fic: This dark shroud hides a face beneath it (the underside remix)
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Dean/OMC(s)
Warnings: Underage sex, violence, dub con, prostitution.
Wordcount: 5097.
Notes: This story was part of the kamikazeremix challenge. It was originally posted here. Many many thanks to vinylroad for pulling beta duties when I demanded help with Dean hooker!fic. You are the bravest soul, my friend.
I'm not going to warn for or rate this but it's a remix of poisontaster's very dark Halo (In Reverse), which you should read, if you haven't already. Both stories just got recced at spnroundtable under Hustlers & Bathhouses, actually.
Um, rather than going into long and ambivalent thoughts on this subject, though, I'd just like to encourage anyone interested in this topic to read Melissa Farley's "Prostitution, Trafficking and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not Know In Order to Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly" published in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Vol: 18, 109 in 2006. It's long, but compelling and shocking and brings to light a lot of invisible issues with the subject matter of this story and others like it. I'll try to get a link up in the next few hours, but it's available through Google Scholar, if you're part of an institution that grants access.
ETA [May 2012]: Four years after writing this story, I'm no longer an abolitionist/radical feminist, and the fact that I recommended a Farley paper out of some kind of moral concern is fucking hilarious to me. Sex work is work; sex workers rights are human rights. My only regret with this story (besides the first line, because sex work is a choice, it really fucking is) is that I didn't make Dean a little bit smarter about his hustle. Maybe I'll write a sequel where he's badass and on top of his game. Ugh, or maybe I'll just rewrite it. Idek.
Summary: These are the things Dean does for his family.
It’s not about having a choice, it never is. The man with the ballcap over thinning curls gives him a twice-over from across the bar and Dean looks back for just as long as it takes the message to sink in, maybe a half second.
It’s like a for sale sign hung around his neck, a cue marked out in ink.
The guy comes over to stand by the bar with his drink and says something like “Isn’t it past your bedtime, son?”
And Dean says, “Sure is,” even though that word out of another man’s mouth makes him want to stand and throw a fist. Instead, he takes another swig from his barely-cracked beer.
There’s a room full of quiet men, here, but the one who picked him is the creep with the daddy fantasy. Or maybe it’s just the pickup. Some men hate the pickup, they think about their wives or bosses, how they’re putting their entire normal lives at risk. They get nervous, and Dean just stays reassuringly unfamiliar while they work themselves up into a fervor of guilt and desire.
Ballcap slithers onto the stool behind him, speaks low and close. “Maybe, boy, you need someone to put you to bed, huh?”
Dean turns his face, gives him the full blank stare - no coy bullshit, no parted lips - says, “You put me to bed, I’ll put you to bed, whatever you want: fifty bucks for the hour.”
The man jerks back like he’s been insulted. Which he has, really, because Dean’s not interested in much besides the cash. He didn’t pick this place with its closeted husbands and sad old queens because he has a thing for limp dicks and fishbelly thighs. He picked it because the young kids don’t have the cash and he doesn’t want to be tempted into putting out for free.
He's been alone, since Sam left. Because Dad checked out right after, and they went their separate ways. He’s broke and lonely, and working here he thought he might fix the one if not the other.
But ballcap - insulted, indignant ballcap - just hisses, “You’re not worth shit, you dumb whore. This isn’t a fucking street corner.”
Dean looks up to see the bartender coming over, knows he’s ten seconds from getting booted. So he takes another good swallow of beer and stands up. Waves the doorman off as he walks out.
He pauses outside to consider his options. Try another bar, hustle a porn joint or a public washroom.
Instead, Dean strolls a few blocks down the one stretch of downtown street that passes for safe in this city, then cocks a stand on the street corner.
No choice at all, really.
--
He never told Sammy where the cash came from, even when they were both old enough to know its value: hard in and easy out.
But Dean liked paying for breakfast with a flippant twenty, grubby out of his back pocket. Sam, gangly and constantly humiliated, would look at it and say, “That’s a stupid amount for a tip, Dean.”
Dean eyed their waitress - hard-cut mouth and no patience for them and their fifth milkshake - and said, “Yeah, but she earned it, don’t you think?”
Sam glanced back at her, the tight sweater, and shrank in his seat, “God, do you have to be like that?”
Dean grinned, picked the twenty up with his fingers and offered it to the woman as she came by, knowing that if it galled her to take it while he leered, he’d earned it with ten times as much shame.
--
The guy who picks him up in Gardner finds him in that one part of the park that looks deserted and feels crowded, late at night on a Thursday.
It’s a schoolnight, but Dean’s out, sitting alone on a bench, practicing tricks with his new throwing knife when he thinks no one’s watching. Does no good to scare off the customers.
But this guy - jeans and workboots, nicotine-stained fingers, goes by Buddy - doesn’t want to stay in the park with all the other rutting deviants.
He says, “I got a truck,” and he puts his hand on the back of Dean’s neck as they walk to the parking lot.
Buddy doesn’t say a lot, doesn’t ask Dean’s name. His hand is warm and heavy.
They get to the truck, and Buddy shoves Dean face-first against it with that same hand. For a second Dean thinks, fuck, cop and then the guy’s whole body is against him, along with the hard insistence of his cock against Dean’s ass.
He rubs full up and down, with breath hot against Dean’s ear and yeah, Dean is a little startled by how fast and how hard the guy is already. Like he’s been waiting for this so long that even a two minute walk with his fingers in Dean’s hair has him leaking in his pants.
Buddy keys the door, and pushes down Dean’s pants with both palms. Dean just gets in the way when he tries to help with the belt, the button. The guy's hands are everywhere.
As Dean backs his way into the cab, the guy palms thigh and ass, runs his nose along the skin of his inner knee. He looks half-starved, desperate for a sure thing.
Dean knows better than to make a crack, but he wants to. It's almost funny, the whine in the air, the way the guy curves like a kicked dog.
But he still looms up over Dean, who’s on his back still, dick exposed, shirt rucked up and knees knocked at an angle because his pants are still around his ankles and his shoes are still on. He’s halfway to roped and tied like this, shuffling to make room.
And Buddy’s still silent as a dead man, except for how fast and hard he’s breathing. He watches Dean with a face mostly shadowed, and Dean’s cock gets flushed and hard as he focuses on how much this guy wants him.
Being wanted, sometimes, is the only thing that can get him going with a trick. It’s a talent, he thinks, and then sometimes he thinks that it’s the reason he does this, the only reason.
