Something About The Open Road (Every Broken Thing 5)
Fandom: Supernatural Pairing: Sam/Dean Rating: Adult. Spoilers: Through ‘Home’. Warnings: Graphic m/m incest. Language. Word Count: 5,068 AN: Many, many thanks to the incomparable and gracious inlovewithnight who took the whole concept of beta and friend to a new level while Mona & PT flailed and hyperventilated our way through this. The legions of hell itself could not force Dean to admit that he’s been waiting for it.
That he’s been lying on top of the covers, still in his jeans, when Sam wakes screaming.
It isn’t the first time, it probably won’t be the last, and Dean had been awake for hours anyway, trying to rid the scent of his mother’s perfume from the back of his throat.
She’d spoken to him. In that endless moment after he breathed her name.
Mom. Never Mary, always Mommy was her name...
She’d said “Dean,” aloud. Then, inside where no one else could hear; “My baby… I’m so sorry… not the life I wanted for you… the life I’ve left you… so many burdens… always taken care of Sammy without being asked... now I’m asking, Dean… please… special… so sorry… love you.”
He doesn’t know what she said to Sam, inside where no one else could hear.
Ghosts don’t smell like anything but ozone and grave dust so he knows it can’t be real (god, he just wanted to reach out and touch her so bad; to bury his face in her hair and pluck at the little flower in the center of her nightgown; to be four years old and safe again). He can’t really have the scent of her clinging to the back of his tongue but the sense memory lingers despite reality’s insistence.
Dean’s always gone weak-kneed at the scent of Benandre. He learned the name when he was nine, scenting through a department store makeup counter like some feral little beast. Starved for the smell of her. He’d even turned down a hot little number with a tongue-ring once who smelled like it because…well. That’d just be weird.
Not too much weirder though than having one ear open to every breath, every rustling noise, every indication of an unquiet mind in the other bed since they stopped as far away from Lawrence as they could get without driving off the road.
Then Sam wakes screaming, calling Jessica’s name, and Dean is waiting.
***
Jess is making pancakes in their kitchen in Palo Alto.
Chocolate chip, like Dean made for him when they were kids and they got a place with a kitchenette or stayed in one apartment long enough to buy groceries. They’re not as good as Mom’s, Dean would mumble and set them in front of Sam with a dollop of crunchy peanut butter on the side, just about to fall off the plate. Just how Sam liked them.
Jessica’s hair is unbound and her feet are bare. She has a serene wax-doll smile on her face. Over her shoulder, hovering just above the countertop, there’s a sense of motion.
Sam lunges at her over and over as she moves, oblivious, around the room. His body twists across the floor, a desperate invertebrate, as she calmly paces from the refrigerator to the table and back again. He calls her name (jess!), reaches for her (please), screams out to her (oh god, please…), but his hands slip from around her ankles. Her ears do not hear him. Her eyes do not see him.
He’s crying harder than he ever has in life, breathless wracking sobs that crack his ribs apart, spill his heart out into his hands, and he’s begging her just to see him. The air shudders behind her again. His tears keep him too weak and breathless to move and…
“Jess. You’ve got to listen. I’ve got to save you. I saw you. I saw you, baby, pinned to the ceiling -- oh god -- bleeding. You have to listen to me, please Jess…”
She is flipping pancakes onto a gilt-edged serving platter, humming aimlessly.
The space just behind her flickers again and resolves into Dean, shimmering like a mirage in leather and denim. His legs kick off the edge of the countertop and his black bracelet is a tight shadow around his wrist. A shotgun dangles in a loose grip between his knees.
Dean slides the mouth of the shotgun down Jess’ spine as if to get her attention and she quivers like Sam would have at the contact. Up. Down. Up. Jess shudders forward and places her palms down on the counter in front of her; her chin drops to her chest. She turns her head sideways and slowly smiles at Dean. That knowing, sexy smirk Sam’s seen a hundred girls give his brother in a hundred different ways.
“Jess, please.”
She straightens and finally acknowledges Sam, finally turns toward him at his strangled plea. Now she’s slowly unbuttoning her blouse with that same smile on her face. The smile Sam associated with long Sunday mornings in bed. Touch and laughter and sunlight and everything he’d only ever known with Dean until then.
