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If you take a look under the stone, there are just worms
And little lizards crawling everywhere
And you’re under there too, singing in your sleep
Like a little kid, I watch you for a while
- Great White Way, Do Nothing
Dean knew that Sam knew that he’d lied, about knowing he wasn’t dead when he left him in that cabin. He hadn’t expected Sam to ask what he’d done about it, or not so quickly, so the lie came out automatic and complicated because there was no good way to say I immediately overdosed on barbiturates to try and give my life for yours.
Sam knew him like the back of his hand, and there was too much that didn’t add up—if Dean thought he was alive, he never would have left him behind. If Dean thought he was dead, there was no way he wouldn’t do something about it. So Dean had to endure a week of stares from a Sam half cut on painkillers after they got home from the hospital, and it was driving him crazy.
He was reading an automotive magazine with his feet up on the table in the bunker’s library, one of his records playing on the old-timey phonograph behind him, nursing a beer, when he heard Sam come up from the kitchen. Sam went all the way through the war room and up the steps before coming to a stop in front of his table and ruining his day.
“You love me too much,” Sam said.
Dean finished the line he was reading before looking up.
“I’m not even gonna dignify that with a response. Are you gonna want dinner later? I was gonna go out, but if you’ll be around I can make something.”
“I’m serious.”
Dean squinted at him. He was wearing a gray-green flannel that Dean was forty percent sure was his. He put his magazine down and heaved his feet off the table with a laboured groan.
“You wanna tell me what I’ve done to deserve this? Because as far as I can tell, we’re good. Finally. For the first time in like, years, we haven’t been at each other’s throats, so please, tell me how I pissed you off this time, by—hold on, lemme check my notes here—” He theatrically flipped through the magazine, licking his thumb to turn a page. “Loving you too much,” he finished, dripping with contempt.
Sam looked alarmingly unannoyed, which was a bad sign.
“I know you did something stupid when you thought I was dead.”
“I told you I didn’t.”
“You’re lying, but, whatever. Fine. Don’t tell me.” He pulled out the chair across from Dean and sat in it, and it felt like an interrogation. Dean rubbed his wrists, feeling phantom cuffs. “I’ve been thinking.”
“That’s dangerous.”
“Would you shut up? I’m trying to say something.”
“You already said it, I love you too much. Duly noted. I get what you’re trying to say.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Sure I do. We did this already, after the trials. You got mad ‘cause I didn’t let you die to close up hell, and you didn’t talk to me for like two months, but we’re good now. You don’t want me dead, I don’t want you dead. Good talk, Sammy.”
He stood up. Sam reached across the table, clapped a hand over his shoulder and shoved him back down.
“We’re not done here.”
“I’d love to be done here.”
“Too bad. This is like, five plus years in the making.”
“It’s a Monday night, and you’re hitting me with a five-year conversation?”
Sam ignored him. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table and Dean took a nervous sip of beer.
“I’m thirty-three years old,” Sam said, “and I’m still your little brother, to you. You think you own me.”
“I do not—”
“I’ve been trying to do the math, actually, and with the time we both spent dead, or you in Purgatory, we’re closer in age now than we were when we were kids. You lost like a year. Not that that’s the point.”
“What is your point?”
“That you’re obsessed with me.”
He said it so easily that Dean thought he’d misheard him.
“I’m what?”
“Obsessed with me. Like the literal meaning of the word. And obsessed with me as a concept, like the idea of me, not actually… me me.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? How many of those painkillers did you take?”
“Enough,” he said, flippant, but he seemed sober and that was the worst of it. “I mean, you don’t think of me as a person. I’m just brother. You don’t even like me half the time, and you don’t know anything about me, but you’re obsessed with me. Because I’m your property.”
This was going off the rails, fast. This was everything they didn’t talk about crammed into one formerly-good evening, a slap in the face of a conversation, Sam heaving up a giant chest full of receipts and shoving them in his face.
Dean latched onto one particular part to take offense to first.
“Fuck you I don’t know you, what the hell does that mean?”
“Would we be friends? If we weren’t brothers. We don’t like any of the same stuff, it’s not—”
“Oh, shut up, we’re not kids, you’re not complaining about my music in the car. That doesn’t matter, I mean—”
“What do you think about?” Sam interrupted. “Most of the time. Where does your head go when you’re not thinking about something else?”
The answer came up gut-wrenchingly quickly and Dean hated it. His brain’s idle state was like a flow chart: Can you see Sam? If yes: is he safe? Is he happy? If no: where’s Sam? Is he safe? Is he happy? Is there something you’re lying to him about? If yes: is it time to tell him? If no: do you think there’s anything he’s hiding from YOU?
Only after he’d been through the Sam flow chart did his mind meander towards food, sex and past failures. The worst part was that Sam was confident enough in being right to ask.
“That’s not fair,” Dean said testily. “You’re my job.”
Sam threw his hands in the air.
“I’m not! I’m not, Dean. I’m an adult man, you don’t babysit me anymore. I shouldn’t be the thing you think about when you’re trying to sleep.”
Dean tried for a smile. The result was awful.
“This is starting to sound pretty—”
“If you say this sounds gay, I’m gonna break your neck,” Sam spat. “You know I wish you just wanted to fuck me? That would be easy, they’ve got words for that kind of messed up.”
That just made Dean’s pits sweat. He felt like Wile E. Coyote running into a tunnel painted onto a mountain face, little birds circling around his head.
“Uh.”
“What do you know about Jeffrey Dahmer?”
He’d been having a good day.
“I don’t like where this is going,” he said slowly. He sat back in his chair to put some space between them, like it helped. Sam just leaned in.
“He did experiments on his victims, to try and make the perfect submissive partner. Alive, but docile. Injected acid into their brains and stuff.”
“Uh. Partner as in sex?”
“Yeah.”
Things were now so far off the rails Dean couldn’t even see the rails anymore. He waited for the punchline, but Sam only looked serious, hawk-focused.
“You think I wanna Jeffrey Dahmer you,” Dean clarified.
“As a metaphor.”
“A metaphor.”
“Yeah. Not literally. It’s a—”
“Wait, wait, wait, back up, what do you mean—”
“Sex?”
“You said it twice now.”
Sam shrugged. He shrugged. Dean could kill him.
“Not literally.”
“Stop saying that! How the hell do you wanna metaphorically fuck someone?”
“You want me,” Sam said, looking right at him, and Dean’s head broke off his neck and rolled away.
“What?” he croaked.
He had no idea when this conversation got away from him. Maybe he’d never had it. If this was on the table, in Sam’s brain, maybe he didn’t have a handle on any conversation they’d had in the past decade.
“You want me,” Sam said again, and if Dean flinched, it wasn’t his fault, “every way there is to want someone. Which includes that. I don’t mean you’re hot for me, I mean you’re— you’re so possessive, and obsessed with me—again, not strictly sexual—that it’s all just everything, to you. You want to own me. You want to be me, and be with me, and all of it. Not in any way I think you’ve really thought about, but it’s still there.”
Dean shrunk back. Dean’s head spun. Dean… Dean was great at making excuses, was the thing.
He was so good at lying to himself, saying his pathological need to keep Sam alive and happy was about saving the world, but that had never been true, and in that hospital, arguing with Billie while his body convulsed and foamed behind them, it all came apart because she saw that. Case in point with the whole Darkness thing in the first place: everyone on the planet would be objectively better, tenfold, if both him and Sam had died, or Sam dead and him sequestered away and unable to do harm. But that hadn’t been good enough for him. He wanted the two of them to be together more than he wanted to save the world, and there was no other way to spin it.
Sam may have had a point.
Sam cleared his throat and Dean’s eyes snapped to his.
“I mean… am I wrong? You would, if you could. Right?”
Dean got stuck in the hypothetical. If he could, meaning if Sam let him. Let him what, have sex with him? Just to see what it was like? At least once—while piss drunk, thank you very much—he thought about sticking his fingers in Sam’s mouth and counting his teeth, but that was something else completely and not that weird (which was weirder, wanting to put your hands in your brother’s mouth or letting the whole world burn for him, twice?) and maybe he’d wondered, abstractly, not even thinking at all, what Sam was like in bed, but that was because he wanted to know if the stick ever came out, and because the shy ones were always freaks. He wanted fodder for friendly fire, he didn’t actually want to know. What the hell was he asking?
“Dean?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
“I don’t,” Dean said, a full minute too late. “I don’t want that. I obviously fucking wouldn’t, and screw you for asking. Good to know what you think of me.”
Sam shook his head. “I knew you’d take this as an insult.”
“You’re calling me a freak to my face, is there another way you want me to take it?” He stood up, snatching his beer off the table. He brandished it at Sam. “Fuck this, and fuck you. I don’t need to sit here and listen to this shit. I’m your brother. I take care of you, and you take care of me, and that’s what family does. It’s fine.”
Sam stood too. Dean envisioned a cartoonish chase around the perimeter of the table and froze.
