Archive of Our Own

Work Text

NOW
Lebanon, Kansas
The Men of Letters Bunker
Sam would’ve never told anyone exactly when he made the decision. Maybe not even Dean.But it was while the two of them were in the bathroom, with Sam absently brushing his teeth, not even really awake yet. Behind him, Dean was in the shower jerking off.It was the mundanity that set off a flood of sentiment. Of all the things to miss. Hardly the first time he’d ever had the please don’t die on me, please come back to me feeling, or the subsequent wave of relief when one or both of them managed it. They were both alive. They were both themselves. They were both in the same place at the same time. They were both settling back into their routine. None of those things could be taken for granted. And for all four to be true at one time?The sentiment, the relief, the we made it triumph, didn’t seem like it was enough of a reaction. Reaction wasn’t the word Sam wanted. Celebration?With each miraculous near-miss, with each passing year, he couldn’t help but think that their luck (if that’s what it was) would run out all at once. They weren't getting any younger. They certainly weren't getting any luckier.Michael was still out there, after all. Somewhere. As he heard Dean’s concluding grunt, Sam couldn’t resist. He took his toothbrush out of his mouth and asked innocently, “Are you okay in there? Sounds like you’re in distress.”Still panting, brains probably still scrambled by the dopamine, Dean spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the water. “Yeah... ‘cause of that weasel pelt on your ugly mug.”Sam smiled and continued brushing.He stared at his fogged-over reflection above the sink. Maybe he’d shave the beard. ☆☆☆☆☆While Dean was still in the shower, Sam had asked Cas to clear everyone out of the bunker. “Just until at least tomorrow afternoon, longer if you can, but at least until then. Find a hunt, go to the zoo, I don’t know.”As soon as he’d said zoo, Cas was immediately on-board. “Do you think they’ll have sloths?” But after a second or two, suspicion had set in. “Is everything okay?”
Sure, everything’s great. If you need me, I’ll be here, possibly blowing a hole in my life.
If they’d had the money, Sam would’ve sent the whole crowd to Disney World for a week or two. He felt guilty enough asking Cas to entertain them overnight. Besides, given the world those folks had come from, they might even enjoy the zoo. Jack had never been. How Cas would be able to expand a trip to the zoo to fill the requested time was something that Sam couldn’t allow himself to worry about just then.Slowly drumming his fingers on his desk, Sam tried to scheme a way he could get Dean to sit still somewhere and listen to him, to get him to talk just a little bit. Since Dean had gotten back to the bunker in Michael's fussy clothes, after he showered, shaved, and took the clippers to his hair, he'd sort of collapsed in on himself. It usually went one of two ways: Dean got very quiet, put on the headphones, put up the music as loud as it would go, and attempted to drown himself in alcohol. Or, Dean got angry and determined and cleaned and organized every square foot of the bunker... and also attempted to drown himself in alcohol.But since Michael left, there was something in the middle: Raw, exposed nerves. Twice, he'd seen Dean's hands shaking. And once he saw Dean wince at his own reflection. But if he hadn't seen those things, Dean would've just seemed... done. Like he didn't have the capacity to care.Dean sidestepped any of Sam's potential schemes by walking into Sam’s bedroom with a six-pack under one arm and unceremoniously dropping onto the bed.Instead of his customary four layers, Dean was in one of the gray robes, sitting with his back braced against Sam’s headboard like when they watched movies together. His bare legs were stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. His hair was starting to dry into short little spikes. He looked like an angry hedgehog. An angry, obnoxiously handsome hedgehog.Something was up. Sam could tell by his face that he was waiting, dreading, whatever question Sam would hit him with. How are you? How are you feeling? Do you wanna talk about it? But Sam only closed his laptop and watched him.“Thought we’d hang,” Dean explained, handing him a beer. Sam accepted it automatically with a smirk. “Yeah, I missed you, too.”This didn’t earn him the biggest Dean eye roll he’d ever experienced, but it was definitely in the top twenty.A little showdown ensued, where each of them waited for the other to say something, before Dean looked away to twist open his bottle. “Yeah, okay. That. But... you know.” He took a drink and sneered a bit at the burn. “Michael got out. He could get back in. If, uh... if he did, I'd want you to be the first to know. So... uh.” He shrugged sort of helplessly. “Reporting for observation, I guess.” “I did wanna talk to you,” Sam admitted. “Figured.” Dean's jaw was already starting to set. “But not about Michael, or about what you remember,” he clarified. “About something else.”Sam tried to ease into it a few different ways, looking for the ideal phrasing. But the more he tried for ideal, the worse it got. So he took a page out of Dean’s book: Rip the duct tape off all at once. Deal with the resulting pain like an adult.“You know, until I was nine, I wasn’t even sure if you liked me very much.” No, that wasn’t quite it. “Or, you know, if you... loved me or not.” That was closer.It was maybe only a second, but Dean flinched before quickly regrouping. He looked anywhere but at Sam, and his eyes were already on the quickest possible escape, through the open door back out into the hall. “Until you were -- Am I... apologizing? Is that... why are you tellin’ me this?” Sam grimaced sympathetically. “Just something I wanna talk about, that’s all.”“More than about the... the jumped-up fuckface that scooped me out like a melon, wore me like Buffalo Bill, who’s currently out there --?” He gestured at the hallway like it was a stand-in for the world outside the bunker. “More than that? Really?”“Which would you rather talk about?”Dean sighed. “Those are my only two choices, aren’t they?”“Afraid so.”“Sure.” Dean rubbed his eyes with one hand before closing them. “Right. So. You were nine.”Yeah, that was the one Sam thought (and also hoped) he might pick. That terrain was scarred-over, safer.Suddenly, Dean’s eyes were open again and he was laser-targeted on some point beyond his toes, beer bottle stopped halfway to his mouth, face momentarily blank.Sam’s words had triggered a Silent Monologue. Not that Dean knew Sam called them that.Usually, Sam would’ve intervened before Dean even started down the “what’s my fault today?” rabbit hole. But Dean hadn’t put the clothes in the dryer last night, a load that included all of Sam’s pants, leaving him no choice but to wear one of the gray robes this morning. He didn’t know why Dean liked them, he thought they were scratchy. The longest one he could find went just to the knee and that was only when he was standing up. Sitting at the desk, he kept pulling on it and hoping Dean wouldn’t notice. Was the robe’s original owner a horse jockey? Where were all the other robes?So he felt just petty enough to sit back and let it happen. Well, the first part, anyway. Sam could’ve provided live color commentary.
Buffering…Buffering… Buffering…

Charge: Sam felt unloved until he was nine.
Now Dean was scouring his database: Sam + “Times I was a dick”, date range between: May 1983 to May 1992.
Searching… Searching… Searching…
In Dean’s internal command center, coordinates lit up on a wall map. Morse code keened over the wires. Signals were bounced from satellite to satellite. His brain spat out a list of crimes he had allegedly committed against Sam: A missed school play in 1988? One of few times he wasn’t there to pick Sam up from school? One of the many times he had lost his temper? Those times when he wouldn’t let Sam go outside and play? A prank gone too far? Not for the first time, Sam wondered what all that drinking really did for Dean. It certainly didn’t allow him to let anything go, so what was it for? All Dean's crimes were felonies, nothing ever had a statute of limitations. Same as always.
Searching… Searching… Searching…
Sam knew exactly the point when the Silent Monologue would stop being amusing, where it was no longer about any single failure of Dean’s, but all of them considered as a terrible whole. Then, it would transition to all the things Dean hadn’t done. After that, it would spiral into whether or not Dean had ever been enough. He imagined his brother tracking backwards through time, from one point on the map to the one before it. What would he do differently if he could go back? And since he couldn’t go back (or he totally would), what could he do to atone for those crimes today? No, now. Right now. Rube Goldberg machines had nothing on a Dean Winchester guilt safari. “Dean,” Sam said firmly, right before it would’ve gotten there. “Stop.”Dean’s eyes snapped back to his, his face briefly defenseless before his shields went up. He continued raising the previously-suspended bottle to his mouth as if he hadn’t been far, far away for over a minute. “Dude. A lot happened that year. You gotta gimme a hint. What I did or… didn’t do. I don’t remember.”“Oh no, senility. Already?” Sam asked mock mournfully. “Did you take your gingko biloba?”Dean nodded and fake-smiled. “Mmm, I forgot.”“I'm not saying you didn’t care about me before then or anything. I was nine and I just wasn't sure. Nine-year-olds are assholes, they’re not reasonable.”“Nah, kids are kids. They’re not supposed to be reasonable. Reasonable’s hopefully where they end up, not where they start.” Dean drained his first beer and immediately went for a second. Catching Sam’s clear look of disapproval, Dean winged the bottle top at his face. Sam barely blocked it in time, slapping it back at Dean, who neatly dodged it. It fell behind Sam’s headboard, where it no doubt joined countless others. Sam decided to hazard a compliment. “You were pretty reasonable at age nine, all things considered.”If he didn’t immediately recognize his brother’s balking “whatever” expression, he might’ve assumed Dean didn’t hear him.
Well, it was worth a try.
“You sent all the hunterlings away?” Dean absently dug a thumbnail under the beer bottle’s label. “Not that I’m not grateful.”Sam squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Stop calling them hunterlings, okay? They heard you say it yesterday and it hurt their feelings.”Dean scrubbed at his hair, making it stand up even more. “When I can walk in front of them without thinkin’ they’re about to blow my goddamn head off because they heard a squirrel, I’ll call them something nicer.” His jaw went stiff. “Would you prefer 'good examples of poor trigger discipline’ or ‘I survived the end of the world a few times but now I’m bleedin’ out in a national park because Johnny Yahoo over th–’”“They’re coming along,” Sam interrupted defensively, before he had to suffer through nine more examples.“I know they’re like… your wards or whatever, Chief, but you knew more about gun safety when you were ten. And you also believed that if you cut a credit card in half, there was money inside, so that’s sayin’ something.”Sam’s teeth were grinding already. “First of all, I was five. Every time you mention that story, you add another year. Second, they just have some catching up do. They’re actually not doing all that bad.”“Great,” Dean muttered dryly. “Maybe next week they can earn their grenade launcher badges. Remind me to be a state or two over, by the way.”He knew from their last two days of bickering that this conversation wasn’t going to get any better. “Dean, I’m tired of arguing about this.”“Alright.” He took another drink, somehow managing to drain a third of the bottle in one swallow. “What do you wanna argue about?”“I don’t wanna argue. I just need to hash some stuff out with you.”Since Michael had left, Dean’s tone had been flat and resigned, and it was no different now. “So… what? A therapy session?” He leaned his head back against the headboard. “I suppose you’ve earned one of those.”
We both have.
“Uh, yeah,” Sam confirmed apologetically. “But… therapy for me, I guess. And maybe for you, too, I don’t know. But just the two of us. So if you could hold off on making fun of me just for today, that would help.”“Hmm.” After a moment, Dean solemnly shook his head, but he was trying not to smile. “Yeah. I can’t promise that.”“Figured,” Sam imitated. “I realized something while you were... gone.” Totally not while you were jerking off in the shower. “And I just think it would help me if we talked.”Dean looked him in the eye and Sam was relieved to see a general lack of sarcasm. “And I’m here for that, man. Really. But I gotta say, I think you’re talkin’ to the wrong guy when it comes to…” He vaguely waved his hand. “Everything.”“Well, you’re literally the only one in the world that I can talk to about this.” Sam smiled wanly. “So I guess you’ll have to do.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

1991
Sam’s fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Gray, had given him a sealed white envelope to take home, with “Parents of Sam Winchester” written on the front. She had assured him that he wasn’t in any trouble.When he saw Dean waiting outside the elementary school at 2:45 to walk him back to the motel, Sam handed him the envelope without really thinking about it.Dean frowned, ripped it open, and pulled out a piece of white note paper with the name of the school printed across the top. Silently moving his lips, he stared at the paper for so long that Sam put his hand out to take it.Sam was an advanced reader. Before they left the last school, he was about to be added to an honors class that had sixth graders in it. The year before, when they both attended the same school, he heard one of Dean’s teachers tell Dad that Dean needed to be in a remedial class for kids who were behind.Sam hadn’t meant his offer as an insult, but the perceived slight flashed in Dean’s eyes as he jerked the paper out of Sam’s reach. ☆☆☆☆☆
NOW
Dean rolled his beer bottle between his palms, eyes unfocused. “Didn’t know you knew about that.”Sam didn’t recognize the expression on Dean’s face at first, because he had only seen it a few times (and they were some of the worst times): shame. Old shame.
God, why didn’t I leave that part out?
Because today wasn’t about leaving stuff out. They’d been doing that for too long.Since he was little at the time, hearing this comment about Dean had helped inform his first opinions of his big brother. Sam remembered thinking of Dean as somehow less-than, as defective. But in 1991, part of the story he was attempting to tell, seeing Dean in action forced him to rebuild all those opinions from scratch.He had to try and fix it. “Dean, remember when you started going to the library and checking out books that had audiotape versions?”Dean scoffed automatically, neck muscles going tense.
Shutdown commencing in three… two... you’re losing him...
“You’d get out of bed at midnight and you’d play the audiotape over your Walkman while you followed along in the book. Then you’d try to read the book on your own, and if you still had trouble with any of the words, you’d follow along with the audiotape again and again and again until you could recognize all of them. Moby Dick, Lord of the Flies, The Glass Menagerie. Others, too. Those were just the ones I found.”“Yeah.” Dean gave a sharp, humorless laugh, still picking at the label. “I was also fifteen, remember that? And those books were the ones toward the end. You wanna know where I had to start?” As if giving Sam a chance to guess, he paused to glare at him. “Charlotte’s fucking Web. A book that you got in the second grade. I remember ‘cause you asked me for help.” He sniffed. “Not that I could’ve.”
Ah, my headache. Right on time.
“Dean, you were taking care of me, taking care of Dad, in and out of schools, hunting, whatever…” Sam waved his hand impatiently. “Forget all that. But ask yourself what did a run-down public school in Nowheresville --”“Johnston, Iowa,” Dean corrected.“Who cares?” Sam snapped. “It was 1991. Do you think that school knew all the theories about different kinds of intelligence? Auditory learning? Tactile learning? Nothing whatsoever. It was one teacher’s opinion. It was a quick way for her to push you off on someone else.”Dean was clearly off in his own head again, so Sam tried a different angle. “You figured out a way to solve the problem, just like you always do. And it wasn’t easy for you, I remember that. Through your own pigheadedness, you taught yourself how to read. That’s smart. Not just ‘street smart’ or ‘gun smart’ or whatever. With no caveats at all, you are smart. I’ve seen you quickly adapt to… I don’t know how many tricky situations that threw me completely for a loop. That’s not something a stupid person could do.”Sam leaned back and waited to see what Dean would do with this information: A secret he thought he had kept from Sam for decades, followed by an unsolicited compliment. Dean ignored the former and briefly mulled the latter, but Sam could tell by the little shake of his head that it had bounced harmlessly off his defenses, never to be considered again. Instead, Dean grumbled, “There’s a reason I did that shit at midnight. Were you ever asleep when you were supposed to be?”“Hardly ever,” Sam replied flatly.Sam didn’t know why he had expected anything different than deflection. Unless it directly pertained to fighting or fucking, Dean was impervious to praise.“What?” Dean frowned, watching his face. “What’d I say?”“Nothing. Just... stop interrupting me.” ☆☆☆☆☆
1991
While Sam was eating his dinner, Dean stepped outside. Sam figured he asked someone else at the motel to read it to him, since it wouldn’t cost him as much pride as having to ask Sam.When he returned, he was angrier than Sam had ever seen him. His eyes and face were completely vacant.He made Sam change into a pair of old, too-short pajamas and shoved all their laundry into a trash bag, taking quarters they could barely afford to spend. He returned two hours later with the clean clothes, still a bit damp because he could only afford to dry them all in one load. At the top of the bag were new clothes for Sam: three new t-shirts, two new flannels, socks, and some briefs. Sam knew they only had twenty-five dollars to last them until Dad got back, so he didn’t wonder how Dean had acquired them.Dean showed him that he could mix and match the t-shirts and flannels so that he was always wearing a different combination than the t-shirt-and-flannel combo he’d worn earlier in the week. He was also tall enough that Dean’s clothes weren’t too big on him, if he needed to borrow something.As Dean hung all the new clothes in the closet on the wire hangers that had been in the room when they got there, Sam heard him say under his breath that this couldn’t happen again.After Dean finally fell asleep, Sam dug through the trash and pieced the note together:
Mr./Mrs. Winchester, please see that Sam has clean clothes every day for school. He seems to wear the same clothes and sometimes they have not been washed. If you need assistance with additional clothing or supplies, please contact us. Thank you, Mrs. Gray ☆☆☆☆☆
NOW
Dean sagged a little against the headboard, glowering. “Forgot all about that. Think I know where this story is headed, though.”
You really don’t.
Sam tried to defuse. “I thought you were mad because it meant you had to do laundry more often.”“It was the ‘if you need assistance’ part,” Dean growled. “Yeah, Dean, I get that now. I’m telling you what I thought at the time.” He was dumbfounded. “That was it? ‘Cause I stole you some clothes from K-Mart? Really? That probably wasn’t even the first time I did that.”“Just listen.” ☆☆☆☆☆
1991
The morning after Sam brought the note home, everything changed. When Sam woke up, he noticed that Dad’s bed – the one Dean slept in when Dad was away – was still made up perfectly with its hospital corners. Dean was wired, impatient for Sam to get up and moving.Dean had absorbed Mrs. Gray’s criticism and, as usual, overcorrected by several orders of magnitude. Like the time Dad got home with mud all over the Impala and complained the next day that it wasn’t clean yet. After that, Dean dutifully hand-washed the car as soon as Dad walked in the door, any time of day. Rain, sleet, or snow? Didn’t matter. Even if it wasn’t dirty, he washed it. Or the time a teacher had told Dean he needed to brush his teeth. From that point on, he would brush them three times a day, not accepting that they were clean until he saw blood on his gums.Or the time Sam told him that he didn’t like it when all the food in a meal was the same color (in his defense, he had been seven at the time), sullenly pushing his remaining cream of potato soup around the bowl with a matching piece of limp white bread. It had never happened again.If it was something Dean could fix, he fixed it urgently. But it was the way he did it, like he was defensive that any fault had been found with him in the first place. It drove him to try and smoke out more potential faults, and he’d end up “fixing” things that weren’t broken. Sam always imagined him saying: “I dare you to find something else!”While Sam glumly picked all the marshmallows out of his off-brand Lucky Charms, Dean outlined the new rules like a manifesto: Sam was to be out of bed no later than 7:45. He had twenty minutes to eat breakfast. In the shower by 8:05. Out of the shower by 8:35. Five minutes to brush his teeth. At no later than 9:00, they had to be out the door to get Sam to school by 9:45. Dinner eaten by 5:00. Two hours to do homework. He could only watch television after his homework was done, but he was to be in bed no later than 9:30. When Sam tried to make him see reason, Dean made it clear that this new schedule wasn’t up for debate. Not even his puppy dog eyes had worked. They always had before.Before, their walks to and from school had been kind of fun. Dean would listen (actually listen) to Sam chatter on at length about whatever cartoon he’d been watching, or whatever book he was reading, or some stupid thing a kid had said on the playground the day before. Dean would joke around, maybe tease him a little. Once or twice a week, Dean would offer him advice on things like “how to disguise yourself quickly” or “how to get past a guard dog” or “how to escape from the trunk of a car.” Dean called this “having tactical awareness.”But nine o’clock on the dot that morning, it was a completely different Dean who walked him to school. He said nothing at all, carefully monitoring everything around them, scrutinizing every person or car that passed them. He walked two paces in front of Sam instead of next to him, but frequently looked back. Sam tried to make conversation, even asking Dean for his “tactical awareness” advice, but it was no use. Sam started to notice that other kids his age, some even younger, managed to walk themselves to school without needing to be guarded by a paranoid thirteen-year-old who (Sam would realize later) had a loaded .22 inside his jacket. Until a year or so ago, Dean held Sam’s hand when he walked him to school. Even though he knew nine was too old for that, he still missed it. Sam would wake up with one of Dean’s arms protectively thrown over him. When they watched television together, Sam would inevitably sit tight against him, with Dean’s arm around his shoulder. If Sam had a nightmare, he could roll over and heat-seek until he found Dean under the blanket, and Dean would hold him, sleepily stroke Sam’s hair, and shush him until he fell asleep again.Then it had all just... stopped. Sam had racked his brain, wondering what he had done wrong.Compared to the motel room, school actually seemed more fun.At 2:45, when the last bell rang, he was used to finding Dean outside, waving at him fondly. But the new and “improved” Dean stood at attention, no movement whatsoever, no facial expression. Sam would walk up to him, Dean would turn, and they’d walk back to the motel together just as silently as they’d walked to school. It was kind of like being guarded by a Terminator.Sam bristled against all this unfairness immediately. Before he did homework that night, he wanted to watch his favorite show, Dinosaurs. Dean of last week would’ve let him watch his show and do his homework after. In fact, Dean of last week knew that Sam would do his homework without being told. But this new Dean snapped off the television during the opening credits and hid the remote. There was now a two-hour window for homework, and it had started. “You can watch TV after you do your homework.”“But my show won’t be on then!”“This isn’t a democracy,” Dean said sternly, which was also something Dad said.“You don’t do your homework,” Sam whined.Dean’s voice was cold. “You’re meant for school. Do your damn homework.” ☆☆☆☆☆
NOW
“What did you do during the day?” Sam paused to ask curiously. “When you skipped school, I mean?”He was still peeling that stupid label with hyper focus. “Went just often enough to keep the truant officers from sniffin’ around. I showed up a couple times a week, turned in two or three assignments, failed a few quizzes.” He shrugged. “Went back to the motel and watched TV mostly.” He smiled fondly to himself. “Snuck into movies a lot. Got pretty good at it, too.” But then, Dean’s eyes glazed over, and a dirty smile crossed his face. Sam groaned internally, one hundred percent certain of what was about to happen. “Wait --”“Snuck into this strip club once.” Dean gazed out into the hall, his tongue lazily tracing his lower lip. “It wasn’t even open, but all the girls were practicin’ their routines. There was this one woman. Kitty.” He uttered her name with a little snarl of reverence, his mouth opening further like he could taste her. “Mmm. Brunette. She wore this lacy pink bustier number and danced to ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ and she bounced up and down…” He absently jiggled Sam’s bed in time with the memory. “Mmm… on this big… uh, exercise ball? Just, up and down. It looked like she was getting off as hard as I was.”
Does he have a boner right now? He does. I am trying to make the most terrifying point I have ever made in my life and he has a boner.
“And when she stripped out of that bustier? She had these… these little --” Dean made a clicking noise with his tongue as he jerked his thumbs at his nipples. “They were pink and X-shaped, and they glowed in the dark. Mmm. Bad Kitty. Couldn’t’ve learned about her in school.”Sam pinched the bridge of his nose, trying desperately not to look at Dean’s lower half. “Stop.”“They called the cops on me.”“Why?” Sam realized a half-millisecond too late that this was maybe the stupidest question he had ever asked.Dean tilted his head in Sam’s direction pityingly. “You’re adorable.”Sam felt himself flush and cleared his throat. “Right. They, uh, caught you with your hand down your pants.”“Dude," Dean snorted proudly. “They caught way more than that.”“No...” Sam didn’t want any more details. But what was he about to get? Details.“I mean, my pants and underwear were down around my ankles, my junk was in my hand, I was strokin’ it at like fifty miles an hour.” Dean helpfully pantomimed all the accompanying hand motions, just in case Sam had never masturbated before in his life.“Please stop talking,” Sam begged forlornly. “And stop… gesturing.”As if slightly offended, Dean stilled his hand and boastfully forged on. “Two cops and a huge bouncer, and it took all three of them to stop me.”Sam furrowed his brow. “To… stop you?”“They were trying to handcuff me, but I kept goin’.”“You… you…” Sam sputtered in horror. “You kept going?”“I was about to blow my load, man, I wasn’t stoppin’ for no one.”Sam opened and closed his mouth a few times, but he had seemingly lost the ability to speak, or breathe, or blink, or assemble sentences. After a moment, he tried again. “You… kept… going.”“You have to,” Dean insisted. “Look ‘em dead in the eye and keep on spankin’ it. Assert dominance!”He could imagine it all in his head: Two baffled police officers, who probably would’ve known exactly what to do if Dean had been an adult, and a burly, equally confused bouncer, all hesitantly surrounding a thirteen-year-old boy who was frantically -- no, unapologetically -- masturbating. All while he probably complained that they were blocking his view of Kitty.“Dean... you get that most people would be... mortified, right?”“Everyone jacks the beanstalk, Sam.” Dean suddenly smirked. “Hey, that should be a children’s book.”A strangled wheeze escaped Sam’s throat, and he fully intended to be mad, but he started laughing instead. He couldn’t help it. Just seeing Dean more animated than he'd been since they got back, he couldn't even fake being mad. “Why do I ask you anything? And when I ask, why do you tell me?”Dean smugly shook his head, about to laugh himself. “When are you gonna stop tryin’ to set boundaries, man? If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s probably not gonna.”
Yeah? I’ll remember you said that.
Dean broke into his widest grin. “I should get you one of those big exercise balls.”Sam’s laughter quickly turned into a choking cough. He tried to recover gracefully, but his voice came out in a raspy sort of squeak. “W-what?”“Hmm? Want one?”“Do I… what?” Sam felt like he was trying to be heard over his pulse and his voice came out too loud. “I… I’m never gonna… finish this story if you keep… interrupting me.”“Hey, genius, it was you who interrupted this time.”Sam dialed for a cutting retort, but there was nothing. Nothing at all. Just a faint buzzing in his ears.
Did he mean... for exercise? He meant for exercise, right?
The delay had now gone on for too long and he'd missed his moment. There was actually no comeback that could rescue him.Dean was staring at him, equal parts amused and concerned. "You havin' some kind of fit right now?""What?" Sam blinked more times than he meant to. "No! I'm just... anyway, as I was saying..."