The shotgun is in Sam’s hands, without his knowledge, without his consent. He raises it, levels it right at Jessica’s midsection as she releases the final button from its slit of fabric.
Sam can’t move. He can’t stop. He can’t speak. He’s screaming inside.
She bends down in an impossibly graceful arc and strokes Sam’s cheek, runs one unvarnished nail down the barrel of the shotgun, but he can’t reach her hands with his own. Flames lick up behind the blackness of her eyes.
Dean’s shadowy form sidles up next to her and gently slides her blouse off her shoulders without touching her skin. Inviolate. His eyes are locked on Sam’s, though, and he says without moving his mouth; “Can’t save ‘em all, my Sammy. My little killer.”
Sam fires and the wound blooms crimson below Jess’ breasts in the shape of Dean’s amulet… Her mouth opens, pained and shocked…
He screams.
***
Dean is on the bed before Sam can properly sit up, one hand tight around the back of Sam’s neck and the other clutching his bicep. He chants his brother’s name softly, willing Sam to see him. After a moment more of blank panic, Sam focuses blurry eyes on Dean’s face and looks surprised to see him against the darkness of a quiet motel room instead of haloed in flames. Reflex -- Dean thinks morbidly -- Body memory.
Sam’s mind always clears more quickly than this; he says, “I’m fine, man, forget it,” by now. And Dean usually goes back to lying on his own bed, watching Sam stare at the ceiling in the dark.
But this time Sam takes a long while to realize that Dean isn't pulling him away from a non-existent fire on the ceiling. Then he pants hard and practically crawls into Dean’s lap like he’d done when he very small and very scared. Dean just holds on to him tighter.
Sam gasps and clutches at Dean’s chest as though there’s fabric there to grasp, fingers curled into claws against Dean’s skin. Sam chokes out a sob, then another when Dean says, “Sammy, it’s okay. I’m here. It’s okay,” because it’s not okay and it’ll never be okay again and Sam knows that but Dean always wishes he could make it that way with sheer force of will. Just for Sam. He’d do, god, anything to make it okay for Sam again, to make it so that it was ever okay to begin with.
And instead of getting better, it just keeps getting worse (now and forever and always) because Dean knows Sam's been choking on this for far too long. Choking on the grief for that beautiful little big-eyed girl he’d loved -- actually loved -- and wasn’t that the biggest fucking shock of the whole damn thing.
Not that she died flush against the ceiling; not that she died in a silhouette of flame that confirmed the worst suspicions, the worst possible mental pictures, in the deepest, darkest parts of Dean’s memory. Certainly not that she’d died at all because Dean just knew some shit like this was going to happen to Sammy if he really ever tried the “normal” thing. No, the most surprising thing were the tears on Sam’s face, the look in his eyes, as he slammed the trunk shut and declared that they had work to do, the fact that he really had, really did, love that girl.
Sam’s whole body is wracked with sobs now, emotion he’d never be able to let out in the daylight, and it’s all Dean can do just to hold on. Sam’s wild with grief and he twists and writhes in Dean’s arms like he’s dying, like he’s trying to somehow escape his own skin and the pain that lives in it. Dean feels helpless, useless for anything but this, for anything but hanging on and riding it out with Sam, taking as much of the grief onto himself as he’s able.
And he's scratching down Dean’s skin like he just can't help it. Clawing at him because Dean keeps pulling him back into his chest, won't let him turn away like he knows Sam wants to. He won’t let Sam bury his face and tear at the sheets instead because Dean can do this. At least he can do this for Sam.
Sam draws livid lines of blood down his back with dirty fingernails and sobs into his chest, clutches and bruises and digs his nails in and chants, Jess, Jess, Jess. Dean is resigned and empty and cold and trying so fucking hard to be what Sam needs; he just gives his body up to Sam’s pain too. Gives him everything he has and despite it all, despite every self-loathing pep talk Dean’s given himself since this long strange trip began, still it pangs him somewhere deep inside that Sam is tearing into his flesh and calling her name.
Eventually -- after what seems like forever -- Sam finally starts coming down, too exhausted for more. Tears keep falling from his eyes, leaking, even as his breathing starts becoming more regular. Dean’s heart aches for him in this broken state. He wants Sam to hear, I’m sorry she died. I’m sorry I don’t regret that it brought you back to me, as Dean strokes his hair and the skin of his back and breathes into his ear, "Sam. Sammy."