Buddy reaches down and strokes Dean’s hard-on with a rough palm, and the smell in here, the smell of him and truck is the same, basically. Cigarettes and road dust and sweat. It’s choking, but Dean just gives himself over to it. Rests his head against the passenger side door and arches up into the guy’s hand with his best moan in his throat.
Buddy’s breathing gets louder, hoarse, the whine in his throat lingering. He draws in one breath in particular and Dean knows this guy won’t ask for what he wants, so Dean'd better offer before he goes ahead and takes it.
So he moves Buddy’s hand away, places it in his hair and goes to work on the guy’s jeans. He rubs his face against the denim - the way he learned when he was fourteen and the trick had a recognizable face around town and didn’t think Dean was smart enough to know the difference between licking a cock and rubbing a crotch - and then he opens Buddy up and sucks him down, licks him cross and lengthwise.
The dick isn’t huge - just red and blunt and fucking shaking for it - and Dean doesn’t get to more than wet it before Buddy groans and comes all over them both.
Dean takes a second to mask his face, to hide that little bit of a shocked smile that comes to him so fast, when he should be pretending to love it.
And then Buddy smacks him.
Face despairing, mouth still wide with release, he looks like a man tried and sentenced straight down to hell: Dean watches his hand swing from the shoulder.
A backhand across the temple that knocks him to the other side of the seat, blinded white.
“Fucking little slut,” Buddy spits, “Fucking little slut.” Like he can’t think of anything else to say. Like he's said it a hundred times before.
He looks at Dean like he's known and hated him all his life.
Dean stays still, not smiling with the shock this time, just scared.
Buddy hits him again, harder this time because there’s nowhere for his face to go but deeper into the seat back. The fist lands on his ear and his entire head wails with the interior echo.
Dean starts scrambling for the door, then, a good twenty seconds too late, because he’s still half-naked, trussed at the ankles and he’s not moving too quick anyway. Dizzy, watery-eyed.
He gets the door open and tries to fall out, but Buddy just follows him. Keeps him on his knees, then down to his belly, with a boot to the ribs that leaves him breathless.
“Stop,” Dean says, and his voice begs before he can stop it. He sounds like a little kid. “Stop it,”
Buddy doesn’t respond - he's still muttering, slut, you fucking slut - as he comes down on his knee on Dean's belly, picks his head up by the hair and slams his skull into the tire, the gravel on the ground.
Dean’s not sure if the guy’s gonna fuck him or kill him or just keep pounding. He thinks all three. He thinks he can't run from this guy because he's never seen anyone who's hated him so much.
No matter what he did. Dean doesn't know what he did.
It's not easy, but he angles into a few punches, raises his knees and curls down just to get close enough to his pants pocket - still around his ankles - to pull his knife.
Buddy's on the ground with him, now, hard-on back and flushed, and Deans sticks it into the guy's ribs, through the flannel shirt that stinks of smokes andsweat.
He’s stabbed things, before - vampires, a chupacabra once - but never a person. And it isn’t a big knife, but it’s new and sharp and suddenly instead of hitting him Buddy is shouting, wordless, hands pressed to his side.
Dean crawls out from under the thrashing weight, hitches up his pants and runs. Or tries to run, maybe he just stumbles. Out of the parking lot, across the empty street and in between the dark downtown buildings. Gardner’s not a big city, but it has shadowy alleys, places to hide from a raging john and your own father’s judgment.
Dean’s bleeding himself, he realizes, and he can’t stand up straight because something inside hurts, and his vision is so blurred he’s not even sure what straight looks like.
He wishes he’d grabbed the fucker’s wallet.
He hopes he killed him.
--
When him and Sammy used to be alone together, when Dad was out hunting and the people in whatever trash town they were hiding out in seemed worse than the imp swarm they were there for, he used to feel scared.
They’d sit and watch endless hours of MASH and the Muppets, eat chips and plastic packets of salsa stolen from the gas station across the road. Dean would have a beer that he wasn’t legal to drink in any state, any country, and the more he picked on him, the more Sam would swear to tell Dad.
Dean would goad him, push every button, knowing that Sam had never once told on him for anything. Nothing small, nothing big.
That eased off the fear a bit. That made it seem not so bad, if Sam felt the same way. If Sam knew who took care of him first, who they each owed their loyalty to.
Like maybe if Sammy ever found out - not that he ever, ever would, god, Dean would die first - he might not tell Dad.
Fear of discovery, that was the nightmare that could wake Dean in sweats.
--
Dean keeps his head down at Stanford when he’s there. Mostly because he’s not supposed to be, Sam can’t know, Dad can’t know. Tonight, he’s on his way out.
He spent three hours lurking across the street from Sam’s apartment, waiting for the kid to come home, turn on the lights, microwave some pasta, watch the game. Success on all fronts, so now Dean’s headed for a microwaved something of his own, maybe a burger, before he hits the highway again. Harpy nest in Utah. Dad’s got his hands full tracking something else up north.
Dean keeps his eyes low when he passes a kid on the path across the quad - one quick appraisal: rich, young, nervous - and lets him go by.
Except the kid turns and stops a half second later, says, “Hey, don’t I - have we met?”
“Doubt it,” says Dean, slowed but not stopped.
“Kappa Phi,” says the kid, and Dean glances to see he’s tall, blonde, broad-shouldered. An athlete, maybe a rower. But still nervous, the scent practically comes off him. “Commencement party last Friday?”
“Must’ve missed it,” says Dean, and turns to go.
“Well, hey.” Says the kid, and there’s something in his tone that makes Dean stop again. It’s a tone he listens for a lot. Some kind of eagerness.
Dean waits.
“Where are you headed?”
“Why, do you want to come with me?” Dean is pretty sure about this one. It’s spring, it’s the end of the year. This is probably as cocksure as this kid ever gets. But Dean doesn’t give him a chance to answer, anyway. “Are you looking to pick up?”
The kid just stares. He has kind of an openness about the face that makes him look like someone’s kid brother. He reminds Dean so suddenly and viscerally of Sam that he has to pause for a second. Reconnect his brain.
In that pause the kid seems to collect himself too, says, a little hoarse, “Yeah, I guess so.”
Dean feels himself wanting this kid and his open mouth and his crisp collar and the bag full of books. Just as much as he’s wanted any stranger, anyway.
But still, he recognizes money when he sees it, and makes himself say, “It’ll cost you two hundred, and you pay for the motel.”