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

1991
Before, Sam watched television while laying at the wrong end of the bed with his head on his hands. Bedtime wasn’t strictly enforced, but even when Sam fully intended to stay up all night, he was typically down by eleven. He would wake up the next morning to find a blanket tucked around him, his head on a pillow that hadn’t been there before. Like the homework, Dean of last week knew that Sam could manage it on his own. The only time he really scolded Sam before was if it was too difficult to wake him up the next morning. “You stayed up too late, Sammy.”And because he had stayed up to late, he would fall asleep early the next night. Why did they need the manifesto when it was working just fine before? Just because of some stained clothes and a note from the teacher? If he ever got another note, Sam was going to throw it directly in the trash. As 9:30 got closer, he hoped Dean would just forget. But at 9:20, Dean ordered him to go to the bathroom, brush his teeth, and put his pajamas on. Sam was so outraged to lose those ten minutes. And pajamas were stupid. He’d always just fallen asleep in the clothes he’d worn to school. Sam desperately tried to bargain: Wouldn’t 10:30 be fine, since he’d been falling asleep by eleven anyway? Dean said no. What if he laid in bed and read a book or something until he got sleepy? Dean said no. Lying in bed, he decided to passive-aggressively sigh every couple of minutes. Any reaction, even Dean getting upset, would’ve been preferable to staring at the popcorn ceiling, completely awake.He’d seen Dean the Immovable Object with other people, strangers. Never before had Dean turned it on Sam.It went on like that, Dean as drill sergeant, Dean as Dad’s right hand. Lather, rinse, repeat.A couple of times, Dean took a day off. That’s what he called it. “Takin’ this one off, Sammy.”On those days, Sam could eat his breakfast and get ready at his leisure as long as they were still out the door by 9:00 to make the silent trek to Sam’s school. When he got home, he could eat whenever he wanted and leave his dishes wherever. He could watch his shows and then do homework. He could sleep in his clothes and stay up as long as he wanted, because Dean would crawl into the bed as soon as they got home, fully dressed, and lay under the blanket as unmoving as a stone. (He hadn’t understood it at that time. But he figured now that this was Dean shutting down completely, his own personal blue screen of death.) Then Dad would show up with some groceries, the usual generic Spaghettio-s, a couple of different cereals, some milk that Sam was advised to drink in moderation if he wanted it to last the week (if no one stopped him, he could’ve finished the whole gallon in one day), white bread, peanut butter, grape jelly, and a couple of different kinds of soup. Dad would give him twenty dollars for emergencies, and would drill Sam on what constituted an emergency, as if he didn’t know by now. Half the time when he left, he took Dean on the road with him, sometimes just for two or three days, but sometimes for almost a week. Even Dean realized that he couldn’t enforce the new rules if he wasn’t there; Sam would just lie and say he’d followed them.Sam would luxuriate in the Dad- and Dean-free time. He walked himself to and from school, even hanging around after school if he wanted. When he got home, he dropped his books wherever he wanted, watched TV for as long as he wanted, made dinner on the hot plate when he got hungry, and slept in whatever clothes he had on. The only rule he followed was the one he didn’t question: Do not leave the motel except for school.But then they would both come back.Dad would be there in the motel room for a couple of days, mostly only to watch television and sleep. He and Dean would talk “around” Sam (that was how he thought of it), in forced sentences with carefully chosen words. Dean’s schedule would be quickly restored. Dad even complimented Dean and told him it was a “good system.” Not that Sam had expected Dad to disapprove of it or anything. Before, when Dad left, things would be fun again. But with new Dean, Dad might as well have stayed. It was all the same to Sam.One afternoon, he decided he didn’t have to take it anymore. Dad had left and Dean had been back in the motel room for a week, and Sam had had enough. The thought of that long, silent walk back to the dismal motel room and Dean’s schedule was unthinkable. Instead, when the last bell rang, Sam walked out the back way, swung a left, and walked the half-mile to his friend David’s house.At the time, Sam didn’t know that you shouldn’t just show up unannounced at someone else’s house, but David’s parents (he had both a mom and a dad) smiled and said he could come in and even said he could stay for dinner if he wanted. They had a normal, permanent house that David had lived in for as long as he could remember.He and David did their homework together at the dining room table. They had the same math class, so they helped each other with some of the tougher problems.When it was almost time for dinner, the most delicious smells came out of the kitchen. It was sliced-up sausage and fresh peppers, with cheesy roasted potatoes, sweet corn, and a big glass of milk. David’s mom even seemed pleased when Sam shyly asked for seconds of everything, even the milk. After dinner, she gave Sam a piece of banana nut bread that she had made that morning, and it was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted. David’s mom laughed at his enthusiasm and said, “It came out of a box.” Sam didn’t know what this meant, he just knew it was fantastic.After dinner, he and David ran outside to his backyard. Sam was so stuffed that he thought he could lay down on the ground and go to sleep, but they played on the swing set with its two swings. David didn’t even have a brother or sister, so he didn’t have to share it at all. Then they found two baseball bats in a shed the size of the motel room’s kitchenette. One was made of wood and the other was white plastic with lots of little holes in it. He and David ran around on the grass and pretended they were fighting with swords.David accidentally hit Sam in the eye with the bat and went in to get his mom. David’s mom was nice and gave him a squishy packet that got cold when he crushed it. Sam held it over his eye as he and David sat in his living room and watched Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.David’s mom and dad would occasionally come in to check on them and would give David hugs or mess up his hair. David’s dad said things like, “Everything okay in here, sport?” and “Just making sure you boys are behaving yourselves” with a little wink.After the movie, he and David went to his room (his own room!) and Sam was astounded at the number of things David had: all kinds of different books and at least fifty different toys and he said that there were even more in storage! Then they played a game called Zelda on something called a Super Nintendo that David had gotten for his last birthday.At around 9:30, David’s mom came in and said it was David’s bedtime, so Sam should go home. David seemed fine with this bedtime, which Sam found a little distressing. Also, he had been hoping they might let him spend the night.David said goodbye and goodnight, and David’s mom walked him downstairs. She was still amused by how much he’d enjoyed the banana nut bread, and wrapped two big slices of it in a piece of tin foil for him to take home. Now he could have something besides dry cereal for breakfast (he had drunk all the milk again).Putting on a jacket, David’s dad said, “I don’t want you walking home in the dark, sport” and walked him out to a red pick-up truck that smelled like pine needles. Sam wondered how long he had to wait until it was okay to show up on David’s doorstep again. A week? Two? His parents had been so nice, maybe they wouldn’t care if it was only a few days until he showed up again. He’d love to play the video game again, too, though he hadn’t been very good at it. David said he’d done okay for a beginner.But then a song came on the radio in the truck that Dean liked (something about a jukebox and a man who wanted to be a guitar player), and Sam fully realized all the possible consequences of the choices he’d made. He thought that having some fun and getting away from motel room (and away from Dean) would make it easier, but all it did was make him dread the motel more. And Dean’s possible reactions.Would Dean lose it? Would Sam lose his TV privileges? What would Dean do really? It’s not like Dean would ever hit him or anything. And how could he ground Sam when “grounded” was Sam’s natural state? This thought made Sam feel a little bit bolder, but...What if Dean told Dad? Like that, his boldness vanished.David’s dad dropped Sam off, and Sam waved goodbye. Instead of walking in, he hung out in the dark parking lot for a few minutes under its lone light, prolonging the inevitable. Bracing himself, he finally unlocked the door and slowly pushed it open.The inside of the room was completely dark, but the yellowing fixture next to the door cast dim light inside.A pile of wood and splinters that had once been the little table between the two beds was right next to the door.A mess on the floor immediately in front of Dad’s bed was in pieces, completely crushed, like someone had stomped it. From the partial number display, Sam recognized the bedside alarm clock. The two lamps had been shattered against the wall, their shades flattened and torn.The little two-seat table where they ate was tipped over on its side, with two of its legs torn off, and Sam couldn’t see the two hard chairs that were usually under it.A generic framed photo of a sunset that had once hung on the wall over Sam’s bed was bent in half, laying in a pile of glass shards.He nervously tried the switch next to the door. As the room flooded with light, he flinched to see Dean sitting on his bed, with the dingy white phone sitting next to him.Dean made no sound and no move to approach. When he registered that Sam was there, all the air seemed to puff out of his lungs, but he didn’t even look at him.Sam noticed Dean’s lower lip first: It looked like a red, pulpy mess, and was still bleeding pretty badly.His clothes and hair were wet and filthy, and his jeans had a fresh rip under the knee. Then he saw Dean’s hands that were carefully resting on his thighs. It was like some kind of wild animal had chewed the skin off his knuckles and fingers joints. They were still bleeding. One of his fingernails had been ripped out, exposing the nailbed underneath. Two of the fingers on his left hand -- his ring finger and pinky -- were bent the wrong way from the other fingers.Behind him, the bathroom door was only attached by its uppermost hinge, covered in reddish-brown streaks.Dean had punched the bathroom door. Again, and again, and again.It was the first time Sam remembered being truly frightened of his big brother.Finally, Dean looked at him. His face was so ashen that the freckles across his nose and cheekbones (his least favorite feature) stood out in sharp contrast. His eyes were red-rimmed which made them look unnaturally green.Sam had never known Dean to cry, and the evidence that this was even a possibility made him feel exposed.“Don’t be scared,” Dean said hollowly, still not moving. “I’m not mad anymore.” Almost to himself, he added, “Thank you. For comin’ back.”Sam desperately wished he could go outside, close the door, then open it again and see that motel room he had thought was so bleak before. He would’ve preferred to lose his TV privileges. He would’ve preferred Dean to yell at him. He might’ve even preferred for Dean to tell Dad. After a minute of suffocating silence, Dean continued, just as empty as before. “I looked… everywhere for you. I searched your school. I went up and down all the roads around it. I checked social services. I knocked on doors. I went down to the river.” He indicated his wet clothes. “I went to the arcade, to the library, to the… comic book store, to the park, to the… the police.” Dean’s busted lower lip shook just a little. “If I had lost you…”“Dad would be mad?” Sam asked sourly, trying to ignore the fact that Dean had actually gone to the police. “You’d get in trouble?”“I would…” Dean looked down at his busted hands. When he breathed in, Sam could hear the choked sob that made his voice sound thick. “Sammy, what would I have…?”Sam suddenly felt very, very small. He’d never seen Dean like this before.Dean watched him closely until Sam reluctantly met his gaze. “Did you walk home, Sam? In the dark?”For someone who “wasn’t mad anymore”, Dean still seemed pretty mad. “David’s dad gave me a ride home.”“Yeah? Have I met David’s dad?” Dean’s voice was quiet, but Sam could see the anger clear on his face. “Do you know David’s dad?”Sam couldn’t even imagine the two of them in the same room, much less presenting David’s dad for Dean’s ruthless inspection. The two of them might as well have been different species. “So I should’ve walked home?”“You should’ve called me!” Dean roared, and even though his speaking voice was still changing, it seemed to shake the room. When he saw Sam take a startled step back, he schooled his features with his good hand and continued in a calmer tone. “So this kid’s dad that it sounds like you only met today… you get in his car to get a ride home. What if someth – what if someone had tried to hurt you? When I have no idea where you are, or what you’re doin’? What if you were out there dyin’ somewhere, and I couldn’t get to you in time?”The naked fear underlying these words wouldn’t be obvious until a few short months later, when Dean told Sam about monsters. At the time, Sam thought Dean meant kidnappers or the proverbial child molester with a panel van and a cute puppy. Neither possibility ever seemed real to him. They were things that happened on an ABC Afterschool Special or that a police officer warned them about in a “stranger danger” school assembly. “David’s dad is cool, he wouldn’t hurt anyone!”“Oh, yeah? The dude you met a few hours ago, he could never have bad intentions? What’d he do? Call you ‘sport’? Pat you on the head?” Well, he had called Sam “sport”, but it didn’t seem like a good time to mention it.“We can’t afford for you to be this naive, Sam.”We. As usual, Dad and Dean were a united front, joining forces to shoot down anything Sam might’ve wanted. Sam could even hear these exact words in Dad’s voice, like it was something Dad had said to Dean that was now being passed on to him.He felt his face flush with anger, but at the same time he also wanted to cry. “I wanted to go see my friend. I didn’t want to come back here.”He hadn’t appended “ever again” to the end of that statement, but Dean heard it anyway and almost crumpled. “I would’ve let you see your friend, Sam.”“And mess up your precious schedule?” Sam hissed bitterly.Hurt lit up Dean’s face like a spotlight, and his voice was shaky when he spoke again. “I’ve warned you about this so many times. We got a note from one of your teachers because I dropped the ball, because I messed up. We got noticed Sammy. Now that teacher is watchin’ you, tryin’ to figure out what else might be wrong. You remember what happened the last time we got noticed? Huh? Medford ring any bells?”At the mere mention of Medford, Sam felt oncoming tears and a wave of nausea. He knew from experience that he couldn’t even ask about why this was their situation, why they had to “lay low.” So why bother trying again now? Dean would just shut down the conversation as soon as it began.Dean was looking down at his bloody knuckles again. “You can go see your friends whenever you want, just… tell me first. Please. Never do this again.”Sam nodded earnestly. Anything to get this terrifying look off his brother’s face.The next words almost sounded like they were coming out of Dean’s mouth unbidden. “I would do anything for you, Sammy. Anything. Do you know that?”Initially, these words were indecipherable to Sam. He had to play them back in his brain to even get them. These weren’t Dean’s words. No, they weren’t Dad’s words.But Dean had never said anything out loud that sounded as raw as this. He seemed so painfully exposed that it made Sam angry and uncomfortable. It was easier for him to assume that Dean didn’t mean it. “No, you wouldn’t! If Dad told you to leave forever, you would!”Dean’s head jerked back. He spoke through his teeth in a knife’s edge tone that Sam had never heard before. “If you think that, if you really think that, then you don’t know me.”Tears started streaming down Sam’s face. Who was this? What happened to Dean? “All you ever do is follow his orders!”Dean held his hands palms out like he was stopping the words. “Dad would never ask me to do that. He… he loves you, he loves you most of –” He cleared his throat, looking toward the ceiling like he might tear up again. “I know it doesn’t seem like it sometimes, but he’s doin’ his best. And even if he did tell me to leave you forever,” Dean’s voice turned cold. “I would take you and run before that ever happened, and never look back.”Sam wasn’t sure what to react to first: This insistence that Dad loved him, Dean saying something so disrespectful about Dad, or the idea that Dean would disobey Dad, leave Dad alone forever, to protect him.He wiped his tears on the back of his hand, sniffing. “So… if it was between me and Dad, you’d… you’d pick me?”“Look at me, listen to me,” Dean leaned forward, unblinking. “Every. Time. Don’t you ever doubt that. Don’t ever doubt me.”To his embarrassment, he felt more tears coming. “But… it doesn’t even seem like you like me anymore.”If he’d ever seen more agony on Dean’s face, he couldn’t remember. “How can you think that?”“You and your stupid schedule! You barely watch TV with me! You’re like a—a robot with no feelings. You might as well leave me here with Dad, it’s all the same! You don’t even hug me anymore!” This last complaint sounded so childish to his ears that Sam immediately wished he could take it back.“Then I’m sorry,” Dean said earnestly. “I am. I…” He automatically started to chew on his lower lip and, remembering it was busted just a second too late, cursed under his breath before starting again. “I thought I could protect us both, keep us safe, and I took it too far. I don’t want to be a prison guard, Sammy. I’m not tryin’ to make your life shitty. Protectin’ you? Makin’ sure you’re happy? It’s the most important thing. I even try to… to shield you from Dad when I know he’s –-” Dean searched for a word. “You know. And I know during those times, I’m tryin’ to keep you both happy, so then neither of you are happy and… You’re the one I should keep happy, Sam. Dad, sometimes… I think maybe he can’t be happy. Can’t even remember the last time he was. So from now on? It’s all you. If Dad doesn’t like it, I’ll handle it.”Sam just stood there with his mouth hanging open. Not only were these the most words Dean had said to him in weeks, but Dean was picking him over Dad. Of course, it seemed easy enough for Dean to promise these things when Dad wasn’t around, and Sam remembered something he’d heard a few months back. “Dad said that pretty soon, he would take you with him on the road more and more. That I would have to stay by myself longer.”Dean stared at the floor grimly. “Yeah, I got no real choice there.” He looked up with a weak smile, or as much of one as his busted mouth would allow. “But hey, no orders from your asshole big brother, huh? All the TV you want? Drink the whole gallon of milk at one time? And I’ll find a pay phone and call you every morning and every night when I’m not here, just like I always do.”He mirrored Dean’s weak smile back at him, relieved to see that his brother’s face could still form an expression that didn’t make Sam feel like his whole world was caving in.“You’d really do anything?”Dean nodded, intent on Sam, as if pleading to be fully understood. He said the word slowly and deliberately, letting it hang heavy between them. “Anything.”Sam just stood there, frozen. It was too much for him to process.“What about this, huh?” Dean almost achieved the lighter tone he was going for, but Sam could still hear the tears. “When Dad’s here, if he’s awake and around, we follow the schedule. When Dad’s not here, we do it my way.” He stopped and amended this. “Our way.”Dean stood then and held his arms open. “C’mon.”Sam ran at him so fast that he almost tripped over the destroyed table, sobbing hysterically as soon as he made contact. He wasn’t really much shorter than Dean then, maybe only three inches (which Dean found endlessly annoying), but he sagged against Dean and buried his face in his chest just like he did when he was younger. Sam didn’t care about the dirt or the blood or the wet or the sweat smell. He’d needed this hug for so long. It felt like his entire body was starved for it.Dean crushed Sam to him with his right arm, the other arm wrapped around halfway with his left hand held gingerly. He rested his chin on the top of Sam’s head.They stayed like that for at least a minute, then Dean clasped Sam’s shoulder tightly, pushing him just far enough away so he could look him squarely in the eye. “It’s not me and Dad, and then you. It’s you and me, and then Dad. Do you believe me?”Sam wanted to believe this. But Dad and Dean were so entwined. He nodded, but he wasn’t certain. He was glad when Dean pulled him back into the hug, because he had started crying again, and it felt like he might not be able to stop.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