“It’s so far from fine, fine isn’t even on the table,” Sam said. “You think it’s normal? The way we are with each other?”
“Maybe!” He tried for gruff, but it sounded hollow. “We don’t know any other brothers.”
He was holding onto his beer, still standing, but trapped. The bottle was almost empty and he didn’t even want the rest, but putting it down would feel like consenting to the conversation, which he wasn’t.
“It’s not,” Sam insisted. Dean huffed.
“Look, what are you getting at? If there’s something you wanna say, say it, but I’m not gonna stand here all night kind of fighting with you. If you think I’m some huge freak, fine, point made, but what’s the rest of it?”
“I don’t—”
“Oh, there’s a rest of it. You and your goddamn metaphors have been rehearsing this, I can hear it. Something’s my fault.”
“It’s not—”
“It’s always my fault. Spit it out.”
Sure enough, bingo, Sam’s face got shifty. His rants always came to a head when he got like this, some grandiose point he wanted to ‘Dr. Phil’ Dean into talking about. It was better to force him to the end than to let him talk himself in circles until Dean got fed up and yelled GET TO THE POINT, COLLEGE!
“My point,” Sam said slowly, and all of a sudden Dean had regrets. There was something there, something dawning. “Is that you did something stupid, again, because you thought I was dead. And that you’re going to keep doing that every time something happens to me. And that’s, you know. Not healthy.”
“I’m with you so far,” Dean said, just as slow.
Fight-or-flight fluttered up his spine. He started to realize that maybe he didn’t want to know the point, if the point was deeper than stop dying for me. Nothing should have been deeper than that.
“But,” Sam went on, and all at once, something in his tone made Dean know, with one hundred percent certainty, what he was going to say before he said it.
A whole lifetime of not talking about it and Dean knew, like an activated sleeper agent, what was about to happen. He couldn’t even get anything out before Sam charged head first into ruining their lives, not a Sam, Sammy, don’t, stop, nothing, he was so shocked he just let him do it.
“—it’s not new. I think all of this is like the thing when we were kids,” Sam finished. “That’s what that was, too. The same type of thing.” He raised his eyebrows. “You remember.”
It wasn’t a question. Dean wasn’t even sure. Could you remember something you’d convinced yourself, with a terrifying perfection, didn’t happen?
He went completely still, like spooked prey. Both his ears popped, so everything sounded like he was underwater. He moved his jaw back and forth to try and pop them back.
“I thought we weren’t gonna talk about that,” he said carefully.
“Almost—what, thirty years? That’s a good run.”
“Jesus, not thirty, I—I can’t do the math but it’s not fucking thirty, it’s been, what, twenty? Fifteen?”
“I was twelve.”
Like a knife in the throat. “Sam.”
“So, fine, yeah, just over twenty years.”
The worst thing was that Sam wasn’t even rubbing it in his face. He didn’t even seem mad, he was just listing facts, like it was sheer coincidence that they hadn’t talked about it until now. Hey, remember that time I tied your shoelaces together and you fell on your face and I laughed so hard I burst a blood vessel in my eye? Remember that time we snuck onto a Greyhound in Fort Lauderdale and just rode and rode for like two days and ended up in the middle of nowhere and Dad had to come get us and he was so pissed? Remember that time we— we—
Dean’s palms were sweating so bad they were wet. Like fully and completely wet, he wiped them on his jeans and left a dark streak. Twenty fucking years and this was how it came up again.
“Cool. Twenty. Let’s see if we can go another twenty, I bet we can, hey? Let’s find out. Finding out would be good.”
“Dean—”
It was too much. Dean spun on his heel and stalked out of the library, down the stairs into the front room. The door to his room locked, if he could make it to his room, this would be over.
“Dean!” Sam called, jogging to catch up. “Don’t walk away from me!”
He made it to the kitchen before Sam grabbed his shoulder and hauled him to a stop. Dean shook his hand off right away and stepped back to put some blessed space between them.
“Don’t do this,” Dean said, fast and way too close to pleading. “No amount of booze, or apocalypse, or hell, or death—ours or anyone else’s—has brought this out in the past twenty fucking years, and I’m not talking about it now, in our goddamn kitchen, just because your thought experiment for the day is about how I act like I wanna put acid in your brain and fuck you until you die.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did, and if you tell me one more time that it was a metaphor, I’m gonna clock you.”
Sam put his hands up. Dean couldn’t tell what the fuck his face was supposed to be, somehow apologetic and angry all at once, his mouth twisted into a frown and a horrible, childish blush way up on his cheeks like he’d been running.
“You and me are finally good,” Dean said, enunciating each word, “and I know we love to ruin shit when it’s working out, but I don’t need this. Not now, when we’ve got more than enough to wring our goddamn hands over. That,” he spat the word out, “was not this. Whatever fucked up shit we’ve got going on now, that was just— just—”
It physically hurt him to consider it after so many years of not thinking about it even a little. It was a tight ball of trauma and shame he kept shoved down deep under all the other trauma and shame, half forgotten until a word or a thought would bring it to the surface, where it would stay until he got distracted enough to let it go back down again. He was nearly forty. It wasn’t part of what him and Sam were to each other, not even close, but it still happened, it just. Just.
For a few months, around when—Sam said he’d been twelve but Dean remembered him as at least thirteen, though it didn’t matter much after so long—when they were both kids, anyways, there was a two or three month period where they’d kiss each other, sometimes. Make out.
It was the kind of thing kids did, new in their bodies and experimenting with the detachedness that only children could have, free from the baggage that came with emotional intelligence. Dean was still a virgin and would be for a while, and Sam for years yet. They were figuring out how their bodies worked, what to do with the hormones running rampant through their systems. They’d gotten it kind of wrong, but they couldn’t be faulted for trying.
Dean remembered it only in broad swaths. Summer nights in the long stretches of time that John would leave them alone together when Dean was old enough to babysit but not to hunt. They’d kiss for hours, literally hours with the blissful ignorance of anything that might come after. Never outside, only in private, because they weren’t so young and stupid that they didn’t feel bad about it. Sam’s unwashed hair, the sticky taste of his mouth. He remembered there being a lot of laughing, wheezy snickers when one of them tried something stupid or weird. Dean sealed their mouths together and sucked the air out of Sam’s lungs, Sam stuck his tongue in his ear. Trying things, figuring it out. It wasn’t heavy. It wasn’t anything at all, at the time.
“Innocent childhood boredom,” Dean finished, so fucking awkward.
It sounded stupid, but it was the phrase he’d landed on a long time ago. He clung to it, and it was right. At worst he might tack on experimentation, but he couldn’t say that out loud and it might imply that he’d done any similar experimenting since, which he hadn’t.
The back of his neck was scorching hot, all the way up his ears.
Sam just said, “Uh-huh,” audibly dubious.
Dean wondered if he was thinking the same thing, about how and why they stopped doing it back then. It was a mark against Dean’s case.
“What, you want it to be something else?”
“No! What I’m trying to say is, we didn’t make out a bunch—”
“A bunch, Jesus, it was like two weeks!”
“—when we were kids because we— well, not because of the normal reason kids make out with each other. It was our insane, codependent world of two thing. Which we still have. It was one thing when we were kids, and maybe it’s something different now, but they’re still the same. You can’t see me normally.”
“So this is my fault.”
“No. I can’t see you normally, either, you’re just…”
“More Dahmery about it?” Dean said dryly.
“I was gonna say passionate, but, uh, yeah.”
“Please don’t call me passionate.”
“What would you call it?”
Dean grimaced. “Intense?”
Sam gave him a whatever shrug. Dean groaned.
“We’ve been through so much other shit together, Sam. At some point, doesn’t this stuff get canceled out? Written over?” He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I don’t feel like I was ever a kid. I don’t even remember it anymore.”
“It can’t un-happen. I still remember. You still remember.”
They’d been so unfathomably young. On the couch, Sam’s little hands on his shoulders. Dean’s stomach swooped and clenched and twisted. It was so long ago, he felt like a sick voyeur in his own memories. He wanted to Eternal Sunshine the whole thing out of his head. It had nothing to do with them.
“If I’m fucked up about you at all, it’s because of our fucked up lives now. Because I’ve had to watch you die like a dozen times, and because we’ve spent our entire lives grieving and getting mauled and being responsible for the entire world. Whatever that other stuff was…” He took a deep breath. Looked away. “It wasn’t us. We weren’t who we were five years ago, let alone when we were kids. Those were some other kids.”
Sam apparently didn’t have anything to say. It was a rare pleasure.
“Is that your point?” Dean asked. “You think me dying for you now is the same thing as— as fooling around when we were kids?”
He’d accidentally admitted what he did, in the hospital. He hoped Sam was too distracted to catch it, or maybe it was such an obvious fact that it wasn’t of note. Of course Dean had tried to give his life for Sam’s before his body went cold. Water was wet and the sky was usually blue.