The kid says, “What?”
And Dean walks back to him, picks up his hand - fifteen fucking years of experience, he knows how to reel them in - and says, “You have a better prospect tonight?”
There is a flash of intelligent decision there - a cost-benefit analysis done in full - and the kid says, “No, not really.”
They don’t need a motel, it turns out. The kid - James - leads him back to his dorm room. Talking the whole way, like they’re on some kind of date.
He’s second year pre-med but he likes to write epic poems in the Greek style, and yeah, he’s a rower, on scholarship even though his dad’s a partner with a firm in Boston and could pay. He’s never done this before (Dean almost laughs at that admission), he’s never gone to a parade or checked out the campus pride group, because - well. He’s done girls, but that never really went anywhere.
And he asks Dean questions too, like if he goes to Stanford or maybe state? And does he live in the city? And what does his dad do? Dean ignores the questions he doesn’t like, which is mostly all of them.
James flashes a key card and leads the way up into a residence block. He has a beige room, clean carpet and an expensive set of sheets messed into a ball on the bed. A computer idles on the desk. All of the books are anatomy texts and those poems he likes, in the original Greek from the university library. Dean reads a title out and James stops short, shocked. “I thought you didn’t go here.”
Dean shrugs, “I don’t.”
James counts out bills onto the desk, and then stands still in the centre of the room while Dean circles and examines. Normally he’d feel obligated to start up right away, but now he’s curious. All the talking and the books has made him wonder what the illusion of normal looks like, up close. He wants to know what lies Sammy is telling himself.
He lingers over the photo of parents, a sister. The house in the picture has a mahogany banister running down a sweep of stairs.
James murmurs, “I won’t ever tell them.”
And Dean turns the picture down and says, “Me either.”
James wants to be kissed. His whole body begs for tongue when Dean does it. Dean obliges. He’s very good at giving men exactly what they want, usually before they know what that is.
They stand there in the middle of the room and neck like teenagers until James is breathless and hard in his pants - cotton, dressy, like he’s already a doctor - and Dean tries to decide what to do next.
For two hundred dollars, everything. And why not, the kid is hard and lean, and his cock stands up long and straight as a soldier.
Dean strips them both, fists himself in front of James so that the kid’s awkwardness eases a bit, and the attention’s there on Dean’s own cock, his own flat belly and flushed skin. They breathe in tandem, watching themselves and each other.
And then Dean kneels, and sucks the kid where he stands, licks his balls, works his way around to the asshole and licks that, too. Follows James down onto the bed, his tongue and fingers working to make the kid writhe, cry out, beg.
He’s such an easy lay. Dean feels safe and in control and he hasn’t been this hard with a trick in a year, two maybe.
He says, hovering, his cock pushed into the fold of James’ ass, to the back of his ear, “Do you want me to fuck you?”
The kid nods into the sheets, gasping, and Dean rolls on his condom and warms the lube in his palm.
The kid takes two fingers, three, and Dean doesn’t want to force the issue but maybe he’s a bit too quick because he doesn’t even get an inch in before the kid is saying “Stop, stop stop” all stiff-limbed and frightened.
Dean pulls out, watches James suck in a breath, and says, “So maybe we’ll try the other way.”
“I don’t-“ the kid says, face crumpled.
Dean waits, patient. He thinks of his first time, full-out. He said stop, too, but it didn’t matter. But that’s not what this kid is paying for.
“Could you-“ James tries and fails again. He doesn’t know what he wants.
Dean goes to work again, revives the shrunken erection, tries to pass on the sense of warmth he feels, just being here for a while. A clean room, someone’s home, someone’s first taste of freedom. He feeds it back to the kid, his own privilege.
He persuades James to fuck him, eventually - and the kid is much better at that, but he comes quickly. Quickly enough that he’s embarrassed. He laughs, shaking, drops the condom in the wastebasket with a sense of ceremony. Dean watches and wonders if he’s expecting some sort of congratulations.
James crawls back onto the bed, puts his fingers in Dean’s hair and says he wants to suck Dean off. Which is fine, yeah. Dean tries hard to enjoy it, mutter some tips and use positive reinforcement.
Dean falls asleep with the kid wrapped around him and when he wakes up, hours before dawn, that body is still there, still warm, still holding him.
He gets up and pulls on his clothes, folds the money away into pockets. He hears James’ breathing hitch as he wakes up, but neither of them says anything.
It’s best to think it’s a relief for both of them when the door closes.
--
He never touched Sam. Not once. He thought about it, sometimes. Like, in the shower, as he picked at a bite mark or examined bruises that didn’t come from any angry spirit. Or in the car, motoring along whatever back highway led fastest to Buttfuck, Nowhere.
Sometimes he’d think about his kid brother when he was trying to get hard for some pervert on a park bench somewhere, and he’d tell himself and his erection that he was in it for the money, and the money was for Sam.
But he never touched him, never let the thought shadow a glance or crease his forehead. Dean knew he had dirty hands, and knew to keep them away from clean linen, good food, and pure souls.
--
He finds Sam’s papers one afternoon, a sheaf of documents with crests at the top of each page. College applications, financial aid. Tucked way at the bottom of his duffel where Dean shouldn’t be digging at all. He's already found and pocketed the whetstone, his excuse. Dean should respect his brother’s secrets. Fair’s fair.
But Sam wants to leave.
And Dean just wants-
He doesn't even know anymore what he wants. But he knows where to go.
He leaves them standing in the truck’s headlights after the hunt that night, Dad bleeding from the arm and them both bickering at each other. Dean mutters an excuse as he closes the car door. They both fall silent as they watch him go, confused but not protesting.
Because when has Dean ever asked for anything for himself?
There’s this bathhouse in Chicago a trick told him about once, and he drives an hour to get there. He’s got blood under his fingernails and he smells like a graveyard and he keeps the radio silent the whole way there.
At the entrance, the doorman looks at him, and almost doesn’t let him pay the fee to get in.
But he washes his hands inside. Strips down to the blue towel they gave him, leaves his clothes in a locker. He finds a spot in one of the saunas, and sits with his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the sweating tile.
He almost falls asleep like that, except he opens his eyes to a man sitting a bench down, face at Dean’s knees, smiling coy as a schoolgirl. “You look like you need to relax,” the man says.
Dean lets his eyes flick to the other men in the room. One is giving another a slow handjob with a soapy facecloth, three more are watching.