1991
When Dean let go of him again, Sam looked around them at the destroyed motel room. “What are we going to do about all the broken stuff, Dean? It’s not ours.”Of course not. Everything they owned had to fit in the two duffel bags. That was Dad’s rule. Every time they packed to move on, whatever didn’t fit was left behind. As if afraid that Sam might escape, Dean rested his good hand heavily on his shoulder, his eyes moving from item to wrecked item. “Yeah, wasn’t really thinkin’ that far ahead.”“I’ll clean it up,” Sam offered, finally seeing the two chairs in the kitchenette. They were in pieces just like the bedside table.“Nah, hold off.” Dean shrugged out of his wet jacket and hung it on the bathroom door knob, which promptly fell off, taking the jacket with it. For a minute he just stood there, rubbed his eyes, and left it on the floor. “I need a shower, maybe more than one.”While Dean showered with the bathroom door as closed as it could currently get, Sam stared at the nightly news without hearing any of it. Even in his rage, Dean hadn’t made a mark on the television. Some things were sacred.Dean tentatively pushed open the bathroom door and stood there in his prized AC/DC t-shirt from their 1979 Highway to Hell tour and some sweat pants.Sam still remembered when Dean had first gotten that t-shirt and smiled at the memory. It was at a swap meet where Dad was looking for car parts. Dad had waved them off and the two of them were milling around. Dean was bored out of his mind but bought Sam a delicious orange cream shake that came in a plain styrofoam cup. That was when Dean spotted the t-shirt among a pile of others and stopped dead in his tracks, causing Sam to plow right into him.He’d been so pleased to find it that he didn’t even consider stealing it. The woman wanted five dollars for it, but Dean talked her down to three after he pointed out some fraying around the sleeves and a small hole in the armpit. If she’d insisted, though, he would’ve eventually coughed up the five.To Sam, it was just someone else’s old t-shirt, but Dean said that meant that someone else had broken it in and now it was just right. That it had history. Dad had been annoyed about the three dollars, since it was out of the ten dollars he’d given Dean to buy food for the two of them, but in that moment, nothing could’ve brought Dean down. His belly growling temporarily or an AC/DC t-shirt? No contest.“Hey!” Dean gave a short whistle and waved a hand in Sam’s direction to get his attention. He was still in the doorway of the bathroom. “Back down to earth, Sally Ride. There’s glass and… everything else on the carpet and my shoes are still dryin’ out in the tub. Can you hand me a few pairs of socks?”Sam grabbed Dean’s duffel out of the closet and dug around until he found some and started to put it back.“Leave it out,” Dean said. “We’re gonna need it here in a minute. I, uh…” He looked at the socks in Sam’s hands and then at his broken fingers. “Awesome, this is gonna be about as fun as showerin’ with only one hand.” To demonstrate, Dean wildly twisted and contorted himself ineffectively toward his left side.Sam cracked up. “Would it help if I put them on you?”“Yeah,” Dean answered, almost shyly. “If you don’t mind.”He didn’t mind. Last year, Dean had come home from a trip with Dad with a broken wrist and middle finger, that time on his right hand, and Sam had done the same for him then. While Dean sat on the toilet’s lid, Sam put the first two pair of socks on him. Dean had wanted a third, but that pair wouldn’t go over the other two. Instead, they got a pair of Dad’s bigger socks and that worked. When Sam looked up at him, he realized that Dean’s split lip, even with all the blood washed away, looked even worse than it had before. It was more than just a cut in his lip, the lip itself was torn in half almost down to the skin itself and blood was still trying to seep out of the tear.“How did you hurt your lip?” Sam asked.“I was scalin’ the security fence next to the river, and I was almost all the way up about to climb over, but my foot slipped.” Dean grimaced sheepishly. “Lip snagged on the chain-link at the top on the way down.”“Ouch!” Sam touched his own lip sympathetically. “I’m sorry, Dean, you were out there because --”Dean waved one hand as if pushing the apology away, then stood up to wiggle his toes experimentally, not that he could wiggle them all that much in three pairs of socks. “Thanks, Sammy.” His face went shuttered for a few seconds, but then he smiled again. “Are you sleepy or can you give me a hand with... uh, my hand? Well, both hands.”“You hurt that one, too?”He turned his right-hand palm out so that Sam could see a big gouge between two fingers, wincing. “Wasn’t a good time in the shower but at least it’s disinfected.”Sam swallowed hard, remembering a time when he’d tripped and gotten a big gash along his hairline, how much the shampoo had stung until it started to heal up.Was Dean asking for help because he wanted to share it with Sam, or was it only because Dad wasn’t there to help him? Either way, if Sam had been sleepy, he was now wide awake and excited at this new glimpse of Dean. “What can I do?”“Help me find something for a splint. I need something at least close to a quarter-inch thick and --” He looked at his left hand. “Two, two and a half inches wide? Last time I used a thick stack of pages torn from the phonebook but I think these breaks are a little too bad for that.”After a couple of minutes, Sam noticed that the walls had thin wooden trim not only in the corners (where it was triangular) but also down the center of the garishly papered walls and those pieces were flat. “Would some of that work? It’s not as wide as you need, but maybe we could tape some pieces together?”Dean looked up from toeing through the alarm clock parts and nodded. “I’ve already done this much damage, why not?”Sam took out his own knife and started making little cuts that were roughly finger-length, to only pull down what they needed.“Nah, we’ll just snap off a long piece and we’ll cut it into what we need.” Dean flicked his knife open, gesturing ambiguously around the room with the point. “Think I got an idea how to get us out of this.”He wasn’t sure if Dean meant the wrecked room itself, or the consequences of having wrecked it.They each stood on either side of the strip and started prying underneath it with their knives. The glue was pretty strong and they ended up removing almost as much wallpaper as they did wood trim.Dean’s knife stopped moving and he peered more closely at Sam’s face. With the unbroken ring finger on his left, he gently touched the skin under Sam’s eye and his voice went as flat and cold as it had earlier. “Where’d you get this?”Sam touched his skin the same place Dean had and remembered. It felt a bit puffier than when he last checked it. “Oh, David and I were playing, and he accidentally hit me in the eye.”“Accidentally?” Dean was staring at him hard, giving Sam his human lie detector look. “Not like the time in —?”“Accidentally,” Sam repeated firmly before he could say the name again. “Promise.”As if appeased, Dean glanced away and continued poking under his side of the trim. “So this David kid… is he cool?”“Yeah, he’s cool. I was at the school library the first day looking for this book Ender’s Game, but it wasn’t on the shelf and the library said it wasn’t checked out. When I turned around, David was reading it at one of the tables. He had read it once already, so he let me have it to check out.” Sam smiled. “And we started eating lunch together every day after that.”“Gilbert and Poindexter,” Dean taunted him, playfully blocking Sam’s knife from the other side of the trim. “Out there nerdin’ it up.”Sam blew a raspberry and Dean laughed.After a few more minutes, they had a long piece of wood trim that was separated from the wall and Dean hacked away at the wallpaper scraps that were still stuck to it. Sam watched as he pulled a zippered leather pouch out of his duffel, then furrowed his brow at Sam uncertainly before checking his watch. “You gettin’ sleepy?”“No, I’m good,” Sam insisted brightly, though he was a little sleepy from all the food and playing. “Is there anything else I can do to help?”Dean didn’t seem entirely convinced, but he held up the long piece of wood trim. “Yeah, let’s take this —” He looked at what remained of the little kitchen table. “Shouldn’t’ve wrecked all the work surfaces, huh?”He handed the piece of trim to Sam and went over to the kitchenette, moving the hot plate toward the mini-fridge so they could use the counter, then paused. "Wait, have you eaten?"“Yeah, I ate over there.” Sam suddenly remembered. “Hey! David’s mom gave me something!”“Hmm?”Sam put down the piece of trim he was holding for Dean and walked carefully through the wreckage to his backpack. The package was slightly smushed on one side by being under his math book when he dropped the pack, but he could already smell it through the foil.He put it down on the kitchenette counter and unwrapped it. “Food?” Dean asked hopefully, as intrigued as Sam knew he would be.“Banana bread,” Sam explained, picking up one thick slice and pushing the other toward Dean.Dean’s hunger won out over his suspicion, and he broke off a corner of his slice and popped it carefully in his mouth to bypass his lip. “Okay, that’s pretty good. She made this?”“She said it came out of a box.”“I’ve seen that stuff at the store, I think.” Dean sighed and looked around the tiny kitchenette. “I’d kill for an oven sometimes. A real fridge, huh? Maybe learn how to...” He trailed off and shook his head, putting another piece of banana bread in his mouth. “Let’s get this hacked up into shorter pieces.”Sam watched attentively as Dean lined up the end of his middle finger down to the knuckle, then moved the wood up slightly and marked it with his knife. He used that piece as a guide to make five pieces that were roughly the same size. Then he pulled a roll of duct tape out of the zippered leather bag and bit off a strip of it with his teeth and held it out to Sam. “I’m tapin’ two pieces one on top of the other, then tapin’ those three pieces side by side so they’re one big flat piece that’s thick enough to brace. Get it?”He took two of the pieces and stacked them as evenly as he could. Dean did the same, though more slowly, with the other four pieces. Broken fingers or not, Sam realized Dean could’ve done this part all by himself. Maybe this wasn’t entirely about not having Dad there to help him.From the zippered case, Dean took out a roll of gauze that looked like it had been used at least once before, and more of the flesh-colored bandage. “You’re about to push your own broken fingers back in place?”“Yeah,” Dean answered slowly. “I mean, just enough to line them up with the splint, so the splint can do the rest. Are you just now gettin’ that?”For some reason, that hadn’t occurred to Sam. “At a first aid assembly I went to last year, they said that for a broken bone, you should always go to the hospital because the bone could heal wrong, or you could break it even worse, if you tried to do it yourself.” He looked directly at the middle finger on Dean’s right hand, which had never quite healed correctly.“Hospitals are expensive,” Dean muttered dismissively, then handed him the gauze.Sam balked and didn’t take it. “We could still take you and just try to pay the bill later?”“No need.” Dean held out the gauze again, more insistently. “I’ve done this before.”“For Dad?” Sam asked. Dean’s face went guarded again, but to Sam’s surprise, he actually answered. “Yeah. But unless my arm’s hangin’ off or I'm bleedin' bad, I know how to handle it.”While he had Dean answering questions, he thought he’d ask the question. “What does Dad do that you have to patch him up so much?”The temperature in the room definitely dropped, just as it was beginning to thaw, and Sam instantly regretted asking.Handing him the gauze with even more annoyance this time and extending his left hand palm up on the counter, Dean watched him. “Can we not get into this now?”“Dad has come home hurt three times in the past year, then the two of you go into the bathroom with that zipper case and shut the door, then he goes to bed. You came home hurt three times last year saying you had fallen down or had an accident.” Sam took the gauze and fidgeted with it while Dean waited with his hand still out. “I know Dad’s not a… a gun salesman, I’m not stupid, Dean.”“Never thought you were,” Dean murmured. “Come on, wrap the gauze all the way around my fingers. Middle finger, too. Try not to cut off my circulation.”“You broke that one too?” It came out more accusingly than Sam had intended.“Won’t be flippin’ off anyone with that hand for a while.” Dean chuckled at his own joke and then stopped when he saw Sam wasn’t laughing and his face went blank again. “It’s to brace the two broken ones, so they heal in the right position.”Sam wrapped the gauze around his fingers as Dean stoically pretended it didn’t hurt to straighten them. “It was because Dad told you not to, isn’t it?” He asked sullenly. “Not to tell me.”Dean was zeroed in on him now, monitoring for every facial tic. “He told me to tell you when you were eight.”Sam stopped mid-wrap. “What?”“That’s when he told me,” Dean said softly. “So that’s when he wanted you to know. But… but I begged him to wait. Until you were ten.”“Why?”With a frustrated groan, Dean yanked the gauze back from him and started wrapping it around his own fingers. “Because you were in the third grade. You were excited about things. You were --” “Are we criminals?” Sam interrupted. This thought had never occurred to him before now. “I mean, the guns and the --”“No!” Dean said emphatically, but then seemed to recalculate. “No... I mean... to some people, I guess. But we’re not evil, Sammy. We’re...” He seemed to scan around the room for his next words. “We help people. And you can puppy-dog-eye me all you want, I’m not tellin’ you more until May second, and that’s it.”“But wouldn’t it be good for me to know?”“No.” Dean was quiet for a long time, smoothing out the gauze. “I wish Dad waited to tell me, but... I understand why he couldn’t. Didn’t have a choice. With you, there was a choice. So I asked for it. Okay?”On one hand, ten seemed so far away. But on the other, Dean had broken from what Dad wanted. Even if Sam didn’t like the decision, Dean had asked Dad to do something he didn’t want to do. He had stood his ground. That meant that, whatever it was, it was important.With his better hand, Dean pressed the splint against the three fingers. “I really do need your help with this part. You can either hold the splint in place or wrap the bandage.”Deciding on wrapping the bandage, Sam secured it in place with two of the silver clips that was stuck to the rest of the roll.Dean held up the splinted hand. “See? Looks as good as anything a hospital could do.”Sam seriously doubted that, but he was glad Dean was pleased with it.He extended his other hand now. “Just the gauze and bandage on this one.”This one was actually harder because the gash on Dean’s right hand was between two fingers. But after a couple of false starts, Sam managed it by wrapping the loose ends around the fingers on either side. “Is that good?”“It’ll do. See? Easy.” Dean smiled and tossed his duffel bag to Sam. “Gotta fix my lip now. There should be dental floss in there somewhere.”While Sam rooted around in it, Dean disappeared into the bathroom with the zippered pouch.Sam stood in the doorway with the small container of floss as Dean draped one of the motel towels across the bathroom sink. “I found some.”Without looking at Sam, Dean closed his eyes and turned his face to the ceiling. “What kind? Please, please don’t say minty.”“Plain.”“Good.” Dean shuddered, taking it. “Some things weren’t meant to tingle.” Dean hesitated for a moment as if he wasn’t sure he should show Sam what he was taking from the pouch, but shrugged and removed a packet of curved needles, a big set of tweezers, scissors, a lighter, and little alcohol pads, putting them down next to the floss and a brown bottle of peroxide.He anxiously watched Dean’s reflection in the mirror as he winced and touched the tear with one of the pads. “Do I… do I have to help you sew it up?”“No!” Dean said, as if offended. “I wouldn’t -- that’s what the mirror’s for, so I can see what I’m doin’." He handed the red plastic lighter to Sam. Pinching the eye-end of the needle carefully between two blunt fingernails, Dean held it over the lighter. "Just burn as much of the lower end as you can without burning me."Sam flicked the lighter and got a flame on the second try. “Isn’t that going to burn your lip?”“It kills the germs on the needle so it’s safe, it’ll be cooled off enough by the time I start usin' it. Tear me off a long piece of floss and wipe it down with one of the alcohol things. I mean long." He held his hands apart the desired length. "Just fold the pad over the piece of floss and pull it through so the alcohol gets on all of it, that’s what I do.”“Good work.” Dean took the piece of floss and threaded it through the needle, before glancing up at Sam’s reflection in the mirror. “You don’t wanna watch this part, Sammy. Trust me.”Relieved, Sam waited on his bed. Just hearing Dean’s sharp inhalations of pain through his teeth was bad enough. Sam imagined he could hear the needle piercing Dean’s lip, dragging the floss behind it, and appearing on the other side. He felt like he might throw up.When Dean got out of the bathroom, the two halves of his lower lip were roughly sewn together, still bleeding a little. “Not gonna win any contest, but it’ll do. Now if I can stop chewin’ my damn lip, I’ll be golden. Didn’t know how often I did that.”“It looks bad,” Sam said queasily, adding hastily, “Not the stitches, the cut.” “Oh, you haven’t seen bad yet. Tomorrow it’s gonna be swollen three times this size.” Dean walked over to the kitchenette and walked back holding the remainder of his banana bread. “Eating’s gonna be real fun.”By then it was almost midnight, and Sam braced to be told it was bedtime, but Dean didn’t say anything about it. He slumped on the end of Dad's bed and wearily watched the remaining half-hour of a movie with Michelle Pfeiffer in it that was intended to be funny, but Dean wasn't laughing. Sam sprawled out next to where Dean sat as if intending to watch it with him, but dozed off instead.Sam woke up to Dean shaking his shoulder. “C’mon little man, I can’t carry you like this, you’re gonna have to stand up for me.”“Hmm?” Sam asked fuzzily.“To your bed. C’mon, it’s like three steps.”Dean braced him as he got up and marched him over. He pulled up the blanket and Sam crawled under it, yawning. “Your pillow’s all crooked, lift up your head.” Sam raised his head and then left it raised even after Dean had fixed the pillow.“And then put your head down again,” Dean growled, pushing him by the forehead back into his pillow. “Why do you always do that?”Sam giggled, and dozed off again as Dean tucked the blanket around him.He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but instead of being in Dad’s bed like Sam expected, Dean raised the blanket on the other side of Sam’s and got in. Too tired to play it cool, Sam cuddled up as tightly against him as he could get, feeling seven years old again in the best possible way, even though he was bigger now and it wasn't quite the same. Every part of Dean he could touch, he did, even tangling their bare feet together. If there had been more of Dean’s skin available, Sam would’ve claimed that, too. Cinching one arm above Dean’s waist, Sam buried his face against his chest and soaked up the remaining warmth from his hot shower, the fresh smell of soap and shampoo, and the reassuring thump-thump-thump of his steady heartbeat. "Sure you're on me enough?" Dean asked sarcastically. "I think part of your ass might still be touchin' the bed."Sam ignored this and, expecting he wouldn't even be heard, whispered into Dean's shirt. “I’m really your favorite?”It seemed like he felt Dean’s rumbling laugh and reply through his chest rather than actually hearing it. “You’re my favorite.”“More than anyone else?”“Damn right. It’s just you and me.” He fondly combed his fingers through Sam’s hair, scratching his scalp just a little, the way he knew Sam liked.“Dean, can you sleep with me from now on?”A few seconds passed. “As long as Dad’s not on his way back to town, yeah, whenever you want.”“Always want,” Sam mumbled drowsily.“You comfortable, Sammy? This the position you wanna be in?”“Mm-hmm.” As soon as Dean put his arm around him, as if locking him in place, Sam was asleep.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

