veins; he felt like a hound of the Hunt himself, aching to get through and bring down this latest threat to innocent lives.
The bricks groaned and collapsed out of the doorway, falling apart like bones going to ash. Sam sputtered out the dust, thick and red and gritty in his mouth, and they went inside, where the darkness cocooned them instantly. They flicked on their flashlights together, not a heartbeat separating them, and examined the entranceway. The space was as big as some of the houses they’d squatted in, pale-veined marble like gravestones on every surface.
The grand stairs swept upwards, and Sam watched Dean play the beam of his flashlight along the steps, thick with dust and mouse droppings.
“Evil things go down,” Sam said.
Dean didn’t make any of the obvious jokes, too caught up in the quest.
The basement would be accessed through the back of the house. Sam stepped forwards, into the hallway past the stairs, his light bobbing with his steps. Dean followed at his shoulder. Wallpaper hung in ragged curls from the sides of the hall, reaching out to them, and Sam kept as close to the center as he could. He could smell it already, the fresh grass-and-burned bone scent of magic.
The door at the end of the hall was ajar. Sam reached out and hooked it all the way open, stepping through before it had stopped swinging.
He didn’t notice any of the details of the kitchen because there were people waiting there, bunched together at one side like a group waiting for a family portrait.
Dad, Jessica, the wavering shade of his mother, and a quivering mass behind them, so many people, so many lost for him, because of him-
“What the fuck is your problem?” Dean asked and pushed past him.
“Don’t you see them?” he asked, trembling even though he knew they had to be illusion.
“See who?” Dean whipped his head around, following Sam’s gaze and then turning full circle. “There’s nothin’ here, Sam. Sam! Samuel, keep it together.” He was on guard, gun out and backed up against Sam, but his voice was pitched just for Sam. Sam wanted to turn and bury his face in Dean’s shoulder.
He sucked in air. “Revenants. Shades of the unquiet dead.”
“They gonna hurt us?” Dean was jumpy, but in that horror-movie there’s-something-coming-around-the-corner way. Professionally jumpy. Sam tried very hard to emulate him. He’d thought that his grief had been burned out of him over the past few years, but there was something about the holographic image of murdered loved ones that had peeled back all five stages of grief and left him raw and shaking.
As they’d been intended to do. A fear spell to make him see the most distracting visions possible. Nothing more than shadows.
Sam made his breathing slow down. “No, they’re just guardians. Put here to scare off the tourists. Come on,” he said, bringing his gun up and aiming it at the door to the basement. “Let’s go kill some bad things.”
****
“I didn’t see anyone,” Dean said, later that night, while they were burning the bones of the priest’s victims. He said it like a challenge.
Sam thought of all the people who would have been standing in front of Dean a year ago, and closed his eyes. “You ever think maybe that’s a good thing?” he asked, then waited through an hour of Dean’s silent treatment before Dean broke and started talking about the difference between hoodoo and voodoo.
Remembering the afterimages-they weren’t spirits, no more reality to them than photographs-hurt more than a stab wound. All his sins remembered: Jessica, terrified and helpless, betrayed by the secret irrationality and evil of the world. Dad, sad-eyed, devastated by Sam’s failures. Mom, unfamiliar and pale, her strength stolen. Madison, her skin stippled because he’d been close, so close when he shot her. Andy. People he barely recognized; only on reflection did he identify that poor doctor Ansem killed, the one Sam hadn’t been able to save. Others, if he cared to think about them.
Sam hadn’t seen Dean, though. That was all that mattered. If he’d seen Dean-
He pushed the thought away. It was irrelevant. The spell had fucked with his head, but it was over now, and by tomorrow evening they’d be three states away.
****
In Ithaca, New York, the vamps they were hunting broke into their motel room, and Sam wasted a good five seconds grabbing for the Bowie knife Dean kept under his pillow, except that of course Dean didn’t know that was his habit any more and the Bowie knife was safe in its sheath across the room.
Fortunately the guns were still on the bedside tables, and the dead man’s blood dried on the bullets worked better than they had any right to expect, so the delay didn’t get them killed. After they’d cleaned up enough to keep the police from being called in, Dean made fun of Sam for his confusion, joking about Sam looking for quarters left by the Tooth Fairy even as he brought out the Break-Free and started cleaning the guns.
Sam sat on the edge of his bed and clenched the bedsheets between his fingers, watching the wrinkles they made on each side of him. Their lives were just like these motel rooms, remade and renamed in each town, anonymous and unmourned. “My brother always kept a weapon under his pillow,” Sam admitted, surprising himself.
Dean stopped, then resumed his careful ministrations. “You miss him pretty bad,” he commented, eyes on his tools. “You get this look sometimes, like you’re expecting-someone different than me.” His ring gleamed as he turned the barrel this way and that.
Sam couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to be in the room, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. If he let himself miss Dean, that meant that Dean wasn’t still here, and that meant that Sam was the abomination Uriel had called him. But he couldn’t help it, sometimes, especially when Dean was careful with him. Underneath everything, Dean had always known that they didn’t need to like each other to be family. Watching Dean try to earn what was his by right hurt, when Sam let it.
Dean deserved a response. “He was-he was really tired, by the end. He’s-I have to believe he’s at peace.”
“Doesn’t mean you don’t miss him.” Dean’s voice was gentle. “I wish I coulda met him. Way you talk about him, I bet he’d’ve kicked my ass for messing with his baby brother.”