“No,” Sam said, drawn out. His face was serious like a heart attack and Dean didn’t know what to do with it. “I didn’t have a point. I just wanted to talk.”
It was a counterpoint to Sam’s obsession thesis that Dean had no idea, not even close, what Sam was thinking.
—
Their worst conversations always happened at the end of a long day of driving when they were both stir crazy, achy and grimy. It had been like that ever since they were kids, a preteen Dean unbuckling to twist around from the front seat and slap the shit out of Sam, Sam screaming bloody murder and kicking back at him with his skinny legs up over the seat until John yelled so loud it scared them back onto their own halves.
The tough thing about being an adult was that there was no one around to scream at you. You had to keep yourself in check. Dean wasn’t great at it.
They were on their way back to the bunker after a two-day scrounged-up job that was the hunting equivalent of knitting, just something to do with their hands and in no way helpful against the mounting pressure of Amara and the end of all life. Dean thought keeping busy would help more than it did, but he just felt impotent, stressed and tired. Sam was no help either; he’d been moody and near-silent since lunch and now the sky was starting to go purple and red, long shadows on the wet highway. Silence was preferable to the aforementioned screaming, but part of him wanted to see if Sam could still kick him in the head from the back seat. Wasn’t sure if the added height would help or hinder.
“Do you remember how it started?” Sam asked suddenly.
Dean glanced over. Sam had his knees against the dash hunched down to fit, not looking at him. He looked back at the road.
“How what started?” he asked, figuring he’d just lost the thread of an hours-old conversation. Again, Wile E. Coyote: an anvil hung over his head and he was blissfully unaware.
“Our, uh. What did you call it? Innocent boredom?”
Dean squeezed his eyes shut before he remembered he was driving. It was hours still to Lebanon and there was hardly anyone else on the road, a weekday night in nowhere. The urge to veer into the oncoming lane was near irresistible.
“Did I do something to you, Sam? What’s wrong with you?”
“We already talked about it! We broke the seal, I thought—”
“You thought wrong! It’s been re-sealed! I’m gonna pull over if you don’t shut up.”
“It’s not—”
Dean jabbed an accusatory finger over towards where he knew Sam was.
“Try it, bitch! I’ll make you walk, don’t you tempt me.”
“Jesus, fine, cool it.”
“You cool it,” Dean griped.
That silence got them through another tape, both sides. Dean switched on the radio after. Country, twangy bluegrass.
He said, “No,” into the stuffy road trip air between them. Sam looked over.
“No, you don’t remember?”
He got it quick enough that Dean wondered if he was still thinking about it.
“Nope.”
And he didn’t. There were specific days he remembered, locations—the cot in Pastor Jim’s attic, a motel room in Baltimore with a busted radiator, toothpaste-menthol mouths in a very green bathroom somewhere he couldn’t place—but for whatever reason, the actual catalyst eluded him. It was his brain finally giving him some healthy self-preservation, he could only assume.
Asking Sam whether he remembered was on the tip of his tongue, just a reflex, but he bit it back in time. If Sam knew, he’d tell him, and then he’d have to know, and would have to live with maybe being the one who instigated the whole thing. He didn’t think he could do that. There was already enough he had to answer for.
“Don’t tell me,” he said quickly. “If you know, don’t tell me.”
Sam stayed quiet, which was alarming. Did he remember? If he did, how bad was it? The instinct to share his brother’s suffering warred with his preference to not hate himself any more than he already did.
That silence lasted two song blocks and commercial breaks on the radio, over the Kansas border or near it. Dean, a known idiot, thought he was in the clear.
Sam shifted down against the dashboard, his knees going higher, shoulders going down, arms crossed petulantly. It was a childish gesture to see on a big guy in his thirties. Topical.
Sam said, “I had a crush on you, back then. Just for a while. I’m man enough to admit that.”
It was like a sci-fi movie, where all the atmosphere got blasted out of the airlock and everyone gasped and imploded. Dean’s entire chest and body got tight and his vision tunneled.
“You’re joking.”
He wanted to pull over. He needed to pull over, Sam could take the fucking car, he didn’t need it where he was going.
“I didn’t know any better!” Sam said, and he was looking at him, the fucker. “You were the only person anywhere near my age that I’d said two words to!”
“Don’t make it sound like you didn’t go to school! We didn’t lock you in a fucking basement, you went out, you— Are you serious right now?”
“I went out and talked to kids who didn’t know monsters were real! I felt like a weird little pariah, I hated school, and… and then there was you.”
“Holy shit, shut up, don’t tell me this.”
The urge to swerve into the oncoming lane was a physical pain in the back of Dean’s head now. His hands were buzzing on the steering wheel, itching for aimless violence.
Sam snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself, I didn’t even know what sex was.”
“This is so much worse than my thing. I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”
“Having an innocent, little-kid crush—”
“On your brother!”
“—is in no way worse than you wanting to wear my skin like a puppet.”
“Is that another serial killer dig? Fuck you! If I’m such a freak, why do you have a crush on me?”
“You weren’t a freak when you were a kid! And I don’t still!”
“You sure? It sure sounds like you’ve thought about me enough, you and your fuckin’ metaphors. Who’s obsessed now?”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t bad, I said you’re worse!”
“Stop talking. I’m serious, not another word. It’s going in the vault. Do you have a vault? Get one, and put this in there.”
“You’re overreacting.” Sam was looking out his window again, folded almost completely against his door, and even when Dean looked over he couldn’t see his face. “It obviously wasn’t a sex thing. I mean, I was young young, I didn’t know. I wanted to sit next to you. It’s not like I— yeah.”
Dean couldn’t ask. He couldn’t ask a single thing because he told Sam to shut up and if he didn’t shut up, that was opening a door he wanted to stay closed forever, and God, did he need that door to stay closed. But—did the crush predate the making out? Did the making out cause it, and if it did, how had Sam ever forgiven him? What did crush mean, exactly? When did it start? When did it fade? Maybe Sam was right, maybe he couldn’t stand not knowing.
He opened his mouth and shut it and opened it again and made a garbled sound that was kind of like, “Huhg.”
“I don’t know why you’re being so weird,” Sam said, and he had that tone again that made Dean want to reach out across the car and slap his hand over his mouth. “If anyone should be embarrassed about any of this, it’s me. For obvious reasons.”
He didn’t say it exactly, but it was enough for Dean to click his teeth together so hard it hurt.
When they were kids, their experimenting came to an end because Sam came in his pants. Neither of them meant it to happen. There had been a slight escalation towards the end that should never have happened—Sam fully in his lap, hands on his shoulders, on the couch—and it went too far. They were both beyond mortified. They never did it again.
Dean always knew it should have been him who stopped it, before that. He was older. Sam knew it was bad but he really knew, and he was already too old to be doing any of it. Then they grew up, and he felt worse about it before, well, everything. After a guy spent an extra lifetime trapped in hell with the devil, a regrettable adolescent bump and grind session dropped way far down in the horror rankings. He was just grateful Sam never hated him enough to throw it in his face: so are you all fucked up about being my formative sexual experience or what?
It also meant that he’d always wondered, about Sam. Sam never said he went with guys, but Dean watched, and he wondered. He worried he’d screwed him up irreparably with something like that so young, making pathways in his brain that wouldn’t close up. Wasn’t that how it worked? How people got weird fetishes? It terrified him.
took a knife, baby, edgy and dull and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my skull
He realized he hadn’t been present for a full minute, driving on complete autopilot. Bruce Springsteen was cooing at him from the speakers.
I wake up with the sheets soakin’ wet and a freight train runnin’ through the middle of my head—only you—can cool my desire
He looked at Sam without meaning to. He was in the middle of tucking his hair behind his ears. He was already looking back.
ooohhh wooaaah woaaah, I’m on fi—
Dean snapped the radio off.
—
Things got worse and stayed bad. Their ruse with Crowley failed, they didn’t have Lucifer or Cas and Amara was still completely unscathed. So, they got two cases of beer on the way home. It seemed like the easiest way to make sure they both slept.
Somewhere around their seventh beer each, standing up got to be too much effort, so they left their triangle of empties on the war room table and sat next to them, both on the same side and leaning on the table edge like they were at a bar.
Dean started, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Don’t hurt yourself.”
“Shush. I’ve been thinking, and I decided I’m pissed off at you.”
“You decided.”
“Yeah. You said I don’t know anything about you, that you’re just ‘brother.’“
He did air quotes. Sam twisted the cap off a new beer and flicked it across the table so it pinged off the bottles.
“Yeah. And?”
“And, I know everything about you! So fuck you for not appreciating it.”
“Oh please, you don’t know shit. I’m like a caricature, you—” Pause for a swig of beer. “—you know like three things about me, and you use ‘em for everything. Ha ha, Sam likes vegetables, Sam likes books. Grow up.”
Dean aimed a kick at his shins, missed, and ground the heel of his boot into his ankle instead. He left it there when he was done, his foot perched on top of Sam’s crossed ankles.
