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Chapter Text

September 1998

Dean got back to their crappy trailer park five minutes before seven, wet tarmac, wet trails, and six miles behind him. It had been raining since noon, that special brand of heavy wet that seemed peculiar to Louisiana in September, and he was soaked through with it to the skin and splattered with mud to his knees, but the burn in his lungs felt good, and a hot shower was going to feel better, and then he was going to poke Sam in the ear until the kid put down his damn schoolbooks and watched TV with him for awhile. That was his plan, and he thought it was a good one, right up until he came around the corner and found the Impala parked in front of their tumbledown trailer, trunk popped and John bent over rearranging something inside, heedless of the rain.

‘Dad?’ Pleasure and surprise and worry knotted up together in his voice, in his chest, because on Wednesday John had called to say he’d be back in Killona for a few days in a week. This was not a week. This was Friday. ‘Hey. Didn’t think we’d see you until next week.’

His father looked briefly up over the lid of the trunk. There was a nasty cut butterflied shut across his forehead, and though he had a genuine, weary smile for his son, something that looked like anger was tucked into the corners of his mouth, was lingering in the lines around his eyes. ‘Dean,’ he greeted him, and went back to whatever it was that he was doing. ‘Bobby called this morning, with a line on something nasty a couple hundred miles north of Cheyenne. Black dog, looks like, maybe a riftwalker or a shambler. There’s a restless spirit we can take care of in Colorado on the way. I’m gonna gas up the car, get you and Sam some food for the road. Get yourself cleaned up. I want you both ready by the time I get back.’

Dean felt his stomach twisting. You said we were staying through December. You told him we were staying through—‘Dad—’

‘Estes Park is about thirteen hundred miles,’ his father was saying. ‘I’ll drive ‘til we reach Dallas. You get some sleep, and then you can take over for awhile from there. We should be able to make it by noon.’

Dean glanced up at their trailer, yellow light spilling from the small living room windows through the gloom. ‘Yeah, Dad, but did you—did you talk to Sammy?’ he asked. ‘It’s just that he’s got this runnin’ thing tomorrow—’

‘So I heard.’ John didn’t look up. ‘Loudly, I might add, and in great detail. Your brother’s picked up an interesting tone, time I’ve been gone.’

‘Dad—’

‘I said I heard, Dean, and I don’t need to hear it again. There are five people in the hospital in Estes Park and three dead outside of Casper; that’s more important than some track meet. Now get your gear and get your brother and be back out here in thirty-five. I’m not gonna tell you again.’

Dean didn’t move, just rubbed a hand over the back of his head and studied the mud for a moment at his feet.

‘Dean.’ His father’s voice had sharpened, dangerously.

He pulled in a careful breath. ‘He runs at nine,’ he said quietly, looking up to meet John’s irritated gaze. ‘They’ll be done by noon, maybe earlier; it’s not even another twenty-four hours, and it’s—Dad, he’s been training really hard for it, sir, and it’s—it’s important to him. Couldn’t we just—’

John slammed the trunk with a decisive thunk, and Dean stopped talking, tense and unhappy. It was silent for a long moment between them. Dean could hear, beneath the rain, the sound of a television coming from the trailer beyond theirs, the whoosh of a car passing on the road, someone’s raucous laughter, faint but clear. ‘I expect crap like this from your brother,’ his father finally said, with a quiet sort of coldness that cut straight to the bone. ‘I expect—I expected,’ he corrected himself, and Dean held himself against a flinch, ‘better of you.’

It took Dean a moment to steady his voice. ‘Yes sir,’ he said quietly.

John looked at him for the length of several heartbeats more, then sighed, squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed at his temples with one hand. ‘We’ll stay in Wyoming for awhile,’ he said, coming around the side of the car. There was no ice left in his voice, only a deep and abiding weariness that somehow hurt Dean just as much. ‘I promise. I’m gonna meet up with Caleb when we get up there; it’ll take us four weeks for the hunt, maybe five, and after that there’s a handful of hauntings up that way that Bobby and I’ve been meaning to get someone on for awhile. We’ll be there for a few months. Probably past Christmas, even, and Sam can join as many damn track teams as he wants, so long as he keeps up with his training. I’ll make this up to him.’

How? was on the tip of Dean’s tongue, but he kept it there, heavy and cold, as John pulled open the door, paused, pushed a hand through his wet hair, and looked up at him again. ‘I know this isn’t easy on him,’ he said, quietly. ‘I know it’s not always easy on you, Dean. But it’s the job, son. You both know that.’

He nodded. ‘Yes sir,’ he agreed, still quietly, and John gave him a small, tired smile.

‘I’ll get you both shakes at McDonalds. You think Sam'll want one of those chicken things instead of a burger?'

Dean was fairly certain that Sam wasn't going to eat anything their father put in front of him this evening, up to and including an entire Chicago deep-dish with feta, spinach, and olives, but he certainly wasn't about to say that.  'Probably, yeah,' he said instead.  John nodded, climbed into the car and kicked her engine to life, and after a long moment Dean sighed and went inside.

The living room was stuffy and silent, as messy as he’d left it an hour ago, and it felt curiously . . . empty. Dean stood for a moment, dripping, just inside the door, and looked around. Sam’s books were still scattered across the small living room and his own knives were sticking out of the dartboard on the wall; there were muddy trainers still by the door and muddy boots by the sofa and breakfast dishes piled unwashed in the sink, but it had already stopped feeling familiar, somehow, was already just another place they were leaving—four walls that had never belonged to them, not really, not for true. The narrow door on the other side of the kitchen was closed, no light leaking around its edges; Dean tried the knob, sighed, and leaned his forehead against the thin wood. ‘Sam,’ he said quietly, knowing that his brother could hear him. ‘Sam, unlock it, man, c’mon.’

There was only silence. Dean gave him another minute, then pulled a flat pick from his wallet on the kitchen table; it was only a privacy lock and so took him approximately 0.7 seconds to open. It was dim in their tiny room, rain drumming on the metal roof overhead. Sam was sitting on the bottom bunk, elbows on bony knees and his head in his hands. Dean felt his heart give a painful thump behind his ribs—I’m sorry Sammy I can’t fix it I’m so sorry—then fisted a hand in the front of his tee and pulled him gently to his feet, and the kid wrapped himself around him like a five-foot-eight baby octopus missing four tentacles and in possession of floppy hair. He was shaking, shoulders to heels, as though there were something inside him trying to crawl out of his skin, but his eyes were dry. ‘I hate him,’ he whispered fiercely, voice choked, face pressed hard against Dean’s rain-soaked shoulder. ‘I hate him; I hate—’

‘Shhhh, shh shh.’ Dean smoothed a hand over the tangled silk of Sam’s hair. ‘Sammy,’ he said softly, and if there were a helpless frisson of want that went smoking down his spine as his little brother crowded closer in the dark, slim arms like iron bands around his ribs—well, that was his business and his problem, and Sam didn’t need to know.

Chapter Text

Wyoming didn’t suck.

Getting to Wyoming had been utter shit, mind you. The fallout from the second shouting match Sam and John had exploded into in Texas had lasted for over seven hundred miles, a prickly, poisonous silence Dean never found relaxing under the best of circumstances, particularly when they were on the road and there was nowhere the hell else for him to go. And the bruise from where his face had lost an argument with a gravestone during the salt-and-burn they’d stopped for in Colorado had hurt—still hurt—like seven kinds of hell. But Caleb had, thank Christ, already been waiting for them when they’d arrived, with a solid lead on whatever the hell it was their father had decided to chase halfway across the country on thirty minutes’ notice, and by then John and Sam had been managing a chilly civility for a good ninety minutes, maybe even ninety-five—all of which meant that forty-three hours after leaving Killona, Dean was dropping his bags inside another door, and Sam’s enrollment paperwork had been filed at another school, and their father was driving down another road away from them.