It’s like instant electricity, that thoughtless caress; Dean feels it snap up the length of Sam’s spine. Reflex. Body memory. An endless moment of possibility -- no finally bad idea yes wait sam please now -- before Sam breathes in deep and arches up onto his knees, pressing his stomach and hips in, and exhales hotly against his ear, fluttering the short hair there and making Dean shiver.
Sam presses against him, pulls Dean’s hips up close to his own with an arm around the waist. Uses all that long-limbed leverage and just rolls him with an ankle hooked behind his knee and a soft, shuddering, “Dean.” It happens slow enough to be gentle and entirely too fucking fast and Dean's brain just isn't keeping up because he’s surprised to find himself flat on his back. Sam surges up and over him then grinds down and Dean’s cock is certainly paying attention because it gets rock-hard in seconds.
Sam’s warmth, his scent is all around him, his tears stinging into the abraded skin of Dean’s shoulder. Then Sammy rocks his whole body in an utterly obscene, illegal-in-eighty-five-states undulation against his and Dean breaks out into a cold sweat as Sam starts to mouth his neck, behind his ear, moving toward his lips with inexorable surety.
Because they haven't done this in years. Not since before Sammy left and that...well. That wasn’t anything like this.
Dean grips Sam's shoulders as the kisses reach his jaw line and pushes him away. Hard. Across the bed so Sam lands sprawling and confused on his back; "Dean?"
Dean's up and on his feet so fast his head spins. He grabs his overshirt and jacket, flannel and leather sleeves threaded in through each other, and walks straight out the door. The keys to the Impala are in his jacket pocket, thank fuck, so he grabs his spare pair of boots out of the trunk and doesn't have to hot-wire anything. His baby starts up with a growl and he settles the aching skin of his back a little bit against the upholstery.
Dean starts driving. He will keep driving until he hits the nearest bar and then he will get as drunk as he ever allows himself to be because reality is just a little too fucking much at the moment. He feels numb and panicked and stupid. So goddamned stupid.
Because the legions of hell itself could not force Dean to admit to anyone that he’s been waiting for it.
***
Sam got backhanded six feet into the air by a werewolf once. When he was nine and Dean was thirteen.
And he’s always defined himself in relation to Dean that way; in position, in opposition to who Dean is, what Dean does, how Dean acts. Every story, every thought from almost his entire life is begun with; “I was this and Dean was that. I did this while Dean did that. I was here and Dean was right next to me.”
Sam is not nearly as good with a pool cue or a gun as Dean. He’s better with blades and a dart board. His hair is browner than Dean’s, like Dad’s (“Dean looks like mom! Dean’s all pretty like a girl. Ow! Ow, hey! Stop it, Dean. Daaaad!”). He’s been taller than Dean since he was sixteen and Sam’s hands are bigger (“Yeah, like Sasquatch big,” Dean snorted, “That’s just freakish.”) and Dean still takes up more space when he walks into a room than Sam’s ever thought to do.
But Dean’s just walked out on him for the first time in…shit, ever really. Sam is alone and it feels just like it did to land on cold ground so hard it slammed the breath out of him.
He was supposed to have been in the car (he was supposed to stay in this box of “finding dad” and “mourning Jess” and “being brothers”). He’d run at the werewolf with no weapons and got bitch-slapped halfway back across the county for his trouble because the furry bastard had been holding Dean up off the ground, smelling him, looking like it was about to rip the tender veins out in his neck for a late night snack.
Dean used the distraction, of course, to its best advantage, kicking out the werewolf’s kneecap and dropping to the ground while he brought his shotgun up and around in his previously pinned hands. He filled the thing full of silver shot (fucking ‘Buffy’ was, as usual, a bunch of horse shit. A werewolf chooses to kill humans) then ran to him and hovered over Sam with too-wide, panicked, green eyes, checking and re-checking for broken bones, until Sam slapped his brother’s hands away and sat up, still struggling a little for air.
Sam can’t move from his position half-sprawled out on the bed, his cock hard and his shorts and t-shirt rumpled and rucked up like he’d just… Like he’d been…
Dean pushed him away, said no with his whole body, and he’d never done that before.