“You favour your right leg when you run,” Dean said. Swig. “I think it was that fall you took, in Iowa, that vamp nest down in the valley. You fell on your left knee weird. Right?”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Everyone and my college physio knows I have a bad knee. Try again.”
“You have the cilantro soap thing, but if you get something with cilantro on it you don’t ask them to take it off ‘cause you’re too fuckin’ stubborn.”
“Not stubborn.”
“You pluck your grays most mornings, so you have more at the back ‘cause you can’t see them.”
Sam clicked his tongue. “Great.”
“I can get ‘em if you want.”
“Pass.”
“And you’re so pissed that I’m not going gray yet.”
That got a smile out of him, full watt. He laughed, his teeth clinking glassy on the bottle he was trying to drink from.
“Alright, what else? C’mon.”
He jiggled Dean’s foot on his ankles. Dean scooted his chair closer and Sam uncrossed his legs so Dean’s calf moved between his. He kept bouncing his knee, a sure tell that he was drunk (another Sam fact). Dean pushed away a few empties on the table between them so he could lean in.
“You like women’s ankles. Not a sex thing, you just think they’re delicate and nice.”
Sam jabbed a finger at him. “Not a sex thing.”
“Right, ‘cause your sex thing is that, I think—I think!—that you own a vibrator.” Dean grinned, huge and mean. “Heard the buzz too many times, outside a room when you’d bring a girl back. Girls wouldn’t have one on them, not that often, and I’m gonna guess it wasn’t an electric toothbrush.”
That got him a goddamn blush, a real, horrified blush the likes of which Dean hadn’t seen in a long time. Dean knocked their elbows together where they leaned on the table, laughing. Sam elbowed him back.
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“Answer the question, Sammy.”
“You didn’t ask. Next.”
Dean, a benevolent and loving god, let it go. He downed the rest of his beer in a few long pulls. He swept his arm out slowly to push the empties back and give the two of them more space to lean, and the motion brought him closer to Sam. Sam was still flushed, hair untucked, pleasantly rumpled and tired and, Dean was pleased to note, he looked pretty happy. He looked like a guy who wasn’t thinking about the number of apocalypses he’d caused.
“Next,” Sam pressed.
He was liking this, and Dean was happy enough to keep him distracted. It didn’t take him long to come up with something else.
“If you have to pick something that comes in different colours, you always pick green.”
The wattage on Sam’s smile went down a little. “You pick blue.”
“Yup,” Dean agreed.
“What number am I thinking of, between one and ten?”
“Seven. You always pick seven.”
Sam looked serious now, or maybe he was just thinking. His jostling legs came to a stop and Dean’s calf was still between his. Dean ducked his head to make sure that all the bottles on the table were, in fact, empty, and had nothing else in them that he could drink. When he looked up, Sam was still looking at him.
Sam asked, “If I have a nap, what do you do?”
“Is this about your Dahmer thesis again?”
“Hey, you brought it up. Come on, what do you do when I have a nap?” He stared into Dean’s silence. “Do you… also have a nap?”
“Uh. Sometimes.”
“That’s what people do with babies. They sync their sleep schedule.”
“It just makes sense! If we’re working on something, it makes more sense if we’re up at the same time! It’s logistics!”
“That’s insane!”
“What, you don’t nap when I nap?”
“Not always!”
Dean sat back and ran a hand through his hair. He watched Sam watch the movement. He sagged back in his chair.
“What’s your deal with all this? Seriously, man.” Something raw rose up in the core of him, anticipation and dread and the feeling of not quite getting something, knowing you weren’t seeing it right. A silhouette that looked like something else. “Look, I know I went off the rails. We talked, it won’t happen again. So what do you care if I’m too…”
He wouldn’t say Dahmery again, but they were both thinking it. After skittering around, Sam’s eyes found his and held on. Trying to sit still hit him with a new feeling in addition to the others: being way too drunk for a serious conversation. Sam didn’t seem to care.
“Do you want the short answer or the truth?” Sam asked.
Dean could feel his heartbeat in his hands. They were both too drunk for this. He could get up, he could go. He didn’t.
“What’s the short answer?”
Sam was mirroring him, matching his posture. He wondered if he knew he was doing it. He wondered how often he did it to Sam.
“I want to see how far I can push you,” Sam said. “Like pathologically. To bug you.”
“And the truth?”
Sam’s eyes wandered over his face again before he spoke.
“I wanna see if you’ll finally do it.”
“Do what?”
“Dean.”
It was the heaviest Dean he’d ever heard, a lifetime’s weight of Dean full of meaning and understanding tumbling out of Sam’s unthinking mouth, and it made Dean want to run and run until he ran out of country to run away in, rather than sit there and be so fucking known like that.
He saw a hand move and realized it was his own. He reached out and picked lint off Sam’s shirt, lint always stuck to flannel, and once it was gone he left his knuckles there on the front of his shoulder. He didn’t know if Sam had gotten closer suddenly or if it was a slow crawl, but there he was. He could have seen the flecks of gold in his eyes if he’d looked up, but he couldn’t, he was staring down at Sam’s hand on the table where his thumb nail scratched over and over again against his forefinger. Nervous. Several inches away from his own hand, the one that wasn’t still on Sam.
“We’re drunk,” Dean said quietly. His old faithful, liquor as an excuse, a haven, a salve.
“I’ve seen you drunker,” Sam said. Dean could smell him, sour breath and shampoo and sweat. He let his eyes drift up and watched his chest move as he took a deep breath. “I haven’t kissed you since I was twelve. You think it’s still the same?”
Sam’s voice was all the way low. Dean bloomed with sweat. His whole face throbbed.
“That sounds so wrong.”
“It’s true.”
This time Dean could feel him lean in, with his hand against his shoulder, the slow shift and creak as he shuffled to the front of his chair. He put his weight on the forearm he had on the table until he was right in Dean’s space, nearly cheek to cheek like he wanted to tell him something. He didn’t have to go that far, because Dean leaned in too. All he could see was Sam’s hair and part of his ear. He unfurled his hand until it cupped the curve of Sam’s shoulder, solid and warm.
“If we were gonna do this, wouldn’t we have done it already?” Dean whispered. He was whispering. “We’re too old for this shit. This is…”
“Weird, mixed up kid stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“We already did it when we were weird, mixed up kids. We’re just doing it again.”
Great, now Sam was whispering, too. He could feel his breath.
“Sam…”
Sam turned his head and ran his nose along his. Somehow, their lips didn’t touch. He rolled his face and bumped their foreheads together.
“I know you want to know.”
It was a challenge, goading him on like he didn’t also want to know. Sam was the one saying all this shit, but Dean felt like he was the one losing. It felt like playing chicken. Sam went on.
“You know everything else about me, apparently. Might as well know this, too.”
Dean shut his eyes. “This is so fucking stupid.”
“You don’t think that.”
“Don’t tell me what I think.”
Sam’s hands hadn’t moved, weren’t on him. They were both just sitting there like idiots, leaning halfway out of their chairs with their faces touching, absolutely not kissing. They never got this close unless one of them was hurt or dying, when Dean’s hands went automatically to grab Sam’s face and pet his hair like he was soothing a scared kid, but that wasn’t this. That was a bad habit, this was something else.
Sam said, “Let’s just get it out of the way. It won’t be anything.”
Dean wanted so badly to believe him. He did believe him, he decided. It would be like—well, like kissing his brother. It would feel sort of detached, like jerking off, because Sam was him and he was Sam; he didn’t get turned on by seeing his own dick, he wouldn’t get turned on by kissing the back of his hand, and this would be like that.
It wasn’t like that. They were already so close that all Sam had to do to kiss him was lift his chin, and it wasn’t like that. Not by a mile.
It was soft and gentle, just Sam’s lips moving warm against his, Sam’s head tilted slightly so their noses didn’t hit, but a flush crept up Dean’s throat instantly. It was this mounting heat and tightness like a vice around his chest, pressure behind his eyes, blood rushing in his ears until he couldn’t hear anything at all, and then he was moving without his own permission, lips parting and his tongue flicking out slowly to find Sam’s already doing the same, his tongue hot and soft and wet touching his so delicately, and he lost it. Arousal hit him like a fucking train and his hands were in Sam’s hair, cocking his head to push closer and slot their mouths together, bite him, eat him, as Sam’s giant fucking mitts clawed over the backs of his shoulders and yanked on his shirt, pulling hard, mindlessly wanting to be closer, closer, panicky-fast. Sam’s hair was so soft between his fingers and in his fist when he closed it tight and pulled hard to tug his head the way he wanted. He got half out of his chair to lean over him and pull until he tipped his head back, anything to get deeper, the rasp of his stubble against his lips, spit—
They burst apart like opposed magnets at exactly the same time.
Chair wheels clattered on the floor and Dean was standing, up, back, away.
Sam looked mortified, so Dean could only imagine how bad he looked himself. Half-dead, maybe. Fully dead, ideally.