Sam choked on air, horrified and halfway to cracking up at the thought. “He’d say you were way out of my league,” he managed. Dean would-he’d want Sam to be happy, but he’d also worry that Sam had forgotten him. But Dean was certainly more present than if he’d bled out in some self-destructive gambit, which he would have done by now if not for the fairy. Sam had to believe that the core of Dean, all that strength and fighting spirit, was still with him. He had to believe it, like he’d believed that he’d be able to save Dean from Hell, like he’d believed that he’d be able to control his demon blood: because when that belief slipped, he was dangerous to everyone around, not least Dean.
This line of thought did no one any good. Sam shook his head, pushing away everything but the memory of Dean smiling after a hunt, tossing a shovel up onto his shoulder and swaggering back towards the car. That was Dean, preserved in Sam’s memory and also here, now, perfected at least as much as he’d been diminished.
“Samuel,” Dean said, using the intimate sing-song he saved just for the long version of Sam’s name. He was done cleaning the guns now, and Sam watched as he stood and stretched, rolling his shoulders. “C’mere,” he ordered.
Sam rose and went to him.
****
When they found themselves on the trail of a lechusa, Sam realized pretty quick that they were in over their heads. Bobby said that he might have something that could help, but he insisted that they come see him. It wasn’t strictly necessary, Sam knew, but this was Bobby’s way of checking on Dean, and Sam couldn’t exactly turn him down without a good reason.
So instead, he had to manage Dean.
He explained about his old family friend, and how helpful Bobby had been to the Winchesters in the past. Then he took a deep breath and stared down at his hands. “Look, you can’t-Bobby’s a great guy, but he’s, uh, pretty conservative. If he finds out about us, it’s gonna be pretty nasty.” Sam silently apologized to Bobby and looked up, confident that Dean would take his obvious discomfort the way Sam intended him to.
Dean frowned, his eyes jade-green with annoyance. “If he can’t deal with me, why do I gotta deal with him?”
Sam shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry, okay? But he knows all about this lechusa, and we need him.”
So Bobby was a bit perplexed when Dean reacted to his too-open welcome with coolness. Dean took the beer-with-holy-water and tipped it towards him in thanks, but then kept the bottle up near his mouth like a barrier, watching Bobby warily as Sam discussed the hunt with him.
****
Sam tried to work fast, to get them out of there as soon as possible. But by the second day, Dean was bored, and the cars in the lot didn’t serve as the distraction they once would have done. By the afternoon, Dean was flitting around like a hummingbird, sticking his nose into everything, reading Bobby’s books, except that he couldn’t get through more than a couple of pages without getting restless again.
Bobby came up from the basement, where he kept the most dangerous items, and caught Dean poking at a cigar box in Bobby’s study. Bobby hurried over faster than Sam thought he could move, and grabbed it from him. “Watch out!” he chastised. “Didn’t your daddy teach you better than-”
Dean snapped to his full height and practically growled. “What the hell do you know about my daddy?” he sneered.
Bobby’s mouth dropped open and he put the box back down on his desk without looking at it. “I’m sorry,” he managed.
Dean closed his eyes for a second, and when he opened them again his face was nearly pleasant. “No, man, my fault. Shouldn’t’ve been in your stuff, you’re absolutely right.”
Sam stood there, gaping, stunned all over again by how much Dean had lost. Bobby was-he wouldn’t have been any better a father to Sam than Dad had been, but Dean had loved him with a devoted purity that most people couldn’t manage. Sam’s ugly lie had prevented them from reconstructing even a rickety copy of that connection out of Bobby’s one-sided memories.
Bobby dragged Sam out to the porch while Dean went to make himself a sandwich. “This is wrong,” he told Sam, low and angry. “Dean has a right to know who he is.”
Sam took a step forward, but Bobby, to his credit, held his ground. Sam leaned forward and very deliberately did not reach out to shake some sense into the man. “I’ll say it again, Bobby. Hell. He went back to Hell every night. He was killing himself. A few memories, that’s a cheap price for a fix.”
“You’re lying to him in every kind of way,” Bobby told him.
“What a new development in my life,” Sam said, pleasantly. “I lied to everyone around for years. I lied to my teachers and my friends and the girl I was going to marry. Lies are easier, Bobby, you know that. Lies are better. And if you can’t deal with that, I guess we’ll just get out of here and figure out how to deal with the lechusa, and everything after, ourselves.”
Bobby’s face was stone. “You ain’t the only one who lost him, Sam. And you ain’t the one with the right to make decisions for him. And what in creation happened to ‘he’s out’? If you’re still hunting, why not tell him who he is?”
“Hey,” Dean said, bracing his hands on each side of the doorway and leaning his head out. “Either of you want a sandwich while I’m at it?”
They both turned, stiffly, to face him. Sam shook his head-he never could eat when he was upset-but Bobby nodded, conciliatory. “That’d be kind of you, thanks.”
Dean ducked back inside. Sam reached out and grabbed Bobby’s arm. “He knows who he is,” Sam told him. “He just doesn’t have to live with knowing what he’s lost.” There was no way to restore Dean’s memories, so the only thing they could give him was a story that might as well have happened to another person, its only confirmation the angel’s handprint and even that, well, that was resistant to interpretation.
