Supernatural Fic: Rockabye.
~Lennie~
Supernatural fic, posted here because I don't know what else to do with it. There's no slash, but you can imagine it's lead-up to slash if you really want. I just like their relationship.
Disclaimer: The Supernatural people, places and events belong to whatever the network's called today. No profit, no sue.
Rockabye
No chick flick moments.
Sam stretched his feet off the end of the motel's bed and sighed. "You know, I'm pretty sure that you weren't like this when we were kids."
Dean didn't answer, or even twitch. Apparently, 'wake me up when it's my turn to drive' had actually meant 'get across a state line and then find me a motel so I can sleep somewhere comfier'. He was so deeply asleep Sam thought it might technically count as a light coma.
Which, admittedly, was exactly the same thing he would have done when they were kids, sleep had always been Dean's remedy for disappointment. But he would have complained about it first, because nothing of any significance could happen to young Dean without it turning into a monologue that Sam would have to listen to. Once that was done, if they were on the road he would scrunch himself into a corner of the backseat and pass out. And Sam would stretch out across the rest of the seat and with his head on Dean's thigh as he joined in.
Now Dean only beat trivial points into the ground. Sam breaking the impala's headlight had produced a scorching rant about young people today and Sam in particular's lack of respect for other people's property, which was ludicrously hypocritical given Dean's tendency to cheat and steal. But that he'd tried to shoot Dean in the face, that was fine and not to be discussed any further. Or at all.
Any extended comment on feelings, insecurities, worries or screaming horror was also banned. As was hugging, although Sam hadn't quite figured out how hugging compromised your masculinity but slapping your brother's butt in order to appear more like a gay couple was okay.
It was a recent development, too. For the first few lonely, angry months at Stanford Sam had felt socially starved and touch-hungry. Most of the physical affection before then had been tackles, noogies, wresting for the remote and his continuing attempts to completely tie Dean up in his sheets before he woke up, but not all.
Maybe Cassie was to blame for Dean becoming more withdrawn. Sam would be tempted to give her a piece of his mind, but he wasn't sure that it hadn't been his fault. Or maybe it was the job that had done it.
"Christ, this must be what girls feel like all the time. You never just want to cuddle and you won't talk about your feelings or let me talk about mine. And why am I stuck worrying about whether you hug your inner child while you sleep, you son of a bitch?" Sam glared at Dean, who still didn't twitch. "Right. Because I can't sleep." And was afraid of what he'd dream about if he did. Still, it was easy to resent Dean and his obviously satisfying coma.
After spending half an hour thinking about their childhood, it was also impossible for Sam to resist getting up and trying harder for the twitch. Poking Dean firmly also had no effect. There was always the option of tickling his feet, but Dean had a tendency to kick when you tried that and he'd already broken Sam's nose that way once. "I hate you for being asleep." Nothing. Sam pushed Dean over to make room and sat down on the bed. "And why not tell me about Cassie? I would have boasted to you about nailing someone that hot."
Sam watched TV until the next commercial break, then continued his one-sided conversation. "I take it back, you're way easier to deal with this way." Still nothing. Suddenly paranoid, Sam pressed his fingers against Dean's neck. But the pulse was strong and slow, and Dean swallowed and started to frown. As soon as Sam took his hand back, the coma recommenced.
Annoyed again, Sam lay across as much of the bed as he could and used Dean's outflung arm as a pillow while he settled in to watch whatever bad movie was available.
Completely unexpectedly, he went to sleep instead.
Sam woke up groggy and confused. Firstly, he hadn't dreamed at all. And secondly, he had one arm curled over Dean's stomach. Sam pulled his arm back and looked around. The TV was off and Dean was lying on top of the covers reading a book, while Sam had somehow ended up under the covers and dead to the world.
Dean waved the book at the room's tiny table. "There's bad doughnuts if you're hungry."
"What time is it?"
"Eleven."
"You could have woken me up."
"Why? I don't want to drive in the snow when I could be in here where it's warm." Dean went back to his book with apparent interest.
Sam staggered up and looked out the window. It was definitely snowing. "And people say our climate's not fucked."