Thanks to a contact of Bobby’s, the place they were crashing in turned out to be a pleasant surprise for once: four miles outside of a place called Casper, it was an actual house for a change, rambling and tumbledown but a house all the same, and it came with a cord of firewood in the shed, a family of squirrels in the attic, and the use of a rust heap of a car which Dean was, after a brief inspection, fairly certain he’d be able to keep running, so long as he could scrounge a better accessory belt sometime soon. He looked over the edge of the hood to where Sam was slouched against the driver’s side door, eating M&Ms from a family-size bag Dean had lifted three gas stations ago in Colorado. Tension had steadily been bleeding out of him since John had left, and he looked—well, Sammy rarely looked happy these days, and Dean knew he was still pissed as hell about the track meet in Louisiana, but he looked better, all the same.

‘It lives, Igor,’ Dean announced, and was rewarded with an eyeroll and what he was sure his brother was trying very hard to pretend was not a smile. ‘And you’re gonna get to learn how to replace an accessory belt next week. Excited?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Dean, I don’t want—’

‘Yeah, well, you’re gonna. Useful skill.’

Sam tossed an M&M up into the air and caught it in his mouth. ‘Math,’ he said, around a mouthful of chocolate, ‘is a useful skill.’

‘Is it? Awesome. Use it to add up how many shits I do not give. You need to know how to keep a car runnin’, Sammy. Even one like Frankenstein here.’

‘Frankenstein’s the doctor, genius.’

‘Shut up.’ He really was going to remember that one of these days, he swore to God. He closed the hood with a thump. ‘And give me some of those.’

Sam held out the bag as he came around the side of the car, and for a moment the two of them chomped contentedly on candy together, shoulder to shoulder against the door. Dean tipped his head back to look up into the windswept bell of the Wyoming sky. The afternoon was quiet, save for the wind, and empty from horizon to horizon; he and Sam might have been the only people alive in the world. There were other houses out here somewhere, he knew that, but he couldn’t see them from where they stood, and Casper, with its solid square buildings and tall slim tower, was four miles distant on the horizon. After a year away from Bobby’s and eight months in nothing but motels or trailer parks, all of them cramped and noisy and where the idea of privacy was as laughable as peace, Dean was almost dizzied by the sudden amount of space and silence above and around them, by the sheer amount of . . . of blue.

‘You wanna head into town for awhile?’ Dean asked after a bit, thinking of the tourist leaflets he’d picked up at a gas station fifty miles back. ‘Check out the sights?’

Sam’s voice was wry. ‘All the women under forty-five and still breathing, you mean?’

‘Well, I was thinkin’ more along the lines of their planetarium, but if you—’ he said, and laughed at the four-year-old on a sugar rush suddenly looking up at him from his teenage brother’s face. ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought. C’mon.’ He popped one more M&M in his mouth, left his brother the last several in the bag. ‘You can tell me all about whatever the voiceover dude gets wrong, so long as the engine doesn’t fall out of this thing on the way in. Dad left us a Pinto, Sammy. A ’79 Pinto. Jesus Christ, my life. You need anything for school while we’re out? Notebooks or pens or shit?’

Sam shook his head, tipped the bag up to his mouth to pour in the last pieces of candy.  ‘Got enough,’ he said.

‘Could get you a My Little Ponies lunchbox ‘f you really want one.’

‘Could bury you out here where they’ll never find your grave, Dean.’

Dean grinned at that, flicked at Sam’s ear, got a bony elbow in the soft spot just between his third and fourth ribs in reply, and was contemplating whether it was worth dragging his brother into a tussle and rubbing his face in the grass for awhile when, ‘Could use some new boots, though?’ Sam said, hesitantly. ‘F we’ve got enough? There’s a Goodwill on East B street.’

He looked sideways at him. ‘On East B Street.’

‘If we take 87 back toward Casper it’ll be—’

Dean snorted back a laugh. ‘You already memorized the entire street map of this place, didn’t you, you little geek.’

Sam shrugged. ‘Might’ve.’ The look his brother slanted up at him was sly and sweet, and Christ, those dimples were going to be the death of him, they were. ‘Might know where all the bakeries are, too, Dean. Not sure I can share that kind of information with someone who calls me a geek, though.’

Dean scrubbed a hand through his brother’s floppy hair. ‘No one’s gonna mind when I string you up in the garage and beat on you for awhile, you know that?’

Sam looked up at him, grinning, and danced lightly back out of range; Dean heaved a long-suffering sigh and waved a hand in the general direction of the passenger door. ‘Fine,’ he said, fishing the keys out of his back pocket. ‘I buy you boots; you point me toward pie; we hit the planetarium. Fair?’

‘Fair,’ Sam agreed promptly, and then—‘Dean, seriously, we have enough? ‘Cause—’

‘We got plenty, kiddo. Dad left us an old card and some cash, and Bobby knows one of the guys who owns a garage in town. I’m gonna start work there this weekend. We’re fine. So c’mon. You find a Walmart while memorizing street corners? Goodwill’s not going to have anything to fit those ginormous feet of yours.’

‘My feet are not gi—that’s not even a word, Dean.’

‘Sure it is.’

‘It was made up.’

‘Yeah, for your feet. Get the hell in the car.’

They came back late, new boots and borrowed books in the back, a new library card in Sam’s wallet, and a six-pack of Coke and of Coors rattling at Sam’s feet. The planetarium had been a bust, seeing as how it was apparently the one planetarium in the known universe open only on Saturdays, but the boots were good, thick-soled sturdy leather that would wear well, and the pie had been better, apple with a buttery crust and lots of cream, and Dean had let Sam drag him off to the public library before it closed to get a temporary card and approximately six thousand thirty three books to take back to the house with them, because he was just that awesome of a big brother. Seriously, there should be awards.

‘Sorry about the planetarium, kiddo,’ he said again, flicking the headlights to high in an effort to find their long dirt drive. The night was clear, but there was no moon, and the nearest streetlight was three miles behind them.

‘S okay.’ Sam yawned, then added anxiously, ‘We’ll go back tomorrow, though, right? And to the lecture?’

‘Sammy, you wanna spend your Saturday night listenin’ to some old guy yammer on about phasers and shit, that’s on you, but—’

‘They’re not—oh, my God, Dean, they’re not phasers, Jesus; the poster said the lecture’s on pulsars, and Dr. Ratigan’s a—’

Dean did not quite manage to hide the white flash of his grin. Sam spluttered to a stop and sat scowling at him for a moment, then whacked him in the chest with the back of one hand. ‘You’re an ass.’

Dean grinned. ‘Yeah, and you love it, little brother.’

‘I am not talking to you anymore,’ he announced.

‘Okay,’ Dean agreed solemnly, and let amused silence sit between them for a long moment more. Sam was trying to pretend he was irritated, of course, looking pointedly out the window into the dark, but Dean could see his reflection in the window, and the smile he was hiding was deep and sweet. ‘Tell me, though,’ he added. ‘We go to this lecture—which is in no way about Star Trek weapons, apparently—you gonna get tossed out like you did at that history one in Georgia? ‘Cause I gotta be prepared.’

‘Oh, fuck you very much.’

‘Seriously, Sammy. ‘F you’re gonna stand up in the middle of it and start arguing with the man—’

‘I did not stand up in the—’

'‘S not what your teacher said, kiddo.’ He chuckled. ‘Man, that letter she wrote Dad was the funniest damn thing I have ever—’

Sam sighed. ‘You are just never going to let that go, are you?’

‘Dude, you got kicked out of a museum,’ Dean told him. ‘On a field trip. Do you even know how proud I was of you? If you hadn’t been fourteen I would’ve taken you out for a beer.’

Sam snorted a laugh at that, rolled his head to look over at him. ‘Yeah, ‘cause jail and CPS would’ve been a good ending to that day, Dean.’

‘Hell, we’ve had worse.’

Sam grinned again. Dean could just see him out of the corner of his eye: eyes bright in the dim light of the dash, hair soft in his face, watching Dean with one long leg crooked up on the seat between them. Dean kept his own eyes on the road, fingers tapping lightly at the wheel, but he could feel his brother’s gaze on him, warm and solid as a touch. He loved having Sam’s attention—always had, even as a kid, long before whatever identity crisis or psychological break or complete fucking mental breakdown he’d been having about his little brother for the past year had hit—and here in the dark he could feel the heat of it prickling along his neck, across his palms, awareness and arousal both.

‘Dean?’

‘Mmm.’

Sam settled himself more comfortably in his seat. ‘Feel like just driving for awhile?’