Bobby shook his hand off and glared at him. But Bobby’s disapproval didn’t change the felicific calculus. Aside from the difficulty of telling Dean the truth after all this time, Sam didn’t want Dean constantly measuring himself against his past. Dean being Dean, he’d find a way to come up short no matter what. And if Dean knew, he’d be able to tell just how much Sam mourned the countless moments the fairy curse had destroyed, every ‘bitch’ and ‘jerk’ a pull on the cord that had connected them before, a reassurance they’d offered each other as easily as breathing.
When Dean had come back from Hell they’d lost the rhythm, like yelling at each other down tin can phones with no wires attached. If Dean hadn’t been so badly damaged, or Sam had been stronger, better, more, maybe they could have found each other again someday, without magical intervention. Maybe they could have learned to live two good lives instead of one terrible one.
At least this way only Sam had to deal with the memories.
Sam was about two seconds from bursting into tears. He fisted his hands until he could feel his nails drawing blood from his palms and breathed in deep through his nose, swallowing hard.
Bobby shook his head, his mouth twisting with disgust, still waiting for Sam to admit that he was wrong. All of a sudden, Sam realized that Bobby might have been the one who taught Dean to play chess. He could imagine it, Dean and Bobby leaning over a board on a cold night when Dean complained of being bored with research. That was probably exactly what had happened, some time Dean had been at the yard without Sam.
He couldn’t ask Bobby about it now.
“You gonna tell him?” he asked, making it a challenge. They needed to settle this between them. He wasn’t entirely sure he was planning to knock Bobby out and run if Bobby said yes, and he truly hoped he didn’t need to find out.
Bobby flinched and looked down at the uneven floorboards of the porch, rising and falling like a little topographical map. Hunters had to pick and choose what they took care of. “I tell him, it’ll-”
It would kill him. Sam nodded. “You keep that in mind,” he suggested, letting the swirling, crumpling feeling in his stomach come out as anger. “I’m gonna take a look at the car.” Bobby wouldn’t want to see him for a while, and Sam wasn’t feeling too kindly disposed himself. Dean would be awkward, stuck alone with Bobby-more awkward-but he could focus on his Dagwoodesque sandwiches to make up for the strained silence. Soon enough, Sam and Dean would be back on the road.
They wouldn’t make the mistake of returning again.
****
They killed the lechusa after two days of boring tracking and two minutes of extremely interesting fighting.
Once the threat of sudden death was lifted, Sam noticed that it was a beautiful evening, the sky royal blue and the moon looking like it was only shouting distance away. They picked up dinner on the way back to the motel-Sam did the buying, because he was basically presentable-and sat out on the warm hood of the car to eat it.
Dean handed him a beer, bottom-first, and Sam took it with a weary smile. Dean’s shoulders were rounded with exhaustion, he was smeared with dirt like he’d rolled in it, and his jeans had two new holes, torn right over the shins, irreparable. He’d have scabs a foot long, and he’d probably roll out some new curses when Sam disinfected the wounds. But he was glowing, like the warm lights of home, and his eyes were bright as he used his ring to pop the top of his own beer.
He swigged and glanced over at Sam. “I got something on my face?”
Sam grinned. “A shower wouldn’t be a mistake.”
Dean raised his eyebrows. “Think we could both fit?”
“No,” Sam allowed, “but we’d have a good time trying.”
They drank in silence then, the coolness of the beer a blessed reward after the exertion of the hunt.
Dean turned the bottle in his hands, his thumbnail worrying the label. “This is-it’s real good. I wonder, you know, what my life was like before. But it can’t have been better, so-I guess it doesn’t matter.” His muscles were tense with the confession, grooves on his forearms telling Sam even more than the words alone.
Sam closed his eyes. His chest hurt, tender and sweet and awful all at once. “I’m glad,” he said, and he was. “I-I got a new start, too. You’re my new start.”
Part 5
Part 2
Part 3
The thing was, Dean had moves, and Sam had never known, even after years watching him get into girls’ pants with a few drinks and a well-timed smile.
He leaned over Sam to look at the laptop screen, just a bit too close, his breath ruffling Sam’s hair, warm and tempting and in exactly the right place that leaning away would have been awkward and obvious. He stripped down to his undershirt when they dug and when he did pushups and crunches in the motel rooms, showing off his arms and his chest where the shirt clung, sweat-heavy, the amulet swaying in the center. He brought Sam breakfast, the coffee sugared just right and always somehow the best egg biscuits around. He watched Sam, openly appreciative, and smiled slow and promising whenever Sam met his eyes.
Sam knew he was being courted. He just didn’t know how to make it stop.
Worse, he liked it. Dean’s full attention had always been a physical weight, oppressive and comforting by turns. Now, he felt Dean’s gaze like gravity, tugging him off course, altering his already erratic orbit.
When Sam put his hands at the small of his back and groaned through the stretch, aching from two and a half hours spent crouched to get at the bricked-in body under the Death House (as the local tabloid called it), Dean asked if he wanted a backrub.
It was the oldest trick in the book, so blatant that only Dean could have made the offer without blinking or blushing.
But Sam recognized the strategem, and fuck if his lower back wasn’t cramped and sore, so he shrugged-that hurt too-and laid down on the bed, toeing his shoes off to thud on the floor. He didn’t bother to take his clothes off.
Dean took a few minutes coming over, and when he did, Sam could smell cinnamon and sandalwood. He’d stocked up on supplies, and at that point Sam should have rethought his acceptance. But Dean’s hands were already smacking together, rubbing the oil warm against his palms, and it would have been rude to change his mind now.