Dean didn't say anything, but it was a companionable sort of silence despite the herd of elephants in the room. The only elephants that were new were the ones for 'are you okay' and 'so about the sleeping with you thing'.
Since there was no hurry, Sam puttered around semi-aimlessly. He ate, spent an hour in the bathroom and enjoyed the feeling of being squeaky clean, then checked his email. But there wasn't anything new, so he sprawled out on his bed and stared at Dean. Who giggled and turned another page obliviously.
He hadn't heard Dean giggle in years. "I didn't know you could read."
Dean's middle finger lifted in the salute of all brothers. "Who do you think taught you how, fucktard?"
"Dad and the public school system?"
"No, all me. And it was like pushing shit uphill, I'll have you know."
Sam frowned. Come to think of it, he didn't actually remember learning to read. "Really?"
Dean finally looked up from his book with an aggravated sigh. "Yeah, really. For a while there I was worried you were retarded. But once you finally figured out how to turn letters into words you kind of took off and started reading everything you could get your hands on. And every time you found something interesting and insisted on reading it all out loud in the car dad would give me this smirky, proud look that was like 'see? and you thought he was brain damaged'. For fucking years, dude." Dean shrugged and went back to his book. "I still say there was something wrong with you. Took me six months before you could spell your own name. If you'd been counting on the American education system, man, you still wouldn't be able to read."
"I don't remember that at all." Sam couldn't actually imagine it. Even with his patchy early education he'd always been reading at a higher level than anyone else in his class, the written word was his bitch. And he owed his literacy to Dean? Bizarre thought.
"Probably because you were three when I started."
Sam laughed out loud. "Dean, that's kind of young to teach a kid to read. No wonder it took me a while."
"But it's plenty old enough to keep whining 'Deeean, play with me' or 'Deeean, read to me' and 'but dad, I'm bored and he's ignoring me'. I swear, it was teach you to read or drown you in a river. Just like you are now, with the not shutting up and letting me read in peace." Dean glared at the book and kept reading.
That, Sam remembered. He also remembered that it hadn't stopped when he could read - just like it was now, irritating Dean was entertainment all by itself. And he remembered Dean reading to him, remembered following Dean's finger across the pages of a Spiderman comic and reading along with Dean's melodramatic voices. That was odd, because Dean had always been a perfectly capable reader and certainly by eight or so hadn't needed to trace where he was up to in a comic book.
"Did you teach me to read with Spiderman comics?"
Dean looked up, startled. "There's another way?"
"Never mind." Sam opened his laptop again and stared blankly at the screen. He was willing to bet that was exactly how Dean had learned to read, probably because that was the only way Dean would sit still and be interested long enough. John Winchester had his faults, but he was a cunning one.
Sam lost interest in spider solitaire before the snow stopped, he still felt dopey and restless from sleeping for so long. "Deeeeean," he whined. It was like riding a bike, the exact nasal pitch of it came back without him even trying.
"What."
"Read to me."
"Oh fuck off." Dean threw a pillow at him.
Sam caught it. "I'm serious. I'm dying of boredom and you've got the only readable thing in here."
"I hope you die in a K-Mart shooting. And I'm not going back to the beginning for you." Dean cleared his throat. "And Billy travelled in time to the zoo on Tralfamadore. He was forty-four years old, on display under a geodesic dome. He was reclining on the lounge chair which had been his cradle during his trip through space. He was naked. The Tralfamadorians were interested in his body - all of it. There were thousands of them outside, holding up their little hands so that their eyes could see him. Billy had been on Tralfamadore for six Earthling months now. He was used to the crowd."
"Kurt Vonnegut? I'm impressed."
Dean grinned. "Don't be, I found it in the bathroom. Escape was out of the question. The atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and Earth was four hundred and forty-six point one-two quadrillion miles away."
Sam curled up on the bed and listened. It was probably the childhood association he'd just discovered, but Dean's familiar voice reading a good book was deeply relaxing. He wondered if there were Spiderman books. There'd have to be, right? Any movie that did well had a book made from it.
