Work Text:
Sam knows what it must have cost Dean, to say those words. “We could stay.”
Twenty fucking years of hunting, of being in the family business, and for two decades, Sam was the only one who ever said those words. Kneeling up on the long backseat of whatever car Dad was driving, elbows resting on the plush as he peered out the back window, panic welling up inside, Sam would turn his head back over his shoulder to see his dad and Dean in the front seats. They were twin studies in determination, piss-off indifference, and still Sam would say it. “We could stay,” he would offer, his voice small and hopeful in the big growling car.
Dad rarely answered, but when he did, it was a simple headshake, hands tightening on the steering wheel. Sometimes Dean would turn back to meet Sam’s eyes, big brother offering of tough love, and what he said then would vary. “Don’t be retarded,” was a common response through the early nineties, or “Grow up, you pussy.” Then, as Dean edged out of irritable adolescence and into manhood, the replies became simpler – a brief consoling moment of eye contact. And once, only once, he’d said, “We can never stay, Sammy. We’re different.”
After that, Sam never spoke the words again, never even let himself think them. Dad and Dean were different, Sam finally got that, but he wasn’t. Different. Not like them. Sam began to experiment with ordinariness the way other kids played with rebellion. And one day, when Sam looked through the back window of Dad’s car, he was on the other side of the glass, watching the road spin out between them, between different and normal, them and him.
But then there was Jessica, and now Sam knows that he has been forced to shed that false skin of normalcy. It’s almost cute, Dean trying to rekindle Sam’s old passion for stability, when really, Sam is the one who needs to keep going.
“We could stay,” Dean says, eyes flicking to the sideview mirror, as though Sam would just nod and grin and Dean could throw the car in reverse, back it up through the last few months, and join Sam back on the sidewalk in Stanford, both of them watching Dad’s car drive away from normal.
Sam shakes his head, and in his mind, a pudgy nine-year-old in the backseat flops down, defeated. He now gets what it must have cost Dean, to keep saying no.
***
They drive for a while in silence, Sam letting Metallica drown out the space between them. His mind wants to drift towards sleep, but he doesn’t want to wake once again to Dean’s brotherly concern, his bluff reassurance, like Sam is a car that needs fixing.
Sleep finds him anyway.
Dean is still driving, but the road has become misty-strange, their journey as intangible as their destination. Sam looks over, sees Dean’s long fingers wrapped around the black leather wheel, and says, “It’s not like I’m scared of all this, you know.”
Dean’s brows come together, doubt etched into his features. “You were always scared, Sammy.”
“Not of the demons. Not the things in the dark. I was scared of the difference.”
“Past tense?” Dean asks, surprised, looking over. His hands are strong-looking; Sam can’t stop noticing their curve, their shape, their surety.
“Past tense,” Sam agrees, and licks his lips. “We’re different. We can never stay.”
Dean is watching Sam, and now they are sacked out together on one of a hundred polyester slick motel bedspreads. “We could stay,” he insists, his voice sounding oddly young, but his sure hand, moving over to stroke Sam’s jaw, is far older.
Sam turns his mouth into the touch, places an open-mouthed kiss into the palm of Dean’s hand. “It’s not the moving that scares me,” Sam breathes, Dean’s skin smelling of leather and gasoline and sex. “It’s what happens when it stops.”
“Then we won’t stop,” Dean promises, shifting over to straddle Sam’s hips. “We won’t ever –”
“Stop making that noise,” Dean orders sharply, and slaps Sam’s ear with brotherly impatience. “Nightmares are one thing, but you’re not having a fucking wet dream in my car.” He’s matter-of-fact, as easy with sex as he is with spirits and credit card scams.
Sam blinks awake and looks down at his lap to see what Dean has already noticed – that Sam certainly wasn’t having a nightmare. He flushes, scowls, and sits up, crossing left leg over right knee to conceal the evidence even if it’s too late. “Where are we?”
“Oregon,” Dean answers abruptly, then cracks a wicked grin, looking over at Sam. “Were you dreaming about the preacher’s daughter?”
Sam clears his throat and stares out the window.
“Shit, religious girls are always the best lays. We should have stayed long enough for you to find that out,” Dean enthuses. “I think it was in Maine, that time with the demonic possession and the housecat? Anyway, you were too little to remember, but there was this minister who had this talisman, and his daughter backed me into their linen closet while you and dad were checking out the basement of the manse – she had a mouth like a fucking Hoover, Sammy. My first blow job. God, I thought she was a succubus, she was that amazing.”
Sam is trying to shake the remains of his dream from his mind, but he catches himself watching the reflection of Dean’s gesturing hands in the window. His brother keeps enthusing about the slutty minister’s daughter, his vulgarity salting the bones of the Iowan adventure, his filthy descriptors tossing a match onto the assembled remains. It’s one more way they’re different, Sam supposes – this easy ability to turn everyone and everything into an anecdote consisting of little more than a state name and a paranormal menace.
Except suddenly Sam remembers Maine and the possessed housecat, and – “That minister didn’t have a daughter,” Sam says, interrupting Dean, turning to look at him.
Dean rolls his eyes. “I think I remember better than you, little bro. You were what? Ten?”
“He only had a son,” Sam persists, because he knows he’s right. “Andrew.”
Dean opens his mouth to argue, but something gets stuck on the way out, and he ends up looking across at Sam, eyes wide and lips parted.
“So,” Sam says, playing it cool, “you and Andrew?” But his mind is racing – god, Dean slammed up against a wall inside some cramped closet, Dean’s long-lashed eyelids fluttering shut with shock and pleasure as the preacher’s kid opened up and swallowed, Dean’s strong hands threading fingers through short dark hair, tugging.