‘Nope.’ He smirked as he registered Sam’s start of surprise. ‘We got somethin’ much more fun to do.’ He found their drive and turned onto it, headlights splashing white in front of them.

‘Dude, I am not watching porn with you.’ Sam paused a moment, then added, ‘And we’re not having a chicken-wing eating contest again, Jesus.’

‘Yeah, you didn’t handle that one so well, did you, Sammy?’

‘Shut up.’ His little brother was eyeing him suspiciously, though there was still a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. ‘What is it?’

‘Well, I promised you a planetarium, right? But the thing is—’ Dean shrugged, swerved off the dirt drive, skirted the front fence, and headed directly out into the fields behind their house, while Sam gripped the dash and shouted delightfully dire predictions about axles and old post holes (‘Like you even know what the hell an axle is, Sammy’), and laughed every time they hit something that bounced them off the seat. They eventually fetched up half a mile from the house, the sky overhead a shining blanket of stars. ‘—planetariums,’ Dean continued grandly, cutting the engine and the lights, ‘are for chumps.’

Sam leaned forward eagerly to look up through the windshield, another one of those impossibly sweet smiles breaking across his face like sunrise; Dean pushed him out of the car to fetch a blanket from the trunk (and a shotgun loaded with salt and a pistol with lead, iron and silver; Dean didn’t know what the hell was out here, and he wasn’t risking Sammy to either something supernatural or a damn rabid cow), then grabbed the beer and left the Coke, and they stretched out on the warm hood together with their backs against the windshield, blanket tossed across their legs against the autumn chill, Sam looking like a gleeful little boy when Dean cracked open two bottles and handed him one, all the light of the stars in his eyes.

‘Tell Dad and I will cut you,’ Dean promised grimly.

Sam grinned, a slice of white in the darkness, and clinked the neck of his bottle lightly against his brother’s. Taking an easy pull of his beer, he tipped his head back to look up into the night, and at the great shining swath of the Milky Way across it, his shoulder warm and firm against Dean’s own. He shifted after a moment to prop himself more comfortably against his brother; Dean lifted an arm to let him settle in close, felt something warm and sweet and comforting blossoming behind his ribs.  Some of it was desire, clearly, the same white heat that flared in his bones anytime Sam touched him these days, but the rest of it, most of it, was utterly uncomplicated affection, memories of the hundred times they’d done this before, of the Sammy who’d been little enough to sit in the vee of his legs and lean back against his chest, demanding in a sweet piping voice that Dean tell him all the stories of all the stars, that he explain what they were, how they got there, whether he and Sam could go visit them someday; who’d been old enough to sit beside him and soak up every memory Dean would tell him of their family before the fire; who time and again had fallen asleep in the dark against him, trusting that Dean would keep him safe. Sam slid down the hood a bit so that he could tip his head back against Dean’s shoulder, and Dean turned his own head just a little to bury his mouth and nose briefly in his brother’s hair, feeling love and lust and warmth and wanting wrapped so tightly around one another and the solid shining core of Sam inside of him that his chest ached for a long moment with the weight of it.  His brother was relaxed and heavy against his side, his free hand folded absently over Dean’s knee beneath their blanket, and as he started talking happily, quietly, about something called Cassini, which Dean gathered NASA had chucked in the general direction of Saturn last year and which Sam clearly thought the coolest thing since cheese, he wished he knew a way, any way, to always keep his baby brother like this: not angry with their father, not angry about their lives, just loose-limbed and content and easy. He wished for that with all his heart, on every star above them.

Chapter Text

October 1998

It was the last Thursday in October when Bobby called about a haunting in the Laramie Mountains, forty miles south. Dean talked to him with his phone propped against his shoulder, stirring together pancake batter for a late dinner and keeping an eye on the syrup on the stove. The spirit sounded like a nasty piece of work, but Bobby had a fair idea who the damn thing used to be, and he already knew where the bones were buried, so it also sounded like something Dean could wrap up in a night. ‘Yeah, no, I’ll call you when I get back,’ he promised, turning up the heat beneath the frying pan. ‘Sounds like an easy salt-and-burn, Bobby. No, I don’t need to write anything d—hey!’ he said, as warm slim fingers tugged the phone away from his ear and Sam rolled his eyes at him and walked back to where he’d been working at the table.

‘Bobby? Hey. No, he’s cooking. Yeah, actual food. What did you want him to write down?’ Sam rummaged for a pencil and then was scratching down what Dean was sure was a completely unnecessary list on the back of one of his notebooks. ‘Got it. Yeah, of course I am. Okay. Yeah, we will. You too, Bobby. Night.’ Sam ended the call, plopped wearily back into his chair, tossed Dean’s phone onto the table, and glowered at it for a minute. ‘I hate tents,’ he announced. ‘Are we gonna need a tent?’

'Sammy, you don’t have to—’

‘You’re not going after a homicidal campsite-haunting ghost alone, asshat,’ Sam said, reluctant and wry and amused and grumpy. He sighed and scrubbed at his eyes, then plunked his hands down flat on the table and looked up at his brother. ‘I can skip my afternoon classes tomorrow, but Jack and Molly are coming over Sunday evening to study, so we gotta be back by then, Dean; I mean it.’ He went back to his book. ‘And you are totally putting chocolate in those pancakes for me, man.’

They were back early Sunday morning, Sam cranky about the tears in his favorite jeans and the line of new bruises down his pretty spine. He remained cranky even when Dean bought him new jeans—‘But they’re not the same, Dean’—and spent a little while every evening rubbing arnica cream into Sam’s (smooth, silken, tempting) skin. But when over the next few weeks Bobby tossed them two more hunts within a day’s drive of Casper, well—for all his wailing about normal (and Jesus, did the kid wail about normal), Sam had the same steady hands and steel nerves that Dean did, and it turned out that, bruises or no bruises, he was far less likely to bitch about hunting if you got him back home in time to study like you said you would. And promised him pancakes. Seriously, the kid’s obsession with them these days was kind of troubling.

Chapter Text

November 1998

The world slid toward winter, and John stayed gone.

Four weeks turned into six, turned into seven. He and Caleb had tracked and killed the black dog by the end of the third, but they’d caught a whiff of a demon soon after, and John was in northern California before he called to tell his sons. Dean worried about their father, and chafed against the fact that John apparently didn’t think he was old enough/strong enough/fast enough/good enough to help on so dangerous a hunt, but November was wheeling by easy, all the same. He liked Jeremiah’s garage and he liked the work he did there, Sam liked his school and he liked the friends he’d made, and Dean had, thus far, resisted the impulse to push his baby brother up against a wall and kiss the living hell out of him, so, you know. On balance, things were good. And the battered, lonely house John had parked them in had turned out to be unexpectedly kind of sort of really wonderful: old, certainly—it had a root cellar below the basement, for Chrissakes—but not yet decrepit, not really, with its scarred wooden floors and soft-papered walls, a claw-footed tub which was big enough for Dean to stretch out in and a checkered floor in the kitchen which for reasons unknown had charmed Sam senseless. The second floor was always chilly, and downright bitter now on windy mornings, but ever since he’d fixed the front door and sealed the first floor window seams against the worst of the drafts, downstairs was almost cozy, and he and Sam slept most nights on the ancient L-shaped sofa in the living room, snug beneath old blankets with a fire burning down to embers in the hearth. It wasn’t home (and Dean knew that, he knew it, and he knew how dangerous it was to forget it), but sometimes, when he woke in the mornings, with Sam warm and safe and within arm’s reach and the same familiar four walls around them, he almost felt like it could be.

Which was why on this particular morning, with flurries coming down outside the kitchen windows, he was up stuffing bread and onion and spices into a dead bird’s stomach rather than enjoying the sleep of the just in his nest of wool and cheap cotton on the couch. Because he could. Because it was the end of November and they had a comfortable house for once, with a kitchen and a table, and Sammy had been lingering by the Thanksgiving display at Walmart for weeks, and Dean thought it might . . . he thought it might be nice, just once, to let his little brother pretend that they were normal, instead of spending the holiday cleaning guns together on a motel floor while their father slept off a bender on the couch. And Bobby had taught him how to stuff and cook poultry last winter—it wasn’t hard; Dean didn’t understand why there were, like, entire television shows devoted to this topic—and vegetables were something he’d been cooking since he was eight, so really, how the hell difficult could it be to turn out a Thanksgiving dinner?