Dean’s fingers were warm and slick when he slid them under Sam’s shirts, skimming up over the waistband of Sam’s jeans and onto his skin, the heat instantly soaking into Sam’s back. Dean’s hands were as strong as a gorilla’s, years of target practice and car repair and digging up graves all aimed at kneading into Sam’s twisted muscles. Sam moaned without meaning to, and Dean only increased the pressure until it was deliciously painful. He was straddling Sam’s thighs, the heat of him soaking through Sam’s jeans.
After the third time Dean’s hands jerked to a halt, tangled up in Sam’s shirts, Dean grunted and swung himself off of Sam. “Take these off,” he ordered, tugging back, and it was true that Dean was stretching the cotton, likely to tear them at the seams, so Sam lifted himself up on his knees long enough to unbutton and strip, then collapsed forward into the pillows again, already chilled with the loss of Dean’s touch. He couldn’t suppress a quick shudder when Dean returned to his place on Sam, the backs of his thighs newly sensitized to Dean’s weight and warmth.
Dean worked on Sam’s lower back for a while, until all the muscles were warm and loose. Then he moved upwards, skimming along Sam’s spine, working his way to Sam’s shoulders, then the tired biceps. He didn’t let up, just kept kneading and pressing, the oil smoothing out his touches until Sam felt as pliable as uncooked dough.
He hadn’t realized that he was making sounds until Dean chuckled, cocky and intimate. “If I’d’ve known you liked having your back rubbed this much, I would’ve been doing it all along.”
Sam blushed and raised his head, his hands fisting on the pillow to either side. “Uh, thanks.” He got why girls put out after massages, getting half-naked aside. It was like dancing, a way of showing off what you could do with your body if you were only allowed. And if there’d been an Olympic medal in backrubs, Dean would have brought the gold home to America.
“Anywhere else you want me to rub?”
Sam closed his eyes and swallowed. Dean’s thumbs traced the line of his shoulderblades, hot and smooth. “No, uh. I’m good.”
Dean leaned down, the hem of his T-shirt falling away from his body to brush Sam’s lower back, the fabric coarse and still warm from Dean’s skin. His amulet rested just below Sam’s neck, a concentrated nugget of heat. It had never gotten this warm while Sam was wearing it during the months Dean was gone, like Dean ran at a higher temperature. Sam shivered.
“Sam,” Dean said, his breath ruffling the ends of Sam’s hair, the moist puff of Sam’s name sending a spike of pleasure straight to Sam’s dick, “I wanna suck you.”
Sam shuddered, whole-body, but Dean just pressed him further into the bed. Sam could smell the spice of the massage oil and his own sweat, ground into the sheets.
“I can’t,” Sam moaned. He’d meant to shut things down before they got this far. He’d meant a lot of things.
“Why not?” Dean’s mouth was closer now, his lips brushing across the hairs on the nape of Sam’s neck.
Sam pushed back, because he couldn’t not move, and Dean rolled smoothly off, pulling Sam towards the center of the bed with him. Now Sam was on his back, Dean pressed up against his side, leaning over him with one hand cupping his jaw, Dean’s thumb rubbing down Sam’s cheek.
Dean was as intense as he’d been when he’d rescued Sam or asked him to stay. But his eyes were brighter than Sam had ever seen them. Sam thought it was hope, because Dean thought he might really get what he wanted. “Give me one good reason we shouldn’t do this.”
Sam stared up at him, unable to surrender the truth, and the thing he should have been able to say in its place was an obvious lie.
“I’m afraid,” he said, when Dean looked like he was half a second from deciding not to wait any longer and just lean down to claim Sam’s mouth. “What if-I don’t want to lose you.” Everyone I love goes away, he thought.
“Samuel,” Dean said, so fond that something in Sam’s chest clenched and released, a flower blooming in stop-motion, “we could get killed tomorrow, or a fairy could come along and take our memories. But we’ve got here, now. What good’s it do to say no to the fun stuff?” Dean’s thumb was still moving, tracing the line where Sam’s beard would grow in if he let it, down over his cheek to his upper lip.
Sam couldn’t catch his breath. Dean was everywhere, hard and strong and alive, alive, alive, a miracle ten times over, and the rest of the world could go fuck itself; what had it ever done for him?
“No good at all,” Sam said, and closed his eyes.
Afterwards, he stared at the ceiling, white tiles pockmarked with tiny holes, a starfield in reverse, the same as a thousand other cheap motels across the country. Sometimes Sam thought that there was really only one motel room, and little sprites moved it around, redecorating on occasion, faster than the Impala could travel. Sometimes he wondered whether, if he left a pair of socks in a drawer in Peoria, he might find them again in Tempe.
Beside him, Dean snuffled, almost a snore. He was grinning slightly in his sleep, the sheet pulled up only to his waist so that his bare chest and arms gleamed faintly in the light from the parking lot outside. His amulet was a dark spot in the middle of his chest, the bull-god seeming to smile at Sam.
Okay, Sam thought, this can’t be as bad as it seems. Yes, Dean was Dean, but not exactly. This Dean was what Dean could have been, should have been, without Sam’s cursed existence warping him. Dean was innocent, regardless of what he could do with his tongue, which Sam was not going to think about; Sam would never know where that skill came from, anyway, so it didn’t matter.
If there was any guilt, it was Sam’s, and that was nothing new.
****
The old Carbon County Prison in Pennsylvania had a hanged man’s handprint embedded in the wall, over a hundred and thirty years old. It had survived repainting and replastering and every other attempt to eliminate it; the story went that the condemned man had put it there just before his execution, as testimony to his innocence.