"Billy was displayed there in the zoo in a simulated Earthling habitat. Most of the furnishings had been stolen from the Sears Roebuck warehouse in Iowa City, Iowa. There was a colour television set and a couch that could be converted into a bed. There were end tables with lamps and ashtrays on them by the couch. There was a home bar and two stools. There was a little pool table. There was wall-to-wall carpeting in federal gold, except in the kitchen and bathroom areas and over the iron manhole cover in the centre of the floor. There were magazines arranged in a fan on the coffee table in front of the couch.
"There was a stereophonic phonograph. The phonograph worked. The television didn't. There was a picture of one cowboy killing another one pasted to the television tube. So it goes.
"There were no walls in the dome, no place for Billy to hide. The mint green bathroom fixtures were right out in the open. Billy got off his lounge chair now, went into the bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went wild."
Vonnegut's crowd of aliens may have been excited, but Sam immediately fell asleep.
It was after two AM and very dark when he woke up gasping. He'd been back on his bed in Stanford looking up at Jess as she died. But this time Dean hadn't burst in and dragged him out bodily and he couldn't move, could only lie there as her blood poured down and drowned him.
Sam sat up and tried to breathe deeply. So the nightmares hadn't gone. At least he'd had almost a full day of decent sleep. He got up and remade the bed, he'd twisted the sheets around his hands so hard that he had crease marks on his fingers and the sheets were coming off the cheap mattress. Turned the lights on, had a shower.
Dean had returned to his coma, sleeping in an uncharacteristically small huddle with both hands tucked under his chin as they pulled the blankets tight around him.
Having no idea what else to do, Sam took one of the blankets off his own bed and added it to Dean's cocoon, then sat down to watch TV. After a while Dean relaxed a little bit, but he didn't uncurl until Sam woke him up at six. He had to then, because Sam gave up on shaking him and shouting his name and dragged him bodily out of the bed and halfway to the bathroom.
"Jesus, I'm awake!"
"Good," Sam panted. Dean weighed more than Sam liked to lift on any regular basis, and as a dead weight he was even worse. "If this didn't work I was going to go get one of the guns out of the car and fire it right over your head."
"And then we would both have been arrested. Good thinking."
Dean staggered to his feet and things were superficially back to normal. But he still slept when Sam drove.
The nightmares kept coming, but after Saginaw Sam preferred them to the new visions. The nightmares might be variations on the visions that he hadn't paid attention to, but the damage was done. He just had to live with the guilt. Every new vision meant the chance to fail just as fatally all over again. Go to exotic locations, meet interesting new people, and watch them die.
He'd vaguely hoped that there was something special about Illinois and he'd be able to sleep again once he was back there, comfortably sandwiched between Missouri that made Dean depressed and Michigan that made Sam wake up screaming. A state of psychic neutrality, where nothing forced its way into his mind except unconsciousness and the biggest mystery was why someone would leave Slaughterhouse Five in a motel bathroom.
It turned out that there was nothing special about Illinois.
Sam didn't think he'd been shouting this time, but there was rustling and mumbling from Dean's bed so he must have been loud enough.
"Sammy?"
Sam figured he'd let the 'Sammy' go this time, since it was an improvement on 'Cordelia'. Even if a good bicker would probably make him feel better. "I'm fine." His voice was shaking.
"For fuck's sake," Dean muttered, and then there was more rustling and footsteps. Sam figured he probably deserved to be belted with a pillow for waking Dean up three times in one night and braced himself. But instead of a hard hotel pillow Sam was hit with a flood of cold air then a large, warm older brother as Dean climbed under the covers. Sam was too startled to fight being pushed firmly onto his side, and only got more surprised when Dean pressed up against his back and threw an arm around him.
"Um, Dean?"
"Shut up and go to sleep, I'm gonna."
"But why are you-"
"Sam, you can shut up right now or you can sleep in the car. Up to you."
Sam closed his mouth. It was weird to feel the vibration of it against his back, but he knew that tone never bluffed.
"Good choice."
Well, at least he was warm. Sam scratched his thigh and wondered how long it would take Dean to fall asleep.
"And no wiggling." Dean grabbed Sam's wrist and pulled it back up firmly, then didn't let go. So Sam had his brother breathing deeply against the back of his neck, a heavy arm across his ribs and his hand forcibly tucked against his own chest. And he was forbidden to speak or move.