“Twenty bucks to blow me.” Dean thinks he might get kicked out. Hustling isn’t looked kindly upon in these dens of camaraderie. But he can’t afford to do it for free. He won’t give it away.
The man blinks away his shock. His smile comes back, and Dean decides it’s kind of sweet, the smile you wear when the world never smiles back.
The man offers a hand and leads him back to a paid room, unlocking it with a little key around a rubber band on his wrist. There’s a shitty little single with a vinyl mat instead of a mattress, a table with condoms and little bottles of lube. A trashcan, a bare light. “I can give you some cash,” the guy says as he sits Dean down on the bed. “But only because you look like you haven’t slept in a year.”
Dean says, “You still want to blow me?” A little surprised.
The guy shrugs narrow shoulders, looks down at Dean’s bare torso and sighs with the effort of switching from supplicant to authority. “I guess not, if I’m paying.”
So Dean goes to his knees and the man gets his blowjob and Dean takes his cash - three fives, a few singles - and goes. It feels too much like a handout, and he can’t even muster a see you around. The man just watches him from the mat, bits splayed out and spent, leaning back on his palms. That sad smile doesn’t leave, but Dean does.
Standing around the hot tubs, he propositions a man who looks furtive and nervous in his blue towel. A man who’s wearing rubber sandals, not bare feet, like he’s afraid of even the diseases on the floor. He’s balding, with skimpy patches of dark hair on his chest. He could be a banker, he could be a bus driver. Either way he’s inexperienced, less likely to rat Dean out for selling the wares.
Dean gets it up and fucks the guy for fifty, but not before hearing about the guy’s sordid jail fantasy. Dean calls him his bitch a couple of times, for good measure. He gets a thirty dollar tip and watches the man shakily dress himself in a grey suit, after.
The next guy offers a couple of pills, giggling over them. He calls Dean his masseur, takes some kind of weird pleasure in paying for a drink at the counter in the common space. Like Dean’s his boy. Bought and paid for, Dean doesn’t argue.
The guy sits down on the top bench in the sauna, and Dean blows him right there in front of everybody. Halfway through he feels his own tepid hard-on getting a helping hand from a pretty boy wearing smeared lipstick. The kid presses up beside him and sucks Dean’s john’s fingers, too, eyeing Dean sideways the whole time.
The john comes almost immediately, and Dean chokes it down. The boy lowers his lashes, tugs Dean’s cock, and murmurs “Come on, baby, you’re next.”
Dean shakes his head and pulls away. "No, no thanks." He can’t afford to blow his load on his own time. He could probably work another few jobs out of what he has going right now, even after the jail fantasy fuck. He ticks the numbers out in his head, adds them up, calculating: he'll keep going.
He goes to the bathroom, rubs his jaw in the mirror. Wonders what he’s working for if Sammy’s just going to turn around and leave.
Maybe he just likes it.
Maybe he’s nothing but a fucked-out whore.
He'll keep going, until he finds out either way.
He doesn’t walk out into the parking lot until dawn, a few hundred dollars padding his pocket. Enough for a few weeks. Enough for until Sammy leaves, probably.
He sleeps in the car. He doesn't go back to the motel until well after noon, and never says a word to either of them about the papers he shouldn’t have found.
--
How it got so different after Dad disappeared, after Sam’s girlfriend died and they just started driving, Dean never pieced together. He just. Breathed different.
Like a wall came down between them.
In the motels, every night with Sam there, it felt like falling asleep in his own bed.
Still, Sam wouldn’t ever talk about Stanford, and Dean wouldn’t ever mention his trips there, his johns there and in the city. He didn’t like San Francisco’s lapdogs or lattes, but he sure liked the going rates on the hill.
He’d talk about hunts, instead: this hunt, the ones Sam missed, the really old ones back when they were kids and Sam still didn’t know how to wind a damn crossbow.
Dean can forgive the papers, forgive the absence because it’s over. And for his half, even if Sam doesn’t know it, he hopes that’s over, too.
--
The guy in Cleveland he almost picks up - mostly by accident - is the last. Dean’s at the bar and Sam’s in the kitchen making nice with their star witness: the line cook that saw the girl fly up into the sky like she’d been snatched by a massive bird.
Dean drinks his beer and doesn’t look at anyone he doesn’t want to fuck because that’s the rule, straight or crooked.
But this guy, he comes up to sit beside him, and looks at him so long and hard that it’d be rude not to say “You need something?”
“I was thinking maybe I’d buy you a drink.” The guy isn’t that old. And he’s a looker, by Ohio standards. Dean noted him across the bar when they came in. Sitting at a booth in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt with a newspaper and an eye out.
Dean waggles his bottle. It's barely 3:00 PM, but he takes the breaks as they come. “I’m covered, but thanks.”
The guy leans back, says, “It’s just I got this hundred burnin’ a hole in my pocket,” as smooth as Dean’s ever heard.
He has to look over, appraise the guy for what he’s saying - seriously you just meant that? - and goes through a list: car, motel, alley. Nowhere Sam could find them.
He hasn’t decided on an answer when Sam comes back out through the kitchen doors, bright-eyed as a fox hound on the trail. He grins at Dean as he walks over, and then tips his chin at Dean’s friendly john. “Hey,” he says to the guy, and glances at Dean for an introduction, or explanation, or whatever.
The guy says, “Oh hey, I didn’t- sorry.” And gets up.
Sam says, “Oh, don't-” and then shuts his mouth.
Dean glances at his brother as the guy retreats back to his booth and his newspaper, and Sam kind of frowns at them both.
Not like Dad would frown, not like that. Just, working it out.
"I didn't know it was that kind of bar," It's a lame joke.
“Yeah.” Dean stares at his empty bottle.
There's another pause. Sam shifts his feet. "Were you-"
Dean glances up, down. He feels nothing when he hears his voice say, like it’s half a joke, “I was considering it.”
Sam just nods. Dean doesn’t push for anything more as they head for the car and the motel. Five minutes, and then Sam’s back to talking about the case. Like it never happened.
It isn’t until later that Sam says, into the dark of the midnight room, “Dean, you’ve been doing that a long time?”
Dean doesn’t answer. He’s afraid to damn himself further. What was Sammy doing at thirteen, besides playing with empty rifle cartridges and missing weeks of school to hunt ghosts?
Sam says, “You don’t have to, anymore. That’s all I’m saying. Not if you don’t want to.”
Dean doesn’t answer that, either. There is no answer, besides, I'm trying.