It gave off EMF, no shock there, but there were no mysterious deaths or other ominous portents associated with the handprint. After a week spent in the area, Dean agreed that there was no job, and no understandable connection to his own scar.
They moved on to a black dog in Northbrook, Illinois.
****
“Look at me,” Dean said, his thumb moving back and forth, rubbing a spot just above Sam’s hip. “Look at me, Sam. Sam,” demanding, coaxing, like he used to be when he was trying to get Sam to close his books and come practice target shooting, only this time the physical activity Dean was promoting was quite different.
Sam shuddered and turned his head until it was pressed into the pillow. Dean, solid and heavy above him as if he were made of gold, leaned down and mouthed at the line of his neck, biting gently, then worrying the skin until Sam gasped.
“Sam,” Dean said, moving towards pleading, and Sam realized that Dean wasn’t just being sexy. If Sam kept his eyes closed, Dean would think that Sam was-well, pretending.
And if there was anything he should have known by now, it was to commit to a side. He’d made his choice.
“Dean,” he breathed, and opened his eyes.
Dean was beautiful.
****
They found a hunt in West Virginia that required a ritual cleansing performed in a charmed circle every night through an entire moon cycle. Dean might have mumbled something about a honeymoon, but Sam didn’t hear it properly.
They camped out in a show house-the developer had gone under in the recession and the rest of the planned community was just markers and string, nobody around. It was hot enough that having only cold water-the heaters hadn’t been installed-was no bother. Sam woke up every morning already sweating, showered off the night’s grime, then immediately got soggy again even before any sparring. Sam knew he looked like a wet dog most of the time, and smelled not much better, whereas Dean just gleamed like he’d been dipped in bronze, and he didn’t even have the decency to stink. Though actually that fact had its benefits; by the end of each day Dean was irresistible, magnetic. After the first three days, Sam dug a bottle of tequila out of the trunk and they did body shots, sans lime or additional salt, while the sun went down.
No internet, so Sam read George R.R. Martin while Dean worked his way through the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler novels that the decorator had stocked in the master bedroom. As Sam might have predicted, Dean loved hard-boiled detectives. He’d even interrupt whatever Sam was doing to read out choice phrases, which Sam wanted to find annoying.
Dean also spent some time playing with the abandoned construction equipment, teaching himself how to use a backhoe, which was mostly hilarious except when it was terrifying. But apart from the one time Dean got covered with mud, nothing untoward happened, so Sam just rolled with it.
At night they cooked out, their fire the brightest thing for miles in any direction, before heading out to do the night’s iteration of the ritual. Dean burned enough meat that even he had to concede that he probably hadn’t been a chef, and after the first week they started to make s’mores every night. Where he was terrible with the burgers, he was a genius with the marshmallows, each one plucked from the flames just as it started to swell and blush golden brown. Dean never could wait for them to cool down, smooshing his between the graham cracker and the chocolate and cursing incomprehensibly as the hot fluff burned his tongue each time.
When he leaned over so that Sam could kiss it better, he tasted like sugar and freedom.
****
The next five months were like that: in most ways, as happy as Sam had ever been. They were certainly a match for the other candidates. His blissful eighth summer, when they’d spent the entire time in Akron and Sam had gone to the library in the morning and the swimming pool in the afternoon, before Sam had understood that they were poor and itinerant in a world that favored neither of those things. His junior year at Stanford, when he’d finally learned to fit in and Jessica Moore asked him out and he aced every class.
Sam had learned to distrust happiness, but the lingering unease of what he was doing with Dean was enough to keep him from obsessing too much over how well things were going.
Dean, meanwhile, turned heads everywhere they went, like he was from a different dimension where people were more alive, more joyful than the real world. He smiled and people opened doors and mouths and hearts to him. He praised the pie in diners and ended up with extra pieces, which he usually split with Sam. He burned bones and threw his arm around Sam’s neck, pulling him down just to rub their cheeks together in affectionate victory.
One time, he made a dreamcatcher to reassure a little girl whose parents had been killed by a closet monster, and she hugged him and begged him not to go, but she listened when he knelt to talk to her and nodded seriously when he explained that it was her job to take care of her aunt and uncle now. Later, he sat on the grass by the side of the road while Sam was working on the car and looked out at the passing traffic, a beer in his hand and his ring glinting on his finger, radiating contentment like a tomcat.
At night he flipped back the sheets and gestured for Sam to get in bed, and no matter how crappy the mattresses or thin the pillows, Sam always slept through the night, because there were no more nightmares for either of them and Dean put out enough heat to rival an electric blanket.
Sam started to get used to the looks people gave him, the ones that said ‘good on you!’ and the ones that said ‘faggot.’
****
“How’d you get that scar?” Dean asked, rubbing his thumb across the raised flesh on Sam’s back. “Looks pretty bad.”
“It nearly killed me,” Sam said, glad that he didn’t have to watch Dean’s face. Dean had worked hard to avoid seeing Sam’s naked back after Cold Oak, ducking out of the bathroom when necessary or, if Sam stripped down in front of him, turning away as if the pattern on the wallpaper had suddenly started moving. Dean from before would never have stared at the scar, much less explored it with his hands, as if it was just one more thing about Sam that needed to be learned.
“My brother saved my life,” Sam told him, because that was important. “It-he got hurt pretty bad doing it. He was never really the same, after.”