NOW
They were both quiet for a few minutes.Dean finally spoke but wouldn’t look at him. “I’m sorry, Sam. Uh, that I punched the wall and scared you.”“I’m not angling for apologies, Dean. This isn’t an… an airing of grievances to make you feel bad. I’m just telling you when I realized it.”“Because I hugged you?” He still wouldn’t look at Sam. “Was that all I had to do?”
Yeah, sure, it was the hugging.
Like the alcoholic version of a chain-smoker, Dean drained his current bottle, set it into an empty section of the six-pack, and immediately grabbed the next one.As he started to twist it open, Sam took it out of his hand. “Dean, it’s…” He checked his watch. “Nine in the morning, why are you drinking so much?”Dean opened his mouth like he had a smartass comment all cued up, but then seemed to think better of it. “Didn’t know what time it was. Didn’t sleep last night.” He scrubbed his hand down his face like he was trying to wake it up, a mannerism he picked up from Dad. “Guess the night kinda ran into the day.” Dean slyly eyed the remaining beers in the six-pack but continued. “You know… Dad told me…” Dean seemed to roll the words he wanted to say around in his mouth, lips pursing. “He said I mothered you too much, that I was makin’ you soft. That you were too old to have your hand held, that it was weird that you wanted to sleep with me. When you turned eight, he told me to cut it out. That’s why he started takin’ me out on the road more and more, ‘cause we were too…” Whatever the rest of the sentence was, it died in Dean’s throat. “I guess, uh… I mean… I don’t know, given the way things turned out, maybe he had a point.”Sam felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “Don’t say that.”Finally, Dean met his eyes. “What? It’s true.”“It’s how we ended up here, Dean, and here is good,” Sam argued. “Any one thing could’ve changed it. Like you deciding to keep being Dad Part 2, deciding you’d had enough bodyguard detail and taking off on your own, or you getting killed and leaving me alone with Dad.”“That one almost happened,” Dean muttered. Sam huffed in exasperation. “Shut up, I’m serious.”Dean’s mouth quirked up at one corner in a silent apology. “I know I don’t say this kinda thing often, but we’re fucked up, Sammy. We’d need a whole panel of shrinks, and then our shrinks would need their own shrinks. We’re…” He peered up at Sam’s ceiling for some kind of inspiration, but gave up. “I don’t know what we are.”I do know. The words were in Sam’s mouth, just dying to be said.Before Sam could summon up the courage, Dean swung his legs up off the side of his bed with as little regard for modesty and, just as Sam had suspected, even less regard for boxer briefs. Before he could avert his eyes, he caught the flash of Dean’s inner thigh muscles… almost right up to the erection that still poked insistently against the robe. If Dean had spread his legs just a little bit more, had leaned back just a little more…Dean was up on his feet, making a declaration that Sam missed entirely. “Sammy?”Sam looked up with a start. “What?”“Breakfast, Major Tom. Scrambled eggs and bacon. You can keep tellin’ your story in the kitchen.” Sam stood cautiously, feeling like his legs were going to collapse right out from under him. “Right. Uh, make my eggs in the other skillet. I don’t want cheese.”“Eggs with no cheese,” Dean murmured under his breath. “Like waffles with no syrup, what’s the point?”Sam ignored him. “And coffee.”“And coffee,” agreed Dean, sucking in his breath a little as his bare feet touched the cold marble floor. Glancing over at Sam, he caught him yanking self-consciously at the hem of the short robe. “Aw, you look cute, Sammy. See, we empty out the bunker and you feel like you can show a little leg.” He smacked Sam hard on the hip, giving him the once over. “Feelin’ pretty, good for you.”Sam rolled his eyes but felt his face redden as he followed closely behind. “At least I don’t look like I’ve been electrocuted.”Dean scowled and combed both hands through his hair, only succeeding in making it fluffy in some places but leaving it sticking up in all the others. “Better?”“Yeah,” Sam lied. “All better.”☆☆☆☆☆
1991
Any relief Sam got from sleeping with Dean the night before was short-lived, because the very next day, everything got (as Dean liked to say) FUBAR.As soon as Sam walked into homeroom, the teacher sent him to the guidance counselor. When he got there, Miss Jenkins was waiting. She reminded Sam of a television grandma with her gray hair in a bun and her long dresses. An older man in a red cardigan and tiny eyeglasses sat in the chair next to her desk. “Sam, this is Gary. He’s a social worker with Child Protective Services.”It was like his stomach hit the floor.Gary greeted him in that fake-chipper way that some adults used to speak to kids. Sam could smell it from a mile away, especially when an adult asked you to call them by their first name. “Hi, Sam. We just wanted to ask you some questions. We heard from a parent of one of your friends that you’ve been on your own for two weeks, so we wanted to follow up with you.”Sam had mentioned that to David without thinking, in spite of Dean telling him so many times to not share any details that weren’t absolutely necessary. “And sometimes not even then,” Dean had added. “I haven’t been alone. My brother Dean takes care of me.” Sam went back and forth between Miss Jenkins and Gary, setting his puppy eyes at maximum.“And how old is he?” Gary asked.Sam tried to keep his tone completely neutral. “Seventeen.”“That’s interesting,” Miss Jenkins replied coolly. “Sam, we know that he’s only thirteen, we checked with the high school before we called you in. Please be honest with your answers, we’re only here to help.”He didn’t address being caught in a lie. “I’d like for Dean to be here. Can you go get him?”Miss Jenkins smiled tightly. “We haven’t been able to find your brother. We’d be very interested in talking to him.” Of course, today of all days, Dean had decided to skip school.First, he tried to tell them that David had misunderstood, that he just meant his Dad had been working for two weeks, but came home every night. Gary called his bluff and asked for a number where they could reach him, but all they had were places where they could leave messages for him, or in case of emergencies, places where they could go and await further instructions. Sam wondered if they could get Uncle Bobby there quickly and have him pretend to be Dad.Just as Dean and Dad had coached him after the near-miss in Medford, Sam stonewalled them mercilessly. He only answered after lots of quiet deliberation and acted like he couldn’t think of the right words. He acted confused by the questions, asked for numerous clarifications, then pretended to be confused by the clarifications. He changed his story slightly a few different times, so that they had to ask the same questions again and again. He answered questions they didn’t ask and gave them details they didn’t request. He acted flighty and distracted and pretended that the questions were traumatic for him as he cried into many tissues. They probably thought Sam had brain damage.“Sam,” Gary began in his syrupy sympathetic tone that didn’t quite hide the fact that he was losing patience. “You should know that we sent a police car to your motel room. Not only was almost everything in the room broken or destroyed, but there was barely any food there. We found what looked like blood. If you’re being hurt, we’d like to help you.”Now Sam understood why Dean was upset about having to use the real address of the motel when he enrolled them in school. They’d tried to use the address of an abandoned business instead, but someone in the school’s office had recognized it, and Dean didn’t have time to find a better option without arousing suspicion.“Someone broke in and did all that while we were at school yesterday. We're not sure who.”Miss Jenkins folded her hands and leaned forward. “Is Dean the one that gave you that black eye?”Sam was outraged on Dean's behalf. "No!"“Was it your father?” Gary inquired earnestly.“No, it was an accident at my friend’s house. David’s. The one whose mom called you. She gave me an ice pack after, she can tell you.”He could tell by the look they silently exchanged that they didn’t believe him. Gary said “Hmm” and made notes on his clipboard.“Can I go to the restroom?” Sam asked. There was another wordless glance between them, and Miss Jenkins stood up. “Of course. I’ll go with you.”Yeah, he should’ve known it wouldn’t be that easy.Miss Jenkins guided Sam out into the hall with a firm hand on his shoulder. When they arrived at the restroom, he went inside. At least she didn’t follow him in or send someone else after him. There was a window that was high up on the wall above the urinals. Sam grimaced and braced his foot on one of them, pulling himself up.The window didn’t have a latch, but it had apparently been sealed shut a long time ago and had rusted in place. Not only could he not pull himself up any higher, but even if he could, and even if he could get it open, it didn’t look like there would be enough room for him to squeeze through it.He glanced up, hoping for ceiling tiles, even though he had even less of a chance of reaching those.Medford, he thought, feeling like he might cry. But Dean wouldn’t cry, so Sam didn’t either. Looking down, he noticed the wooden stepping block that was used so the smaller kids could reach the urinals. Carefully lowering himself back to the floor, he picked it up and frowned, testing its weight in his hands. Maybe…Miss Jenkins and someone else, a man, started knocking on the door. “Sam? Everything okay?” Dean had once said, “Give an embarrassing, super specific answer. Give them too much information. You’re gonna feel stupid, but it works. They feel too awkward for you to question it.”“I have really, really bad diarrhea. It really burns,” Sam called out with a sort of pained moan in his voice, wincing to himself. Is that what Dean had meant?“Okay,” she said after brief pause. “Take your time.”Sam breathed a sigh of relief and, holding the wooden block under one arm, went into one of the stalls and carefully stood on the toilet.He could still hear Miss Jenkins in the hallway. She wouldn’t come in herself, she would probably send in the man. Regardless, was he going to hit someone over the head with the block, and if he did, would it actually buy him any time or just make them angry?“What would Dean do?” Sam whispered to himself. Now that Dean had picked him, this was an easy answer: He’d hit them with the block until they went down.While this thought made Sam feel warm and loved, he didn’t think he could do it.He felt for the pocketknife Dean had gotten him from a flea market on his last birthday, but he didn’t think he could actually stab someone either.Sam decided to play off of what he’d already said. He stepped down from the toilet as quietly as possible, put the wooden block back where he found it, and walked up to the door. “Miss Jenkins?”“I’m here. Everything okay in there, Sam?”“I…” Sam winced again, trying to sound as tearful and embarrassed as possible. “I messed up my pants. Is there another pair of pants I could wear?”“Of course,” she said sympathetically. “I’ll go find you something to change into.”Sam had to stop himself from hissing “Yes!” in triumph.He wondered if Miss Jenkins would do this herself or send someone else to do it, but heard her voice fading as she spoke to someone else further down the hall. Opening the door as narrowly as he could, Sam peered out into the hallway. Mr. Tracey, the school’s bear of a maintenance man, was standing guard just outside the door. That was probably the man’s voice he had heard earlier. Sam didn’t see anyone else.
Think, Sam, think.
Inspiration struck and Sam grabbed a roll of toilet paper. He started ripping sections of it off, wadding them up, and throwing them into the toilet farthest from the door. When he was done with the roll, he pulled as many scratchy brown paper towels out of the dispenser as he could and started to wad them up, too, but depending on where Miss Jenkins had gone to find him clean pants, he might not have much time. He threw in the whole stack of them just as they were. Of course, after the fact, it occurred to him that he could’ve just thrown a whole roll of toilet paper in there and accomplished pretty much the same thing. Now he had lost valuable time.He flushed the full toilet and the water level rose ominously. After three more flushes, it was sloshing over the seat and onto the floor.Opening the door just enough to get Mr. Tracey’s attention, Sam asked haltingly, “Sir, the toilet I used is backed up and water is going everywhere, can you help me?”Mr. Tracey wrinkled his brow and walked in quickly. As soon as he was inside the stall Sam had indicated, Sam opened the door and took off as fast as he could.He glanced left and right, and headed for the back exit, the same way he’d walked out to go see David. If Sam could find him, Dean would know what to do.He heard Miss Jenkins voice calling out to him from down the hall. “Sam? Sam Winchester? Get back here!”Sam put on a burst of speed, turning down the first hallway he came to, just to get out of her sightline. Dean said that people made lots of assumptions when they could no longer see you, and that you could take advantage of them.Dean had said, “They’re gonna go to the first place you think is a safe bet, the easy place, so find a different one. You want them wastin’ their time on the obvious one while you get farther away.”“Where would I hide first?” Sam said to himself, stopping briefly in the hallway to consider his options. There was an empty classroom to his right. That was probably the obvious way Dean meant. Second was the maintenance closet. Hiding in there wouldn’t accomplish what he wanted, but they didn’t know that. Third, then, was a narrow hallway that was mostly used by teachers to go into their break room. Sam had gotten lost when he first started going there and remembered that there was an exit at the end of it that would cross the grassy courtyard area. If he could get past that, he could walk over to the east entrance where all the fifth and sixth grader classes were.Like the answer to a prayer, the bell rang for the end of first period, and Sam remembered everything Dean had ever told him about taking advantage of a crowd for cover.He ran across the courtyard, pretending to be any other student who was late for class. Once he was inside the doors to the fifth and sixth grade area, he took a moment to catch his breath, then easily stepped into the crowd of older kids who were gossiping in the hallway or getting things out of their lockers. Because of his height, he looked like he belonged. He was even taller than some of them.Dean’s voice played in his head again, “Change how you look. If they’re expectin’ a red shirt, find a blue one.”“Okay,” Sam acknowledged to himself, setting his jaw.He started opening locker doors, looking for clothes, and found a red windbreaker emblazoned with the name of the school’s softball team. Shrugging out of his favorite flannel, he reluctantly swapped it out with the jacket which was very tight across his shoulders, possibly a girl’s, but he could make do. Opening a few more lockers, he found a black baseball cap and put it on his head, hoping fervently that its owner didn’t have head lice.When he checked down the hall, he saw Miss Jenkins standing there, scrutinizing every face.In his head, Dean advised him again. “Once you’ve changed your appearance as much as you can, do not run unless you have no other options. You’re no longer what they’re lookin’ for and you’re just a person who’s standin’ there. Be completely unremarkable and stand your ground like you’re exactly where you need to be. Strike up a conversation with someone, buy something out of a vending machine, read a newspaper.”
Strike up a conversation with someone.
That was easy for Dean to say.For Sam, it was a lot more daunting. He’d been at this school for almost two months, and he’d only made one friend.And, according to his watch, he only had about three minutes before the second period bell rang and left the halls dangerously empty.The intercom suddenly crackled with a loud burst of static. “Sam Winchester, please report to the guidance counselor’s office. Sam Winchester, please report to the guidance counselor’s office.”He barely stopped himself from freaking out. “Shit shit shit shit.”There was an open classroom just across from him where a pretty blonde teacher waited outside her door for students to file in. Sam waited for some other students to enter and fell in behind them.
I belong here, I belong here, I belong here.
He casually picked a desk in the back and slumped forward in his seat. In reality, he felt like he was going to have a heart attack. The blonde teacher, whose name was Miss Nesbitt, took roll call without noticing that Sam didn’t belong there. But as she returned graded quizzes to the students, she noticed him and stopped. “Hi, who are you?”
God, what do I say?
She might’ve heard his name over the intercom so he improvised. “Robert Bonham. I’m… new. This is my first day.”A line deepened between her eyes. “And you’re in honors math, Robert?”“Yes, ma’am. This is where they told me to go.” He decided to channel Dean a little: “I don’t have my books yet. Should I not have come in until I had my books? I’m really sorry, I’ll go talk to someone… maybe I did the wrong thing…” He looked down and faked a few shaky breaths. “This is the worst first day. Nothing has gone right.”It worked. She smiled and reassuringly patted his arm, assigned the other students a couple of pages out of a workbook, and disappeared to the administrative office to ask about “Robert Bonham.” As soon as she was gone, Sam waited for a couple of minutes, got up, and walked out the door.The hallway was empty except for a boy walking into the restroom and a girl wearing the lower half of a mascot costume.Sam got a little cocky then, and moved quickly toward the double doors that lead out onto the covered walkway to the gymnasium. He was looking behind him down the hall as he pushed the door open, so he didn’t notice that Mr. Tracey was approaching.If Sam had just played it cool, he might’ve been able to slip by in his disguise. (“Sam Winchester? Never heard of him.”) But instead he froze. Completely froze. Which prompted Mr. Tracey to look at his face. “Sam, is that you? Miss Jenkins has been looking for you!”☆☆☆☆☆
NOW
“It was a valiant effort.” Dean poked at the bacon in the cast iron skillet with a spatula. “You almost made it. I’m proud of you, Sammy. Didn’t even know you were listenin’.” He held up one finger without turning around. “The escape from the bathroom was inspired, I have to say.”Sam grinned at Dean’s back. “I had a good teacher.” Dean made a noncommittal noise as the bacon sizzled and the room filled with the aroma of coffee.
He thinks I mean Dad.
God, he made Sam want to scream sometimes. “I’m talking about you, Dean.”His brother turned away from the stove to face him and almost made his “whatever” face, but after a moment he gifted Sam with a small, slightly bashful smile. “Thank you.”
See? Was that so hard?
Turning back to the counter, he put some paper towels on a plate and dumped the bacon onto it to soak up the grease. “You know I know this story, right?” Sam’s tone came out more strident than he intended, “I need you to listen, Dean. I’m building up to something here. I need to give you all the details. They’re important and it’ll all make sense when I’m done.”Without turning around, Dean placatingly held his hands up, still wielding the spatula. “Alright, fine.”He rationed their eggs out onto the plates, placing four pieces of bacon on each one. Since Dean was unable to understand human-sized portions, Sam would roughly eat half of everything on his plate, leaving Dean to finish it. As he watched Dean move easily around the kitchen, he wondered where all the food went. Dean was trim, so it must’ve burned up on impact as soon as it hit his stomach. Sam, on the other hand, seemed to gain three pounds whenever he ate a burrito. “Here’s your boring-ass eggs.” Dean turned to put the plate down in front of him, then handed him a folded paper towel and a fork. “Coffee’s comin’.”Sam stared down at his plate and thought about where the conversation would eventually lead, feeling a twinge of apprehension. Once he got to the most important part of all this... if he could...Dean put down two mugs of black coffee and put the little basket of creamer and sugar packets next to Sam with a spoon balanced across the top. Before he’d even fully dropped into his chair, there was bacon in his mouth. He glanced contritely as Sam, mistaking his stillness for suspicion. “Look, I apologize again for sneakin’ cheese in last time, I just wanted you to know what you were missin’. This time, there’s no cheese, I promise.”Sam absently cut the scrambled eggs into smaller pieces with his fork. “You’re lucky I didn’t ask for egg whites.”Dean’s bacon stopped halfway to this mouth and he brandished it at Sam as he spoke. “Oh, if you ever want egg whites again, you can cook that shit yourself. I refuse, just on principle.” He fiercely took a bite out of the bacon as if to underscore his point. “Then you can swan around the kitchen all you want and cook yourself, uh, tofu sprout hummus loaf… kale… salads, soy milk or whatever.”“Well, I don’t think tofu sprout hummus loaf is a thing,” Sam replied dryly. “And you don’t cook soy milk.”Searching for a devastating riposte and failing, Dean devoured his last piece of bacon as if it had insulted the car.They both chewed in silence for a minute, or as silently as could be expected with Dean wolfing his food down as if someone might take it away before he was done.Sam pushed away his plate and, in a single uninterrupted motion, Dean pulled it toward him.Dean finally spoke around a bite of Sam’s remaining bacon that would’ve choked a lesser man. “Alright, it’s your TED Talk, go on with your story.”Sam’s eyes widened. “You’ve heard a TED Talk?”“Mmm, you kiddin'? Love ‘em.”“Yeah, right. What’s the last one you listened to?” “Uh, something about artificial intelligence running the world? It wasn’t bad. Made me a little paranoid about my phone, though.” Dean took a huge drink of coffee that was obviously still too hot and unconvincingly tried to play it off. “They’re gettin’ a little weird, though, man. They’ll let anyone do ‘em these days.” He jabbed himself in the chest. “I could do a TED Talk.”Stirring sugar and creamer into his coffee, he waited for Dean to expand, but bacon was a powerful distraction. “Fine. I’ll bite. What would your TED Talk be about?”His brother lit up just like he did when talking about Kitty, and Sam hastily backtracked. “On second thought, please don’t tell me about your TED Talk.”Was there even such a thing as an X-rated TED Talk? Sam doubted it.Only a bit miffed, Dean shrugged and primly wiped at only the corners of his mouth with the paper towel as if they were dining in a 5-star restaurant that required jackets. That was when Dean leaned toward him, like he was watching him through crosshairs.As sirens started to blare in Sam’s head, Dean unleashed the filthiest, most predatory smile that Sam had ever had directed at himself. His voice went sultry and Johnnie Walker-smooth, his tongue just behind his teeth. “Afraid you’d get too turned on, huh?”The coffee spoon slipped out of Sam’s fingers, bounced off the edge of the mug, and hit the table with a thud that sounded louder than anything he had heard before. Worse, he could feel all the blood going to his face.
Very cool, Sam. Not at all awkward.
To throw just a little more gas on the flames, Dean smugly winked at him. “Assert dominance, Sammy.” For fuck’s sake, did Dean do this stuff to him on purpose? Or was it only the whole “no boundaries” thing? Was it actual flirting, or was it just Dean being Dean? He couldn’t tell anymore.“Gahhh!” Dean pushed Sam’s plate away in disgust with the eggs still on it, as if nothing odd had just happened. “No cheese.”Carefully shifting in the chair to disguise the fact that he was suddenly diamond-rigid, Sam preoccupied himself with wiping up the stray drops of coffee on the table.Dean didn’t miss the squirming, but fortunately misinterpreted it. “Yeah, let’s go back to your room. These chairs aren’t good for the long haul.”Sam, turning carefully, made sure to leave the kitchen first.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