Dean must be thinking this was sick. He probably hoped Sam wouldn’t bring it up again, that it was another fucked up set of moments from their childhood that are better to repress and deny in the time-honored Winchester Way. Dean had been done with him when Sam left the family business for a college degree and a pretty girl who bought throw pillows with fringe for their couch.
Dean was done with him after he’d fucked Sam through the mattress the night before he left. When he’d left bruises and bite marks so that Sam wore long pants every day in the late August California sun, wore his clothes down the dormitory hallway to the showers and didn’t cut his already overly long hair until almost October. Until the marks had all finally faded and all he could feel was the ache of their absence.
Sam springs up from the bed to careen around the little table and into the bathroom. His palms slam down onto the toilet seat just as he vomits bile and sorrow out until his chest aches. He numbly brushes his teeth, carefully not looking at his tear-streaked face in the mirror, has several gulps of water from his cupped hand, shuts off the tap and neatly hangs up the towel on the rack.
What the hell will happen when Dean comes back? Because Dean always comes back. Sam lies down very slowly and closes his eyes and thinks about the fact that Dean always comes back; always comes back no matter how stupid Sam had been. Dean came back to him all the way in Palo Alto, all the way on the other side of not talking at all for years.
Sam closes his eyes and breathes. In. Out. In.
Dean will come back. He’ll come back if only because he left Dad’s journal open on the table and he’d never trust Sam to do with it what needs to be done. He’ll be back.
***
Dean goes so far as to hit on a long-legged brunette with these slitted honey-hazel eyes that gaze out at him from under messy bangs. Four perfectly-spaced scratches throb down the center of his stomach as he gives her the best incarnation of his grin he can manage. It works.
She tells him her name is Comfort. “As in Southern Comfort”, she says with an eye-roll Dean has to respect, as she takes another drag from one of those weird, super-skinny, girly cigarettes. “My mother was a total alcoholic.”
Dean thinks sarcastically, “Wow. Classy.” But that doesn’t stop him from almost taking her back to the Impala for sheer irony’s sake. He carefully decides that he’s just not in the mood (certainly not that it would be pathetic) and he excuses himself to a never-ending “bathroom break” out the back door that he usually saves for the post-blowjob portion of the evening.
Dean’s just drunk enough to feel every molecule of cool oxygen that moves in and out of his lungs when he steps from the bar out into the open, nightmare-blue sky. He knows he’s off-center, off his game; that he’s meat for the beast right now and honestly he doesn’t give a shit. He just prays he doesn’t drive off the side of the road and fuck up his car as he makes his way back to the motel.
He’s dangerously close to sobriety again by the time he fights with the sticky motel doorknob lock, so he sits and watches Sam’s sleeping form in the too-short bed while finishing off the quarter-full bottle of whiskey he’d brought in from the trunk. Then he stands up -- with great conviction, as though it’s preordained that he rise at exactly that moment -- and strides over to the bed.
Sam looks awful. His face is pinched, frown lines deeply etched and tear-tracks salting his cheeks.
Dean digs his fingernails into his palm and the pain feels good. He wishes for something to kill; longs crazily for something nasty to break down the door and attack them before he looses all sense, before he sinks down onto Sam’s mattress.
Instead, the input from his own skin reverberates around inside his skull, the dirtiest kind of invitation. And there’s Sam sprawled out across the crappy, thin bedding like a filthy promise. Dean thinks, “I’m going to hell. I’m going straight to hell. Fuck.”
The second time is the hardest.
First time’s a mistake, a miscalculation, needful, shameful and unforgettable. Third time’s the charm, a habit, a behavior, a sin. Second time though. The second time bridges the gap.
The second time has intent. It’s premeditated. It has a First Move.
Dean makes it. Dean closes the distance and he doesn’t think once about what that means. He needs to get close to Sam. Needs to make Sam feel better, needs to make Sam feel.
It’s a reflex. Body memory.
“Sam.” He toes off his boots and kneels gently between his brother’s bare feet. Inches up the poor, scratchy excuse for a comforter. “Sammy.” He’s been hard and aching since before he left the bar.