“Wasn’t your fault,” Dean said, his clever fingers moving away, pressing hard against the tired muscles in Sam’s upper back.
“You can’t know that,” Sam said, struggling to keep his inappropriate and intense anger out of his voice.
Dean shifted his weight onto Sam, pressing down almost painfully and forcing Sam to stay still. “Sure I can. I know you.”
Except Dean didn’t.
If Sam had known, if he’d thought for one second that there was even a risk that Dean would have made a deal for Sam despite having rejected the same thing for Dad, Sam would have snapped Jake’s neck himself before the disaster had a chance to unfold. But Sam hadn’t known his brother well enough to understand that he was actually breathing for two. And on Dean’s side, Dean hadn’t figured out that saving Sam the way he did would only drag out the destruction. So in that way, Sam guessed, nothing had changed: they were still overconfident and reckless with each other.
All he could do was hope that he was the one who’d have to pay for it.
When Dean’s hands went from relaxing to seductive, Sam moaned gratefully and let himself stop thinking.
****
So, the zombie priest had a couple of defensive moves up his rotting sleeve. They made it past the phantom hounds guarding the perimeter of the old mansion by throwing them meat basted with a paste made of couch grass and other herbs, a variation on the drugged meat of a thousand heist flicks. Dean’s idea, and one he’d be justifiably crowing about for weeks, not that Sam would tell him that more than once.
After that there was a flight of poison darts-Sam saw the cobweb trigger line hovering over the creaking steps just in time to shove Dean down, both of them rolling painfully but not lethally onto the concrete of the walkway while the darts pattered uselessly above and past them.
Then there was a spell that moved the doors and windows around, so that kicking out the front door by the hinges just left them facing a brick wall. It was frankly creepy. Also painful on the kicking foot.
Dean began the incantation, an injunction to clear all paths, to open and hold the way, and Sam caught the rhythm quickly, going almost in a round. His blood fizzed in his veins; he felt like a hound of the Hunt himself, aching to get through and bring down this latest threat to innocent lives.
The bricks groaned and collapsed out of the doorway, falling apart like bones going to ash. Sam sputtered out the dust, thick and red and gritty in his mouth, and they went inside, where the darkness cocooned them instantly. They flicked on their flashlights together, not a heartbeat separating them, and examined the entranceway. The space was as big as some of the houses they’d squatted in, pale-veined marble like gravestones on every surface.
The grand stairs swept upwards, and Sam watched Dean play the beam of his flashlight along the steps, thick with dust and mouse droppings.
“Evil things go down,” Sam said.
Dean didn’t make any of the obvious jokes, too caught up in the quest.
The basement would be accessed through the back of the house. Sam stepped forwards, into the hallway past the stairs, his light bobbing with his steps. Dean followed at his shoulder. Wallpaper hung in ragged curls from the sides of the hall, reaching out to them, and Sam kept as close to the center as he could. He could smell it already, the fresh grass-and-burned bone scent of magic.
The door at the end of the hall was ajar. Sam reached out and hooked it all the way open, stepping through before it had stopped swinging.
He didn’t notice any of the details of the kitchen because there were people waiting there, bunched together at one side like a group waiting for a family portrait.
Dad, Jessica, the wavering shade of his mother, and a quivering mass behind them, so many people, so many lost for him, because of him-
“What the fuck is your problem?” Dean asked and pushed past him.
“Don’t you see them?” he asked, trembling even though he knew they had to be illusion.
“See who?” Dean whipped his head around, following Sam’s gaze and then turning full circle. “There’s nothin’ here, Sam. Sam! Samuel, keep it together.” He was on guard, gun out and backed up against Sam, but his voice was pitched just for Sam. Sam wanted to turn and bury his face in Dean’s shoulder.
He sucked in air. “Revenants. Shades of the unquiet dead.”
“They gonna hurt us?” Dean was jumpy, but in that horror-movie there’s-something-coming-around-the-corner way. Professionally jumpy. Sam tried very hard to emulate him. He’d thought that his grief had been burned out of him over the past few years, but there was something about the holographic image of murdered loved ones that had peeled back all five stages of grief and left him raw and shaking.
As they’d been intended to do. A fear spell to make him see the most distracting visions possible. Nothing more than shadows.
Sam made his breathing slow down. “No, they’re just guardians. Put here to scare off the tourists. Come on,” he said, bringing his gun up and aiming it at the door to the basement. “Let’s go kill some bad things.”
****
“I didn’t see anyone,” Dean said, later that night, while they were burning the bones of the priest’s victims. He said it like a challenge.
Sam thought of all the people who would have been standing in front of Dean a year ago, and closed his eyes. “You ever think maybe that’s a good thing?” he asked, then waited through an hour of Dean’s silent treatment before Dean broke and started talking about the difference between hoodoo and voodoo.
Remembering the afterimages-they weren’t spirits, no more reality to them than photographs-hurt more than a stab wound. All his sins remembered: Jessica, terrified and helpless, betrayed by the secret irrationality and evil of the world. Dad, sad-eyed, devastated by Sam’s failures. Mom, unfamiliar and pale, her strength stolen. Madison, her skin stippled because he’d been close, so close when he shot her. Andy. People he barely recognized; only on reflection did he identify that poor doctor Ansem killed, the one Sam hadn’t been able to save. Others, if he cared to think about them.
Sam hadn’t seen Dean, though. That was all that mattered. If he’d seen Dean-
He pushed the thought away. It was irrelevant. The spell had fucked with his head, but it was over now, and by tomorrow evening they’d be three states away.