1991
Sam sat quietly on a ratty blue couch that was surrounded by old copies of Highlights magazine, books that were for much younger children, and a box of random toys that had seen better days. Framed posters on the wall with cartoon characters assured Sam that he deserved to feel loved and safe. Since they took him directly away from loved and safe to bring him here, Sam thought that was pretty funny. If he hadn’t been so scared, he might’ve even laughed.“Watch everyone,” was what Dean would say. Sam did, but only to pass the time.A glass barrier separated the kids’ area and assorted staff from a waiting room out front, occupied by a handful of miserable-looking people who sat in low plastic chairs that looked like they could’ve been stolen from Sam’s school. The walls were decorated with fresh stripes of bright primary colors, which just made everything else more faded in comparison.Four other kids were there with him. A blond-haired boy who looked a year or so older than Sam was cursing at Gary and kicking his desk as a security guard hovered nearby. The only other social worker available, a black woman with curly hair, was trying to question a little girl who was so little that someone had to help her onto the chair. A small boy in denim overalls kept wandering over to the desks, sobbing for his mom. Periodically, someone walked him back and put him on the opposite end of the couch from Sam, only for the little boy to repeat the process ten minutes later. Across from the couch, a girl about Dean’s age was curled up into one of the two overstuffed chairs, enviably asleep in spite of the cursing, kicking, crying, and the near-constant ringing of the phones.A second security guard, this one placed in the lobby on the other side of the glass, stood at attention.A young, dark-skinned woman who looked like she was barely out of high school sat at the reception area in the waiting room, answering each call in her rote but friendly way as her other lines continued to ring.Another pair, a man and a woman, were older than the receptionist but younger than the two social workers and Sam hadn’t seen either of them talk directly to kids. They mostly walked briskly back and forth across the desk area, ferrying folders and answering calls. Clerks, probably.Sam waited until one of the two clerks, the man, passed nearby and stood up to approach him. “Excuse me, I’ve been here for a couple of hours and I’m kind of thirsty. Could I get a drink or something?”The man paused at first as if he didn’t see Sam, but then the fog cleared and his eyes seemed to focus. “Sure, give me just a minute, buddy.”Sam politely thanked him and returned to his spot on the couch as the crying boy in overalls was ushered back to the kids’ area by the female clerk, for maybe the ninth time since Sam had gotten there. If Dean were here, he would’ve been eying the female clerk. She was bottle blond and “stacked”, as Dean liked to say. As near as Sam could tell, this meant “big boobs.”Man, Dean was going to be so pissed at him. They had just talked about what almost happened in Medford, and here it was, happening for real. Typical, just as things were starting to turn around.Until now, Medford had been the closest call. And that one had been Sam’s fault, too.They’d had scrapes with county services before, but by the time any agency got its shit together, they were usually long gone.But they had stayed in Medford for three months, even though they had only been alone for two weeks when it happened: Sam had let himself be goaded into a fight with this kid named Shaun, who had started picking on Sam from his very first day of school there. He even hit Sam a couple of times, and Sam just absorbed it and tried to shrug it off.Until the day he lost it and fought back.It wasn’t Sam’s fault that Shaun didn’t have a big brother who got bored and liked to wrestle to pass the time, who had taught him how to defend himself. Sam easily won the fight.If he had left Shaun on the ground where he’d landed, maybe it would have only been a few days’ suspension and a nasty letter home. But Sam was still pissed off even after he’d won, so he pulled out his new pocketknife and used it to threaten Shaun.Sam was given a week’s in-school suspension in the same room used for detention. The school said they were going to call Dad, but Sam didn’t think much of it at the time. He thought the three of them would be long gone before anything came of it. Dad was always “just about done” and headed back home, and Dad had mentioned once that city and county services never moved too quickly.After that, it was one thing after another: The school tried to call Dad, but the phone number on the enrollment form was fake. Then someone from the school showed up at their given address, which belonged to an abandoned hardware store. That was when Child Services were called and Sam had just been missed being grilled by them on where he actually lived. Then a teacher happened to pass by their motel as he and Dean were leaving to walk to school the Monday after.If Dean hadn’t gotten that “something’s wrong” feeling, and spotted the two cars with county insignias on them at the motel’s front office when they got home that afternoon, who knew where Sam would be right now?They had gone to a payphone and called Caleb, who could go get Dad wherever he was. Then they had to go back to the payphone two days later, where Caleb told them Dad was on his way, but the drive would take some time. For almost four days, he and Dean lived in the woods off the food that Dean had been able to throw into his duffel: white bread and peanut butter and the kind of cheese that came wrapped individually in plastic. They drank out of garden hoses and slept on the ground. Well, Dean slept on the ground, and Sam slept on Dean.Dean had been so pissed that he barely talked to Sam except in one- to three-word sentences that sounded like he was spitting them out. Sam thought he was just plain angry at him, but then Dean said, “You know if they picked us up, we wouldn’t end up in the same place, right?”When Dad picked got there, he yelled at Sam (and at Dean) and then yelled some more. He said that if one or both of them ever got picked up like that, he would “let them stew for a few days” before he came to get them.Sam started to panic.What if Dean called Dad for help and Dad said to wait? What if they had gotten to Dean already? Miss Jenkins had said they were trying to reach him. Would he be brought here, too? Sam was torn between hoping they didn’t get him and hoping they did. Dean would know what to do.What if they got separated? What if they did end up in different places just like Dean said? Sam to a foster home, Dean to... where? A different foster home? Juvenile hall? A group home?Sam snapped back to this new Medford as the blond boy who had been cursing at Gary was marched over and pushed into the other overstuffed chair. Whoever he was, he had burned through all of Gary’s fake-nice. “Vince, I will make the security guard sit here with you if you don’t calm down.” Then, acknowledging Sam with an abrupt half-nod, Gary took the hand of the boy in overalls and walked him back to the desk.Vince swore at Gary’s back (once Gary was too far away to hear him, Sam noticed wryly) and kicked the table with all the books and magazines on it hard enough to make some of them slide off onto the rug. Then he picked up one of the children’s books and flipped through it so roughly that Sam thought he might rip the pages out.The clerk Sam had asked for a drink finally returned with a can of grape soda with an apologetic smile. “Sorry it took so long, buddy. Is this okay?”Sam nodded gratefully and popped it open, sipping at it. “Don’t I get one?” Vince yelled at the man as he walked away. “I’ve been here longer than him!”The clerk either ignored him or didn’t hear him, and answered one of the ringing phones.“Hey!” Vince called out.This perceived injustice put Sam right in Vince’s crosshairs. Sam could feel his stare and tried not to react, but he could feel his face flush. If he had waited a few seconds to open the damn thing, maybe he could’ve just given it to him to shut him up.Then, a few feet away, he could’ve sworn he heard the clerk say “Dean Winchester” to whoever was on the other end of the line.Did they get him?The big clock on the back wall said it was almost noon. If Dean hadn’t just been swept up in this, he would be in front of the school at a quarter to three. He’d give Sam fifteen minutes’ grace, but then he would go looking. Since he had checked with social services the day before while Sam was at David’s, he would naturally check there again today, right? But not until after three, and he might check other places first. And if he checked at the school, they might pick him up there, too.Dean’s voice in his head again: All panicking does is make you stupid.Sam took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down.Vince was clearly tired of being ignored and kicked the table again to get Sam’s attention. “Why are you here?”“Uh, a misunderstanding,” Sam replied quickly, so he could try to overhear more of the phone conversation.The kid feigned sadness and asked mockingly, “Did your Daddy give you that black eye?”Sam grabbed one of the Highlights magazines just to give his hands something to do, saying simply, “No.”The mocking voice became sing-song. “Did he touch you in your no-no place?”“No,” Sam answered again, trying not to get angry.His answers didn’t give Vince anything to latch onto, so the boy stood up, dropped onto the couch uncomfortably close to him, and looked down at the random page Sam had open on his lap. “Aw, you’re gonna learn about caterpillars.” Absently flipping through the pages, Sam tried to catch Gary’s eyes. He was the only one looking vaguely in their direction, though his attention was on the little boy in the overalls. The closest security guard was flirting with the lady clerk.Vince snatched the magazine out of his hands and threw it on the floor, knocking his knee hard into Sam’s. “Pick it up.”“Leave me alone,” Sam said wearily, but it came out a little more pleading than he intended.Vince punched him in the arm now, hard. “I said pick it up, retard.” That was when all the phones stopped in mid-ring.Another punch from Vince, though he lowered his voice to adjust to the silence. “Pick it up, retard!”The receptionist stood up and, selecting multiple lines, said “Hello? Hello?” into each of them. She turned and motioned for one of the clerks to buzz her in, and the male clerk must’ve hit a switch that Sam couldn’t see, because the door swung open to allow the receptionist inside, then after a moment, closed behind her with a mechanical thump.She spoke to the man who had brought Sam the grape soda, and the two of them walked over to Gary and spoke too low for Sam to hear.Gary threw a file down on his desk and told the other social worker to keep an eye on the little boy, before he joined the other two in walking back to a hallway where Sam could see a giant copier and some filing cabinets, but nothing else.Again, Vince punched Sam in the arm, harder than the last time. “I’m talking to you, retard!”Sam was starting to lose his temper, and finally turned to look him in the eye. “Is that the only insult you know, or just the only one you’ve ever heard?”Vince’s eyes narrowed and he moved his face closer to Sam’s. “What in the fuck did you just say to me?”He’d been playing braver than he felt all day, so why stop now? “If you have a crayon, I can write it down.”Vince punched him even harder this time, and Sam hid a wince but didn’t bother to look away from the commotion. “Stop punching me. Or I’m going to punch you back, and it won’t be in the arm.”Vince laughed, punching him again. Sam just absorbed it. The office was plunged into near-darkness when the harsh fluorescent lights buzzed and then abruptly snapped off. The only light now came from the sunshine streaming in the lobby doors.The black social worker who was watching the two kids got up to try the lights, and drew her hand back in alarm like it had zapped her. She called out to the two security guards, who joined each other in the waiting room. The people who were sitting in the hard chairs suddenly looked awake, some of them milling around and others drifting outside to see what all the fuss was about.People at the other end of the offices started looking upward and sniffing curiously. When the acrid smell of burning plastic reached Sam, he broke into a smile.Another punch from Vince. “What are you smiling at, dickweed?”“I think... I think it’s a rescue,” Sam replied, proud and awestruck. “A what?”Sam didn’t know how, but he knew. This was Dean. He was here.He smugly turned to Vince, still smiling. “Go on. Punch me again. See what happens.”And Vince did, something between a punch and a slap directly to Sam’s ear, which immediately started ringing as if the phones had never stopped.A hard rap on the barrier next to the kids’ area startled Vince, but not Sam. Dean was standing on the other side of the glass and Sam beamed at him, but when he saw the rage on his face, his smile wilted. “Hey, fuckface!” Dean called out, only slightly muffled by the glass.Sam realized that Dean was looking at Vince, not at him, and his smile returned.Vince turned to Sam, confused. “Well, he’s not talking to me,” Sam told him helpfully.Dean motioned him over with his better hand. “Yeah, I obviously mean you, dickless. Get over here. Now.”If Vince had been smart, he would’ve just ignored him. Fortunately, Vince was not. He’d been spoiling for a fight since Sam got here, and now one had come right to him. Vince snorted and strolled over to the glass until he was a foot away from where Dean stood. “What are you gonna do from behind the glass, idiot? Say mean things?”Sam stood up now, too, but hung back cautiously, prepared to distract the remaining social worker if he needed to, but the two little kids were freaked out because of the lights and the stink, so she was preoccupied with calming them down.Dean got closer to the glass, his breath lightly fogging it up. “Come closer. Like you said, I’m behind the glass. Nothin’ to be afraid of, right?”Vince rolled his eyes and moved closer. “C’mon, closer than that,” Dean coaxed gently.Vince stepped forward so that his face was only a couple of inches from the barrier.To Sam’s horror, Dean bit hard through his freshly-sewn lip, sucked it into his mouth, then forcefully spat a mouthful of blood and saliva at the glass right in front of Vince’s face.The boy recoiled, almost teetering backwards. Bracing the hand with the splint against the glass, Dean smiled and bared blood-stained teeth, his voice dangerously controlled. “I’ve punched through stronger stuff than this to get to sorrier pieces of shit than you.” Dean’s eyes went dead and hooded. “Touch him again, this is gonna be your blood and a lot more of it. Am I clear?” Vince staggered backwards, mumbling incoherently.“Oh, I’m sorry.” Dean turned his head so that his ear was close to the glass. “Didn’t quite catch that.”“O-okay.” Even speaking up, it was still almost a whisper, and it looked like Vince might cry. Sam stifled a grin as Dean waved a dismissive hand at Vince, as if he'd never been there. He seamlessly transferred all of his attention to Sam, stepping to a clear part of the barrier so they wouldn’t have to talk through the mess on the glass. “You okay?”“I’m okay. I’m sorry, Dean. I was stupid. I said too much to David.”“S’okay, I’ll have you out of here in a minute.”Sam moved closer so that only the barrier and maybe an inch of space separated them. “Could you have really broken through the glass?”Dean checked to see that Vince was out of earshot and grinned. “Nah. It’s not glass.” He rapped on it with one torn-up knuckle and it made a dull sound. “Some kind of hard plastic, harder to break than glass. If I had a brick and twenty minutes, sure, but he didn’t know that.”“You’re gonna have to sew up your lip again.” If possible, it looked worse than when he saw it before the first stitches.“I didn’t bite out the stitches, I just slowed down the healing some.” He gestured for Sam to move back closer to the corner and he followed, taking him out of Gary’s sightline. A purely malicious grin broke across Dean’s face. “Worth it, though. If you can’t beat ‘em, scare ‘em shitless.”“How are you getting me out of here?” Sam asked anxiously as one of the clerks glanced over at the kids’ area.“As soon as one of these assholes pulls the --”Both of them flinched and covered their ears as the fire alarm went off. “Thank you,” Dean mouthed sarcastically at the ceiling. He jerked his head toward the door on the other side of the reception area. Sam wasn’t sure it would open, but it did, albeit stiffly. As soon as Sam’s hand was out the door, Dean grabbed it tightly and they ran into what looked like a maintenance closet and closed the door. After making it through an obstacle course of wet floor signs and mop buckets, Sam thought they were hiding, but then he saw the exit. As soon as Dean opened it, a different alarm went off, but they were already outside.After a quarter-mile or so, they came to a little park outside the town library. Dean let go of his hand to gesture at a bench that was over by the monkey bars. The two of them slumped onto it, trying to catch their breath.As soon as Sam could speak again with panting, he turned to Dean. “Didn't Dad say to leave me if I ever got picked up?”Because Dean was looking all around them, checking to see if anyone looked curious, Sam thought he hadn't even heard him.But Dean turned to him like he didn’t understand the question. “Dad’s not here, remember? So it's my rules.” "Our rules," Sam corrected."Our rules," Dean agreed.Sam started to move closer to him on the bench, but Dean beat him to it, pulling Sam to him with one arm. ☆☆☆☆☆
NOW
Sam watched Dean’s face closely. “So, yeah, that’s when I realized it.”While Sam wasn't looking, Dean had opened another beer, and was absently picking at its label just as he had the other. "Sam, I wasn't pissed because you almost got picked up at Medford. I was pissed because you didn't tell me some asshole kid was pickin' on you.""I didn't want you always fighting my battles," Sam said quietly.Dean had that look that Sam found so frustrating, like he had something he wanted to say, but wouldn't say it.He decided to stick to a safe topic, if just for a few more minutes. “Hey, how did you pull off that rescue, anyway? I always meant to ask.”Shaking his head, Dean smirked. “I’d like to tell you I had a solid plan, but, uh, no. I was at a movie theatre, nothing else I wanted to see, so I walked back to the motel and there were county cars, cop cars. They had the room open, goin' through everything. I went to your school to warn you, but didn’t see you in the class you were supposed to be in, so I figured they already had ya. Came down there and looked in as much as I could and saw you. Ran down the road to a payphone and tried to call in a bomb threat but --” Dean chewed his lip as he remembered, and Sam, still partly in 1991, almost warned him not to. “Couldn’t even get through, line stayed busy. So I just went back up there and walked around the building to see what I could do. I cut the phone lines, thinkin' I could create some chaos, then I saw that the morons had their circuit box outside the building without a lock, and they even had the circuits labeled. I just stripped the wires for everything but the alarm until something sparked and set the damn thing on fire. Soon as the security guards ran outside, I figured it worked, so I ran around the other way and came right in the front door. I could've been picked up right there and stuck back there with you.” He took a long drink from his beer and laughed a little to himself. “Just dumb luck to be honest with you.”“Well… sometimes dumb luck is the only luck you have.”Dean’s smile was genuine as he made a little marquee with one hand. “Put that right across the Winchester family crest.”Sam had hoped that the change of scenery and a return to the story would have, uh, softened him somewhat. He was relieved to be sitting at the desk, and even more relieved that he, unlike Dean, hadn’t gone commando. With the too-short robe and Sam’s length, it would’ve been painfully obvious. But then Dean shifted on Sam’s bed, sitting against the headboard with his arms crossed, which caused the robe to bunch up under him. Almost Dean’s entire thigh was exposed and, even worse, the robe’s material was taut across his middle, exposing that Dean was hard, too. Really, really hard. Unrepentantly hard, and he was either oblivious about it or completely shameless. Sometimes it seemed like the stupidest stuff made Dean hard. Food, for instance. Muscle cars. Led Zeppelin. And, on at least one occasion, a woman on television who was test-firing an Uzi. He knew these things turned Dean on because usually Dean told him so.He suddenly realized that Dean was looking at him, speaking to him, and he hadn’t heard a word of it. “What?”“That’s what finally won you over?” Dean asked again.“Yeah, but there’s... there’s more.” Sam was starting to feel a little sick. “But I’m not done. Don’t tune out on me.”He searched Sam’s face, like this might be some sort of trick, and his eyes were surprisingly somber. “It’s that important to you?”“Yeah, I guess it is,” Sam said shortly, and added almost involuntarily. “Could you please stop flashing me?”Dean looked down at himself, but certainly didn't seem to feel awkward about anything he saw. But he uncrossed his arms, raised his hips up off the bed (Sam bit the inside of his cheek), and yanked the robe’s material out from under him. Unfortunately, he didn’t move the robe’s opening back to his front first, so Sam got a clear view of his strong, freckly thigh, the tight curve of his ass when his hips raised. When Dean silently checked with him (Better?), Sam was completely numbed, hoping he didn’t give himself away with a startled noise.
Great. So now he knows I was looking, and now I’m even harder than I was.
His brother’s lack of shame notwithstanding, Sam hadn’t seen that much of Dean’s uncovered body in some time. The years had pared him down and his body was no longer as minimally padded as Sam remembered. While he did look just a bit too thin (god knew how), he had packed on dense muscle in all the right places. Not muscles like Sam’s, but the kind of muscle you saw on long-time athletes or men who had spent years working construction, powerful but not bulky, built for speed.Dean was side-eying him. “Are you okay? You’re squirmin’ around. Did I buy you the wrong body wash again?”“No,” Sam said a little too quickly and a little too breathlessly. “I think I slept funny. I’ve got a cramp in my hip.”
Close to the hip at least.
God, if Dean chose that moment to flirt with him again, he wouldn’t know what to do.Reaching for his face, Dean pushed his hair out of his eyes in annoyance. “You need a haircut, dude. The beard, the hair? It’s gettin’ out of control. I'm gonna put Nair on your f --” But he hesitated and put the palm of his hand against Sam’s sweaty forehead. His rough fingers were cool from holding the beer. “You runnin’ a fever?”“No, I think it’s just… warm.” Sam swallowed and swatted his hand away, trying to get the words out before he could change his mind. “There’s more to the story. You might… not like where this is going. But I’m asking you to be patient, okay?”“Not like it how?”Sam rubbed his eyes tiredly. “I need you not to interrupt, as much as you might want to.”Dean was getting that cornered animal look to him again. “Alright.”“No going into your room and closing the door. No getting in the car and disappearing for a month. No shutting me out. None of that.” Sam felt... exposed. Too open. In fact, Dean could’ve gotten up right then and walked out of the room and Sam wasn’t sure what he would do anyway. He just had to hope Dean didn’t. “Promise me.”“How bad is this gonna get, man?”“Promise me,” Sam repeated, blinking as a drop of sweat went right into his eye.Dean looked more concerned now than reluctant. He took a few seconds to respond, but not as long as Sam feared. “I promise, Sammy. You’re scarin’ me a little, but I promise. Uh... what are we talkin' about now?”“1995.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