Aside from having to go out to the car for a machete to deal with the turnips—seriously, Dean had met monsters who’d gone down more easily than those things; whatever the hell that waxy shit all over them was, it was tough—it hadn’t been difficult at all. It was 11:30 when he heard the telltale thump of Sam falling off the couch and staggering upstairs to the bathroom, and then the creak of old pipes as he turned on the shower soon after, and by then their small turkey was already in the oven and would be done in an hour and a half.  He had the potatoes and carrots and turnips chopped and in water, ready to boil later; the cranberries were cooked and gelling on the table; the (stupidly expensive, Jesus) potato dinner rolls Sam liked were in a bag in the cabinet; Walmart had sold him a freakin’ pumpkin pie yesterday; and while he would have willingly hurled himself into rapidly moving traffic before admitting it to anyone, he was enjoying this, just puttering around a warm, quiet kitchen on a cold, quiet morning, where the only things needing to be chopped into pieces were root vegetables that had no intention of fighting him on that point. (Also: there was gonna be pie.) He heard the stairs creaking under his little brother’s footfalls awhile later as he was studying the recipe on the back of the empty bag of cranberries. He cast a suspicious look at the orange in his other hand. What the hell was zest? And why did citrus fruits not come labeled, if they were going to give parts of them such crazy-ass names?

‘Sam, you have any idea what the zest of an orange is?’ he asked, back to the door. ‘These crazy bastards think I should put it in the cran—’ He glanced over his shoulder, smiling, expecting to find his little brother damp-haired in rumpled sweats and one of his own old Zeppelin tees; he found him instead in the one pair of good pants and dress shirt the kid owned, both of which unfairly highlighted the fact that he was nothing but lean muscle and slim hips and goddamned perfect bones these days, with Dean’s one tie knotted unevenly at his throat. Dean blinked. ‘Dude,’ he finally said, and was deeply proud that his tongue did not seem to be actually hanging out of his mouth. ‘’f we’re goin’ formal this year, I’m gonna need that tie.’

It was probably a stretch to say his brother was looking around the kitchen in shock—he’d seen Sam in shock, and this wasn’t it—but there was a sort of half-panicky disbelief in his face that wasn’t anything like the warm pleasure Dean had been imagining.  ‘Dean, what  . . . ?’

He shrugged. ‘You’ve been bitchin’ about ‘normal holidays’ for two weeks, princess,’ he said. ‘Well, actually for about six years, come to think of it. Thought we’d take it out for a test drive.’ He glanced out the window, frowning, as an unfamiliar car came rumbling into their yard. Someone up front gave a cheerful double honk, two someones in the back rolled down a window and called out a laughing Saaaaaaaaaam!, and all of a sudden both the clothes and the expression on his brother’s face made a painful sort of sense. His mouth quirked, slightly. ‘But I take it you got other plans, kiddo?’

‘I—Dean, it’s just—Jack and Molly asked me last week to—they asked me to come with them and their mom up to their aunt’s for dinner, and I thought—I mean, we never do any sort of—’

‘Yeah, no, of course.’ Dean scrubbed a hand over his hair, glanced briefly at the stove, and ruthlessly stomped down on the disappointment and whatever the hell else was currently tearing painfully at his heart. ‘Yeah. Okay. Good. Just, uh—back before ten, all right? You call me if you need a ride.’

Sam was looking at the pots of potatoes and carrots and turnips like he was going to cry. ‘Dean,’ he managed.

‘Sammy, ‘s fine.’ And it was, it was going to be; that hollow pit in his gut was going to fill up and go away any minute now, he was sure of it. ‘No big deal, all right? Just some stuff I picked up on the way home last night. We’ll have leftovers for the weekend,’ he said, putting down the orange, because who the fuck cared what a zest was, really, when Sam was leaving and Dad was gone, and you were supposed to spend today surrounded by your family. He wiped his hands on a dishtowel. ‘And Jesus Christ, seriously, Sam, what the fuck did you do with that tie? C’mere.’

‘It’s—’

‘Not a damn garrote, for one thing. Look up,’ he said, unknotting it with several quick, easy tugs. He felt Sam’s breath hitch when the backs of his fingers brushed his throat; he supposed his skin was still cold from washing the vegetables earlier. As he knotted the grey-and-crimson silk deftly back into place, his brother leaned toward him, swaying in just a little, smelling like soap and starch and—and Sam, and Dean bit the inside of his mouth against the white-hot bolt of desire that shot through him. ‘I know I taught you how to do this,’ he muttered. ‘I remember teaching you how to do this. I gotta do everything for you, kid?’

‘Yeah,’ Sam said, very softly.

‘Yeah, well. There.’ He tucked the thick knot neatly between the points of Sam’s collar. ‘Don’t spill shit on it, all right? Go. You’re burnin’ daylight.’

Sam didn’t move his big stupid feet. ‘What’re you gonna do?’ he asked tentatively.

Dean mustered up one of his trademark grins. ‘Clean the guns and fall asleep after football. Same as always. Which does not mean,’ he added, ‘that I’ll be sleepin’ at ten, so your ass had better be back here by then, Sammy; I mean it. Now c’mon.’ He turned Sam with his hands on his shoulders and propelled him toward the door. ‘You’re not gettin’ anywhere with that Molly chick if you keep her mom waitin’ in the driveway.’

‘She’s just a—’

‘Friend? Yeah huh. I’m sure, little brother.’ He smirked as Sam scowled up at him; it felt almost natural. He could do this. He could.  It was not that big a deal. ‘I’ll see you later. Behave yourself, yeah? Don’t, y’know, pick up a drumstick with your teeth.’

That earned him a flash of Bitchface 23, one of Dean’s personal favorites, being a complicated variation on Bitchfaces 3, 9, and 17, before Sam shrugged into his jacket and glanced again at the pots on the stove and then vanished out the door. Dean felt the teasing expression slide off his face like water as soon as the kid was gone. Alone in their kitchen, he allowed himself to feel the hurt of Sam’s footsteps tripping lightly down the wooden stairs of the front porch for seven precisely-timed seconds, and then he scrubbed a hand across his face and turned back to the stove. All right. It was fine. This was fine. It was just food, damn it. He’d just cook all of this crap now and put it in the fridge for Sam if he wanted it this weekend, and once the damn bird was cooked he’d make himself a turkey sandwich for lunch and have a piece of pie, and it would be fine. Good, even. Clearly.

‘Damn stupid idea anyway,’ he said softly, and reached for one of the dials on the stove.

The door creaked open at his back. ‘It’s the skin.’

Dean turned, brow already creasing in confusion. ‘. . .what?’

‘The zest,’ Sam said, toeing off his shoes and tugging loose the tie Dean had just so very thoughtfully tied properly for him. ‘It’s the skin of the orange, but not the white stuff underneath. You have to grate it, I think. How much do we need?’

Dean glanced out the window at the car backing out of the drive. ‘What the hell are you—’

He shrugged. ‘I told them I was really sorry, but I’d just come downstairs and found my big brother making dinner as a surprise, so I wanted to stay home.’ His mouth quirked, wryly. ‘Mrs. Weatherstone now thinks you are, and I quote, ‘the sweetest thing,’ and she said they’d be happy to have us both over for Christmas if we want to come. But, you know.’ He shrugged again. ‘We’ve only got the one tie, so.’

Dean looked, he really looked, but he could find nothing disappointed in his baby brother’s face (and Jesus, he wouldn’t have blamed the kid if there had been; Molly Weatherstone had short dark hair and a filthy laugh and legs as long as Sam’s): there was only contentment, and a sweet, secret happiness tucked into the corners of his smile. ‘Sammy, you didn’t have to d—’      

He looked up at him with clear bright eyes. ‘Neither did you,’ he said simply, and Dean could not—could not—look away, even though his face was showing too much and he knew it. The silence in their small kitchen hummed and thrummed and stretched between them, the only sounds the soft ticking of the clock and the gas turning on in the oven, and, outside, Mrs. Weatherstone giving another double honk as she drove away.