His brain hadn’t come back online yet and his mouth wasn’t working. His heart was beating so fast it made him breathe hard with the shock of it, and all he could do was stare at Sam as he stared back at him all blotchy and wide-eyed.
Sam spoke before he could, tripping over the words with how quick he forced them out.
“This was a bad idea.”
So it wasn’t just him. That was potentially worse.
“Too far.”
He couldn’t remember why he thought it wouldn’t be like that. It was kissing a person, of course it would feel like kissing a person. That’s how it felt when they were kids, too, did he forget? If it was boring, they wouldn’t have done it.
Something he definitely forgot (see: intentionally buried) was that he’d been Sam’s first kiss. That meant he taught him how to kiss. He didn’t expect Sam to still kiss exactly like him twenty years later.
Sam wiped his hands on his jeans.
“I’m gonna—”
“Yeah. Good. Yeah.”
Sam practically ran out of the room. Dean waited long enough to make sure he didn’t run into him in the hallway.
—
Dean skulked out of his room wrapped in his robe the next morning, nursing half a hangover and a whole sense of impending doom, now for more reasons than one.
He hoped he could make it to the coffee machine without running into Sam. It was after ten, Sam would be up and somewhere that wasn’t the kitchen, and if he didn’t want to die any sooner than the rest of them, he would have left him some coffee.
He crept down the hall like the goddamn Pink Panther. Everything was quiet and he could smell coffee. He hit the kitchen, touched the coffee pot: warm. Sam would live another day. Dean could die alone, crushed by intrusive thoughts of his brother’s tongue in his mouth.
He got a mug and poured himself a cup. It was decently hot, even. He sat at the table and brought the mug to his lips, and before he realized it was too hot, he heard a sound behind him.
“Morning.”
He whipped around. Sam was coming down the steps into the kitchen, showered and dressed.
Dean had no idea where to even start. “H—”
“Do we have chemistry?”
He might as well have punched him in the throat.
Sam got a cup of coffee like nothing was anything, while Dean thought again about how they kissed the same. That meant he kissed perfectly, to Dean, and probably vice versa, and then that sent him screaming over the edge of what other formative experiences they shared that might have shaped other parts of their sexuality, and God, what if they had some of the weird shit in common?
Dean hunched over further in his seat. He stared down into the dark, peaceful surface of his coffee.
“I am begging you to stop talking about this, man.”
Sam leaned against the counter. “I’m serious. People think we’re a couple sometimes, what’s up with that? Is it because we—”
“We what, Sam?” Dean snapped. “Nevermind, don’t answer that. No. It’s not because anything. It’s just, you know, two guys, clearly close, same age. I’m pretty and you’re clean. People are stupid.”
“Hey, if the shoe fits.”
Dean all but bared his teeth at him. It was hard to be threatening while wearing a robe, bare feet and mussed hair.
“If the shoe fits, you pretend it doesn’t, you get new shoes, and you don’t tell anyone you tried those shoes on, ever.”
“Why are you mad at me? You’re the one who—”
“Sam.”
“Did anyone ever think Bobby and Rufus were dating?”
“Maybe,” Dean said defensively. “Not like Bobby would tell us if they did. And neither of them were pretty or clean.”
“You think they ever made out?”
“I’m gonna kill you.”
—
He didn’t have the luxury of avoiding Sam with everything that was going on, and God only knew what he’d corner him about next. God, literally, might know, and he was there now, but nothing could make Dean talk to him about any of the Sam stuff except maybe to say I would LOVE to know what you were thinking when you made us like this.
He remembered some Christian platitude from his youth, ‘God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers,’ and of all the things in his life it could apply to, whatever insane song and dance he’d been doing with Sam the past few weeks felt particularly apt. He kept catching Sam looking at him, and he caught him because he kept looking at Sam, too. He told himself it was stress, having God and Lucifer oozing their heavenly daddy issues into his place of rest, but he wasn’t so sure. He caught Sam looking a lot.
He was in the garage vacuuming out the car when Sam texted him. He picked his phone up off the roof.
Come here
Vague, but standard. Dean texted back.
where?
Zero seconds later: Room.
Less standard, but they’d both been spending more time in their bedrooms with the full house. He left his things in the garage and found his way back inside, heading with only minor dread towards Sam’s room.
The door was shut when he got there and he opened it without knocking. It was dim inside, just the bedside lamp on, and warm.
Sam was in it. He had just showered. He was standing there, looking at him, and he was virtually naked.
Before Dean could think of anything better to say, he croaked, “God’s in our guest room.”
Sam shrugged at him.
He was holding a towel just over his abdomen so it fell between his legs but left his hips bare on either side of that, exposing the hard, pale cut of muscle going towards his groin. A wiry trail of hair disappeared behind the towel. His body was a fucking temple in a way Dean’s never was, intentionally healthy and strong where Dean just kind of fell into his, carried a few extra pounds and years and managed to stay hot thanks to a stellar metabolism and minor weight lifting.
Jealousy twanged deep in Dean’s gut. Jealousy.
“Would it be better if you got it out of your system?” Sam asked, low and slow. “Wanting to know.”
Dean’s mouth was dry, just standing frozen in the open doorway. Everything abstract was suddenly concrete. One cheap Bed Bath and Beyond towel stood between him and absolutely insanity. It was a thin towel, he could almost see the shape of it.
“It’s not like that,” he said.
It sounded so wooden. He had no idea what his hands were doing but he hoped it looked normal. His eyes were nowhere near Sam’s face. Sam wasn’t moving.
“Okay. Answer the question.”
He couldn’t. He didn’t even know what getting it out of his system would look like. Did he mean sex? Or would he lay down and let Dean examine him like some freak pinning up butterflies in shadow boxes? And get what out of his system? Sam, in his entirety? Nothing could get that out. It would be like one of those houses built on a cliff, yanking out the struts that kept it up and watching it slump and creak and crash down the hill as it tore itself apart. That was the whole problem.
“No,” he heard himself say. “It’d be way, way worse.”
If there was nothing to get out, it would just let more in. Sam was on the other end of that fucking kiss, he had to know.
The only conclusion he could come to was that this was some kind of game, to Sam. Just another prank, his apparently pathological need to bug him, a distraction. They hadn’t been in a jokey place with each other for a while—not much levity left, not much to laugh about—but he wouldn’t put it past him. Maybe he thought it was funny, how fucked up Dean was over him. ‘Shoot acid into your brain’ funny. He always had a shitty sense of humour, and even worse timing.
It was too big for Dean to know how to ask, so he just stood there and looked at him. Summer tan lines at his hips and the still-healing wound in his abdomen, stitched with hospital precision. Brother. Sammy.
At his silence, Sam said, “Alright,” like it was that easy, and turned around to root through his dresser.
The towel was just over his crotch, so when he turned around Dean could see his naked ass, just on display. Dean looked, of course he looked, there was nothing else to look at, miles of smooth skin along his scarred, muscled back, long lean legs, wide shoulders and narrow, boyish hips.
He dropped the towel. He was still facing away, Dean couldn’t see. He found a t-shirt in the drawer and threw it over his shoulder. His wet hair stuck to the back of his neck.
He said, “In or out, but close the door.”
Dean was too far gone to talk himself around what Sam meant or why he said it, to make excuses or interpretations or dive into outrage or denial. All he could do was try to rein in the way every cell in his body screamed in in in in in in in in in in.
He snapped his mouth shut. It had been open for a while. He swore under his breath, stepped out into the hall and shut the door behind him. He could hear Pantera coming from Lucifer’s room a few doors down.
—
Days later, he was alone in his room watching a movie on his laptop, his head spinning, making a piss-poor attempt to keep his mind off the end of life as they knew it.
He knew the knock at his door was Sam even before it opened, despite their house guests; he swore he could feel him, a vibrating, dreadful energy. He thought again about the possibility of Sam taking on the Mark and fear, rage and a thousand other things made his chest ache. A failed plan, but also a dodged bullet.
Sam opened the door and leaned in his doorway, and for a second they just looked at each other, silently commiserating. Dean sat up against the headboard and uncrossed his ankles. Sam was wearing a blue denim shirt that he was pretty sure was his again. It looked good on him. He caught him doing laundry the other day, sorting their shirts and boxers into neat piles on top of the dryer, and said something along the lines of is it really one of your priorities to die clean?
Sam said, “This feels worse than normal.”
Dean held back a ‘no shit, Sherlock.’
“We’ll… we’ll figure it out. We always do.”
Sam’s silence spoke volumes and Dean knew what it said. All the rest of it and they’d never gotten quite as bad as ‘God is dying.’
“Can I come in?” Sam asked.
“You sound like a vampire.”
“Can I?”
Sam didn’t ask to come into his room. They’d lived two steps away from each other their entire lives, if Sam asked to be invited in anywhere, they’d never get anything done. So. Maybe he was asking something else.
“Yeah,” Dean said.
It felt stupid to say no at the end of all things, and he wondered how much trouble that specific sentiment was about to get him in.