He was definitely going to wait until Dean went to sleep then go sleep in Dean's bed.
At least, that was the last thing Sam could remember thinking when the next room's wake-up call woke him up the next morning. Sam unwrapped Dean's arm and rolled onto his back. "Dean?"
Dean didn't open his eyes, just slapped his hand over Sam's mouth. "Shut the fuck UP and go back to sleep!"
He did manage to doze until Dean got up, cursing and bitching about being woken up all night. And this time it was Sam's turn to studiously avoid mentioning that they'd shared a bed. He'd figured out why, and it was just embarrassing.
Embarrassing, but restful. So if he talked about it, he'd have to say 'thank you'. And that would be even more embarrassing, for both of them.
Start walking. Sam sighed. Yet another officer of the law that Dean had managed to alienate. Probably hit on her and stole her badge or something.
Dean was certainly cranky enough. "I'm serious, Sammy. Go off on your own again and I'll have to kill you." Dean punched Sam in the arm, not gently.
"So we'll have to pee together like girls from now on and I'll be a prisoner of your tiny bladder." Sam sympathised with Dean being worried, he really did. That didn't mean he had to act like anger was a reasonable response and indulge Dean's emotional dysfunction.
"Damn right."
"What if I get hit by a falling satellite and die? I'll leave without you and you won't be able to kill me."
Dean stopped still and glared. "Then I'll mutilate your corpse and line the trunk of my car with your bones so you'll have to haunt me. Okay?"
"That's disgusting. And creepy." Sam grinned. "The most disturbing thing is that I'm actually kind of touched."
"You should be. I wouldn't put just anybody's mutilated corpse in my car." Dean started marching up the road again.
Sam caught up with him easily and slung an arm around Dean's shoulders. Dean could be a socially retarded ball of insecurity and aggression if he wanted to, but Sam was over it. "I love you too."
Unsurprisingly, Dean shrugged the arm off. "Jesus, you're such a freak."
"And you're a freak with me!" Sam grinned and jogged ahead of Dean's half-hearted swipe.
Dean laughed and called after him. "If you really loved me, you'd carjack someone!"
Supernatural fic, posted here because I don't know what else to do with it. There's no slash, but you can imagine it's lead-up to slash if you really want. I just like their relationship.
Disclaimer: The Supernatural people, places and events belong to whatever the network's called today. No profit, no sue.
Rockabye
No chick flick moments.
Sam stretched his feet off the end of the motel's bed and sighed. "You know, I'm pretty sure that you weren't like this when we were kids."
Dean didn't answer, or even twitch. Apparently, 'wake me up when it's my turn to drive' had actually meant 'get across a state line and then find me a motel so I can sleep somewhere comfier'. He was so deeply asleep Sam thought it might technically count as a light coma.
Which, admittedly, was exactly the same thing he would have done when they were kids, sleep had always been Dean's remedy for disappointment. But he would have complained about it first, because nothing of any significance could happen to young Dean without it turning into a monologue that Sam would have to listen to. Once that was done, if they were on the road he would scrunch himself into a corner of the backseat and pass out. And Sam would stretch out across the rest of the seat and with his head on Dean's thigh as he joined in.
Now Dean only beat trivial points into the ground. Sam breaking the impala's headlight had produced a scorching rant about young people today and Sam in particular's lack of respect for other people's property, which was ludicrously hypocritical given Dean's tendency to cheat and steal. But that he'd tried to shoot Dean in the face, that was fine and not to be discussed any further. Or at all.
Any extended comment on feelings, insecurities, worries or screaming horror was also banned. As was hugging, although Sam hadn't quite figured out how hugging compromised your masculinity but slapping your brother's butt in order to appear more like a gay couple was okay.
It was a recent development, too. For the first few lonely, angry months at Stanford Sam had felt socially starved and touch-hungry. Most of the physical affection before then had been tackles, noogies, wresting for the remote and his continuing attempts to completely tie Dean up in his sheets before he woke up, but not all.
Maybe Cassie was to blame for Dean becoming more withdrawn. Sam would be tempted to give her a piece of his mind, but he wasn't sure that it hadn't been his fault. Or maybe it was the job that had done it.