They fall asleep, and wake up to each other in the morning.
Pairing: Dean/OMC(s)
Warnings: Underage sex, violence, dub con, prostitution.
Wordcount: 5097.
Notes: This story was part of the kamikazeremix challenge. It was originally posted here. Many many thanks to vinylroad for pulling beta duties when I demanded help with Dean hooker!fic. You are the bravest soul, my friend.
I'm not going to warn for or rate this but it's a remix of poisontaster's very dark Halo (In Reverse), which you should read, if you haven't already. Both stories just got recced at spnroundtable under Hustlers & Bathhouses, actually.
Um, rather than going into long and ambivalent thoughts on this subject, though, I'd just like to encourage anyone interested in this topic to read Melissa Farley's "Prostitution, Trafficking and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not Know In Order to Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly" published in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Vol: 18, 109 in 2006. It's long, but compelling and shocking and brings to light a lot of invisible issues with the subject matter of this story and others like it. I'll try to get a link up in the next few hours, but it's available through Google Scholar, if you're part of an institution that grants access.
ETA [May 2012]: Four years after writing this story, I'm no longer an abolitionist/radical feminist, and the fact that I recommended a Farley paper out of some kind of moral concern is fucking hilarious to me. Sex work is work; sex workers rights are human rights. My only regret with this story (besides the first line, because sex work is a choice, it really fucking is) is that I didn't make Dean a little bit smarter about his hustle. Maybe I'll write a sequel where he's badass and on top of his game. Ugh, or maybe I'll just rewrite it. Idek.
Summary: These are the things Dean does for his family.
It’s not about having a choice, it never is. The man with the ballcap over thinning curls gives him a twice-over from across the bar and Dean looks back for just as long as it takes the message to sink in, maybe a half second.
It’s like a for sale sign hung around his neck, a cue marked out in ink.
The guy comes over to stand by the bar with his drink and says something like “Isn’t it past your bedtime, son?”
And Dean says, “Sure is,” even though that word out of another man’s mouth makes him want to stand and throw a fist. Instead, he takes another swig from his barely-cracked beer.
There’s a room full of quiet men, here, but the one who picked him is the creep with the daddy fantasy. Or maybe it’s just the pickup. Some men hate the pickup, they think about their wives or bosses, how they’re putting their entire normal lives at risk. They get nervous, and Dean just stays reassuringly unfamiliar while they work themselves up into a fervor of guilt and desire.
Ballcap slithers onto the stool behind him, speaks low and close. “Maybe, boy, you need someone to put you to bed, huh?”
Dean turns his face, gives him the full blank stare - no coy bullshit, no parted lips - says, “You put me to bed, I’ll put you to bed, whatever you want: fifty bucks for the hour.”
The man jerks back like he’s been insulted. Which he has, really, because Dean’s not interested in much besides the cash. He didn’t pick this place with its closeted husbands and sad old queens because he has a thing for limp dicks and fishbelly thighs. He picked it because the young kids don’t have the cash and he doesn’t want to be tempted into putting out for free.
He's been alone, since Sam left. Because Dad checked out right after, and they went their separate ways. He’s broke and lonely, and working here he thought he might fix the one if not the other.
But ballcap - insulted, indignant ballcap - just hisses, “You’re not worth shit, you dumb whore. This isn’t a fucking street corner.”
Dean looks up to see the bartender coming over, knows he’s ten seconds from getting booted. So he takes another good swallow of beer and stands up. Waves the doorman off as he walks out.
He pauses outside to consider his options. Try another bar, hustle a porn joint or a public washroom.
Instead, Dean strolls a few blocks down the one stretch of downtown street that passes for safe in this city, then cocks a stand on the street corner.
No choice at all, really.
--
He never told Sammy where the cash came from, even when they were both old enough to know its value: hard in and easy out.
But Dean liked paying for breakfast with a flippant twenty, grubby out of his back pocket. Sam, gangly and constantly humiliated, would look at it and say, “That’s a stupid amount for a tip, Dean.”
Dean eyed their waitress - hard-cut mouth and no patience for them and their fifth milkshake - and said, “Yeah, but she earned it, don’t you think?”
Sam glanced back at her, the tight sweater, and shrank in his seat, “God, do you have to be like that?”
Dean grinned, picked the twenty up with his fingers and offered it to the woman as she came by, knowing that if it galled her to take it while he leered, he’d earned it with ten times as much shame.
--
The guy who picks him up in Gardner finds him in that one part of the park that looks deserted and feels crowded, late at night on a Thursday.
It’s a schoolnight, but Dean’s out, sitting alone on a bench, practicing tricks with his new throwing knife when he thinks no one’s watching. Does no good to scare off the customers.
But this guy - jeans and workboots, nicotine-stained fingers, goes by Buddy - doesn’t want to stay in the park with all the other rutting deviants.
He says, “I got a truck,” and he puts his hand on the back of Dean’s neck as they walk to the parking lot.
Buddy doesn’t say a lot, doesn’t ask Dean’s name. His hand is warm and heavy.
They get to the truck, and Buddy shoves Dean face-first against it with that same hand. For a second Dean thinks, fuck, cop and then the guy’s whole body is against him, along with the hard insistence of his cock against Dean’s ass.
He rubs full up and down, with breath hot against Dean’s ear and yeah, Dean is a little startled by how fast and how hard the guy is already. Like he’s been waiting for this so long that even a two minute walk with his fingers in Dean’s hair has him leaking in his pants.
Buddy keys the door, and pushes down Dean’s pants with both palms. Dean just gets in the way when he tries to help with the belt, the button. The guy's hands are everywhere.
As Dean backs his way into the cab, the guy palms thigh and ass, runs his nose along the skin of his inner knee. He looks half-starved, desperate for a sure thing.
Dean knows better than to make a crack, but he wants to. It's almost funny, the whine in the air, the way the guy curves like a kicked dog.
But he still looms up over Dean, who’s on his back still, dick exposed, shirt rucked up and knees knocked at an angle because his pants are still around his ankles and his shoes are still on. He’s halfway to roped and tied like this, shuffling to make room.
And Buddy’s still silent as a dead man, except for how fast and hard he’s breathing. He watches Dean with a face mostly shadowed, and Dean’s cock gets flushed and hard as he focuses on how much this guy wants him.
Being wanted, sometimes, is the only thing that can get him going with a trick. It’s a talent, he thinks, and then sometimes he thinks that it’s the reason he does this, the only reason.