Because Dean has always been stronger than is strictly good for him but he’s just so fucking tired.
***
Dean smells like cheap whiskey and the fog of bar room smoke. Sam’s eyes are open all of a sudden and he only knows it’s Dean a split-second before he remembers in a rush what’s happened.
“I… Dean, what…?”
Dean shrugs away his jacket and shirt, runs his hands up Sam’s thighs, fingernails rasping against wiry hair and says, “Shh, Sammy. Please. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of you.”
Sam is so pathetically grateful he could cry, hates Dean for making him feel this way and he’s all turned around and fucked up but this is nothing like the last time, the time before California and Jess. Dean is sucking kisses onto the insides of Sam’s thighs and whispering secret things against his skin that he wishes he could hear. Dean’s hand slides up and rubs against his waist in a slow line while he mouths Sam’s cock through his boxers then brings his other hand to join the first at the waistband. Pulls the light cotton off Sam’s hips and down his legs to disappear somewhere in the darkness of the floor.
Sam’s neck is tense and curved as he keeps trying to raise his head and look, to see Dean, to see what Dean is doing. He wants to reach for him, pull him up and touch all the skin just barely visible in the shadows created by the light trickling into the room from the parking lot.
But then Dean slides his lips around Sam’s cock, sucks him into his mouth and groans around it. Sam cries out; Dean groans again in response and wraps his two left fingers around the base, squeezing Sam, guiding him, making it last. Sam hears the rasp of denim and metal and feels the exact moment Dean’s furiously searching right hand makes contact his own dick in his shuddering hot exhale and the flick of his tongue.
Sam’s neck snaps back and he rolls his head against the pillow. “Please.”
***
Then Sam starts talking and Jesus fucking Christ but there’s only so much a man can take.
“Dean. Please. God, fuck. Let me touch you -- please please please, god -- ah, please Dean come here. Come on, c’mere. I want to, Christ, I want to touch you too. Please, Dean, you never let me touch you....”
Dean groans and viciously squeezes the base of his cock to stop him coming right then and there, shakes off Sam’s hand in his hair and absolutely does not move up the bed.
“Dean! Dean, please. Oh god, then fuck me, please Dean fuck me. I need to feel -- Please! -- I need…I need you to…”
Sam gasps then and calls out, “Dean!” He sounds almost panicked, and that’s the end. That’s about all Dean can take and he comes so quickly, in hard spurts all over his fingers, moaning around Sammy’s cock and sucking hard enough to bruise.
***
Sam looks down, mouth open and panting, and Dean pulls off with a little gasp, still working his left hand in long, hard strokes around Sam’s cock as he catches his breath. God. Dean just came all over himself blowing him and the thought makes Sam shudder from his scalp to his toes, makes his cock twitch hard in Dean’s fist.
Dean looks back up at him. His eyes are shadowed and Sam can’t see the expression within and he wants to but then Dean sinks down to take him in his mouth again, still grasping him at the root with his left hand and, oh God, circling his ass, pushing inside with one finger at the same moment his lips close around the head.
Sam sits up on one elbow and drags his gaze from Dean’s lips stretched into a perfect O, along the tense curve of his neck to the muscles working, working, under the skin of Dean’s right shoulder as he fucks two fingers now, steady and relentless, into Sam. Sam’s hips buck up at the sight and Dean shifts after him just enough that the single shaft of sickly-yellow floodlight slanting in through the part in the curtains hits, with excruciating accuracy, the exact place Sam is watching.
The skin covering those rippling muscles is torn and scratched. Bleeding, bruised and broken in the shape of Sam’s grief and Sam gasps as he understands all at once what it means to be loved by a Winchester. He understands all at once that he is lover and beloved both because it’s been carved into their flesh now. It’s ripped in through the skin of them now.
***
Sam cries out, “Dean,” and falls back, clutching at the sheets and Dean’s hair with either hand. Sam is silky and hot and pulsing in his mouth and tastes like everything Dean’s ever called home.
He releases Sam’s dick from his gripping fingers, runs his hand up Sam's body and strokes circles into the soft skin of his stomach and chest. He slides down over Sam’s sides, making him tremble. Dean knows this body, knows Sam would be ticklish there if he weren’t so close to coming.