1995
It was the year Dean became intolerable.The year had started out well enough. The early part, anyway. Dean had just turned sixteen, which meant there was that weird limbo between their birthdays when Sam’s age, on paper anyway, was five years younger than Dean rather than four years. Dean loved to tease him about it.That year it felt like a full five years were between them.That was also the year Dean disappeared. Dad said he was helping out some other hunters, and that Dean would be back “soon”, but “soon” turned into a week, then two weeks, then a month.Sam had never been alone with Dad for that long. Dean said once, “I swear, I could leave you two alone in a room for twenty minutes and you’d find somethin’ to argue about.”Just to prove him wrong, Sam had once waited a half-hour.During those two months, Sam experienced what he would thereafter call translation issues. Sam found he would say something that Dean would’ve found funny or interesting, but those same things got on Dad’s nerves. “And, what’s your point?” This got on Sam’s nerves, and then it would escalate into a battle of nerves between them, to see who could piss off the other one more. The one who raised his voice first lost.Sam realized that Dean had been running interference for them all along, like a diplomatic liaison, though “Dean” and “diplomatic” in the same sentence without the word “isn’t” between them was pretty hilarious out of context. After that, Sam started noticing all the times Dean would preface an explanation with “what Dad was tryin’ to say...” and “listen, Dad just came off a tough gig” and could’ve turned it into a drinking game. He figured Dean had similar preambles for Sam-speak on the other side of the language barrier.When he finally saw Dean again after the tense drive to upstate New York, he thought he might cry, but he’d had a birthday while Dean was gone, and he was pretty sure twelve year olds didn’t do that.It wasn’t his Dean who came back anyway. For one, this new and improved Dean was girl-crazy to the point of tunnel vision, like his dick had a mind of its own and he was gleefully along for the ride.He had been headed full-speed that direction since puberty first got its hooks in him. While it was a well-thumbed magazine, longer showers, and oh-dark-thirty jerk-off sessions during which Sam was supposed to be sleeping, he could roll his eyes and ignore it. He still thought girls were gross then.Puberty never seemed to level-off or plateau for Dean. In fact, every year back then, it was like he went through it all over again and it combined with the puberty that was already there. That was the year Sam saw Dad pull Dean out of the car on three different occasions as he tried to hook up with a girl (and in one instance, two girls) in the backseat. Sam wondered how many other times Dean had gotten away with it.Even once he was back, he was still mostly gone. He was on hunts at least for half of that year, off and on, all through Sam’s dismal summer vacation. And even if he wasn’t, he was out chasing girls, leaving Sam at the motel or at Plucky’s until they closed at nine.Every time Dean came back from a hunt, he was less the Dean that Sam loved. Like an exaggerated, “cool” version of himself, with the fun parts edited out. Each time he returned, he was a little taller and his voice was a little deeper. He had a growth spurt that year, and Sam, who had been just about even with him, was suddenly only up to his shoulder.After that, Dean was “cool” with Sam, too, even when Dad wasn’t around. He slept in Dad’s bed or in a sleeping bag, even though the other half of Sam’s bed had been just fine before. He wore a t-shirt and a pair of sweats to bed regardless of whether they were in Minnesota or Arizona. They no longer had their walks to school because Dad had a truck now and Dean would make the five-minute drive and drop him off, usually playing some song at top volume so that a bunch of kids would turn to stare at Sam as Dean peeled away.When Sam tried to put into words how angry all of this made him, it just sounded immature and whiny. But sometimes, he would wake up between midnight and three in the morning when he heard Dean jerking off, and ask him if he was awake. That meant Dean would stop. Even though he could hear the grumpiness at being interrupted under Dean’s sleepy drawl, they would still talk in almost total darkness for an hour or two. Dean liked when Sam talked about whichever book he was reading. He would remember what Sam had said about the book the next time they talked and ask Sam what had happened since. Sam would roll to the edge of his bed to face Dean, and Dean would roll to the edge of Dad’s to face Sam. Even though they couldn’t really see each other, they would talk across the space.“The dude’s name is really Hero Protagonist? That sounds kinda lame.”“His first name is spelled H-I-R-O,” Sam explained. “And it’s Hiroaki, people just call him Hiro. I think the Protagonist part is just a joke on the first name.”Sam thought he could barely make out Dean saying “Hiroaki” to himself in that way he had of tasting an unfamiliar word for the first time so he would remember it next time. Or maybe Sam could just see it that clearly in his head.“He delivers pizza, but that’s not his real job?”“He’s a hacker, he deals with code and computers, but he’s not really good with people, so he delivers pizza to get money. It’s a weird book, it’s hard to explain.”“But he’s also a sword fighter?” Dean asked skeptically.“He’s the best sword fighter.”“And there’s an official mafia? Like the Cosa Nostra, that mafia?”“Right, but the mafia’s like an American company. Everything’s a company or owned by a company. Part of Hong Kong in the book is a business.”“Feels like I’m on drugs just thinkin’ about it. How the hell did everything become a business?”“The government started handing over power to these mega-corporations, or rich people bought up a bunch of territory, so now the government is kinda meaningless.”“Yeah, like it is now.”“And everyone has mercenaries who are contracted to their territory, and they enforce things, but it’s different teams of mercenaries.”“Competing mercs? Turf wars I bet, all kinds of fightin’ for control?”“Oh, man, everyone’s trying to get more power. It’s a dark, futuristic thing only with more computer stuff. Sorta like Blade Runner or Total Recall and you like those. But a lot weirder. I mean, I’m only two chapters in and it’s pretty weird so far.”Sam had always wanted Dean to read what he was reading. Until that year, Dean had always wanted Sam to watch what he was watching.At some point, one or the other would fall asleep, and they’d pick up the conversation the next time Sam interrupted him based on who had fallen asleep first. Sam would tell him more about the book and Dean would ask more questions, which made Sam analyze the book more than he normally would have. Even if he wasn’t aware of it, Dean had helped him write some book reports that way.By the next morning, the magic had worn off and Dean would be Mr. Cool again.Then there was the hunt in Nevada. Three days after a vampire nest. Sam had been on that one with them, teamed up with Dean. At the end of it, Dad met with another hunter at a bar, and Dean quickly vanished as soon as he gave Sam some quarters for the arcade games. When it was time to go, Dad couldn’t find him. He asked around and found out that Dean had actually gone home with one of the bartenders, a woman old enough to be… well, their mom.Dad found out where he was and basically busted in to haul Dean out of there as Sam waited in the car.The Dean that emerged from that house was the most different Dean of all. There was no tension in his face, just a big easy smile. His boot laces were untied and flopped on the ground as he ambled over to the car, rolling his hips in a new strut. He wasn’t “cool” in that moment. He was but he was Sam’s kind of cool rather than what Dean thought was cool. The old Dean could be glimpsed through this new, more grown-up version.Confidence and swagger, but also hope and strength. And delight at the little things. This Dean was his Dean now.When Dean spotted Sam in the backseat, he beamed at him, a wide grin that changed his whole face. Sam hadn’t seen that grin in awhile, and he’d never seen it on this new version of Dean before. The combination was...Twelve-year-old Sam didn’t have the words for it. This only seemed to make Dean’s girl-craziness skyrocket, but he and Dean talked more after that. They watched television together, ate their meals together, and went to the movies again. Sure, sometimes Dean would disappear with some girl and stumble back in the next morning, but it was different now. It was better.Dean went on another long hunt with Dad, one determined to be too dangerous for Sam. Dad said they would be gone for a month, which probably meant no Christmas. Again. Sam hadn’t yet given up on that holiday.Only two weeks later, as Sam walked back to their motel from school, the Impala was parked outside. Dad, Dean, or both?It was Dean, who was in the best mood Sam had seen him in for a long time. He’d bought some kind of fancy sandwiches with all kinds of meat on them, and Sam’s sandwich had all the stuff he liked and none of the stuff he didn't. They were still warm so he had timed it with Sam getting home. They sat together on Dad’s bed with their backs against the headboard, ate their sandwiches, and watched Die Hard with a Vengeance which had them both cracking up.“Why are you in such a good mood?” Sam asked finally.Dean didn’t look away from the movie. “What’re you talkin’ about? I’m always in a good mood.”Sam scoffed. The lie was so ridiculous that it didn’t merit any more than that. “Come on, what is it? Did you get laid again or something?”Dean turned to him now, grinning, eyes bright. “I have, but that’s not why.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out what looked like two cards, and used one of his sleight-of-hand poker tricks to flick one of them away from the other and hand it to Sam. “I wasn’t going to tell you until tomorrow, but…”He took the card. It was a concert ticket: Metallica. Los Angeles, California. Whisky a Go Go. December 14, 1995.“Metallica!” Dean raised the devil horns with one hand. “It’s gonna be awesome, man. You and me in West Hollywood, at this place that’s like legendary. Zeppelin played there! This is one of only two stops they’re makin’ in the states this year. You don’t wanna know how hard it was to get those.”Sam ran his thumb along the edge of it, not wanting to mar the glossy surface. “Did you get them for a girl?”Dean turned away from the movie now as if Sam had slapped him. “Yeah, her name’s Sam Winchester.”Because that joke never got old.“I got them for you and me, man. We both deserve a break. If we leave tomorrow after you get out school, we can make a whole road trip out of it on the way to the City of Angels. I might even take you to a beach, huh?”“But I have school,” Sam objected, but he already knew they were going.“School’s gonna be there when you get back. But Metallica?” Dean thumped the edge of his own ticket and deftly palmed it. “Only in town December 14th. I’ll write you a note, I’ll say there’s a funeral or something, but you and me are hittin’ the road, little brother.” Dean ruffled his hair and Sam let him. “Pack a bag and we’ll put it in the trunk tonight, and when I pick you up tomorrow, we go.”That was the longest day of school ever. All day long, Sam couldn’t focus on anything else.He actually got out of his last class early and ended up outside at 2:30, thinking he would need to wait a bit, but Dean was already there and honked the horn.Dean had planned out a whole scenic route for them to take. From Cleveland, they went to Spring Green, Wisconsin to this place called The House on the Rock which was the weirdest place Sam had ever seen, to the point of causing sensory overload. Sam kept getting tired and overwhelmed, so he’d have another Mountain Dew and plow on to the next room. On the crazy carousel, he rode some kind of blue dragon unicorn creature and Dean took Polaroids that he said he’d use for blackmail material at some later date. They ended up skipping the next attraction Dean had planned so they could spend another day checking the place out.Then they went to Riverside, Iowa where they saw the future birthplace of James T. Kirk and went to a Star Trek museum. In Alliance, Nebraska, they got to see Carhenge, which was Stonehenge only made out of junked out cars. From there, it was down to Roswell, New Mexico where they were both fascinated by all the alien exhibits but privately made fun of the True Believers who were treating it like a UFO pilgrimage. At their hotel in Roswell with the alien-themed room and the single bed, Dean didn’t tease him when Sam curled up next to him as close as he could get. If Dean had even made a note of it, Sam would’ve rolled over and pretended it never happened.That same night, Dean had a nightmare and Sam, his head halfway on Dean’s chest, woke up. Dean was sweating in his sleep, mumbling “no” over and over again, but getting a little louder with each one. Sam got scared, trying to shake him awake, and Dean fixed him with glassy half-open eyes. “Sammy,” he slurred quietly, brushing the side of Sam’s face with his fingers. “You and me… we’re sacred.” Then he pulled Sam’s head back toward his chest before immediately falling asleep again.Sam had laid there, wide awake, for hours. We’re sacred. The words might as well have been burned into Sam’s skin like a brand. Maybe in the middle of the night, that was when people told the absolute truth? Or was it only when they were half-asleep?The next morning, when they hit Route 66, Dean told him all about the history of highway, and it felt like they were on a pilgrimage of their own.In Apache Junction, Arizona, they went to a ghost town, where people were in character as cowboys who had gunfights (with blanks) out on the dirt roads in front of the saloons and cathouses. Dean bought a cowboy hat from one of the gift shops “like Wyatt Earp used to wear” and wore it all the way into California while Sam teased him mercilessly. But he had to admit, Dean wore it pretty convincingly.They took US-60 to Interstate 10, which Dean said would take them straight through to Los Angeles. Sam thought he would get bored on the way but he and Dean talked about almost everything but hunting, listening to one Metallica album after another to get ready for the show. As they got closer, Sam took out his ticket again to look at it. “Wait, this is at a club? Will they let me in?”Dean turned away from the road briefly to wink at him. “All ages show. I checked that first. You’re stuck with me, kid.”With a few hours to kill before the show started, they made the same tourist drive through Hollywood as hundreds of others, taking in attractions they had only ever seen on television. It was an entirely different world, where everything was clean, well-maintained, and camera-ready. No dirt roads here. Probably no dive bars, either. In every direction, there was something to see. Wearing the AC/DC t-shirt that no longer fit Dean after his growth spurt, Sam thought he would feel out of place, as if he expected to see nothing but rich people. They did see a few limousines with heavily-tinted windows, but they saw all other kinds of people, too. Sam could understand why people liked California so much.The club that night was crowded and parking had been a nightmare with Dean cursing through the whole thing, but they made it. Sam hadn’t been to a real concert before, so he wasn’t quite prepared for just how many people there were. Dean walked in front of him and broke trail through the crowd while holding a handful of Sam’s t-shirt to pull him along. When they got to a good place to see the stage, he talked in Sam’s ear so he could be heard over the loud music being piped in before the band took the stage. “If we get separated, wait under that go-go cage thing.” Dean indicated a big glass installation high up on the wall, with people dancing in it. “If I can’t find you, I’ll look there.”That’s when a girl caught Dean’s eye and he smacked Sam on the shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”Sam groaned, suddenly realizing he was really the only kid here. There were a few teenagers, but that was it.Metallica took the stage with a song that Sam didn’t recognize from Dean’s cassette tapes, but by the time they broke into the second one (“Master of Puppets”), Sam saw Dean again. He was behind one of the speakers, with Sam right in his sightline. Sam was worried at first, because Dean seemed to make a face like something hurt or surprised him, but then a girl appeared between him and the speaker as Dean wrapped his fingers in her long hair and kissed her. When she turned to face the same way as Dean, crouching down so that Sam only saw the top of her head, Dean gave Sam a broad smile just like the one in Nevada but then turned his attention back to the girl. Sam couldn't see her face, but he could see Dean's through... all of it.He couldn’t remember any songs that Metallica played after that.  ☆☆☆☆☆
NOW
As Sam looked up from his story, Dean from 1995 faded into Dean now, Sam followed the lines on his face like he was seeing them for the first time.“If it’s any consolation, I don’t remember much of that show, either,” Dean said with a forced grin, obviously trying to break tension. “So, what was the point of that one? I wanted to get laid and became a prick, and then actually got laid and... wasn’t a prick? Help me out here.”Sam thought he had been pretty transparent with that one, but maybe it only felt transparent because he’d been over it so many times.
There’s still one last chance to abort mission. You can say something harmless right here. You can bail out. This is it.
And then everything would go back to the status quo. Just like that. Dean could make a joke about wasted time and pointless stories and then they could watch a movie or something.“Yes. I mean, yes you did.” Sam foundered desperately, looking down, hair falling into his eyes. “You were... you were different after that. You were...”Ducking his head as if following Sam’s eyes to the floor, Dean asked, “I was... what?”Sam took a deep breath. He wondered if Dean could hear the blood pounding in his ears, because he could barely hear anything over it.
Duct tape, Sam. Rip it off.
The words came out all strung together in shaky sigh. “That was when I realized I was in love with you.”Dean went entirely still, and Sam wondered if maybe he hadn’t heard him. The silence that followed was terrifying, and only got worse as it stretched on. Either it had sucked all the oxygen out of the room, or Sam had actually forgotten how to breathe.“Say that again,” Dean said quietly, barely moving his lips.Sam shook his head, and tried to say it again, but nothing happened. “Can’t.”“Can’t,” Dean repeated hollowly.“Hard enough to say the first time.” His words were still coming out all tangled together. It was a wonder Dean could understand him at all.He couldn’t have described Dean’s face in that moment if he tried. It went through too many quick transitions, some of them Sam might’ve missed by blinking, from sad to scared to curious, only to settle into the blank, dead-eyed expression that Sam had only seen on Dean at his worst. “Say something,” Sam pleaded. "Get angry. Do something."Dean stood up then and this time, carefully pulled the robe around him as he stood. No flashing this time, no more fun. He walked to the door. By some miracle, Sam found his feet and moved quickly to block his exit. It was like he could see every muscle and tendon standing out in Dean’s neck. “You promised me,” he said raggedly. “You promised me and you keep those. Don’t... don’t stop now.”“Let me out, Sam.” There was that cold, quiet voice that only Sam knew was a direct threat of violence.“No.” Sam braced his arms against either side of the doorway. “You promised, and you’re staying. You can... hit me all you want, but I’m not moving, until you... until you hear what I have to say.”Sam braced for the punch. In fact, he had sort of been expecting it. If Dean gave it, he’d take it. But he wouldn’t move.Dean smiled sourly. “What happened over these three weeks, man? What changed?”“Quit fixating on the three weeks.” Sam impatiently put both hands in his hair. “It’s not about the three weeks.”“So, you’ve... been in love with me since you were, what? Thirteen?”“Twelve.”“Twelve.” Dean cleared his throat, and he looked like he might throw up. “What did I do to --?” He bit his lip and laughed helplessly. “Why are you tellin’ me this? Huh?”Sam had rehearsed what he’d say if Dean had this reaction, but it didn’t matter now. All he felt was the panic. “Because an archangel had you out there, and I thought ‘this is it, I’m never gonna see him again.’ And I thought, if I did see you again, I should tell you all the things I haven't told you.”Dean turned his back on him then, shaking his head as if he could make all of this go away. “And... if Michael does get back in... and I don’t actually ever see you again, I don’t want you to die without knowing that.” Sam swallowed and moved closer to him, at the risk of leaving the door unguarded. “And I don’t wanna die without telling you.”“What do you want me to say?” Dean asked. The threatening edge was gone, but not the anger.“I... I want you to say that you feel the same way.” Sam had never actually put those words together before now, and he felt all the blood drain out of his face. No, this was a bad idea. Maybe he could fix it. Maybe he could still walk it back.“I don’t,” Dean said coldly.“Look at me!” Sam put his hand on his shoulder and tried to turn him around. Dean angrily shrugged him off. “I don’t, Sammy.”“You’ve been flirting with me all morning. You do it all the time, but today has been...” Sam slumped forward a little. "So I thought, maybe..."Dean shook his head again and Sam was desperate to see his face and tried to take him by the shoulder again, only to have Dean walk further into the room to get out of reach. “I was just jerkin’ your chain, Sammy, I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry if you... took it that way, I wasn’t tryin’ to... encourage... that.”That. Like it was the sickest thing he'd ever heard.“It’s not about today, Dean. It’s not about three weeks. I almost told you after Hell, and if you weren’t so pissed at me after Purgatory, I might’ve told you then, too. I’ve almost told you so many times.” He tried to keep his voice level. The first one to yell would lose, so it was probably the same for actual crying. “And I know you feel the same way. I know it. You can’t lie to me. You may not remember 2001, but I do.”Still turned away from him, Dean's hands fell open, fingers slack, at his sides. Other than that, he didn't move at all.But at least he didn't try to leave.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