Buddy reaches down and strokes Dean’s hard-on with a rough palm, and the smell in here, the smell of him and truck is the same, basically. Cigarettes and road dust and sweat. It’s choking, but Dean just gives himself over to it. Rests his head against the passenger side door and arches up into the guy’s hand with his best moan in his throat.
Buddy’s breathing gets louder, hoarse, the whine in his throat lingering. He draws in one breath in particular and Dean knows this guy won’t ask for what he wants, so Dean'd better offer before he goes ahead and takes it.
So he moves Buddy’s hand away, places it in his hair and goes to work on the guy’s jeans. He rubs his face against the denim - the way he learned when he was fourteen and the trick had a recognizable face around town and didn’t think Dean was smart enough to know the difference between licking a cock and rubbing a crotch - and then he opens Buddy up and sucks him down, licks him cross and lengthwise.
The dick isn’t huge - just red and blunt and fucking shaking for it - and Dean doesn’t get to more than wet it before Buddy groans and comes all over them both.
Dean takes a second to mask his face, to hide that little bit of a shocked smile that comes to him so fast, when he should be pretending to love it.
And then Buddy smacks him.
Face despairing, mouth still wide with release, he looks like a man tried and sentenced straight down to hell: Dean watches his hand swing from the shoulder.
A backhand across the temple that knocks him to the other side of the seat, blinded white.
“Fucking little slut,” Buddy spits, “Fucking little slut.” Like he can’t think of anything else to say. Like he's said it a hundred times before.
He looks at Dean like he's known and hated him all his life.
Dean stays still, not smiling with the shock this time, just scared.
Buddy hits him again, harder this time because there’s nowhere for his face to go but deeper into the seat back. The fist lands on his ear and his entire head wails with the interior echo.
Dean starts scrambling for the door, then, a good twenty seconds too late, because he’s still half-naked, trussed at the ankles and he’s not moving too quick anyway. Dizzy, watery-eyed.
He gets the door open and tries to fall out, but Buddy just follows him. Keeps him on his knees, then down to his belly, with a boot to the ribs that leaves him breathless.
“Stop,” Dean says, and his voice begs before he can stop it. He sounds like a little kid. “Stop it,”
Buddy doesn’t respond - he's still muttering, slut, you fucking slut - as he comes down on his knee on Dean's belly, picks his head up by the hair and slams his skull into the tire, the gravel on the ground.
Dean’s not sure if the guy’s gonna fuck him or kill him or just keep pounding. He thinks all three. He thinks he can't run from this guy because he's never seen anyone who's hated him so much.
No matter what he did. Dean doesn't know what he did.
It's not easy, but he angles into a few punches, raises his knees and curls down just to get close enough to his pants pocket - still around his ankles - to pull his knife.
Buddy's on the ground with him, now, hard-on back and flushed, and Deans sticks it into the guy's ribs, through the flannel shirt that stinks of smokes andsweat.
He’s stabbed things, before - vampires, a chupacabra once - but never a person. And it isn’t a big knife, but it’s new and sharp and suddenly instead of hitting him Buddy is shouting, wordless, hands pressed to his side.
Dean crawls out from under the thrashing weight, hitches up his pants and runs. Or tries to run, maybe he just stumbles. Out of the parking lot, across the empty street and in between the dark downtown buildings. Gardner’s not a big city, but it has shadowy alleys, places to hide from a raging john and your own father’s judgment.
Dean’s bleeding himself, he realizes, and he can’t stand up straight because something inside hurts, and his vision is so blurred he’s not even sure what straight looks like.
He wishes he’d grabbed the fucker’s wallet.
He hopes he killed him.
--
When him and Sammy used to be alone together, when Dad was out hunting and the people in whatever trash town they were hiding out in seemed worse than the imp swarm they were there for, he used to feel scared.
They’d sit and watch endless hours of MASH and the Muppets, eat chips and plastic packets of salsa stolen from the gas station across the road. Dean would have a beer that he wasn’t legal to drink in any state, any country, and the more he picked on him, the more Sam would swear to tell Dad.
Dean would goad him, push every button, knowing that Sam had never once told on him for anything. Nothing small, nothing big.
That eased off the fear a bit. That made it seem not so bad, if Sam felt the same way. If Sam knew who took care of him first, who they each owed their loyalty to.
Like maybe if Sammy ever found out - not that he ever, ever would, god, Dean would die first - he might not tell Dad.
Fear of discovery, that was the nightmare that could wake Dean in sweats.
--
Dean keeps his head down at Stanford when he’s there. Mostly because he’s not supposed to be, Sam can’t know, Dad can’t know. Tonight, he’s on his way out.
He spent three hours lurking across the street from Sam’s apartment, waiting for the kid to come home, turn on the lights, microwave some pasta, watch the game. Success on all fronts, so now Dean’s headed for a microwaved something of his own, maybe a burger, before he hits the highway again. Harpy nest in Utah. Dad’s got his hands full tracking something else up north.
Dean keeps his eyes low when he passes a kid on the path across the quad - one quick appraisal: rich, young, nervous - and lets him go by.
Except the kid turns and stops a half second later, says, “Hey, don’t I - have we met?”
“Doubt it,” says Dean, slowed but not stopped.
“Kappa Phi,” says the kid, and Dean glances to see he’s tall, blonde, broad-shouldered. An athlete, maybe a rower. But still nervous, the scent practically comes off him. “Commencement party last Friday?”
“Must’ve missed it,” says Dean, and turns to go.
“Well, hey.” Says the kid, and there’s something in his tone that makes Dean stop again. It’s a tone he listens for a lot. Some kind of eagerness.
Dean waits.
“Where are you headed?”
“Why, do you want to come with me?” Dean is pretty sure about this one. It’s spring, it’s the end of the year. This is probably as cocksure as this kid ever gets. But Dean doesn’t give him a chance to answer, anyway. “Are you looking to pick up?”
The kid just stares. He has kind of an openness about the face that makes him look like someone’s kid brother. He reminds Dean so suddenly and viscerally of Sam that he has to pause for a second. Reconnect his brain.
In that pause the kid seems to collect himself too, says, a little hoarse, “Yeah, I guess so.”
Dean feels himself wanting this kid and his open mouth and his crisp collar and the bag full of books. Just as much as he’s wanted any stranger, anyway.
But still, he recognizes money when he sees it, and makes himself say, “It’ll cost you two hundred, and you pay for the motel.”
The kid says, “What?”