Sam came into his room, shut the door behind him and joined him on the bed, which was just big enough that they didn’t touch. Not that Dean couldn’t feel the heat blasting off him.
Sam saw his laptop and laughed. “Is that—”
“Lost Boys,” Dean confirmed, and Sam laughed again.
“When was the last time you watched a non-80s movie?”
“Hey, cinema peaked early.”
Dean didn’t have a beer because he didn’t want to leave his room and run into Chuck wasting away somewhere, or anyone else, and Sam hadn’t brought any. He didn’t know what to do with his hands when he wasn’t holding a drink, but Sam didn’t say anything else and they fell into a comfortable silence, the movie audio coming out tinny over his cheap laptop speakers.
“You used to watch this every time it was on TV,” Sam said, fond. “One of those never-skip, never mattered how far through movies.”
He shifted closer under the guise of getting comfortable and their shoulders pressed together.
“Brothers fighting vampires? It’s topical.”
They’d made out during it at least once, Dean was pretty sure, that or another movie about brothers. He remembered feeling squicky about it. Corey Haim’s name was Sam, even, the universal little brother name.
Maybe Sam remembered too, because he saw him looking at him out of the corner of his eye. His arm was pressed to his all the way down now. Sam cleared his throat.
“You really don’t remember how it started?”
“No.” Dean sighed at the screen. It seemed stupid to avoid it anymore, or pretend he didn’t know what it was. They could at least talk about it to get it out of their system, like Sam said, and thinking about that brought him another vision of the near-naked Sam that had that haunted him all week, tan lines and obliques. It was different now. He was fraying. “You do, don’t you?”
“Yup.”
“Will you shut up if I let you tell me?”
“Probably.”
“I’m gonna need better reassurance than that.”
Sam ignored him. He turned to face him and fear spiked into Dean’s throat at the thought of getting a live-action demonstration.
“We… we were wrestling, or sparring or something. And you let me pin you.”
“Let you.”
“Yeah. You let me win all the time, I was twelve.” He was so quiet, the way people got when they told secrets. “I just remember, I had my face, like, here.” He thumbed the junction of Dean’s neck and shoulder, but he didn’t act it out. “And I turned my head in towards you. And you turned yours, and we—uh, we kissed. Or I kissed you, I don’t know, but, I think that was the first.”
Even hearing Sam say the word ‘kiss’ made him twitchy. That first time came back to him somewhat, gauzy details his brain had compressed into low-resolution. Sensations more than anything: the white-hot spike of fear-wrong-thrill, a scratchy rug under the backs of his hands, the sick realization that his Protect Sammy Protocol was experiencing its first ever catastrophic failure.
“In Idaho,” he said slowly.
“Yeah.”
“The motel had snot-green carpets.”
“That’s the one.”
“So you started it. The first time.”
Sam held back a laugh, like it was funny. His dimples were criminal when he smiled.
“I started it every time, man, you wouldn’t— you really blocked it out, huh?”
“Looks like it.”
“Huh,” Sam said again. “Well. I won’t bore you with the details.”
Sam’s reminder lifted Dean’s veil a little. He remembered it felt like a competition, trying to dare the other into it with looks alone, irritating touches, making fun of each other for each other. It wasn’t that he hadn’t started it, it was just that Sam always lost.
Maybe because Sam already liked him then.
The thought that it had been more than a warm body and an empty afternoon to preteen Sam, and that preteen Sam was also this Sam, and he’d kissed both of them, made him feel fucking insane. Screaming, talking to himself, gesticulating wildly insane.
He was fraying. God was dying in their living room and they were gonna follow him pretty shortly if they didn’t come up with something good, soon, but instead they were sitting in bed watching The Lost Boys and Sam’s dimples were fucking criminal, something so boyish and sweet on someone so big and broad and Dean was fraying, unraveling, going to absolute fucking pieces over it.
He looked back at the screen. He tried to watch the movie or at least pretend to. He could hardly hear it anymore. He drummed his fingers on his thighs.
“So, you hounding me for weeks about this shit,” he said. “It’s about your little crush?”
He didn’t like Sam’s pause. He really, really didn’t like it. He could hear him breathing. He wouldn’t look over at him. He stared at the screen. Glittery vampire blood and the kid from Bill and Ted getting eviscerated. Focus on that.
“No,” Sam said finally, making that tiny word ten years long. Dean saw the hesitation, but after a second, Sam nudged his knee against his and left it there. “It’s about yours.”
There it was. No games, no dares, no plausible deniability, just one simple accusation that Dean was too worn down to pretend was anything other than very, very true.
So maybe he wasn’t done experimenting, and maybe he had a few choice words for the short, bearded almighty who didn’t think to rewire whatever it was inside him that gave him this sick, awful wanting, but he didn’t have to drag Sam down with him, not even at the end of the world. One final act of selflessness he could do for his brother.
“I’m gonna go,” he managed.
Nausea twisted at him and he felt himself get up, numb all over, push the laptop away and slide off the bed, stalking for the door. It didn’t matter that it was his room, he’d find a new room, he’d go, he’d drive.
“Dean.”
Another breathy Dean like a ton of bricks. It knocked all the air out of his lungs. He froze, hesitated like a coward, and then he heard the bed frame creak and Sam was right behind him.
“Dean,” Sam said again, this time like he was sad, like he was asking, and Dean’s Protect Sammy Protocol overrode all his self-interested fail-safes.
He turned around. Sam was right, right behind him, so close he was looking at the pit of his throat, thankfully too close to look him in the eye. Dean started to babble, pure panic and sweat and nothing left to hide behind.
“Not now, Sammy, not—”
“There might not be a later.”
“Don’t just—”
“It’s not because of that. You’ve gotta believe me.”
Sam got even closer, so close their socked feet almost touched. Dean was already so reluctantly, guiltily turned on just from the sheer proximity of him, his whole body thrumming.
“What do you want?” Sam whispered, him and his goddamn whispering.
Dean shook his head, ducked his face, ran a hand over his mouth. Sam said it again.
“Hey. What do you want?”
Dean was so tired, so worn out by fear and failure and it didn’t seem like it mattered much at the end, anyways. Sam was asking.
“I wanna… I wanna count your teeth. With my fingers.”
It went over well, he thought. Sam sounded amused.
“Yeah?”
“I wanna put my fingers down your throat and hold your hair back while you throw up.”
“You did that already. Sophomore year, I got wasted on Fireball, and you—”
“I wanna wax your chest “
“Wow.”
“I— I wanna make you dinner. I wanna read you books. Sam.”
His voice broke at the end and he grabbed Sam’s forearm to get the rest across. Sam had gotten thinner as he got older, ropey where he’d been so juiced at twenty-five, twenty-six, and Dean kept his head down, watching his hand on Sam’s ropey arm, his wrinkled knuckles and the veins like highways under Sam’s skin.
He didn’t know how else he was supposed to say it, if not like that. Sam would get it.
Sam put his hand on the side of Dean’s neck; Dean closed his eyes at the insane spark of skin contact without meaning to.
So, Sam got it.
He pushed the pad of his thumb over Dean’s jaw and sighed. “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
Dean slid his hand up Sam’s arm. He was so big; he always forgot to notice, it never stood out until he had his hands on him. When he got up to his shoulder, he buried both hands in his hair, just holding the shape of his skull, and he nearly shuddered with the feel of it. When Sam twisted a hand in his shirt and pulled him in, he went, until that last second when he ducked his head.
He put his forehead against the front of Sam’s shoulder, close enough that he felt the hot skin of his throat against him. Sam’s hand smoothed up his back and they were pressed together all the way down. Dean couldn’t get a breath in, couldn’t think, his heartbeat was a drumroll, fast and endless. Sam dug his fingers into the back of his neck, his thumb hard in the notch of his vertebrae.
“What are we doing?” he whispered.
Dean tightened his fingers in Sam’s hair until he heard his breath hitch, felt it against his chest. He thought about that drunken kiss in the war room, yanking his head back, the way Sam chased his mouth.
“I don’t know.”
He lifted his head. He could see Sam’s pulse fluttering and he put his mouth on it, hardly a kiss. The gap in their heights was small enough that it put his face against Sam’s jaw, two-day stubble scratching his cheek. The way he smelled, so achingly familiar and so strong now, so close to the source, made him lightheaded. He moved his lips against him and Sam closed his whole hand around the back of his neck.
“Dean—”
“It’s okay. It’s okay, it’s just us.”
He heard him swallow. “Just us.”
“Yeah.”
‘Just us’ had been a balm over so much in the past, it had to work for this, too.
He pulled back to look at him, his hands still in his hair. Sam’s eyes searched his face, wide and terrified, and kept landing on his mouth, his lips parted. The movie went on behind them, we definitely blew plan A. Time to activate plan B.
For the first time, Dean started it. He leaned up and kissed him.