‘So,’ Sam said, clearing his throat, and Dean blinked and stopped staring, because Jesus, Winchester, get a grip. ‘Zest. You want me to grate it?’ He frowned, suddenly. ‘Dean, do we even have a grater?’

They didn’t, but, as it turned out, the rasp at the bottom of their weapons bag could grate the ever-loving shit out of orange peels. Dean made sure to wash it first.

Chapter Text

December 1998

Sam stayed closer, after Thanksgiving.

Molly and Jack Weatherstone still came over with sodas and snacks and math books on Fridays—because this was apparently something all adorable geeks liked to do, not just his brother—but Sam stopped going out with them to parties on the Morrisons’ farm on Saturday nights or to the local burger joint on Tuesday evenings, just settled in to watch TV or a movie instead, dark head tipped against Dean’s shoulder or pillowed on his hip, and more often than not, as mid-December rolled in, snowy and cold, he came by the garage in the afternoons instead of waiting at school for Dean to pick him up after work. Usually he set up a little geek fort in Jeremiah’s office and worked on his homework until Dean was done for the day, but sometimes he wandered out into the shop to bring his brother coffee, or to perch on a spare creeper and talk to him as he worked, and now and again he let Dean pull him under a car to show him something easy or interesting or useful, and Dean had never been as content, or in such misery, in his life. He loved having his brother so close, so often, but it made keeping a lid on what he felt for the kid a damn sight more difficult than it had ever been on the road. ‘Cause there had been distractions on the road. There had been Dad on the road. And though in Casper there were distractions aplenty, and though he usually gave the Geek Squad the house on Fridays and headed off to one of them, it wasn’t fucking helping anymore. Because no matter how much he drank, there wasn’t enough beer in the world—nor was there enough whiskey, or tequila, or whatever the hell that blue shit was he’d drunk last week—to make him blind to the fact that Sam was getting taller and stronger and leaner and more beautiful every damn time he turned around, and that he had yet to meet anyone, man or woman, who could make him forget his baby brother’s sweetness and sass for more than an hour, maybe two. He could chat with, flirt with, sleep with as many girls and pretty boys as he cared to, but it was his brother’s laughing hazel eyes he always saw and his brother’s slim strong body that he wanted, and when he jacked off in the shower, eyes squeezed shut, forehead pressed against the warm wet tile, it was his brother’s name he came with on his lips.

‘Sam!’ Dean hollered happily. He turned up the volume on the TV, so the familiar, doom-laden music rolled through the downstairs of the house. ‘Sammy, get in here.’

Sam’s voice floated pitiful and weary from the kitchen. ‘Oh, my God, not again.’

‘Shut up and get your ass in here.’

‘Dean, it’s a stupid movie,’ he hollered.

‘It is an awesome movie, and we’re watchin’ it. C’mon.’

‘It’s a stupid movie that you’ve seen, like, six hundred times!’

‘Yeah, well, this’ll make it six hundred one. Now leave your homework and the damn laundry and come in here, because you’re gonna be sorry if I have to come get you.’

His disgruntled baby brother appeared in the doorway a minute later, barefoot and shirtless in his flannel sleep pants with a blanket he’d been tucked up in at the table wrapped around himself like a cape. Sam had not yet grasped the concept of spacing laundry days. ‘Even Stephen King doesn’t like this movie, Dean.’

‘Then Stephen King’s got issues. Clearly.’

‘My clothes have to go in the dryer in ten minutes and I’ve got three p-sets due tomorrow. I’m not—’

Dean jerked a thumb at the windows behind him, where outside snow had been falling soft and swift for the past seven hours. ‘Have you looked outside? You and your p-sets aren’t goin’ anywhere tomorrow, geek boy. Do ‘em then. Do the laundry later.’ He was silent a moment, looking at Sam in the doorway, then quirked an eyebrow at him and grinned. ‘You cannot possibly still be scared of this movie, Sammy.’

Ah, and there it was: Bitchface 11. ‘Yeah, Dean. ‘Cause ghosts on a television screen are really freaky.’

‘Those twins used to scare the crap out of you, kiddo.’

‘I was eight years old. Of course they scared the crap out of me,’ he said. ‘And way to go, letting me watch this back then, by the way.’

Dean studied him for another long moment, felt a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. ‘Those twins still scare the crap out of you, don’t they.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

Dean started laughing.

‘Shut up, Dean.’

‘Saaaaaaaaammy,’ he sang. ‘Come and play with us, Sammy . . .’

Sam scowled at him. ‘S not funny!’

‘Yeah it is. C’mon.’ Still grinning, he thwacked the sofa cushion next to him. ‘Come watch with me, little brother. I will keep you safe from the terrifying eight-year-olds, I promise.’

Sam heaved the long-suffering sigh of long-suffering little brothers, but he switched off the light behind him in the kitchen and shuffled over to the couch anyway, before flopping down sideways and settling his head in Dean’s lap. ‘This is a boring movie,’ Sam declared, flailing behind himself for one of the throw pillows squashed in the small of his back. He tucked it beneath his head in the cradle of Dean’s left hip and thigh. ‘Seriously. I am going to be bored.’

‘Sam, out of curiosity, you ever heard of personal space?’ Dean inquired, even as one of his hands sank, entirely of its own volition, into the silken tumble of his hair.

‘You’re on my half of the couch,’ Sam replied reasonably, ‘you spilled coffee on the big pillow yesterday, and you promised to protect me. Lump it.’ He rolled his head to look up at him then, and smiled. ‘Also, no.’

Dean felt his mouth quirk in spite of himself, and then he kicked a foot up on the coffee table and settled in, rubbing gently at his brother’s scalp. ‘You’re a pain in my ass, Sammy-Sam, you know that?’

‘Yeah, well.’ Sam pushed his head into Dean’s hand like an animal demanding to be petted, yawned, turned back to the TV as the Overlook came into view, all snow and ghosts and bloody secrets. ‘You love me.’

Danny Torrance cycled around a turn in a hotel hall, found two little girls in blue waiting for him at its end. Dean tugged lightly on his brother’s hair. ‘Got your eyes closed, Frances?’

‘Shut up.’

Dean leaned forward to get a look at his brother, crowed with delighted laughter. ‘Jesus Christ, you do.’

‘I said shut up, Dean.’ 

***

Sometime between Jack ending up in the supply closet and taking apart a bathroom door with an axe, Sam fell asleep in his lap, stretched out comfortably on his back with his head toward the screen, breaths coming soft and slow and easy. Dean turned down the volume a little so that the screaming wouldn’t wake him, and though he loved this movie—he really did—long before its end he was watching Sam instead: the soft sweep of his lashes, the rise and fall of his chest, the way shadows were pooling in the hollow of his throat. Dean was willing to acknowledge the possibility that he was becoming pathetic. But Sam’s blanket was tangled halfway down his ribs and the firelight was sliding warm and gentle over his skin, and he was so damned lovely Dean could feel the ache of it in his bones. He should wake him, he knew. He should wake him, and tease him about the twins, and kick him off the couch and back into the kitchen to finish his laundry, but . . . he smoothed Sam’s hair back off his face with hesitant fingers, let his thumb trace the curve of an eyebrow, a cheekbone, the strong line of his jaw. Sam’s mouth parted, just a little, but he didn’t wake. And for the love of all that was holy, Dean was not a saint.

Just a touch. Just a touch, just for a minute, ‘s all. He brushed his fingers, feather-light, over the bump in Sam’s left collarbone, broken at twelve on a headstone, traced the ragged welt on Sam’s shoulder from the time a revenant had scythed him at fourteen, the four talon marks from where a harpy had damn near killed him last Christmas. Dean knew the story behind every scar on his brother’s body, remembered the twisting visceral panic of every time he hadn’t been fast enough or strong enough or smart enough to keep Sam from getting bloody, getting hurt.  I’m sorry, Sammy. He let his hand slide down Sam’s ribs beneath the blanket, over the lean line of one hip, feeling the curve of his brother’s slim bones beneath his palm, the warm soft silk of smooth skin, and bit into his lip against the heat and pressure pooling in his own groin. It was just a touch. Just a touch, just for a minute; that was all. His fingers slipped just a little beneath the loose waistband of Sam’s pants.