****
In Ithaca, New York, the vamps they were hunting broke into their motel room, and Sam wasted a good five seconds grabbing for the Bowie knife Dean kept under his pillow, except that of course Dean didn’t know that was his habit any more and the Bowie knife was safe in its sheath across the room.
Fortunately the guns were still on the bedside tables, and the dead man’s blood dried on the bullets worked better than they had any right to expect, so the delay didn’t get them killed. After they’d cleaned up enough to keep the police from being called in, Dean made fun of Sam for his confusion, joking about Sam looking for quarters left by the Tooth Fairy even as he brought out the Break-Free and started cleaning the guns.
Sam sat on the edge of his bed and clenched the bedsheets between his fingers, watching the wrinkles they made on each side of him. Their lives were just like these motel rooms, remade and renamed in each town, anonymous and unmourned. “My brother always kept a weapon under his pillow,” Sam admitted, surprising himself.
Dean stopped, then resumed his careful ministrations. “You miss him pretty bad,” he commented, eyes on his tools. “You get this look sometimes, like you’re expecting-someone different than me.” His ring gleamed as he turned the barrel this way and that.
Sam couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to be in the room, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. If he let himself miss Dean, that meant that Dean wasn’t still here, and that meant that Sam was the abomination Uriel had called him. But he couldn’t help it, sometimes, especially when Dean was careful with him. Underneath everything, Dean had always known that they didn’t need to like each other to be family. Watching Dean try to earn what was his by right hurt, when Sam let it.
Dean deserved a response. “He was-he was really tired, by the end. He’s-I have to believe he’s at peace.”
“Doesn’t mean you don’t miss him.” Dean’s voice was gentle. “I wish I coulda met him. Way you talk about him, I bet he’d’ve kicked my ass for messing with his baby brother.”
Sam choked on air, horrified and halfway to cracking up at the thought. “He’d say you were way out of my league,” he managed. Dean would-he’d want Sam to be happy, but he’d also worry that Sam had forgotten him. But Dean was certainly more present than if he’d bled out in some self-destructive gambit, which he would have done by now if not for the fairy. Sam had to believe that the core of Dean, all that strength and fighting spirit, was still with him. He had to believe it, like he’d believed that he’d be able to save Dean from Hell, like he’d believed that he’d be able to control his demon blood: because when that belief slipped, he was dangerous to everyone around, not least Dean.
This line of thought did no one any good. Sam shook his head, pushing away everything but the memory of Dean smiling after a hunt, tossing a shovel up onto his shoulder and swaggering back towards the car. That was Dean, preserved in Sam’s memory and also here, now, perfected at least as much as he’d been diminished.
“Samuel,” Dean said, using the intimate sing-song he saved just for the long version of Sam’s name. He was done cleaning the guns now, and Sam watched as he stood and stretched, rolling his shoulders. “C’mere,” he ordered.
Sam rose and went to him.
****
When they found themselves on the trail of a lechusa, Sam realized pretty quick that they were in over their heads. Bobby said that he might have something that could help, but he insisted that they come see him. It wasn’t strictly necessary, Sam knew, but this was Bobby’s way of checking on Dean, and Sam couldn’t exactly turn him down without a good reason.
So instead, he had to manage Dean.
He explained about his old family friend, and how helpful Bobby had been to the Winchesters in the past. Then he took a deep breath and stared down at his hands. “Look, you can’t-Bobby’s a great guy, but he’s, uh, pretty conservative. If he finds out about us, it’s gonna be pretty nasty.” Sam silently apologized to Bobby and looked up, confident that Dean would take his obvious discomfort the way Sam intended him to.
Dean frowned, his eyes jade-green with annoyance. “If he can’t deal with me, why do I gotta deal with him?”
Sam shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry, okay? But he knows all about this lechusa, and we need him.”
So Bobby was a bit perplexed when Dean reacted to his too-open welcome with coolness. Dean took the beer-with-holy-water and tipped it towards him in thanks, but then kept the bottle up near his mouth like a barrier, watching Bobby warily as Sam discussed the hunt with him.
****
Sam tried to work fast, to get them out of there as soon as possible. But by the second day, Dean was bored, and the cars in the lot didn’t serve as the distraction they once would have done. By the afternoon, Dean was flitting around like a hummingbird, sticking his nose into everything, reading Bobby’s books, except that he couldn’t get through more than a couple of pages without getting restless again.
Bobby came up from the basement, where he kept the most dangerous items, and caught Dean poking at a cigar box in Bobby’s study. Bobby hurried over faster than Sam thought he could move, and grabbed it from him. “Watch out!” he chastised. “Didn’t your daddy teach you better than-”
Dean snapped to his full height and practically growled. “What the hell do you know about my daddy?” he sneered.
Bobby’s mouth dropped open and he put the box back down on his desk without looking at it. “I’m sorry,” he managed.
Dean closed his eyes for a second, and when he opened them again his face was nearly pleasant. “No, man, my fault. Shouldn’t’ve been in your stuff, you’re absolutely right.”
Sam stood there, gaping, stunned all over again by how much Dean had lost. Bobby was-he wouldn’t have been any better a father to Sam than Dad had been, but Dean had loved him with a devoted purity that most people couldn’t manage. Sam’s ugly lie had prevented them from reconstructing even a rickety copy of that connection out of Bobby’s one-sided memories.