He has just his mouth on Sam’s cock now; stroking the thumb of one hand over ribs, fingers splayed against hot skin; feeling the silken fluttering of muscle around the fingers of his other hand as he thrusts in, curls upward to hit Sam’s prostate with every stroke. He presses down on Sam’s pelvis with his outstretched arm, fucking his own mouth at his own pace, finding his rhythm in Sam’s half-started thrusts.
Noises fall from Sam’s mouth without form, breathy, gasping things that twist in Dean’s gut like the rush of power at the closing of an exorcism. “Immundissime spiritus… unclean spirit… da locum…give way… recedo, delinquentes…depart, transgressor… recedo, seductor…depart, seducer.”
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Sam comes in a hot flood over his tongue and with a throaty moan. Dean keeps licking and sucking lightly until Sam’s twitching and pleading and pulling him up his body.
***
Dean’s lips are red and bruised and open. Sam moves to taste them, has half-formed plans of sucking Dean’s bottom lip in between his own to soothe the swelling hurt with his tongue. Dean -- effortlessly, gently -- turns Sam’s awkward lunge into a roll that almost, but not quite, seems like what he’d meant all along. Then they are spooned on their sides, Dean’s front pressed against Sam’s sweaty back.
His voice rumbles, buzzes against the back of Sam’s scalp. “Go to sleep, Sammy. It’s all right. Just go to sleep.”
Sam is too fucked out, too cried out, too worn out to argue or even think and so he does. He doesn’t dream.
***
Dean doesn’t fall asleep for a very long time. He holds Sam against him and tries not to think, tries to focus on Sam’s warmth and dreamless stillness. Tries to focus on Sam’s heartbeat, steady and strong, a soothing tattoo against his flat palm beating out Alive. Alive. Still alive. Still here. Still safe. I’ve kept him safe.
***
Sam wakes up early but Dean’s already in the shower. He remembers everything before he even opens his eyes, no anesthetic moment of sleepiness shields him, and he lies motionless, blinking up at the ceiling for several long moments. Sam thinks hard about the wounds on Dean’s back and shoulders now, wonders if Dean will dress before he comes out of the bathroom or parade around in a towel like there’s nothing to see.
He quickly realizes he just can’t handle the idea of Dean walking out and running his mouth as usual, tossing a wet towel at his chest and bitching about breakfast and Sam getting his ass in gear, while Sam’s still drowning in the smell of them on the sheets, while he can still feel Dean’s touch branded into his skin.
Sam scrambles out of bed and pulls on the closest pieces of his clothing he can find. He grabs a hat and Dean’s sunglasses, because Christ knows what he must look like and slides his wallet into his back pocket. He walks out the door and down the street to the park to calm the fuck down before trying to find some coffee at the very least.
He sinks onto a bench with green peeling paint and wishes, with a sort of wild hysteria, that he smoked cigarettes so he’d have something to do with his hands.
Dean hadn’t touched him since he left, since before Jess.
All this time away, Sam’s been able to pretend that he doesn’t miss it, that he doesn’t need it, but in the midst of his appalling grief, he finds this crazy, unshakable, unspeakable need to have Dean’s hands on him. In him.
Reflex. Body memory.
Hard as a rock and dizzy, Sam puts his head down between his knees and breathes.
He’d thought – hoped – he’d forgotten.
He’d hoped things would be different now. That he was different.
But he's not, and it's not, and he'd run all the way to California and back and there's still...all this. Dean’s smile, Dean’s scent, Dean’s hands on him. Dean’s hands on him all the time; the way they make him break, fall completely apart and then put him back together. The simple, undeniable fact of Dean.
Sam thought (hoped, prayed, naively assumed…) the same need wouldn’t be back to haunt him, to repeat the same fucked up drama all over again. Like mom. Like Jess. He'd loved Jessica with everything that was in him, with all his heart and soul, but in many ways he doesn't think he's ever been quite so lonely as he was without Dean.
Sam lets his breath out in a long, hopeless sigh, tugs both hands through his hair and starts plotting how to seduce his brother. He’d beg if he had to. He would do anything.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to link to azuremonkey's gorgeous ficlet, Memory, part 2. It is sort-of-fanfic for this part of the series and makes me squee like a rhesus monkey... ~Mona