Dean, his imagination murmured, in Sam’s voice, and his breath was suddenly unsteady in his chest. Because it was sweet—oh, Christ, it was so sweet—to imagine his brother sounding like that, all soft and hoarse and wanting, and he should stop this, was going to stop this, had to stop this, because he’d only been going to touch, just for a minute; that was all he—‘Dean,’ he heard again, and it took him a very long moment to realize that it wasn’t his imagination he was hearing. It was Sam. 

It was Sam.

His eyes flashed up, stricken, to his brother’s face. Sam was awake, awake and watching him, beautiful eyes wide open in the dark, and from the way his lower lip was bitten red between his teeth, Sam had been awake and watching him for awhile. Dean couldn’t look away, couldn’t move, muscles locked up tight even though his brain was screaming at him to get his hands off his brother and get the hell out of the room and possibly keep going until he hit Antarctica, because—

‘Dean,’ Sam said again, softly, and it took a long, long moment for his panic-stricken brain to process that his brother wasn’t running.  Sam’s mouth was trembling and there was something suddenly and impossibly vulnerable in his face, but he didn’t—he wasn’t— He eeled up the couch a little so that his head and shoulders were both resting on the pillow across Dean’s thighs, eyes nervous and reckless and . . . and wanting, and how had Dean never seen—‘Please,’ he whispered, voice unsteady, and Dean stopped breathing. Sam pushed his blanket slowly down to his slim hips, kicked it into a soft woolen puddle on the floor. ‘Jesus, Dean, please.’

He was hallucinating, Dean thought. He had drunk too much whiskey and he was hallucinating, or he was dead, or else he was caught in the best dream of his life, because there was no possible way that this was—his left hand was moving entirely without his permission, stroking the soft, soft skin of Sam’s stomach, his hip; Sam pushed up into the touch, tilted his head back into the hand Dean still had tangled in his hair, and made a soft sound that catapulted right past pie on the list of things Dean refused to live without, ever again. Somewhere, a voice that sounded suspiciously like their father’s was shouting that Sam was his brother, his little brother, his responsibility, that he was fifteen and a half years old and could not possibly know what he wanted, but it was hard to listen when Sam was looking like this, was looking at him like this, as though Dean were every present he had ever wanted, every last one of them combined. He was aware, dimly, of the television still on, of the logs popping in the hearth, but his world was rapidly narrowing to the slim beautiful boy beneath his hands, and he couldn’t—he didn’t—

Dean could see his brother’s pulse beat in his throat, once, twice, and then Sam stretched his arms up over his head, slowly, eyes never leaving Dean’s, crossed his slim wrists in the L-join of the couch, and Dean was done.

He smoothed a hand up over his brother's ribs again, circled his beautiful neck with his fingers, stroked against his pulse point with his thumb; after a moment he let his thumb dip into the hollow between Sam’s collar bones, let it skim down over his sternum, fanned out his fingers to brush one after the other over Sam’s nipple, lingering with the last. Sam sank his teeth into his lower lip, breath unsteady, spread his legs a little, shifting, and whispered, ‘Dean.’

Dean swallowed, thickly. ‘You tell me.’ His voice was soft and unsteady and fierce.  ‘Sammy, ‘f you want me to stop, you tell—’

Sam shook his head. ‘Don’t,’ he managed, ‘don’t you stop.’ He made a helpless sound as Dean slipped his hand briefly beneath the waistband of his pants, thumbing gentle circles against his hip, ignoring his swelling cock. ‘Dean, c’mon, please—’

‘Shh.’ He rubbed his hand over his brother’s stomach, felt Sam’s pulse thudding beneath his palm. ‘Just—just let me.’

Sam let him. Sam lay with his head flung back in his lap and let Dean map the branches of his ribs with his fingers, trace the curve of his shoulder and the long line of his throat, cup the back of his neck as he dug gently into the pressure point beneath the hinge of his jaw with his thumb. It was warm and slow and . . . and intimate, somehow, light-years beyond anything Dean had felt with any of the girls or pretty, tousle-haired boys he’d tumbled into bed the past few years, and for Chrissakes, he was doing nothing more than touching, just sliding a single hand over his brother’s skin. But Sam was sweetly, startlingly responsive to it, and Dean found himself cataloguing every sound his little brother made, every hitch in his quick, light breaths: Sam liked kitten scratches along a sensitive patch of skin above his left hip, and heavy, hard pressure from the heel of Dean’s hand against his stomach; he liked the grip of a hand around his ribs, the brush of knuckles in the crook of his elbow; liked when Dean shifted the hand still tangled in his hair to scratch at his scalp, when he circled a wrist with his fingers and stroked at its delicate skin with his thumb. Spasmed half off the couch when Dean rubbed at a nipple again, this time with intent, and by the time both were stiff and pink and swollen Sam was panting, eyelids fluttering and slim shoulders pressing into Dean’s leg as he arched up into his touch.

Dean had never wanted anyone as much in his life.

‘Look at me,’ he murmured, and as his brother’s eyes flickered open he let a hand slide down to caress his cock, briefly, through the worn cotton of his sweats. Sam kicked at the arm of the couch with one bare foot and made a filthy sound in the back of his throat; Dean grinned, squeezed to coax another soft moan out of that pretty mouth, then hooked a thumb in his brother’s waistband and tugged. ‘Up,’ he murmured, and eased Sam’s pants down as he lifted his hips. Sam toed his sweats the rest of the way down his long legs and kicked them off; Dean swallowed the saliva suddenly pooling on his tongue as he looked at his brother stretched out naked across his lap. Sam’s cock was hard and thick and it—Jesus, it was pretty, flushed a dusky rose-red and already slick at the head. Dean scratched gently through the wiry hair at its base, ignored Sam’s stuttered plea to touch me, Dean, Jesus, please, let his fingers slip down to run along the crease of Sam’s thigh instead. Sam made a sound that was complaint and curse and arousal at once.

‘Shh.’ Dean stroked Sam’s hair off his brow as his other hand rubbed along the top of his brother’s inner thigh, back and forth, back and forth, callouses rough against the smooth, smooth skin. ‘Shhhhhh.’

‘Please,’ he managed hoarsely. ‘Dean, please, man, I can’t—’

‘Yes you can.’ He cupped his balls briefly, gently, rolled them between his fingers; Sam made a choked, lovely sound, cock twitching, and Dean smoothed his palm up over his brother’s thigh, over his hip and ribs and chest to his throat, back down to his stomach, up again to cup his jaw, all the while drunk on the feel of his skin. ‘Jesus, Sammy, you’re beautiful,’ he murmured, and meant it.

Sam’s eyes were a thin ring of flickering color around black. ‘Dean,’ he begged, and Dean slid a hand up over his soft mouth.

‘Lick,’ he ordered softly, and felt the shudder that raced down his brother’s spine. ‘S it,’ Dean murmured, as Sam started to lick broad soft swipes across his palm and up his fingers, hazel eyes steady on his. As Sam got him wet Dean carded his free hand gently through his hair again, scratching at his scalp, cupping the curve of his skull; his brother pushed his head up into his touch like a cat, and Dean indulged himself in one long moment more of just watching him, reveling in the tension coiled in every long, lean muscle beneath that beautiful honeyed skin, then finally pulled his hand free to wrap around Sam’s cock.  His own gave a painful jerk at the slide of hard velvet flesh against his palm, at the loud, broken groan of Dean Jesus fuck that strangled in his brother’s throat. He knew the kind of touch Sam liked—impossible not to, the close quarters they’d always kept—but he teased him gently for a little while anyway, with too-light, too-gentle strokes, just to wrench more of those helpless, pretty sounds from him, to watch his slim hips pushing up in a desperate bid for friction he wasn’t going to get. There was something hot and possessive and hungry uncoiling in his own chest. He wanted to keep Sam right where he was, strung-out and submissive across his lap, wanted to push him onto the carpet and press his own mouth over every inch of that beautiful skin, wanted to take him upstairs and put him on his back in one of the narrow beds, up against the grey-tiled wall of the shower, facedown over the heavy desk at the end of the hall. He wanted.