"Christ, this must be what girls feel like all the time. You never just want to cuddle and you won't talk about your feelings or let me talk about mine. And why am I stuck worrying about whether you hug your inner child while you sleep, you son of a bitch?" Sam glared at Dean, who still didn't twitch. "Right. Because I can't sleep." And was afraid of what he'd dream about if he did. Still, it was easy to resent Dean and his obviously satisfying coma.
After spending half an hour thinking about their childhood, it was also impossible for Sam to resist getting up and trying harder for the twitch. Poking Dean firmly also had no effect. There was always the option of tickling his feet, but Dean had a tendency to kick when you tried that and he'd already broken Sam's nose that way once. "I hate you for being asleep." Nothing. Sam pushed Dean over to make room and sat down on the bed. "And why not tell me about Cassie? I would have boasted to you about nailing someone that hot."
Sam watched TV until the next commercial break, then continued his one-sided conversation. "I take it back, you're way easier to deal with this way." Still nothing. Suddenly paranoid, Sam pressed his fingers against Dean's neck. But the pulse was strong and slow, and Dean swallowed and started to frown. As soon as Sam took his hand back, the coma recommenced.
Annoyed again, Sam lay across as much of the bed as he could and used Dean's outflung arm as a pillow while he settled in to watch whatever bad movie was available.
Completely unexpectedly, he went to sleep instead.
Sam woke up groggy and confused. Firstly, he hadn't dreamed at all. And secondly, he had one arm curled over Dean's stomach. Sam pulled his arm back and looked around. The TV was off and Dean was lying on top of the covers reading a book, while Sam had somehow ended up under the covers and dead to the world.
Dean waved the book at the room's tiny table. "There's bad doughnuts if you're hungry."
"What time is it?"
"Eleven."
"You could have woken me up."
"Why? I don't want to drive in the snow when I could be in here where it's warm." Dean went back to his book with apparent interest.
Sam staggered up and looked out the window. It was definitely snowing. "And people say our climate's not fucked."
Dean didn't say anything, but it was a companionable sort of silence despite the herd of elephants in the room. The only elephants that were new were the ones for 'are you okay' and 'so about the sleeping with you thing'.
Since there was no hurry, Sam puttered around semi-aimlessly. He ate, spent an hour in the bathroom and enjoyed the feeling of being squeaky clean, then checked his email. But there wasn't anything new, so he sprawled out on his bed and stared at Dean. Who giggled and turned another page obliviously.
He hadn't heard Dean giggle in years. "I didn't know you could read."
Dean's middle finger lifted in the salute of all brothers. "Who do you think taught you how, fucktard?"
"Dad and the public school system?"
"No, all me. And it was like pushing shit uphill, I'll have you know."
Sam frowned. Come to think of it, he didn't actually remember learning to read. "Really?"
Dean finally looked up from his book with an aggravated sigh. "Yeah, really. For a while there I was worried you were retarded. But once you finally figured out how to turn letters into words you kind of took off and started reading everything you could get your hands on. And every time you found something interesting and insisted on reading it all out loud in the car dad would give me this smirky, proud look that was like 'see? and you thought he was brain damaged'. For fucking years, dude." Dean shrugged and went back to his book. "I still say there was something wrong with you. Took me six months before you could spell your own name. If you'd been counting on the American education system, man, you still wouldn't be able to read."
"I don't remember that at all." Sam couldn't actually imagine it. Even with his patchy early education he'd always been reading at a higher level than anyone else in his class, the written word was his bitch. And he owed his literacy to Dean? Bizarre thought.
"Probably because you were three when I started."
Sam laughed out loud. "Dean, that's kind of young to teach a kid to read. No wonder it took me a while."
"But it's plenty old enough to keep whining 'Deeean, play with me' or 'Deeean, read to me' and 'but dad, I'm bored and he's ignoring me'. I swear, it was teach you to read or drown you in a river. Just like you are now, with the not shutting up and letting me read in peace." Dean glared at the book and kept reading.