2001
Dean stomped back in with a bucket of fried chicken and a plastic bag full of bottles of water. He was mid-sentence, as if he’d started grumbling to Sam before he even put the key in the lock. “-- Person to say ‘unseasonably warm’ to me gets a bullet in the teeth.”“Unseasonably warm,” Sam said immediately and wondered why Dean’s withering glare after this sort of thing was always so funny to him, after probably thousands of times.Under the cast on Sam’s foot was an itch around the ankle that refused to go away. It felt like dust and sweat were mixing together in there, forming some kind of gritty paste on his skin. Two more weeks until this godforsaken thing came off. “What took you so long? The chicken place is only a mile away.”“Too hammered to drive, decided to hike.” Dean dropped the chicken bucket on the low coffee table in front of Sam’s seat on the fold-out sofa and swatted at the fingers trying to get into the cast. “Use the Slim Jim if you hafta scratch, that’s why I brought it in.” “It doesn’t reach,” Sam complained. The metal strip got almost down to the itch, but was too wide to fit between his ankle and the cast the way it would’ve slid between the window and the weather stripping on the car.Ada, Oklahoma was dead in the middle of what the news called an unprecedented heat wave. No air conditioning, and no swimming pool, for two weeks. It was anyone’s guess as to which of them would snap and kill the other first. Probably Dean, since he had the use of both feet and all the muscle.Dean yanked his Black Sabbath t-shirt up over his head, wiped his face with it, and threw it in the general direction of the bed, missing only by inches before walking away. Sam shook his head and sighed. “Still not used to you in shorts.”“Get over it,” Dean called out from the kitchen behind him, if a tiny microwave and a mini-fridge qualified as a kitchen.It had only taken Dean a day’s worth of pride to admit that he might die of heatstroke in his standard wardrobe, so he was wearing a pair of Sam’s black gym shorts from two high schools ago. They hung off of Sam’s hips and were too snug across Dean’s. It was funny at first because Dean’s arms were tanned but his bowed legs weren’t. All the walking and standing around outside, just to smoke or see something other than the inside of the room, had evened out his skin and put a few new freckles on his face. His hair had gotten darker from the lighter brown Sam remembered and had been a little long when they first got here. Not like Sam’s or anything, but fringy in the front and tucked behind his ears. Right after Dean surrendered to the idea of shorts, he took the clippers and buzzed it shorter all over but mostly left it long on top. Sam nervously checked his own hair when he heard the sound, but Dean didn't make his usual threats.Dean reappeared with two paper plates and a stack of mismatched napkins from previous food runs, nudging the table closer to the sofa so Sam wouldn’t have to reach so far. He handed Sam one of the bottles of water, but opened it for him first as if Sam’s broken foot had regressed him back to age six.Sam hadn’t seen Dean without a shirt for a long time, and curiously looked him over. He used to think the ridges above Dean’s hips were love handles, but it was muscle. Dean referred to his thigh, ass and stomach muscles as "fuck muscles" because why wouldn’t he?As he turned away to look for the remote control, Sam saw a fading bruise in the general area of his kidneys, starting to go yellow around the edges. A thin, silvery scar, about a half-inch wide, started at one shoulder, curved over to the other in an arch, cut across his shoulder blades in a jagged line, then got suddenly wider as it terminated at the small of his back. Claw gouges, probably. Whatever past hunt it was from, it had been a close call.As he turned back around, Sam definitely didn’t notice that the soft hair at his navel was gold-brown, like the hair on his arms and legs.Instead of sitting down next to him, Dean grabbed his cigarettes and his phone. “Gonna have a smoke.” He pointed at the chicken bucket. “Eat your damn chicken breast. God knows I’m not goin’ to.”“Do you want the skin off of it?”“Some fat wouldn’t kill ya, you know.” Turning to cast a critical eye over him, Dean absently touched his own side as if he was thinking of how Sam’s hypothetical fat should be distributed. “Fifteen, twenty pounds maybe? Eat the skin.” Before he closed the door behind him, he shot Sam a half-grin that typically preceded trouble. “But save room for dessert.”Sam frowned and took the paper lid off the bucket and pulled his chicken breast out, taking the skin off of it and dropping it on Dean’s plate.Dessert? What the hell was he talking about?“You’re too skinny, you should eat more” was such TV sitcom-mom bullshit. It was like they were 9 and 13 all over again, except for this… Thing between them that got worse every year, whatever it was.He hadn’t seen Dean for almost six weeks before the hunt where he got hurt. If they were in and out of the room to go somewhere, or if they weren’t absolutely miserable, it probably would’ve been fine. But two weeks of almost non-stop Dean contact were doing a number on him.He might snap and kill Dean first, just to escape whatever the Thing was. He didn’t think of it as being in love with Dean then. At the time, it was uncomfortable and unwelcome, playing on a loop in his brain like a catchy pop song.Besides… Dean? Of all people?Dean was obnoxious and rude. His footfalls were heavy and rattled mirrors and lamps. He managed to generate more noise than anyone else Sam had ever met. He slept with girls without bothering to learn their last names. He always made Sam take the “girly” toothbrush out of the two-pack. He smelled like gun oil, lighter fluid, cheap soap and, these days, Marlboro Reds. He used up all the hot water. He sharpened things when he was bored no matter what time it was. He couldn’t sing, but sang anyway. He drank directly out of the carton. He never fully toweled off after a shower, but did this weird air-dry thing where he just laid around being wet and making whatever surface he settled on damp while he slowly got dry. What kind of person did that? For fuck’s sake, use a towel!That wasn’t the kind of person anyone fell in love with, much less Sam. Absolutely not.Dean would put a dollar’s worth of quarters in the Magic Fingers and then lay there and vibrate and laugh like it wasn’t weird to do when others were in the room. He regularly talked with his mouth full. He drove too fast. He walked into rooms shedding flannel and weapons in his wake. He casually stole small items as they walked through stores. He never considered where they were or who was there with them before opening his big mouth and making terrible observations at the worst possible moments. He memorized stupid movies as if they were high art, but he could never remember his social security number (though he could reel off Sam’s in an instant). He divulged details that absolutely no one requested. He watched porn at night on pay-per-view before making sure Sam was fully asleep first, as if he didn’t care if Sam was asleep or not.
Don’t think about that.
Too late.When Dean did that, Sam would lay awake in bed thinking “I’m not listening, I’m not listening, I’m not listening…” But he couldn’t seem to help it. Dean never fast-forwarded through the shitty dialogue. He would watch the whole contrived scenario play out like he was genuinely curious as to whether the three mostly-naked cheerleaders who the coach caught going down on each other in the locker room would try to seduce him to keep from being kicked off the squad. Then the thrusting, sucking, and moaning would start. When it got loudest, he’d hear Dean’s breathing get faster and rhythmic: slow, fast, slow again, fast again, with a low, throaty hum buzzing just underneath.
Don’t think of his hand. Don’t think of his fingers.
Too late.When Sam jerked off, it was perfunctory, just to get rid of it. But Dean took his sweet time, riding the wave as long as he possibly could. Then Sam would hear that little hitch in his breath, a half-swallowed “oh”, a bitten-off expletive, and then a long, stuttering exhale of release.And then sometimes, Dean would go again a few minutes after that.Maybe Sam jerked off with him on occasion from under the covers, matching Dean’s changes in rhythm as if he was following along with sheet music. And maybe Sam occasionally had to cover his mouth so Dean wouldn’t hear him when he came immediately after. But it didn’t mean anything, right?Right.He shouldn’t have known what his brother’s oh-jesus-oh-fuck-I’m-there noises sounded like. He shouldn’t have had to grow up in a single room with him. He shouldn’t have watched Dean’s face as he got a blowjob behind the speakers at a Metallica concert, nor should he have thought Dean was the most beautiful he’d ever been in the moment he came. But it all added up: the tightness in his chest, the confusion that burned off as anger and unrequited horniness, the overwhelming self-consciousness. On his own, Sam managed, but if Dean was looking on, he suddenly made stupid mistakes, like tripping over a tree root and breaking some of the little bones in his foot. Did Sam want to punch him in the mouth or kiss him? Both. One after the other. The order in which he wanted to do them depended largely on his mood.The door opened again and Dean told whoever was on the other end of the line that he would see them later, taking the last drag off his cigarette before flicking it away.He clicked the button to hang up before walking over to the bed and, after rooting through his duffel bag, sat down on the edge of the bed and loudly (and painstakingly, Sam noticed) trimmed his fingernails. Sam glared at him, adding that to the list of obnoxious things. How could a person make nail-trimming loud? And why couldn’t he do it in the bathroom? Why did he almost always floss while they were watching television? Who did that?Dean caught it. “What’s this look you’re givin’ me right now?”“I’m not giving you a look.” Sam looked away to pick at his piece of chicken, which he no longer wanted. They should’ve gotten some kind of cold food. “Are you about to head out?”Dean shook his head, confused.“Out,” Sam repeated louder, gesturing at Dean’s phone. “To see… what’s her name?”“Gabriella.” Dean labored over each syllable wistfully. “Nah, she’s got work tonight. To be honest, I was hopin’ almost as much for her air conditioning as I was the sex.”“Classy,” Sam mumbled."Yeah." Dean sank onto the sofa next to him and started eating the skin that Sam had left on his plate with his fingers while pointing the remote at the television with his other hand. “Sing out if I get to something interesting and we’ll watch it.”“Interesting to me, or interesting to you?” Sam asked sullenly.“Alright.” Dean switched off the set again, letting the remote drop to the table with a thump. “You weren’t in a bad mood when I left, but I go outside for ten minutes and now you’re givin’ me the business. What’d I do?”What could he say? You took off your shirt? You confuse me? Please leave? Please don’t? “I’m just tired of being benched. I’m tired of you babying me. My ankle itches and I can’t do anything about it. I am one more Clint Eastwood marathon away from killing you and then myself.” Sam tried to take the sting out of this last with a smirk. “But mostly, it’s because I’m sweating in places where I didn’t think sweat could even get.”“I hear ya,” Dean agreed. “I’m goin’ to Wal-Mart tomorrow and I’m gettin’ us some box fans, fillin’ the cooler with ice and setting us up an emergency evaporative cooling thing in here. Should’ve done that before now, actually. I’m sweatin’ my balls off and if I take one more cold shower to beat the heat, they might not come back down.”“Gabriella would be devastated,” Sam said dryly.Dean snorted and roughly bumped Sam’s knee with own. “Wanna come with? Might be good to get you out of this room, maybe take a drive somewhere.”Sam imagined stumping around Wal-Mart on the too-short crutches Bobby had loaned him. “Do they have air conditioning at Wal-Mart?”“Hm, probably.” Dean ate half the meat off of a chicken leg in one bite, then patted the pocket of his shorts. “Mmm, almost forgot about dessert.” He produced a little plastic baggie with two large capsules that seemed to be packed with some kind of powder. “Bought this from a guy outside the chicken place, tellin’ him we needed a way to survive the heat. I was goin’ for weed, you know, with all the weed chills, but he said this was better.”Sam stared in disbelief past the baggie at Dean’s face. “You bought drugs?”“I’ve bought drugs before.”“From a chicken place?” “He called it molly, says that it makes you feel cold.”Sam decided to speak slowly to maximize his point. “You bought a drug you’ve never heard of from a guy who deals out of a chicken place?”“He deals out of the parking lot,” Dean clarified.“Yeah, that’s much better. Did he also have a mullet and a Trans Am?”Dean frowned thoughtfully. “It was a Pontiac Firebird, but I see your point.”Wait, “molly”? Sam had heard that name for a drug before, at some assembly at his last high school. Molly was another name for MDMA, otherwise known as ecstasy. The assembly was to alert the students that someone on campus was selling it so they could avoid it. Shockingly, this warning had the opposite effect.Molly, as far as Sam knew, was not sought out because it made people “feel cold.” In fact, the kids at Central Westwood High School were using it because it made them incredibly horny, and the sex that resulted was apparently really, really, really fantastic.Sam narrowed his eyes at Dean suspiciously. Did he not know that?Dean tilted his head at the look. “You in or out?”“The powder in there could literally be anything,” Sam argued. “It could be drain cleaner or something.”“This guy is like the drug connection for this whole town, Sam. Everyone buys from him, he wouldn’t shit where he lives.”When Sam started to shoot down this ridiculous defense, his mouth suddenly went dry.Dean?Ecstasy?Dean Winchester, the pleasure-seeking missile? While he and Dean were in high school at the same time, Sam was eating his lunch in the cafeteria. Four girls a table over were talking about Dean, which was hardly unusual. But they weren’t saying the usual stuff that made Sam roll his eyes, about Dean being cute, funny, or cool.They had referred to him as the Energizer Bunny. Because he “kept going and going and going...”(“I heard he’s huge, too.” One of them had said that, and it was the sort of thing Sam wished he could un-hear at the time, due to how much frustration and curiosity it had caused him.)That Dean... on ecstasy? And it was just the two of them...“Sure,” Sam decided abruptly, hoping the suffocating heat would explain why his face was suddenly flushed. “I’ll take one.”Dean shook one out of the baggie and handed it to Sam. “That was easier than I thought. I was expectin’ a whole Nancy Reagan national campaign.”“Uh, how long does it take to kick in?”“About an hour.” Dean picked up Sam’s empty water bottle and got up to swap it out with a new one from the mini-fridge.Sam stared at the capsule in his hand. His heartbeat sounded so loud to him, and he felt warmer than he had felt all day. He should’ve been miserable.Dean started to open the new water bottle for Sam, but caught himself and handed it over. “I figure even if it doesn’t make us feel cold, maybe it’ll make us not care for a while. We win either way.”“Right,” Sam agreed, watching Dean open his own water bottle and use it to wash down the capsule. Dean handed him the remote. “Find something to watch and leave it there.”Sam flipped through the channels and stopped on one. “Hey, look, the Golden Girls. Your favorite.”“Mmm.” Dean’s voice went sultry. “Think about all the tricks Blanche must know, after all she’s done.”Sam shuddered and groaned. “Gross.” After flipping through a few more channels, he found The Fifth Element, which they both liked. They’d only missed the first fifteen minutes. The television might as well have not been on, because all he could do was try to watch Dean without making it obvious, looking for little signs that the ecstasy had kicked in. It had not been an hour, so he didn’t know what he expected. Also -- “You’re supposed to be elevatin’ your foot,” Dean nagged him.Sam hadn’t heard him. He hadn’t heard a word. “What?”“Your foot’s supposed to be up on the arm of this thing, with some pillows under it, remember? Sprawl out, I’ll get the pillows.”When Dean left to get the pillows, Sam almost panicked. “No, where are you going?”Dean gestured at the wooden chair that was pushed up to the table with the landline. “You get the sofa, I’ll take this.”“No, that’s not comfortable.” Did he sound as manic as he felt? “Stay on the sofa and I’ll just prop my leg up and sprawl out with you here.”“How?” Dean asked wryly. “With your head in my lap?”“What?” For a second or two, his brain glitched and Sam forced a too-loud laugh to cover up the delay. “No, I mean, I’ll just lean on you or something.”Sam swung the cast up onto the arm and Dean raised it to secure one of the bed’s pillows under it. Sam held himself upright by bracing on his hands. When Dean sat back down and got settled in, Sam pushed back against him.Rather than sit there with his arm pinned between the two of them, Dean raised it and moved closer to his side of the sofa. “You don’t look comfortable. If you’re gonna lean on me, do it for real, like I’m the back of a chair.”
What am I doing?
After rearranging himself, Sam leaned further into him. He expected Dean to rest his arm along the back of the sofa, but Dean braced it across Sam’s chest like a safety bar. He realized that his head was against Dean’s bare side and if he looked up, there was Dean’s bare shoulder. All that tanned, freckly skin.“Comfortable?” Dean asked softly. “This the position you wanna be in?”Sam nodded. This. This is what I’m doing.He started drifting in and out then. This was like the good old days, and he felt himself falling freely towards that “Dean is here, I can sleep” rabbit hole where he had to try and stay awake.What if the capsule didn’t “take” with Dean? What if he just spaced out and didn’t try anything? Sam didn’t know how to flirt, and if he did, and Dean’s hadn’t kicked in yet, this whole thing would go sideways fast. He needed Dean not to think, just as he was trying not to think too hard about it himself. If he actually stopped, and called this by its name, he’d be terrified.It wasn’t that he wanted it to happen, he rationalized. It was that it might happen, and if it did, he might not try to stop it.As he wondered what to do next, Dean’s hand flattened against Sam’s chest possessively, his thumb lazily drawing a short stroke back and forth across his heart, just inside the collar of his t-shirt. It felt like Sam was having a series of small heart attacks. He wondered if Dean could feel the booming under his palm.“You feel any cooler?” Dean asked. “I guess I should say colder, ’cause you’ll never be cool.”Sam huffed and settled further against him. “Think you’re right, it’s more about not caring.”“Whatever works,” Dean murmured, but his thumb kept going back and forth across Sam’s skin.For something he wanted so badly, this was all moving way too slow. All of Sam’s patience vanished. He swung his cast off the arm of the couch and pulled himself up to a standing position, holding on to the sofa for support.“You should drink some water,” Dean told him. “You’re sweatin’ everything out.”But Sam turned toward him. ☆☆☆☆☆
NOW
“Stop.”Sam was thrown off once again by the differences between Dean now and Dean then, but more startled by Dean’s current expression. As he leaned toward Sam from the edge of the bed, he looked pissed off and terrified at the same time. There was no color in his face, and it made him look older than the last time Sam had looked at him.
The only way he’d know to stop there is —
“You remember,” Sam whispered under his breath. It felt like a hole was opening up under him. “You remember.”The fact that Dean wouldn’t look at him was as good as confirmation.“How much?” Sam got up from the desk, moving toward him, forgetting how stupid he looked in the goddamn robe. “How much of it?”Dean smiled sourly, and his voice sounded thick. “Go on. Finish the story. Let’s get this over with.”Even inside his own head, Sam’s voice sounded like it was being broadcast over a weak signal. “You remember all of it.”“Take your shot,” Dean looked up at him, eerily serene. “It’s okay. Take it.”He grabbed a handful of Dean’s robe and he wanted to shake him, to wake him up, to make him talk for once. To say what was in his head just one time without Sam having to break out the forceps. “You stupid son of a bitch.”Dean’s nod was so slight that Sam wasn’t sure he’d really seen it. “Yeah, I guess I am.”Sam let go of him, pushing his hair off his face. He didn’t want to sit back down, he didn’t want to go back to the desk, he didn’t want to stand. He wanted to draw back a fist and hit Dean in the face as hard as he could, to draw actual blood, to feel something give way under the force. But Dean was expecting it, not even braced. His hands were still. He didn’t even blink.Maybe they’d gotten so accustomed to violence, especially the violence they’d done to each other over the years, that it wasn’t even a surprise. A punishment Dean knew how to absorb and file away, never to discuss it again, was pointless. Sam let his arms fall to his sides. “You made me think you forgot about it. You never mentioned it again. You let me carry that, all this time.”The terror he’d seen in Dean’s face had burned off, and all that was left was the rage. How could he look threatening sitting on the edge of a bed, not even moving? What was it about him that he could do that? “Oh, do you wanna talk about carryin’ somethin’? Is that part of this TED Talk or the one after?”“Don’t,” Sam said bitterly. “I know what you’re doing, it’s not gonna work.”"Hmm?” Dean’s tone was light now, not quite mocking but close. “What am I doing?”“You’re trying to get me so pissed off that I stalk out of here. And then you get to stop talking, and nothing gets settled. I’m not —” Sam wanted to knock the lamp off his desk, but stopped himself. “You let me carry that. You let me believe that you forgot.”Dean was looking at some point past Sam’s face and his eyes had that dull gleam to them. “I carried it, too, you know.”Sam held his face in his hands for a minute, trying to collect a thought, any thought. “I’m… gonna go get some real clothes out of the dryer because I feel like an idiot. If you’re not here when I get back, that’s on you.”“I’m not goin’ anywhere,” he said to Sam’s back. “I’ve been waitin’ for this bill to come due for awhile. You can talk until your wind runs out, I can apologize until mine runs out, but there’s nothin' I can say to fix this. So I guess I don’t see the point in talkin' about it.”“Fix it?” Sam muttered to himself and turned back to look at him. “Are we talking about the same thing?”“The ecstasy thing.” Dean mirrored Sam’s confusion right back. “What I did to you.”
Goddamnit. I should’ve known.
He chose his words carefully. “I’m not describing a long-buried psychological trauma here, Dean.”Dean put one hand through his hair as if he might yank it out by the roots. “Then what the fuck are you talkin’ about?”“I’m pissed because you never mentioned it again! To the point where I thought you didn’t even remember it.”"Well, I thought you didn't remember it, either... or blocked it out, whatever.""It was good, Dean," Sam said softly. "It was really good and I wanted to keep going, and I want that for us again now."Dean didn't say anything but bewilderment was radiating off of him.Sam walked over to the desk and sat back down. ☆☆☆☆☆
2001
Before Sam turned to face him, he’d had a plan, the perfect thing to say.Looking at Dean wiped it right out of his mind, and the only thing that made it out of his mouth was a fragment of the whatever brilliant thing he’d had planned: “Kiss me?”It didn’t sound suave or sexy. Actually, it sounded kind of whiny and frantic. Whenever he thought about it, he cringed as if it had just happened.Dean searched his face. For a few horrible seconds, Sam thought maybe he’d jumped the gun, trying Dean too quickly. Then Dean took him by the wrist and pulled him toward the sofa, toward his lap.Was it happening? Was it really happening?Sam started to panic, because he hadn’t planned this far ahead. It occurred to him that he was just a bunch of gawky limbs, too tall, too skinny. He had this stupid cast, and he didn’t know much about kissing. He probably smelled like stale sweat and fresh sweat mixed together. That morning he had showered, but maybe he should shower again? Before… this?He tumbled gracelessly into Dean’s lap, draped across him so that his legs were stretched out across the rest of the sofa. Dean wrapped one arm around his waist, his fingers exploring underneath Sam’s t-shirt until his fingertips found bare skin. Dean held his face as if afraid he might get away, gently running his thumb over Sam’s lower lip in-between warm, urgent, and slightly smoky kisses so it felt like the kiss never actually ended.Dean sighed into his mouth and Sam felt it in his skull, kissing him back. He was harder than he had ever been, and there was no need this time to make it go away or to rush it, though his body seemed to open up for Dean like it was an emergency. His legs spread wide, he exposed his throat, he offered himself up.Perfect trust. No way to fall. Breathing more quickly, Dean yanked upward at the hem of Sam’s t-shirt and they stopped kissing long enough for Sam to pull it over his head. Dean rearranged him so that he was directly sitting on his lap and Sam awkwardly planted a knee on either side of Dean’s hips, straddling him. He could feel that Dean was as hard as he was and rubbed against him, moaning as Dean sucked kisses along his jawline, against the side of his neck, against his throat, along his collarbone. God, no wonder girls couldn’t stop kissing him.Dean sucked one of his thumbs into his own mouth, looking into Sam’s eyes. His lips looked stung and swollen as he pulled it out again. How did he manage to look obscene and threatening at the same time? Dean put his other thumb on Sam’s bottom lip, and Sam sucked it in just the same. Dean slowly slid it back out with a filthy grin and slowly stroked each spit-slick thumb over Sam’s nipples, and Sam discovered that he really liked that.Dean touched him in so many places that Sam could barely keep track of it all: Dean’s lips and tongue brushed against his now-red and swollen nipples before Dean blew gently across them, making them stiff. Then he was back up to Sam’s throat where his kisses had a little bite to them, before stretching upward to claim Sam’s mouth again, tongue exploring inside, and then his rough palms massaged the small of Sam’s back. He hooked his thumb into the waistband of Sam’s shorts and pulled them downward, exposing his ass. Sam rose up just enough for Dean to pull them down all the way and Dean dug his fingers in, closing Sam then opening him up like he was displaying him.When Sam moaned again, Dean shoved three fingers far into his open mouth, and Sam choked and accidentally bit him before making a sticky mess in his underwear.Smirking, Dean kept his fingers hooked possessively inside Sam’s mouth. “You’ll need ‘em wet. Lick ‘em.”Sam sucked them all the way up to Dean’s knuckles, relieved to have a hole being filled, shaking all over. He wondered if Dean’s cock tasted the same way, and decided that he couldn’t wait to find out. How big was it, anyway?He didn’t feel hot and sweaty anymore. He felt like he was on fire, but if Dean planned to give him a break, it didn’t show. Dean slid his fingers slowly out of Sam’s mouth, then opened him up again, spreading his cheeks wide, searching for Sam’s tight little hole. When he found it and brushed his thumb lightly around it, Sam rose up enough to spread more.“Dea --“Dean roughly kissed the sound out of his mouth as he pressed a fingertip into him, just a little. “I want you back there,” Sam gasped. Hugging him close, Sam felt Dean’s laugh reverberate through his whole body. “I’m not gonna fit.” To prove it, Dean tried to insert one finger just up to the first joint and it wouldn’t go. Sam clenched around it greedily.Grazing his teeth across one nipple, Dean sucked it into his mouth, hard, and Sam thought he might cry. “Bed,” Dean said gruffly, slapping Sam’s hip to signal that he should get up. “Shorts, off.”Sam tried to stand up but forgot about his stupid cast, and Dean caught him by the arm and yanked his shorts and underwear down, smearing the mess down his legs.Grabbing him around the shoulders, Dean helped him limp over to the bed and then pushed him down so that he landed on his back. Dean removed his own shorts. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Jesus. No wonder Dean said he wouldn’t fit. Sam stared and tried to solve the spatial relations problem in his head but Dean caught him and grinned. “Told ya.”“Try,” Sam pleaded.Dean bent down to go through his duffel and shook the bottle of lube at Sam that he used for jerking off and Sam took in all of his thick thigh and trunk muscles like he was going to paint them from memory. He stood and slapped Sam’s knee. “Spread as wide as you can, ass off the bed.”Sam obediently parted them, presenting himself to Dean. He had never been more open in his life, never on display like this. It felt so dirty, and he decided he wanted to feel this way whenever possible, whenever Dean would have him. Even if it required questionable capsules bought in a parking lot, he didn’t care. Whatever it took to get this from Dean, he would do it. He would beg without even a modicum of shame. Is this how Dean felt? Always ready? Always wanting it? Like a deep itch that was ten times worse than the one inside Sam’s cast? No wonder he was unbearable sometimes.Putting the lube on the bed next to them, Dean turned the necklace Sam had given him around so that it hung down his back and planted an elbow on either side of him. He kissed him forcefully, from his forehead, down to his mouth, then down to his chest, over his stomach, a bite to the top of his hip, and then laughed, delighted, at Sam’s wheezy inhale as he licked a line from his balls straight to the head of his cock, which was just starting to get hard again. “Yeah, that got your ass up off the bed, didn’t it?”Positioned at his hips now, Dean got the lube bottle and Sam was startled to feel it drizzled and dripping down the crack of his ass. Dean drew one finger down to lube it up, then slowly circled the tight ring of muscle, coaxing it open.Sam went into what he could only describe as a bliss blackout as Dean rubbed and prodded and pushed, patiently, taking his time. Dean had his head pillowed on Sam’s thigh and Sam could feel his warm breath against his balls. He would’ve said “lick it again” but he couldn’t really speak and Dean would’ve done the opposite just to spite him anyway.It was the weirdest feeling, like every nerve ending in his body had moved down to his ass.When Dean got the first finger in all the way up to the last knuckle, Sam moaned and tried to stifle it.“Don’t,” Dean said firmly. “I wanna hear it. All of it.”Dean drew his finger out slowly almost all the way, then back in again just as slowly, getting into a little rhythm with it and Sam’s breath got patchy and slow to match it. A sharp inhale on the entrance, then a moan on the exit, dying for it to be inside him again. Then Dean started sucking his cock at the same time and Sam thought he was going to black out. It wasn’t enough to make him come again, just enough to be the most infuriating thing he’d ever experienced.
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
When Dean started to get a second finger in, he licked Sam’s balls, kissing him there as urgently as he’d kissed him on the mouth, running the tip of his tongue underneath. Dean’s mouth was a deadly weapon. It’s like his tongue had more muscles than it was supposed to.Sam noticed how it was dark outside now when it had still been light while Dean kissed him on the sofa. Hours had gone by and the air was a bit cooler than it had been.Two of Dean’s big fingers were moving in and out now and Sam felt like he couldn’t get his legs high enough over his head. “Should I... should I be on my stomach?”“Mmm,” Dean planted slow, wet kisses up the side of his cock. “Nah, I like your face.”Dean likes my face. Sam could’ve coasted on how much that statement pleased him for the rest of his life, and fought off an idiotic urge to say I like your face too.“It feels really good,” Sam said instead, feeling like he was about to break into happy sobs at any moment. “It’s a pretty sight, too. Clenching and unclenching, tight and wet, warm and snug inside. You got a vein right here that’s goin’ crazy.” He assumed that was what Dean was lightly tracing with his fingertip. Dean pushed Sam’s knees even farther apart, and Sam gasped as Dean tried to get a third finger in. It hurt, but in a way that seemed worthwhile, if it meant Dean could get his big cock in there eventually. God, if he’d known this “filled hole” feeling was so damn good, he would’ve tried to seduce Dean years ago, and then maybe Dean could’ve fucked his way in right away.After a few more minutes, Sam felt all three fingers fully inside him. Whenever Dean slipped them back in, the edge of his silver ring brushed against Sam’s asshole and caused a little light show behind his eyes. Just the thought of Dean’s big, rough hands, owning him, using him.He jumped when Dean added more lube and smeared it around teasingly, all up and down his crack. Without warning, Dean started to push all three fingers in much more forcefully, tightly hold them in for a few seconds as his knuckles dug in to Sam’s ass, move them around while he was inside, then pull them out just as forcefully before ramming them in again. Sam’s legs were in the air now, with Dean holding up the foot with the cast for him. Sam urgently tried to fuck back against his hand, anxious to feel Dean’s fingers inside when they were gone, desperate to feel the sensation of them sliding back out when they were in.Dean was long, longer than average, and definitely longer than his fingers. Sam was frantic about having him inside, and realized that he was pleading out loud. “Alright, I’ll try it. But if it hurts, you tap out like when we’re fightin’, you hear me?”Practicing self-defense moves with Dean had kicked this whole thing off in the first place, in that “this makes me feel tingly and happy all over but I don’t know why” sort of way, being tackled and bent over with his arm pinned behind him back, with Dean in his ear telling him where he messed up, pressed against him to correct his stance, on top of him when they tumbled to the floor. Could they do that, only naked? Sam decided he would ask later.Dean wasn't ever easy on him. He'd say, "Whoever’s comin’ for you won’t take it easy, so I won’t either."“I... I kinda want it to hurt,” Sam admitted, a little embarrassed. “I want you inside me, I want to feel you. I want it hard... and rough.”“Good thing.” He heard the lube bottle opening again, and leaned up on his elbows a little so he could watch Dean stroke himself to slather it on. “’Cause that’s how you’re gettin’ it whether you like it or not.”An involuntary whimper seemed to wring itself from Sam’s throat.Dean grinned and raised up so Sam could see better as he slowly stroked himself some more, enjoying the obvious effect it was having on him. “I’d shove this down your throat, but you bit my fingers back there when you got excited, so I’m gonna wait and make sure that's not an ongoing thing.”“Mmm, sorry.” He couldn’t wait to taste it. Maybe Dean would let him lick it if he promised to be careful.Dean got up on his knees and raised Sam’s legs so that they rested on his broad shoulders. As Sam felt the head of Dean’s cock pushing in, not even close to fitting, he tried to will himself to open more, until the leg with the cast fell off Dean’s shoulder and he had to put it back. The thought of being more filled up, and fucked even deeper, was so exciting he thought he might come just imagining it. Dean’s big cock inside him, in and out, all the spots it could hit, how it would break him open wider.“C’mon, dirty boy, open up.”Dirty boy? His first impulse was to be annoyed, but an un-spellable word was wrung out of him as soon as he heard it.Dean laughed breathlessly, finally starting to show signs of exertion. “Must be on the right track, I think you just spoke Yiddish.”“Shut up,” Sam muttered halfheartedly, as Dean got the head of his cock inside, easing it in and out. He was pleased to hear Dean’s sharp inhale whenever he had to squeeze the big head back in, and would clench with all his might whenever Dean did, to make it even tighter.Gripping the back of Sam’s thighs, he raised him even more off the bed until Sam was practically folded in half, then dug his fingertips into either side of Sam's hole, trying to make it as wide as he could.He could feel Dean watching his face as he pushed in more. He didn’t pull out and then back in this time, he just kept pushing as Sam wasn’t much use but to writhe under him. Dean’s cock was now in farther than his fingers ever had been, hitting all kinds of uncharted territory. It was just big, hard, and swollen, and Sam didn’t even have all of it yet.As Dean started to get closer to being in fully, with maybe the last two inches still stubbornly resisting, he fingered some of the extra lube away and painted Sam’s stiff cock with it. Sam thought he might actually just float away into the air, but that was before Dean started alternating strokes, so that he either had Dean’s rough hand on his cock or Dean’s cock in his ass at any given second.With a painful release of pressure, Dean was all the way inside him and Sam could feel Dean’s balls rubbing against his ass. He winced, adjusting slightly, trying to get used to the new depth. Dean stayed inside but kind of churned around as if letting Sam's asshole get used to him.Dean’s breathing fell into a familiar rhythm as he pulled out a little, sunk all the way back in, pulled out a little more... back in again as hard as he could, grinding his hips hard against Sam’s ass. The hand on Sam’s cock wasn’t moving in the alternating rhythm anymore, but more feverishly. It was like Dean had to keep reminding himself that he meant to do it slowly, to make it last.Sam looked at Dean’s face, blown away by the naked want that was for him. Him. When Dean could probably have anyone he wanted. When Dean could --He came again, and there was a lot of it, more than he remembered ever having before. It flowed over Dean’s fist, onto Sam’s belly, and dripped down over his balls. Dean decided to finger-paint with it onto Sam’s thighs, higher up on his belly, gleefully smearing it everywhere, making a huge mess and leaving Sam sticky. Annoying, but dirty, being marked as a pervert.Dean shifted position so that he was laying on top of Sam and sliding in and out at a different angle. He pinned Sam’s arms above his head and licked deeply into his mouth.“Put your fingers in my mouth,” Sam demanded.Dean’s grin was downright malicious. “Ask nicely.” If it didn’t make him feel fluttery, Sam would’ve glared at him. But he needed it. “Please put your fingers in my mouth.”"I'm gonna need a little more begging.""Plea --"Dean suddenly shoved all four of his fingers in, then locked his thumb under Sam’s chin to keep him from being able to spit them out. He massaged his fingertips against Sam’s tongue, as if reaching for the back of his throat. Sam made enraged sounds at him, almost gagging, as pissed off as he was turned on. He bit Dean’s fingers, willfully this time, and was punished with a violent thrust that almost knocked his head into the wall. "You need all your holes plugged at once, huh? You want two big dudes pushing you around, one with his cock in your mouth, the other one fucking your ass, pumping cum into you? That's too bad, I'm not sharin'. Maybe I'll get you a big dildo to shove in there."At this onslaught of visuals, Sam felt himself clench around Dean, blown wide open, overloaded, and heard Dean’s immediate grunt in response to the tightness. Dean buried his face against the side of Sam’s neck as his hips worked more urgently with each thrust. On every other one, he was hitting an amazing spot or a nerve or something and Sam started sucking on Dean’s fingers, harder and harder, keening wordlessly around them. Dean put his other arm under Sam’s head so he could be even closer, grind even deeper. They were sweatier than they had been all day, slick against each other. Dean’s hair was damp against Sam’s neck.There it was, that little hitch of breath in Dean’s throat that Sam knew so well. Sliding his fingers out of his mouth, Dean brushed the wet bangs out of Sam’s eyes. After a hard kiss that Sam thought might have left him with a cut lip, Dean snarled in a low voice, “Mine.” He tangled his fingers in Sam’s hair, pulling just a little, panting. “Forever.”It was so possessive, greedy, and controlling, and they were the two best words Sam had ever heard in his life.“Y-yours,” he murmured. “Always.”Dean lost his rhythm then, thrusting uncontrollably, whispering Sam’s name like it was some kind of mantra. His shoulders went tense and his body was so hot against Sam’s skin that he thought Dean might have a fever. When he came, he was holding Sam tighter than he’d ever been held but didn’t pull out, and Sam felt warm and wet from the inside, fill-up, swollen, bruised, bitten, stretched, defiled in the best possible way. Mostly he felt sensuous and loved. So maybe they weren’t sacred anymore, but Sam wouldn’t have traded it for anything. ☆☆☆☆☆
NOW
“Agonizingly comprehensive,” Dean began tonelessly from the edge of the bed, with a sarcastic rictus of a grin. “So, thank you. For remembering --” He opened his hands helplessly. “Everything. In... mortifyingly graphic detail. And then sayin’ it out loud. That was my favorite part!” Dean stood up, cinched his robe chastely, and started stalking around Sam’s bedroom like a caged animal. Sam started to say something, but Dean stopped to look at him, hands grasping in front of him as if they could shape the words he wanted, but then he started talking faster than his brain could process. “This... is an awesome feeling. It’s-it’s-it’s like secondhand... firsthand and... every-other-hand embarrassment joined forces with... all seven stages of grief and... you know... strapped me down like Clockwork Orange and... made me watch Mom and Dad have sex and-and then hit me with a claw-hammer right in the dick.”Sam rose from behind the desk anxiously. “Uh, you’re... I think you’re unspooling right now.”“I don’t know whether to shit or go blind,” Dean said, then stopped, furrowing his brow. “Why are those the only two options in that phrase by the way? What does that even mean?”“Dean. Sit. Please. Or I’m gonna shoot you with a tranquilizer dart.”He just stood there, then tilted his head. “Wait, don’t we really have those?”“We do.” Sam laughed. “And if I thought one would actually take you down, I would jam it in your neck right now.”They exchanged fake smiles.Dean did not sit down, but continued pacing. “Let me see if I have the highlights here… uh, I went out and bought drugs and I pressured you into takin' 'em — we’re off to a stellar start — and I…nailed you and… you seem to have… enjoyed it. Now you’d like to go… back to that and you don’t think any of that might have to do with the fact that you were, you know, eighteen, um, horny? And… on ecstasy…. and maybe remembering it as a good thing is… because of that?”Sam straightened, realizing. “Oh.” He could feel Dean’s patience counting down from three and added quickly, “I never took the ecstasy. I palmed it.”Dean stopped pacing and held up one hand and seemed to go through, as near as Sam could tell, what Charlie had once described as him having a “cascading failure”, where one part malfunctioned and then slowly took the other parts down with it.For a minute, Sam thought maybe he was just stuck that way, like a needle in a groove, but Dean turned then. “You didn’t take the ecstasy?”“Yeah, I just said that.”“So… there was no ecstasy in your system.” Dean’s voice raised a decibel. “At all!?”Sam rolled his eyes. “That’s what ‘I didn’t take the ecstasy’ means, so, no. The ecstasy was for you, because, you know, you didn’t feel the same way and I thought, maybe if you took it, you would… I didn’t need a recreational drug to put me… there. I already felt that way about you.”Dean did the thing where his mouth tried to form six or seven statements at the same time, then said none of them. He looked like he might actually throw up. His shoulders slumped a little and, closing his eyes, he buried his face in his hands and appeared to be driving his fingers into his eye sockets so hard that Sam thought he might be trying to claw them out. A terrible sound that wasn’t quite a laugh started from deep in Dean’s chest. Just when Sam thought it might be winding down, Dean wheezed under his breath and it would start again.
Oh god, I broke him.
Sam approached him carefully, hands outstretched to block if he needed to. “I… can’t actually tell if you’re laughing or crying right now.”As if to establish right away that he was absolutely not crying, thank you very much, Dean quickly uncovered his face. “I still can’t tell,” Sam said.He thought the deranged sound was going to start up again, but Dean rubbed the bridge of his nose for a few seconds and cleared his throat. “Sam, I didn’t take it either.”Sam just stared at him, rearranging those words in different orders to see if he could make sense of them. “You didn’t take it? Then why were you —?”“Because I… I got it for you! I mean, I didn’t —” Dean stopped, horror-stricken.
Was there a such thing as two cascading failures happening simultaneously?