‘Dean,’ Sam finally moaned, twisting in his lap. ‘D-Dean, c’mon, don’t—man, stop—unh—stop t-teasing, damn it, please—’

Dean swiped his thumb through the pearls of precome bubbling from the slit in his brother’s cock, and Sam’s head thrashed back and forth on the pillow in his lap once, twice; Dean’s hand tightened in his hair to keep him still, and the sound that spilled from his mouth was the sweetest, sharpest thing Dean had ever heard.

‘Good?’ he murmured, pulling his brother’s head back, not gently, to expose the long line of his throat, and Sam’s eyes fluttered shut as he moaned again and gasped out, ‘Yes.’ Dean thumbed again beneath the crown of his cock to make him whimper, kept a firm grip on his silken hair as he started to jack him off in earnest, rough and quick. Sam’s hands clenched and loosened helplessly as Dean stroked him, cock sliding slick and smooth through Dean’s warm wet hand, voice nothing more now than a broken thread of hungry sound. His chest was flushed, and his throat and the high planes of his cheekbones; he wasn’t going to last much longer.

 ‘Give it up, kiddo,’ Dean said softly, and watched goosebumps break out along his brother’s skin at the sound of his voice, felt a tremor ripple through Sam’s entire body, shoulders to heels. ‘C’mon. Gotta give it up for me. ‘S gonna feel so good. C’mon, Sammy.’

Sam’s hips bucked, sharply, at his name, and the sounds in his throat sharpened to a desperate whine.

Dean felt a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. ‘Is that all you need?’ he asked. ‘Hmm, Sammy?’

Sam pulled a shuddering, gasping breath. ‘Dean,’ he moaned. ‘Jesus God, Dean—’

Dean twisted his fingers in Sam’s hair, yanked, and in a voice of gravel and honey murmured, ‘Sammy,’ and Sam’s eyes shot open, unseeing, as his shoulders curled and he came, hard, in thick wet splashes of heat all over his stomach and his brother’s fingers, and on the sweetest, filthiest stuttering cry Dean had ever heard. Dean worked him through it, warm and tight, gentling his grip only as Sam started to soften in his hand, then stroked a careful thumb down the shaft, cupped his balls in a broad warm palm. Sam swallowed, shivering, whimpering, eyes fluttering shut again, lashes wet and breath unsteady; his skin was still flushed, his hair damp with sweat, and he was, without exception, the most beautiful thing Dean had ever seen. Mine, he thought, as Sam turned his head to press his face blindly into Dean’s hip. He rubbed his cheek against it like a cat, vulnerable and sweet, mouthed drowsily at the thin cotton of his tee; Dean cradled the back of his head, gently, thumb rubbing at his scalp, felt something blooming tight and painful behind his own breastbone, working its way up into his throat. My Sammy. Mine. 

It was another moment before Sam’s breath settled, before he let his head roll back a little and opened his eyes and reached up to tangle his fingers in the collar of Dean’s shirt, languid and content. ‘Dean.’ Sam’s voice was soft, so soft, as though Dean’s name were some sort of grace, a benediction. Dean pulled him up to cradle him in his lap; boneless and pliant, Sam folded up his long legs and ducked his head to hide his face in the crook of his brother’s neck, like he had when he’d been little and sleepy and in need of warmth or comfort in whatever shit motel they’d landed in for the night. He burrowed in close, making a soft sound low in his throat; Dean cupped a hand around the back of his head, fingers sinking into the silk of his hair. ‘I gotcha, kiddo,’ he murmured, and felt Sam nose gently at the underside of his jaw in reply, smear a soft kiss against his throat. Dean’s head tipped back at the feel of it, cock so hard in his jeans it hurt.

‘Dean,’ Sam whispered again, half a heartbeart before he sucked a mouthful of soft skin between his teeth and bit, gently. As Dean’s breath stuttered in his throat he licked another open-mouthed kiss over the bite, soothing the sting with his tongue.

‘Sammy—’ Dean managed hoarsely.

Sam pushed himself up a little to shove the pillow still beneath him on his brother’s lap to the floor, shifted to straddle Dean’s hips, still kissing wetly up the side of his neck, all chapped lips and blunt teeth and warm, wicked tongue. It was sleepy and sloppy and the hottest fucking thing Dean had felt in his life, and he couldn’t—he wanted—

Sam lifted his head to smile at him, lazy and dimpled, with the beginnings of a giddy, disbelieving joy in his face that Dean hadn’t seen since Sam had been a kid. ‘Hi,’ he murmured, and tugged with uncoordinated fingers at the hem of Dean’s shirt.

‘Sam—’

‘Off.’ He pulled the soft fabric up over Dean’s stomach. ‘Dean, wanna see you. Please. Off.’

‘S–Sammy—’

‘Off,’ he insisted, tugging, and made a small happy noise as Dean lifted his arms to let him pull his tee off over his head. Sam’s hands, clumsy still with the afterglow, were impossibly warm against his skin as they slid down to unbutton his fly, knuckles a teasing weight through the denim.

‘Sammy, you don’t—you don’t have to—’

Sam looked at him as though he had three heads, all of which had just said something ridiculous. ‘I want to, dumbass,’ he murmured, and stopped worrying at the last button in order to lean in and kiss him, and Dean made a soft sound he would never, ever admit to having come from his own throat. Sam’s mouth was slick and warm and tasted like chocolate and coffee, and Christ, the way the kid kissed should not have been legal—soft and thorough and filthy and wet, licking sleepily into Dean’s mouth like he was something impossibly precious, something necessary. It was too much, seemed too close to what Dean felt every time he looked at his brother, and Sam couldn’t possibly feel that for him; he couldn’t; he was Sam, bright bitchy hilarious Sam, and he deserved so much more than Dean could ever—

Dean wrenched his head sideways, suddenly desperate for air; Sam pulled his face back around gently and kissed him again, thumbs stroking his cheekbones where he cradled his brother’s face in his long-fingered hands. ‘Let me,’ he murmured against his mouth, nipping at his lower lip. ‘Dean, let me, ‘s okay, please, love you, love you so much, please—’

Something was fracturing in Dean’s chest, and it was going to come spilling out of his eyes as tears in about 3.2 seconds if his brother kept this up. Dean circled Sam’s wrists with his fingers and pulled, sharply, so that his brother’s hands slipped from his face to his chest, and then he ducked his head to bite a hot line of kisses along Sam’s jawline, which was roughly eight hundred times safer than that devastating, beautiful mouth. ‘Dean,’ Sam whispered, and there was something in his voice that was fond and exasperated at once. Dean suckled on the tender skin just below the hinge of his jaw, until fond and exasperated became shivery and wanting, until Sam let his hands keep sliding down over Dean’s chest, long clever fingers tweaking Dean’s nipples and skating across his stomach, dropping to rub at his cock briefly, teasingly through his open fly. Dean decided he wasn’t going to admit to the noise that came out of his throat that time, either. Sam went briefly up on his knees; Dean lifted his hips to let his brother pull his pants and boxers down, kicked them free as Sam settled into his bare lap and pressed up against him, stomach still slick with come and all warm and firm against Dean’s cock, and Jesus fuck that was good, that was perfect, and Dean locked an arm around Sam’s slim waist to pull him closer, tighter, as he rutted against him. His brother made a soft, willing sound and let him, rocking into his thrusts with tiny pulses of his hips, and Dean wrapped his other arm around Sam’s ribs and hid his face in the curve of Sam’s warm damp neck and breathed, drowning in his scent. Sammy. My Sammy. Sam. Sam’s hands were skating reverently over his shoulders, the sides of his neck, the curve of his skull; mouth wet and hot against his temple, his cheekbone. ‘Love you,’ he was murmuring against his skin. ‘Love you, love you—’

It was too much. Too much, too sweet, too good, and he wanted—he wanted—

He must have been speaking aloud, because, ‘Anything,’ Sam whispered, as he snaked a hand between them. He swiped his fingers through the slippery mess on his stomach and wrapped his hand around Dean’s cock, and there was no way Dean was going to survive this. There was a coil of white heat already pulling impossibly tight in his stomach and a shivery static-y buzz that was chasing—he let his head thunk back against the top of the sofa, gasping, fucking up into the tight slick grip of his brother’s hand. ‘Anything,’ Sam whispered. ‘Dean, anything, whatever you want; you can do whatever you want to me—’

Dean’s orgasm slammed into him with a force that wrenched the breath out of his lungs and hurled him into viciously sweet, shocky waves of white heat that felt so good they left every nerve ending in his body a smoking ruin in their wake. He was still aware, dimly, of Sam’s hand working gently on his wet cock, of Sam’s other hand cradling his jaw, thumb stroking restlessly over his mouth as his brother whispered Dean, voice wrecked and awestruck and reverent, but it was a long moment before he was aware of anything beyond that. He came back to himself slowly, heart still pounding, breath unsteady, Sam a warm sweet weight against his chest and across his thighs.