There was no wind-up this time, no playing nice. Sam wrenched him in and licked into his mouth with this low sound in his throat, anguish and lust and giving-up that Dean felt like it was his own, said yes to with every inch of his body. It felt insane to call it lust when Sam was right, it was everything, he wanted to own him and be him and be with him and there were no lines that mattered between any of it anymore.
Dean slid his hands up Sam’s neck, jammed thumbs up under his jaw and took his mouth again and again in deep, fevered kisses, not thinking anymore, too overwhelmed by every single one of his senses full of Sam, the taste of his mouth and the crush of his hands, more terrifying at nearly forty than it was at sixteen because it meant so much more after all the loss and horror and proven devotion that crackled between them.
Sam moved back, all but panting; Dean followed, sucked his lower lip, bit it, fingers on his chin pulling his mouth open to kiss him again.
“Jesus,” Sam breathed, giving up on whatever else he was going to say or do. “Dean—”
Dean kissed him hard, groaning helplessly. His name had never sounded so good in anyone’s mouth because fuck yes, he was Dean Winchester, he’d never been more Dean Winchester in his entire life, like his whole self was a feedback loop from him to Sam and back. His hands shook unless he had them clenched in something, Sam’s shirt, his hair, wrapped around his shoulders or biceps or gripping his face so hard it had to hurt, but Sam just let him, gave as good as he got, dug his nails into Dean’s back and made him hiss.
Sam grabbed his ass when he came up for air and he laughed, hysterical, he forgot what laughing felt like and he never had any idea about the rest of it, Sam’s massive hands feeling him up and his hard chest and the way it felt to tilt his head up, shorter for the first time and losing his mind over it because it was Sam.
Sam shoved his flannel off his shoulders and rubbed his bare arms with an appreciativeness Dean recognized and burned up over, Sam liking his arms the way girls liked his arms, something so banal in the context of everything they were to each other, but of course he liked his arms, that’s how it was when you wanted to fuck someone.
His knees were buckling. Sam would be insufferable if he knew.
He dragged his mouth off Sam’s and listened to him pant into his ear, kissed messy up the perfect line of his cheek, no plan, dizzy with oxygen loss and zero blood going to his brain.
“Sammy.”
“Yeah. Yes. Where do you— What do we—”
“Come on,” Dean said against his jaw, “you were always braver than me.”
He pulled Sam towards the bed by his shirt, still attached at the mouth, knees knocking, both of them with so many notches in their bed posts and still going clumsy and stupid with wanting. Sam pushed him down and he slapped the laptop closed and shoved it somewhere, his hands going to Sam’s shirt and fumbling with buttons like he’d never done it before. Sam wouldn’t let him breathe or look and that wasn’t helping, he was on top of him and manhandling him up the bed like he was nothing.
Dean shoved his hands inside Sam’s shirt as soon as he could and Sam got it off the rest of the way. Dean skated fingers over his bullet wound.
“Are you—”
“Fine, God—”
Sam crushed him back into the mattress with his mouth on his and Dean realized he’d never had anyone in this bed, they didn’t bring girls to the bunker. The memory foam felt so good under him with all Sam’s thousand pounds weighing him down, good and firm enough to get leverage on when Sam put his thigh between his and rocked into him.
“You,” Sam started, losing the thread for a long minute when Dean kissed him again, his hands roaming wide over the acres of his bare back. “You kiss just like me.”
“You kiss like me, bitch, I kissed first.”
“Same difference.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying!”
Dean had his own thought experiment, about how it wasn’t obsession if it was them, it was self-discovery, because he was Sam and Sam was him and it meant none of this had to matter more than they wanted it to because they were already everything to each other and had been for a long time. Time was a circle, and God, could he get used to how Sam felt in his bed, or maybe he was just finally losing his mind.
He was so hard it was uncomfortable and Sam knew, he had to, he had his leg right up between his and Dean was riding it like a cheerleader under the bleachers, he hadn’t even noticed. His hands had to be leaving marks in Sam’s back. He could feel Sam too, like a warhead against his thigh, and one of them had to go first. He cocked his shoulder forward and slid a hand between their bodies, between Sam’s legs.
Sam stopped kissing him to pant, “Oh, thank God,” so quiet and relieved, and Dean laughed.
“Fuck, do they make you carry a license for that thing?”
Sam laughed too, sounding almost as insane as Dean felt. He was so hard and hot even through his jeans and Dean had no idea what he was doing but he knew enough to put it together, and didn’t think Sam would care much either way.
He pushed at Sam’s shoulder and hip until he rolled off him, then turned on his side so they faced each other. Sam fumbled his way through getting his jeans off, but left his boxers on, which Dean found weirdly sweet, so he did, too.
Sam slapped a hand against his face, clumsy, and pulled him back into a kiss, shuffling around, trying to figure out what to do with his arms. Dean palmed his dick again and Sam sighed shaky against his mouth, his hips moving into the touch. He gave him a few strokes through his boxers, feeling out the shape of him, almost too thick to get his fingers around. He swore softly as Sam’s mouth went slack against his. The fabric was already wet where the head of his dick pushed up against it.
“Okay,” Dean said, to himself, to Sam, like he was steeling up to give him a shot or stitches. “Okay, it’s okay.”
He kissed him again to keep him quiet, both of them, and slid Sam’s boxers down as far as the tips of his fingers would let him, then hiked up a leg, hooked his toes in the waistband and used his foot to pull them down the rest of the way, down Sam’s calves, over his ankles and off. Sam was breathing way too hard.
“Dean—”
“Yeah,” Dean panted, another kiss, a reassuring hand stroking Sam’s bare hip, Sam now completely naked and Dean in his shirt and boxers. He wanted to look, stare, catalogue, but that would mean not having his face on Sam’s face. In lieu, he smoothed his hands down his front to feel what he couldn’t see; his thatch of chest hair, the flat planes of his stomach and finally, finally, his hard cock, which fit fucking perfectly in his hand.
Sam bit Dean’s lip, hard. His hips jerked into the stroke of his fingers. “Fuck—”
“Are you always this sensitive?”
His voice was hoarse. He couldn’t even think. Sam was so hard, tacky and hot against his palm, and the angle wasn’t great but he didn’t seem to need much. His legs slid between Dean’s, ankles knocking, too much leg for the bed.
“No. Not— no.”
That made Dean endlessly, horribly greedy, sick, blurting precome into his boxers. He nudged Sam’s face with his until he kissed him again, and Sam could barely do that. The hand that wasn’t under their pillow grabbed Dean’s arm, petting, gripping, trembling like a goddamn leaf.
“What do you like?” Dean asked. Sam just kissed him again, but Dean leaned back an inch, teasing. “Hey.”
“Anything,” Sam breathed, clearly not listening, which was an ego boost that would rattle around in Dean’s head for a while. He pressed.
“What do you do? When it’s you?”
“I— Tighter. Up under the head, your, yeah, like that, Jesus—”
Sam dug his hand into the back of Dean’s skull and held on, breathing too hard to kiss anymore. Dean took his hand off him and he whined, he fucking whined, and didn’t say a thing when Dean slid his fingers into his mouth. He let him press his fingers over the soft, wet flat of his tongue, sucked on them, chased them with his tongue when he slid them over his teeth and as he drew them out. When Dean wrapped his fingers around his cock again it was so wet he didn’t know what was spit and what was precome, Sam had been leaking for a while, constant, and Dean wondered again whether he was always like this or if it was another thing that was apparently just for him.
He worked the circle of his fingers up over the head and felt Sam’s fingers flex in his hair every time, heard his involuntary gasps of pleasure, felt his breath on his lips. His eyes were open and Sam’s were shut and he watched, blurry and out of focus, his eyes squeezing tight, his brow furrowing.
He took advantage of the situation.
“Do you have a vibrator?”
Sam didn’t even open his eyes. “Yeah.”
He asked the only question that mattered.
“Do girls use it on you?”
“If they want.”
“Do they?”
“They have.”
“Can I?”
“Not tonight.”
“I know.” He kissed his cheek because it was there, and felt stupid. “Sammy—”
“I know,” Sam said back, and Dean had no doubt he did.
He unfolded the hand in Dean’s hair, with effort, and stroked shakily over the back of his neck. They were both sweating now, Dean placing soft kisses on Sam’s open mouth, jerking him faster, feeling the way his whole body drew up and his cock thickened in his hand.
“Yeah, there you go, you like that?”
Sam made a choking kind of sound. “I knew you’d be a talker, fuckin’ narcissist—”
“You like it.”
“Shut up.”
Sam unfolded the arm curled under his head so he could get both hands on Dean, even though it meant one bent awkwardly between them, sliding one hand between Dean’s cheek and the pillow to cup his head in his hands and keep their foreheads pressed together.
Dean was never big on cameras, videos, pictures, but all he could think about was wanting to remember every second of this forever, however long forever lasted, every tell of Sam’s pleasure: his curled toes, feet dug in the sheets, the breathy, reluctant grunts and gasps muffled against Dean’s mouth, against his cheek. He was shaking so bad. Days from his own death, and Dean felt invincible.