That, Sam remembered. He also remembered that it hadn't stopped when he could read - just like it was now, irritating Dean was entertainment all by itself. And he remembered Dean reading to him, remembered following Dean's finger across the pages of a Spiderman comic and reading along with Dean's melodramatic voices. That was odd, because Dean had always been a perfectly capable reader and certainly by eight or so hadn't needed to trace where he was up to in a comic book.
"Did you teach me to read with Spiderman comics?"
Dean looked up, startled. "There's another way?"
"Never mind." Sam opened his laptop again and stared blankly at the screen. He was willing to bet that was exactly how Dean had learned to read, probably because that was the only way Dean would sit still and be interested long enough. John Winchester had his faults, but he was a cunning one.
Sam lost interest in spider solitaire before the snow stopped, he still felt dopey and restless from sleeping for so long. "Deeeeean," he whined. It was like riding a bike, the exact nasal pitch of it came back without him even trying.
"What."
"Read to me."
"Oh fuck off." Dean threw a pillow at him.
Sam caught it. "I'm serious. I'm dying of boredom and you've got the only readable thing in here."
"I hope you die in a K-Mart shooting. And I'm not going back to the beginning for you." Dean cleared his throat. "And Billy travelled in time to the zoo on Tralfamadore. He was forty-four years old, on display under a geodesic dome. He was reclining on the lounge chair which had been his cradle during his trip through space. He was naked. The Tralfamadorians were interested in his body - all of it. There were thousands of them outside, holding up their little hands so that their eyes could see him. Billy had been on Tralfamadore for six Earthling months now. He was used to the crowd."
"Kurt Vonnegut? I'm impressed."
Dean grinned. "Don't be, I found it in the bathroom. Escape was out of the question. The atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and Earth was four hundred and forty-six point one-two quadrillion miles away."
Sam curled up on the bed and listened. It was probably the childhood association he'd just discovered, but Dean's familiar voice reading a good book was deeply relaxing. He wondered if there were Spiderman books. There'd have to be, right? Any movie that did well had a book made from it.
"Billy was displayed there in the zoo in a simulated Earthling habitat. Most of the furnishings had been stolen from the Sears Roebuck warehouse in Iowa City, Iowa. There was a colour television set and a couch that could be converted into a bed. There were end tables with lamps and ashtrays on them by the couch. There was a home bar and two stools. There was a little pool table. There was wall-to-wall carpeting in federal gold, except in the kitchen and bathroom areas and over the iron manhole cover in the centre of the floor. There were magazines arranged in a fan on the coffee table in front of the couch.
"There was a stereophonic phonograph. The phonograph worked. The television didn't. There was a picture of one cowboy killing another one pasted to the television tube. So it goes.
"There were no walls in the dome, no place for Billy to hide. The mint green bathroom fixtures were right out in the open. Billy got off his lounge chair now, went into the bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went wild."
Vonnegut's crowd of aliens may have been excited, but Sam immediately fell asleep.
It was after two AM and very dark when he woke up gasping. He'd been back on his bed in Stanford looking up at Jess as she died. But this time Dean hadn't burst in and dragged him out bodily and he couldn't move, could only lie there as her blood poured down and drowned him.
Sam sat up and tried to breathe deeply. So the nightmares hadn't gone. At least he'd had almost a full day of decent sleep. He got up and remade the bed, he'd twisted the sheets around his hands so hard that he had crease marks on his fingers and the sheets were coming off the cheap mattress. Turned the lights on, had a shower.
Dean had returned to his coma, sleeping in an uncharacteristically small huddle with both hands tucked under his chin as they pulled the blankets tight around him.
Having no idea what else to do, Sam took one of the blankets off his own bed and added it to Dean's cocoon, then sat down to watch TV. After a while Dean relaxed a little bit, but he didn't uncurl until Sam woke him up at six. He had to then, because Sam gave up on shaking him and shouting his name and dragged him bodily out of the bed and halfway to the bathroom.
"Jesus, I'm awake!"
"Good," Sam panted. Dean weighed more than Sam liked to lift on any regular basis, and as a dead weight he was even worse. "If this didn't work I was going to go get one of the guns out of the car and fire it right over your head."
"And then we would both have been arrested. Good thinking."
Dean staggered to his feet and things were superficially back to normal. But he still slept when Sam drove.