“Neither of us took it,” Sam said blankly.

Dean repeated this as if he was arguing. “Neither of us took it!”

“So… it was just…”

“Us.” Dean finished.

Sam laughed, feeling like all of his muscles unknotted at once. “So that’s good! So that’s…” Now he stopped. “See, you did feel the same way. All along.”

Dean looked pale and tired, locked away.

"You did," Sam accused quietly. "You... you were..."

Dean’s face didn’t show any of the rush of relief that Sam felt. ‘I’m… in hell. Or possibly a musical. It could go either way.”

“Are you… happy or…?”

Dean held up a hand to pause the conversation, put the other hand over his mouth quickly, and swallowed with a grimace. “I just threw up in my mouth. Uh, no. I don’t actually know how I feel right now, so don’t ask me.”

Sam remembered this emotion wheel thing that a social worker showed him once, to help him “identify his feelings.” Probably not a good time to joke about that.

Dean’s shoulders stiffened and his voice got clipped and controlled. “I need a break, Sammy. I need a break from —” His sweeping gesture somehow indicated Sam, the room at large, and, for some reason, the lamp Sam had stopped himself from throwing at the floor. “I need you to let me out of my promise so I can leave here and take a break.”

“For how long?” Sam asked sharply.

He backed away angrily. “For like… an hour? Is that cool with you, Chief?”

“Oh!” Sam sagged and exhaled quickly. “I thought you meant, like —“

Dean snorted and turned to walk out of the room. “I think we both know you wouldn’t be that lucky.”

Lucky? What?

Was that not just good news? Did they not just get the best news?

As Dean walked out, Sam pushed his fingers into his own eyes sockets. It hurt a little and made little sparks of color dance under his eyelids. He could see the appeal. “Now I’m back to wanting to kill him.”

“Heard that,” Dean said from down the hall.

Yeah. Of course he did.