Sam’s whole body was tight. Dean was relentless. Sam laced his fingers behind Dean’s neck and held on, his mouth right against his.
He whispered, “I’m gonna come,” and his breath hitched.
Dean kept his eyes open, too close to see anything besides smears of colour. He swallowed hard.
“Okay.”
Sam shuddered and sighed. He breathed out and Dean breathed in at the same time, taking his air into his lungs and holding it. Dean felt him pulse, once, twice, and then he fucked into his hand and went still and started spilling out over his fingers, dripping down onto the sheets. Dean worked him through it, his own dick twitching with anticipation and sympathy and aching for the kind of release he could feel tearing through Sam, mindless with how bad he wanted it.
Sam was pretty quiet, just breathing, broken gasps he tucked against Dean’s face.
“‘Okay’?” Sam asked, almost laughing.
He was still drooling come over his fingers and Dean couldn’t think about much else.
“I panicked.”
Sam kissed him for real for the first time in a while, with a low, happy moan that Dean felt all the way down to the core of him. He didn’t want to let him go, still pulling him soft and slow and feeling the twitches of aftershocks go through him, and the way he halfheartedly tried to twist his hips away.
“You ever go more than once?” Dean asked, quiet, physically feeling himself become obsessed with the idea, even moreso when Sam looked mildly alarmed.
“Not lately.”
“You don’t get laid at all lately.”
“I mean not since I was young.” He pulled back far enough to get a look at Dean’s face and cut him off. “No.”
Dean still had his hand around his dick. He tugged. “Quitter.”
“No.”
“No like never, or no like not now?”
Sam just kissed him again, and it kept him from dwelling on whether those were the same thing.
Dean groaned, so close just from touching him and watching him that it felt like his whole pelvis was on fire, pleasure already sparking at the base of his spine and making him desperate and sloppy. He couldn’t remember the last time he got so worked up, ready to go off over nothing like some kid. Of course it would take something as catastrophic as his naked brother to get him there.
Sam tried to get a hand into his boxers but Dean gripped his wrist and shook his head, sliding downwards to fit his body against Sam’s.
He rolled his hips against him and Sam picked it up quick, got his thigh between Dean’s and flexed it to give him something to rut against. He kept kissing him and it made him crazy to think where else Sam’s tongue could go, whether they’d have time or if Sam wanted to or maybe that he was so stupid for finally having him and wasting it on grinding, but he couldn’t wait and it felt right and Sam was making all these encouraging mumbling sounds against his mouth. One of his hands was on Dean’s ass, guiding him, and that was the first time he’d really been back there, and Jesus, did that get Dean’s imagination going.
“Sammy—”
He was there, finally, stumbling desperate over the edge. He felt his thighs lock up, mouth slipping off Sam’s to bury his face in his neck as his shoulders bowed and he shuddered all over, emptying into his boxers, sticking to Sam’s bare skin. He couldn’t stop moving, he couldn’t remember the last time he came so hard and from something so stupid, his hips still moving in long thrusts against the crux of Sam’s thigh.
Up near his temple, Sam was panting up at the ceiling like he was the one coming. He had his hands up under Dean’s shirt, stroking his back. The continued friction Dean’s spent dick was too much, perfect, excruciating, he couldn’t stop. Sam’s arms slid around him and he went still.
“Holy shit.”
Sam sounded distinctly pleased. Dean laughed at himself, nothing else to say.
Once he had half a brain back, he pushed himself up on his hands and looked down at Sam, really looked for the first time since he got naked, all flushed and tousled and boneless in his bed like he belonged there. He rolled off him and Sam hauled him in, ignoring his wet boxers, and struggled to pull his shirt over his head without sacrificing too much of their kiss. Dean’s whole body was buzzing, exhausted, the smooth skin of his chest prickling under Sam’s rough hands.
He grabbed Sam’s face and realized he still had come on his hand when Sam made a yech noise and slapped it away.
“It’s yours,” Dean reminded him.
“So?”
Dean leaned back far enough that Sam could see, brought his hand to his mouth and licked Sam’s come from between his fingers. He had to know. Sam’s face lit up, pleased and disgusted all at once.
“I knew it. I would’ve put money on that.”
“I’m consistent,” Dean agreed. He moved his tongue around inside his mouth. “Hm. Better than mine.”
“Ugh.”
“It’s a compliment.”
He wiped his hand on the sheets; it was his bed. He closed his eyes, opened them, and found Sam looking down at his newly bare chest and stomach, skipping fingers over old wounds and newer ones. His fingers paused when they hit the waist of his boxers, then dove in, pulling them down over his thighs and off with minor help from Dean.
“Wow. So this is what all the fuss is about.”
“What fuss?”
“Yours. You’d think it was a foot long.”
Sam took his half-hard dick in his hand and gave it a few experimental strokes, making Dean fold up with oversensitive sparks and pleasure and almost crack Sam’s jaw with his head. He pressed his face to Sam’s throat.
“Hey. Hey.”
Sam laughed softly and let him go. Dean, never one to miss an opportunity, stayed huddled in close, silently daring Sam to say something. He didn’t. He threw an arm over his shoulder and slotted their legs together again.
Dean almost dozed off. The bunker was permanently cold but Sam was a furnace. Dean’s thoughts circled aimlessly, vague fear and shame and the logistics of having Chuck around; he’d know or already knew, that’s what God did, and there was always a chance he was tactless enough to tell Cas, Crowley or Rowena, but it wasn’t worth thinking about. Faced with the unmaking of the universe, it seemed stupid to worry about people knowing you were hot for your brother.
He thought Sam was asleep by his slow, even breathing, so he tipped his face up and kissed his neck. He wasn’t. He made a sleepy noise and his arm shifted over Dean’s back.
“You good?” he asked, his voice sleep-rough.
Dean laughed. “I don’t even know how to answer that.” He slid his hand up Sam’s side until he found the bullet wound and pressed his palm over it, feeling the damaged heat and the smooth, new skin. “How long do you think we’ve been like this?”
It was Sam’s turn to laugh.
“Probably since we kept making out with each other twenty years ago, if I had to guess? Maybe we didn’t clue in, but. It’s not new.” He stroked a hand aimlessly over Dean’s shoulders. “Every last night before the end of the world, I half expected you to… I dunno.”
“Yeah?”
“I guess. I don’t know if I knew I was thinking it, but there was always just this… anticipation. Before your deal came due. Before the cage. I dunno. I expected something, I didn’t know what.”
Dean reared back slowly until he could look at him. He couldn’t remember their last night before any of those things, too wracked with sleepless grief and terror to form new memories, but the thought of Sam wondering about some nameless anticipation, waiting for a whisper and a weight at the edge of his motel room bed, hit him so much harder than he ever thought. If he could go back—
“What?” Sam asked, panic creeping in.
Dean wanted to say: Why are your nostrils shaped like that? Why aren’t mine? Would you ever dye your hair? Why are you taller than Dad? I wanna see you hold a kitten. I wanna huff your armpit sweat. I wanna touch that dangly thing at the back of your throat. I wanna wash your asshole. Let’s do poppers. Show me your internet history. I’d fuck you in public if you let me. I’d let you stomp on my balls if you even suggested you wanted it, and what would you do for me? Really? If the chips were down like they’d never been down before?
He said, “I want you,” and his voice cracked. “You were right. All of it. I know you won’t believe me, but. It’s you and me, Sammy. We can figure out the rest, but that’s all it’s ever been, you know that.”
He knew it was too much immediately after he said it, but he couldn’t tack on a ‘or, you know, whatever’ to soften the blow.
Sam’s face was—a lot. Not the devastated wince he half expected, but shock, loss, awe, and if he really wanted to pump his tires, devotion. Maybe understanding, or something like it.
“I know.” Sam curled a hand around the back of his neck, eyes locked on his, and pulled him in. “It’s okay.”
Another kiss, slow and deep, both Sam’s hands stroking his hair as he rolled on top of him again, boxing him in with his arms. Even just kissing him was toe-curlingly, maniacally good, so good he worried it would raise his bar forever and make this a high he’d spend the rest of his life chasing, however long that was. And they hadn’t even fucked yet.
“Sam,” he mumbled, no follow-up, just voicing the cacophony of Sam in his head. It was Sam. It was him. Sam kissed him again, turned him back on his side and kissed him until their movements got slow, sharing breath, hardly more than nudging their lips together. Tomorrow, they’d figure it out. Tonight, he barely had the energy to reach up and turn off his lamp.
Sam took his hand and rolled over, pulling Dean’s arm over his side. He tugged ineffectually at the sheets until they squirmed under them, and then Dean snugged right up behind him like he was fucking made for him, because he was, his knees fitting into the space behind his, face smushed against the top of his back.
“Little spoon,” he said against his nape, nosing his hair out of the way. “You sure you don’t still have a crush on me?”
Sam bit the back of his hand. “Go to sleep.”