Dean is pulling over, spraying gravel, and they are in a parking lot in front of a red neon sign that probably says ‘motel’, but Sam can’t see anything but that flickering bright image of his brother thrusting into the wet open mouth of –
Sam’s legs have come uncrossed again, and he’s grateful for the sudden dark that’s descended as the sun slipped behind the trees. “It’s not a big deal,” he says, even though it really is.
Dean is still silent, but he looks away and gets out of the car, slamming the door and throwing open the trunk to retrieve a fresh credit card. Sam watches through the windshield, watches Dean stalk into the motel office, the tiny flicker of tension in his jaw.
It’s interesting, Sam thinks, once his cock relaxes enough to restore blood flow to his brain. He’d never guessed that Dean might be play-acting in his own way, that Dean’s own fear of stopping might have just as much to do with the need for normalcy as Sam’s childhood fear of moving.
***
It’s like Sam’s dream. They are stretched out on the double bed, sitting up against the headboard, watching a TV whose reds bleed up and to the right. Only Dean is silent and belligerent, and Sam is confused and horny.
This must be what different feels like, he supposes, shifting a little to relieve pressure on the half-erection he’s been sporting all evening.
“I’m not a queer,” Dean says at length.
“And I’m not a baby,” Sam returns, both of them staring straight ahead.
***
The nightmare comes back to him like the old friend it’s becoming, and when he wakes, it’s to find Dean watching him, eyes dark and glittering.
“When you find her killer,” Dean asks, voice low, “then will you leave?”
Sam rubs a hand over his eyes, wiping away the last of his perspired fear. “No,” he answers. “We’re different. I get that.”
Dean takes a while to accept this, his eyes shifting slowly left and right, studying Sam’s expression, evaluating his honesty. Finally, he gets up on one elbow and slides closer. “As long as there’s two of us,” he says, “I think we can get through anyway.”
The first kiss is almost brotherly, chaste and tender, the reassurance Dean never gave Sammy, not once in two long decades. But Sam doesn’t want reassurance, he doesn’t want tenderness, and his mouth opens under Dean’s tentative comfort.
Dean sighs into Sam’s mouth, moves over Sam until they are pressed together, legs shifting until Dean’s thigh is insinuated between Sam’s legs, until Dean’s cock is hot and insistent against Sam’s thigh too. Dean’s breath is bursting onto Sam’s flushed cheek, and for a moment, they both feel the chance to stop before it’s too late.
Only it was too late, Sam realizes, twenty-two years ago. He slips his hands down, cups Dean’s ass, and pulls at it, hitching Dean’s hips up and in, making Dean gasp and grunt.
For long minutes, they can only shift against each other, pressing mouths and hips together like teenagers making out on a couch, but then Sam rolls them over and clambers down the landscape of Dean’s body. Like Andrew the preacher’s son, Sam tugs Dean’s shorts down around his knees and then licks his way down Dean’s cock. Never done this before, not anything like this, but Dean is a different person when he’s naked and panting, and Sam almost feels like he’s meeting his brother for the first time. Who knew that Dean grew so submissive when he was getting his slit tongued? Dean’s strong hands are heavy, stroking gentle encouragement behind Sam’s ears.
Sam risks a glance up, and it’s even better now, now he knows that Dean’s not greeting this with eyes squeezed shut, not imagining that Sam is anyone but Sam – no, Dean is drinking this all in with an eager open mouth, his eyes learning Sam’s every move, every dirty twist of tongue and lips.
Sam locks Dean’s gaze with his own, then goes down.
Dean grips Sam’s ears and holds on, and shit if Sam isn’t going to tease the hell out of him for that later. “They’re not handles,” he’ll say, and Dean will slap the back of his head, sneering.
But right now, it’s down and down and down until Sam is frantically blowing air out his nose and then breathing in, discovering Dean’s scent here, his real scent – not gasoline and leather, but sex and longing.
Sam sucks gently as he pulls up again, and Dean has lost all semblance of manly control – his soft grunts have turned into desperately needy cries, and he’s saying, “oh sammy sammy sammy,” every time Sam uses his teeth, just a little.
All the distinctions between them – college boy and tough guy, honest kid and dishonest crusader, grieving lover and unloved player – they’re all being obliterated, melting away with every new descent, every slow slide down the shaft of Dean’s cock. Sam guesses that Dean is close from the way that his hips are jumping a little on every upstroke, and so Sam reaches down and slips his hand inside his own shorts, feeling his cock full and curved up with want.
He matches the rough tugs he gives himself, one, two, three, four, and – as he’s about to pull up for the fifth, he feels the abrupt pulse at the base of Dean’s cock, and Dean holds him in place, coming down Sam’s throat. Sam, insanely turned on by this, finds himself pulling on his own cock fast and far rougher than he likes it, needing to come while Dean is still doing this, still spilling heat and release into Sam’s throat.
He manages it, barely, feeling the first slip of come over his fist just as Dean’s hand on his head relaxes, gently coaxing Sam back off.
Sam pushes up onto his knees, freeing Dean and yanking his shorts down with his free hand so that Dean can feel it, feel the spill of Sam’s orgasm onto Dean’s bared leg. Dean jolts at the first, his sated eyelids lifting again, but as Sam comes, Dean reaches out, wraps his hand around Sam’s fist, and helps Sam draw the climax out even longer.
When Sam finally collapses on the mattress beside Dean, they kiss for a few lazy seconds before they are drifting.
Sam may return to his nightmare, or he may not. And Dean might keep telling exuberant tales of his conquests, or he might stop.
The only thing that really matters, Sam knows now, is that they both know – there are two of them, and that makes it okay.