‘Don’t freak out,’ Sam murmured, voice gravelly with sleepy, satisfied desire. He pressed a kiss to the side of Dean’s throat, the underside of his jaw. ‘Please, man, please don’t freak out. Wanted this for so long.’ He licked gently at his brother’s skin. ‘Wanted you. Since f’rever. Please. Okay? It was so good, Dean. Please.’

It was a moment before Dean’s brain came back online enough to let him parse all of that, longer still to let him get a hand up to pet at the back of Sam’s head. There was a reason he should be freaking out, he was pretty sure of it—there was a serious, justifiable reason for panic here—but damned if he could remember what it was right now, with his body gone boneless from pleasure and Sam nosing at the crook of his neck like a puppy, mouth and breath warm against his sweaty skin. ‘Love you,’ Sam whispered, again.

Dean tightened his fingers in the kid’s hair, pulled in a shallow breath. Sammy, he wanted to say, but it came out as only a soft huff of air, almost without sound. There was a tangle of words swelling in his throat, half a dozen gentle, true, ridiculous things, but he didn’t know how to unravel the knot of them, didn’t know if he even could without unraveling all of himself.  He stroked Sam’s hair instead. The TV was still on softly in the background, but the house was quiet, entirely dark outside of their little enclave of light in the living room, and Sam was here, warm and sated and safe in his arms, lifting his pretty head now to tip their foreheads together, their shared breath warm between them. Dean brought a hand up to cup the side of his brother’s face, clumsily tender; Sam turned his mouth into his palm, brushed a kiss across the calloused skin. Wanted you. Since f’rever. Dean swallowed twice to find his voice. ‘How long?’ he finally asked.

Sam pressed a kiss to the heel of his hand, the inside of his wrist, murmured, ‘Oklahoma,’ into the soft skin just above Dean’s pulse. ‘When Dad left us to go hunt that windwalker with Jefferson.’

Dean remembered Oklahoma, vaguely, a haze of sun and heat and a little brother who was distant and clingy and pissy and affectionate by turns, who demanded all of his attention one day and ignored him for the next, who was bitchy when Dean flirted with the cute waitresses in the town diner but who cuddled into his side in the shelter beneath their trailer park during the storms, spiders crawling overhead and tornado sirens wailing outside. But— ‘That was . . . Oklahoma was four years ago, Sammy.’

Sam shrugged, entirely unselfconscious. ‘First wet dream I ever had was in that crappy trailer of ours there. It was about you.’ He leaned in just a little to catch Dean’s mouth again with his—gentle this time and brief, a little boy’s kiss, and still so sweet Dean ached with it. ‘I told you, Dean. I’ve wanted you forever.’ The grin he slanted at him as he sat back a little was merry and sweet and sly. ‘And you have been really fucking dense about it,’ he added solemnly, and then laughed as Dean whacked him upside the head with the hand that had sunk into the tangle of his hair. Dean let his own head tip back against the couch again, but he couldn’t quite swallow his smile, not with Sam cuddled so close, the feel of so much of his warm skin pressed against his own. He felt his little brother’s hand against his throat, stroking gently along the line of tendon, before Sam bent to chase his long lovely fingers with his mouth; eyes fluttering shut, Dean cupped a hand around the back of his neck to keep him there. Sam’s mouth was wet and warm and lazy, not suckling hard enough to bruise, just enough to keep him floating a little, and Jesus, it felt so fucking good.

He didn’t realize he was half-dozing until Sam’s laughing ‘Dean!’ brought him back, amid the hazy impression that it hadn’t been the first time his brother had said his name. He cracked an eyelid, found himself confronted with that fond dimpled grin that he would have given a kidney to see more often on Sam’s face. ‘You are just, like, a walking stereotype, do you know that?’

Dean was unclear on how his plan to flick his brother in the forehead devolved into him smoothing his brother’s hair back off his face, but, well, whatever. ‘Shut it.’

‘Come upstairs and get cleaned up with me.’

Dean yawned, shook his head. ‘Not movin’.’

‘But I want a bath.’ God, Sam’s hands were warm. ‘With you.’

Dean contemplated this for a moment. On the one hand, he would have to move. On the other, that big old tub upstairs, filled with steaming hot water and a warm naked wet soap-slippery Sam—yeah, all right, he could get on board with that plan. In, you know, a bit. He had to figure out how to make his legs work again first, and he was still gonna need a couple of minutes for that.

‘Deeeeeeean.’ Sam started rocking gently again, slow and easy in the mess between them. ‘Come take a bath with me. I want you to, okay?’ He bent to kiss the side of his brother’s neck again. ‘Please?’

Dean stared up helplessly at the ceiling. ‘Jesus, I did not say no to you enough as a kid.’

He heard Sam’s smile, even if he didn’t see it. ‘You never said no to me as a kid. Don’t start now.’

‘I said no to you plenty; I did not say no to you enough.’

‘Yeah?’ He continued to suck lazy kisses along the side of Dean’s throat. Seriously, the brat was a goddamn baby vampire. ‘Name one thing I ever really wanted that you didn’t give me, Dean,’ he said, muffled. ‘One time you told me no.’

Dean resolved to punch him for sounding so smug, just as soon as he remembered how to make his hands do something that did not involve sliding up and down Sam’s narrow back. The kid was still moving, still rocking, already half hard, and though Dean knew, objectively, that it was too soon for him to be able to get it up again, his cock seemed to have missed that memo entirely. ‘Alliance,’ he finally managed. ‘You wanted that—Jesus, Sam.’

Sam’s voice was a happy hum against his skin. ‘Hmm?’

‘You wanted that—that ridiculous dog. In Alliance. I totally did not let you have it.’

Sam didn’t lift his head. ‘Dad totally did not let me have it,’ he murmured. ‘You totally took me to the dog park near our crappy apartment every afternoon until Dad moved us. Try again.’

Sam’s mouth was really distracting. ‘Um.’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘Shut it.’ It would be easier to do this, Dean suspected, if he could recall what order words were supposed to go in when you put them in a sentence together. Which a lapful of naked Sam made it really difficult to do. His hands slid down entirely of their own volition to grip his brother’s hips; when his own had started rocking up to meet them was anybody’s guess. ‘Cheetos,’ he finally got out, triumphantly. ‘You wanted Cheetos—fuck, stop that—for breakfast. That one time. Somewhere. With a Coke. I said no.’

Sam lifted his head to grin at him, wicked and playful and hot. ‘That the best you got?’ he asked. ‘Cheetos?’

Dean let his head tip back, let his eyes flutter shut. ‘And Coke,’ he rasped, and he didn’t care that he wasn’t supposed to want this, that Sam wasn’t supposed to want this; if it was going to make his brother laugh like that, if it was going to make him happy, then it was worth it, it was. He felt Sam give his neck one more possessive lick before settling his mouth against the shell of Dean’s ear. ‘You always gave me what I wanted, Dean,’ he whispered, and Dean shivered with the moist warmth of his breath. ‘You always give me what I want. And right now? Right now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in the damn bathtub, and then I want you to take me to bed and make me beg. That’s what I want.’

Something white-hot snapped somewhere inside his brain, and for a moment the world was nothing but a whine of heat and light and hunger. The next thing he was consciously aware of was the thud of Sam’s back hitting the carpet as Dean took him down to the floor, and Sam’s shout of delighted laughter, and the feel of Sam’s slim wrists pinned beneath his hands. They did eventually get to the tub, and they did eventually get to bed, and Sam did, eventually, beg quite prettily, but the first time Dean fucked his brother senseless was on the floor of an old farmhouse in Wyoming, and Sam felt the carpet burn across his ass and back and shoulders for days.