The nightmares kept coming, but after Saginaw Sam preferred them to the new visions. The nightmares might be variations on the visions that he hadn't paid attention to, but the damage was done. He just had to live with the guilt. Every new vision meant the chance to fail just as fatally all over again. Go to exotic locations, meet interesting new people, and watch them die.
He'd vaguely hoped that there was something special about Illinois and he'd be able to sleep again once he was back there, comfortably sandwiched between Missouri that made Dean depressed and Michigan that made Sam wake up screaming. A state of psychic neutrality, where nothing forced its way into his mind except unconsciousness and the biggest mystery was why someone would leave Slaughterhouse Five in a motel bathroom.
It turned out that there was nothing special about Illinois.
Sam didn't think he'd been shouting this time, but there was rustling and mumbling from Dean's bed so he must have been loud enough.
"Sammy?"
Sam figured he'd let the 'Sammy' go this time, since it was an improvement on 'Cordelia'. Even if a good bicker would probably make him feel better. "I'm fine." His voice was shaking.
"For fuck's sake," Dean muttered, and then there was more rustling and footsteps. Sam figured he probably deserved to be belted with a pillow for waking Dean up three times in one night and braced himself. But instead of a hard hotel pillow Sam was hit with a flood of cold air then a large, warm older brother as Dean climbed under the covers. Sam was too startled to fight being pushed firmly onto his side, and only got more surprised when Dean pressed up against his back and threw an arm around him.
"Um, Dean?"
"Shut up and go to sleep, I'm gonna."
"But why are you-"
"Sam, you can shut up right now or you can sleep in the car. Up to you."
Sam closed his mouth. It was weird to feel the vibration of it against his back, but he knew that tone never bluffed.
"Good choice."
Well, at least he was warm. Sam scratched his thigh and wondered how long it would take Dean to fall asleep.
"And no wiggling." Dean grabbed Sam's wrist and pulled it back up firmly, then didn't let go. So Sam had his brother breathing deeply against the back of his neck, a heavy arm across his ribs and his hand forcibly tucked against his own chest. And he was forbidden to speak or move.
He was definitely going to wait until Dean went to sleep then go sleep in Dean's bed.
At least, that was the last thing Sam could remember thinking when the next room's wake-up call woke him up the next morning. Sam unwrapped Dean's arm and rolled onto his back. "Dean?"
Dean didn't open his eyes, just slapped his hand over Sam's mouth. "Shut the fuck UP and go back to sleep!"
He did manage to doze until Dean got up, cursing and bitching about being woken up all night. And this time it was Sam's turn to studiously avoid mentioning that they'd shared a bed. He'd figured out why, and it was just embarrassing.
Embarrassing, but restful. So if he talked about it, he'd have to say 'thank you'. And that would be even more embarrassing, for both of them.
Start walking. Sam sighed. Yet another officer of the law that Dean had managed to alienate. Probably hit on her and stole her badge or something.
Dean was certainly cranky enough. "I'm serious, Sammy. Go off on your own again and I'll have to kill you." Dean punched Sam in the arm, not gently.
"So we'll have to pee together like girls from now on and I'll be a prisoner of your tiny bladder." Sam sympathised with Dean being worried, he really did. That didn't mean he had to act like anger was a reasonable response and indulge Dean's emotional dysfunction.
"Damn right."
"What if I get hit by a falling satellite and die? I'll leave without you and you won't be able to kill me."
Dean stopped still and glared. "Then I'll mutilate your corpse and line the trunk of my car with your bones so you'll have to haunt me. Okay?"
"That's disgusting. And creepy." Sam grinned. "The most disturbing thing is that I'm actually kind of touched."
"You should be. I wouldn't put just anybody's mutilated corpse in my car." Dean started marching up the road again.
Sam caught up with him easily and slung an arm around Dean's shoulders. Dean could be a socially retarded ball of insecurity and aggression if he wanted to, but Sam was over it. "I love you too."
Unsurprisingly, Dean shrugged the arm off. "Jesus, you're such a freak."
"And you're a freak with me!" Sam grinned and jogged ahead of Dean's half-hearted swipe.
Dean laughed and called after him. "If you really loved me, you'd carjack someone!"