And Dean walks back to him, picks up his hand - fifteen fucking years of experience, he knows how to reel them in - and says, “You have a better prospect tonight?”
There is a flash of intelligent decision there - a cost-benefit analysis done in full - and the kid says, “No, not really.”
They don’t need a motel, it turns out. The kid - James - leads him back to his dorm room. Talking the whole way, like they’re on some kind of date.
He’s second year pre-med but he likes to write epic poems in the Greek style, and yeah, he’s a rower, on scholarship even though his dad’s a partner with a firm in Boston and could pay. He’s never done this before (Dean almost laughs at that admission), he’s never gone to a parade or checked out the campus pride group, because - well. He’s done girls, but that never really went anywhere.
And he asks Dean questions too, like if he goes to Stanford or maybe state? And does he live in the city? And what does his dad do? Dean ignores the questions he doesn’t like, which is mostly all of them.
James flashes a key card and leads the way up into a residence block. He has a beige room, clean carpet and an expensive set of sheets messed into a ball on the bed. A computer idles on the desk. All of the books are anatomy texts and those poems he likes, in the original Greek from the university library. Dean reads a title out and James stops short, shocked. “I thought you didn’t go here.”
Dean shrugs, “I don’t.”
James counts out bills onto the desk, and then stands still in the centre of the room while Dean circles and examines. Normally he’d feel obligated to start up right away, but now he’s curious. All the talking and the books has made him wonder what the illusion of normal looks like, up close. He wants to know what lies Sammy is telling himself.
He lingers over the photo of parents, a sister. The house in the picture has a mahogany banister running down a sweep of stairs.
James murmurs, “I won’t ever tell them.”
And Dean turns the picture down and says, “Me either.”
James wants to be kissed. His whole body begs for tongue when Dean does it. Dean obliges. He’s very good at giving men exactly what they want, usually before they know what that is.
They stand there in the middle of the room and neck like teenagers until James is breathless and hard in his pants - cotton, dressy, like he’s already a doctor - and Dean tries to decide what to do next.
For two hundred dollars, everything. And why not, the kid is hard and lean, and his cock stands up long and straight as a soldier.
Dean strips them both, fists himself in front of James so that the kid’s awkwardness eases a bit, and the attention’s there on Dean’s own cock, his own flat belly and flushed skin. They breathe in tandem, watching themselves and each other.
And then Dean kneels, and sucks the kid where he stands, licks his balls, works his way around to the asshole and licks that, too. Follows James down onto the bed, his tongue and fingers working to make the kid writhe, cry out, beg.
He’s such an easy lay. Dean feels safe and in control and he hasn’t been this hard with a trick in a year, two maybe.
He says, hovering, his cock pushed into the fold of James’ ass, to the back of his ear, “Do you want me to fuck you?”
The kid nods into the sheets, gasping, and Dean rolls on his condom and warms the lube in his palm.
The kid takes two fingers, three, and Dean doesn’t want to force the issue but maybe he’s a bit too quick because he doesn’t even get an inch in before the kid is saying “Stop, stop stop” all stiff-limbed and frightened.
Dean pulls out, watches James suck in a breath, and says, “So maybe we’ll try the other way.”
“I don’t-“ the kid says, face crumpled.
Dean waits, patient. He thinks of his first time, full-out. He said stop, too, but it didn’t matter. But that’s not what this kid is paying for.
“Could you-“ James tries and fails again. He doesn’t know what he wants.
Dean goes to work again, revives the shrunken erection, tries to pass on the sense of warmth he feels, just being here for a while. A clean room, someone’s home, someone’s first taste of freedom. He feeds it back to the kid, his own privilege.
He persuades James to fuck him, eventually - and the kid is much better at that, but he comes quickly. Quickly enough that he’s embarrassed. He laughs, shaking, drops the condom in the wastebasket with a sense of ceremony. Dean watches and wonders if he’s expecting some sort of congratulations.
James crawls back onto the bed, puts his fingers in Dean’s hair and says he wants to suck Dean off. Which is fine, yeah. Dean tries hard to enjoy it, mutter some tips and use positive reinforcement.
Dean falls asleep with the kid wrapped around him and when he wakes up, hours before dawn, that body is still there, still warm, still holding him.
He gets up and pulls on his clothes, folds the money away into pockets. He hears James’ breathing hitch as he wakes up, but neither of them says anything.
It’s best to think it’s a relief for both of them when the door closes.
--
He never touched Sam. Not once. He thought about it, sometimes. Like, in the shower, as he picked at a bite mark or examined bruises that didn’t come from any angry spirit. Or in the car, motoring along whatever back highway led fastest to Buttfuck, Nowhere.
Sometimes he’d think about his kid brother when he was trying to get hard for some pervert on a park bench somewhere, and he’d tell himself and his erection that he was in it for the money, and the money was for Sam.
But he never touched him, never let the thought shadow a glance or crease his forehead. Dean knew he had dirty hands, and knew to keep them away from clean linen, good food, and pure souls.
--
He finds Sam’s papers one afternoon, a sheaf of documents with crests at the top of each page. College applications, financial aid. Tucked way at the bottom of his duffel where Dean shouldn’t be digging at all. He's already found and pocketed the whetstone, his excuse. Dean should respect his brother’s secrets. Fair’s fair.
But Sam wants to leave.
And Dean just wants-
He doesn't even know anymore what he wants. But he knows where to go.
He leaves them standing in the truck’s headlights after the hunt that night, Dad bleeding from the arm and them both bickering at each other. Dean mutters an excuse as he closes the car door. They both fall silent as they watch him go, confused but not protesting.
Because when has Dean ever asked for anything for himself?
There’s this bathhouse in Chicago a trick told him about once, and he drives an hour to get there. He’s got blood under his fingernails and he smells like a graveyard and he keeps the radio silent the whole way there.
At the entrance, the doorman looks at him, and almost doesn’t let him pay the fee to get in.
But he washes his hands inside. Strips down to the blue towel they gave him, leaves his clothes in a locker. He finds a spot in one of the saunas, and sits with his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the sweating tile.
He almost falls asleep like that, except he opens his eyes to a man sitting a bench down, face at Dean’s knees, smiling coy as a schoolgirl. “You look like you need to relax,” the man says.
Dean lets his eyes flick to the other men in the room. One is giving another a slow handjob with a soapy facecloth, three more are watching.