Bobby dragged Sam out to the porch while Dean went to make himself a sandwich. “This is wrong,” he told Sam, low and angry. “Dean has a right to know who he is.”
Sam took a step forward, but Bobby, to his credit, held his ground. Sam leaned forward and very deliberately did not reach out to shake some sense into the man. “I’ll say it again, Bobby. Hell. He went back to Hell every night. He was killing himself. A few memories, that’s a cheap price for a fix.”
“You’re lying to him in every kind of way,” Bobby told him.
“What a new development in my life,” Sam said, pleasantly. “I lied to everyone around for years. I lied to my teachers and my friends and the girl I was going to marry. Lies are easier, Bobby, you know that. Lies are better. And if you can’t deal with that, I guess we’ll just get out of here and figure out how to deal with the lechusa, and everything after, ourselves.”
Bobby’s face was stone. “You ain’t the only one who lost him, Sam. And you ain’t the one with the right to make decisions for him. And what in creation happened to ‘he’s out’? If you’re still hunting, why not tell him who he is?”
“Hey,” Dean said, bracing his hands on each side of the doorway and leaning his head out. “Either of you want a sandwich while I’m at it?”
They both turned, stiffly, to face him. Sam shook his head-he never could eat when he was upset-but Bobby nodded, conciliatory. “That’d be kind of you, thanks.”
Dean ducked back inside. Sam reached out and grabbed Bobby’s arm. “He knows who he is,” Sam told him. “He just doesn’t have to live with knowing what he’s lost.” There was no way to restore Dean’s memories, so the only thing they could give him was a story that might as well have happened to another person, its only confirmation the angel’s handprint and even that, well, that was resistant to interpretation.
Bobby shook his hand off and glared at him. But Bobby’s disapproval didn’t change the felicific calculus. Aside from the difficulty of telling Dean the truth after all this time, Sam didn’t want Dean constantly measuring himself against his past. Dean being Dean, he’d find a way to come up short no matter what. And if Dean knew, he’d be able to tell just how much Sam mourned the countless moments the fairy curse had destroyed, every ‘bitch’ and ‘jerk’ a pull on the cord that had connected them before, a reassurance they’d offered each other as easily as breathing.
When Dean had come back from Hell they’d lost the rhythm, like yelling at each other down tin can phones with no wires attached. If Dean hadn’t been so badly damaged, or Sam had been stronger, better, more, maybe they could have found each other again someday, without magical intervention. Maybe they could have learned to live two good lives instead of one terrible one.
At least this way only Sam had to deal with the memories.
Sam was about two seconds from bursting into tears. He fisted his hands until he could feel his nails drawing blood from his palms and breathed in deep through his nose, swallowing hard.
Bobby shook his head, his mouth twisting with disgust, still waiting for Sam to admit that he was wrong. All of a sudden, Sam realized that Bobby might have been the one who taught Dean to play chess. He could imagine it, Dean and Bobby leaning over a board on a cold night when Dean complained of being bored with research. That was probably exactly what had happened, some time Dean had been at the yard without Sam.
He couldn’t ask Bobby about it now.
“You gonna tell him?” he asked, making it a challenge. They needed to settle this between them. He wasn’t entirely sure he was planning to knock Bobby out and run if Bobby said yes, and he truly hoped he didn’t need to find out.
Bobby flinched and looked down at the uneven floorboards of the porch, rising and falling like a little topographical map. Hunters had to pick and choose what they took care of. “I tell him, it’ll-”
It would kill him. Sam nodded. “You keep that in mind,” he suggested, letting the swirling, crumpling feeling in his stomach come out as anger. “I’m gonna take a look at the car.” Bobby wouldn’t want to see him for a while, and Sam wasn’t feeling too kindly disposed himself. Dean would be awkward, stuck alone with Bobby-more awkward-but he could focus on his Dagwoodesque sandwiches to make up for the strained silence. Soon enough, Sam and Dean would be back on the road.
They wouldn’t make the mistake of returning again.
****
They killed the lechusa after two days of boring tracking and two minutes of extremely interesting fighting.
Once the threat of sudden death was lifted, Sam noticed that it was a beautiful evening, the sky royal blue and the moon looking like it was only shouting distance away. They picked up dinner on the way back to the motel-Sam did the buying, because he was basically presentable-and sat out on the warm hood of the car to eat it.
Dean handed him a beer, bottom-first, and Sam took it with a weary smile. Dean’s shoulders were rounded with exhaustion, he was smeared with dirt like he’d rolled in it, and his jeans had two new holes, torn right over the shins, irreparable. He’d have scabs a foot long, and he’d probably roll out some new curses when Sam disinfected the wounds. But he was glowing, like the warm lights of home, and his eyes were bright as he used his ring to pop the top of his own beer.
He swigged and glanced over at Sam. “I got something on my face?”
Sam grinned. “A shower wouldn’t be a mistake.”
Dean raised his eyebrows. “Think we could both fit?”
“No,” Sam allowed, “but we’d have a good time trying.”
They drank in silence then, the coolness of the beer a blessed reward after the exertion of the hunt.
Dean turned the bottle in his hands, his thumbnail worrying the label. “This is-it’s real good. I wonder, you know, what my life was like before. But it can’t have been better, so-I guess it doesn’t matter.” His muscles were tense with the confession, grooves on his forearms telling Sam even more than the words alone.
Sam closed his eyes. His chest hurt, tender and sweet and awful all at once. “I’m glad,” he said, and he was. “I-I got a new start, too. You’re my new start.”
Part 5