“Twenty bucks to blow me.” Dean thinks he might get kicked out. Hustling isn’t looked kindly upon in these dens of camaraderie. But he can’t afford to do it for free. He won’t give it away.
The man blinks away his shock. His smile comes back, and Dean decides it’s kind of sweet, the smile you wear when the world never smiles back.
The man offers a hand and leads him back to a paid room, unlocking it with a little key around a rubber band on his wrist. There’s a shitty little single with a vinyl mat instead of a mattress, a table with condoms and little bottles of lube. A trashcan, a bare light. “I can give you some cash,” the guy says as he sits Dean down on the bed. “But only because you look like you haven’t slept in a year.”
Dean says, “You still want to blow me?” A little surprised.
The guy shrugs narrow shoulders, looks down at Dean’s bare torso and sighs with the effort of switching from supplicant to authority. “I guess not, if I’m paying.”
So Dean goes to his knees and the man gets his blowjob and Dean takes his cash - three fives, a few singles - and goes. It feels too much like a handout, and he can’t even muster a see you around. The man just watches him from the mat, bits splayed out and spent, leaning back on his palms. That sad smile doesn’t leave, but Dean does.
Standing around the hot tubs, he propositions a man who looks furtive and nervous in his blue towel. A man who’s wearing rubber sandals, not bare feet, like he’s afraid of even the diseases on the floor. He’s balding, with skimpy patches of dark hair on his chest. He could be a banker, he could be a bus driver. Either way he’s inexperienced, less likely to rat Dean out for selling the wares.
Dean gets it up and fucks the guy for fifty, but not before hearing about the guy’s sordid jail fantasy. Dean calls him his bitch a couple of times, for good measure. He gets a thirty dollar tip and watches the man shakily dress himself in a grey suit, after.
The next guy offers a couple of pills, giggling over them. He calls Dean his masseur, takes some kind of weird pleasure in paying for a drink at the counter in the common space. Like Dean’s his boy. Bought and paid for, Dean doesn’t argue.
The guy sits down on the top bench in the sauna, and Dean blows him right there in front of everybody. Halfway through he feels his own tepid hard-on getting a helping hand from a pretty boy wearing smeared lipstick. The kid presses up beside him and sucks Dean’s john’s fingers, too, eyeing Dean sideways the whole time.
The john comes almost immediately, and Dean chokes it down. The boy lowers his lashes, tugs Dean’s cock, and murmurs “Come on, baby, you’re next.”
Dean shakes his head and pulls away. "No, no thanks." He can’t afford to blow his load on his own time. He could probably work another few jobs out of what he has going right now, even after the jail fantasy fuck. He ticks the numbers out in his head, adds them up, calculating: he'll keep going.
He goes to the bathroom, rubs his jaw in the mirror. Wonders what he’s working for if Sammy’s just going to turn around and leave.
Maybe he just likes it.
Maybe he’s nothing but a fucked-out whore.
He'll keep going, until he finds out either way.
He doesn’t walk out into the parking lot until dawn, a few hundred dollars padding his pocket. Enough for a few weeks. Enough for until Sammy leaves, probably.
He sleeps in the car. He doesn't go back to the motel until well after noon, and never says a word to either of them about the papers he shouldn’t have found.
--
How it got so different after Dad disappeared, after Sam’s girlfriend died and they just started driving, Dean never pieced together. He just. Breathed different.
Like a wall came down between them.
In the motels, every night with Sam there, it felt like falling asleep in his own bed.
Still, Sam wouldn’t ever talk about Stanford, and Dean wouldn’t ever mention his trips there, his johns there and in the city. He didn’t like San Francisco’s lapdogs or lattes, but he sure liked the going rates on the hill.
He’d talk about hunts, instead: this hunt, the ones Sam missed, the really old ones back when they were kids and Sam still didn’t know how to wind a damn crossbow.
Dean can forgive the papers, forgive the absence because it’s over. And for his half, even if Sam doesn’t know it, he hopes that’s over, too.
--
The guy in Cleveland he almost picks up - mostly by accident - is the last. Dean’s at the bar and Sam’s in the kitchen making nice with their star witness: the line cook that saw the girl fly up into the sky like she’d been snatched by a massive bird.
Dean drinks his beer and doesn’t look at anyone he doesn’t want to fuck because that’s the rule, straight or crooked.
But this guy, he comes up to sit beside him, and looks at him so long and hard that it’d be rude not to say “You need something?”
“I was thinking maybe I’d buy you a drink.” The guy isn’t that old. And he’s a looker, by Ohio standards. Dean noted him across the bar when they came in. Sitting at a booth in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt with a newspaper and an eye out.
Dean waggles his bottle. It's barely 3:00 PM, but he takes the breaks as they come. “I’m covered, but thanks.”
The guy leans back, says, “It’s just I got this hundred burnin’ a hole in my pocket,” as smooth as Dean’s ever heard.
He has to look over, appraise the guy for what he’s saying - seriously you just meant that? - and goes through a list: car, motel, alley. Nowhere Sam could find them.
He hasn’t decided on an answer when Sam comes back out through the kitchen doors, bright-eyed as a fox hound on the trail. He grins at Dean as he walks over, and then tips his chin at Dean’s friendly john. “Hey,” he says to the guy, and glances at Dean for an introduction, or explanation, or whatever.
The guy says, “Oh hey, I didn’t- sorry.” And gets up.
Sam says, “Oh, don't-” and then shuts his mouth.
Dean glances at his brother as the guy retreats back to his booth and his newspaper, and Sam kind of frowns at them both.
Not like Dad would frown, not like that. Just, working it out.
"I didn't know it was that kind of bar," It's a lame joke.
“Yeah.” Dean stares at his empty bottle.
There's another pause. Sam shifts his feet. "Were you-"
Dean glances up, down. He feels nothing when he hears his voice say, like it’s half a joke, “I was considering it.”
Sam just nods. Dean doesn’t push for anything more as they head for the car and the motel. Five minutes, and then Sam’s back to talking about the case. Like it never happened.
It isn’t until later that Sam says, into the dark of the midnight room, “Dean, you’ve been doing that a long time?”
Dean doesn’t answer. He’s afraid to damn himself further. What was Sammy doing at thirteen, besides playing with empty rifle cartridges and missing weeks of school to hunt ghosts?
Sam says, “You don’t have to, anymore. That’s all I’m saying. Not if you don’t want to.”
Dean doesn’t answer that, either. There is no answer, besides, I'm trying.
They fall asleep, and wake up to each other in the morning.