![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: But For The
Rating: Adult
Fandom: SPN
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Wordcount: 4,300 words.
Summary: You’re sitting on your ass in an alternate universe, kiddo. Want to revise your thinkin’ on what’s not possible?
Author's Notes: At the bottom.
Every now and again Sam wakes up groggy and disorientated. He gets halfway through bitching at Dean for turning up the heat in the motel room while he's sleeping, goddamit Dean, I hate when you… and then he remembers.
He’s not in Kansas anymore.
More often than not he doesn’t wake up alone. This morning little Elton Hidge is on his right side and Belle Andrews is lying prone over his legs. He raises his head enough to see Dean fussing around with his stuff on the other side of the makeshift room and groans.
“Why me?”
Dean just chuckles. “You’re better than a space heater man. Kids are survivalists, they know the best way to keep warm.”
Sam rolls his eyes and puts his head back down. It’s early, the first spikes of dawn only just edging the blanket they use as a curtain. By his reckoning, his best estimation without a calendar, Sam has been in this brave new world thirty-eight days. Dean, a but for the grace of god much more spectacularly scarred version of his brother who grew up with a mom and a dad but no Sam, frowns over his shoulder.
“You don’t shake a leg and we’ll miss out on the bacon.”
“And by bacon you mean…?”
“Okay, so it’s soy, but Mom cuts it just like bacon and deep fries it-”
“Yeah, alright,” Sam grumbles. “Help untangle me from the munchkin league here.”
o0o
Sam hasn’t really gotten used to the community feeling of the place yet. Everybody chows down as a groip on a couple of cobbled-together long tables. They say Grace, pass plates and bowls and treat the meager offerings like a feast every time. Dean had accused Sam of potentially eating them out of house and home when he first arrived and Sam guiltily takes a second serving of breakfast hash when Mary insists and gives him the mom-face.
His layers can’t quite cover up the fact that he starts losing weight if he eats like a normal human being rather than an organic garbage disposal.
“You gonna eat that?” Dean asks, cheeks already stuffed like a cartoon chipmunk as he makes a play for Sam’s extra before it even has time to settle on his plate. Mary parries his wandering fork like a pro. Dean raises his eyebrows. “Oh, so it’s like that is it?” he accuses but there’s laughter in his eyes.
o0o
John Winchester avoids him and Sam tries not to let it hurt his feelings. He admitted to himself through a lot of soul searching that he was probably always the one striving more for their father’s approval despite outward appearances indicating that it was Dean.
So far as Sam was concerned, Dean had already had John’s approval. He’d never had to work for it in his life.
This John Winchester is a stranger and still Sam finds himself inexplicably drawn, letting it really get to him whenever the man hastily vacates whatever space he’s occupying. John doesn’t trust him and Sam knows he should just resign himself to the fact that he probably never will.
“It’s nothing personal,” Bobby says dropping himself to seated on the low table Sam has rested his butt on. Bobby is still wearing a damn trucker cap and he’s so familiar that it almost physically hurts. “He’s just worried.”
“I’m not dangerous,” Sam sighs, scrubbing a hand over his eyes. “I’m… lost.”
Bobby chuckles low, a friendly sound that Sam likes a great deal. “He ain’t worried about you bein’ evil kiddo,” he says and Sam frowns at him in confusion but one thing both the Bobbys he’s known have in common is they can be infuriatingly cryptic when they want to be. Bobby slides off the table and hitches at his jeans. “C’mon, I’ve got some salvage you might be interested in.”
Sam wants to ask exactly what John is worried about with him but doesn’t get a chance. Bobby’s making his way towards a group that’s come in from the border and Sam stands to follow him when pain spikes through his temple, driving him to his knees. Distantly Sam hears his name being called but he can’t respond, too busy trying to keep his brain from exploding out through his forehead. Pictures flicker through his mind and then hands are on him, hauling him upright.
“Sam, hey! Sammy!” Dean sounds panicked and Sam blindly reaches out, snagging the battered revolver Dean keeps in his waistband. Dean makes to grab for the gun but Sam’s already got it up and pointed at Marley Stevens who has just come back in. She’s forty-two, tough as nails and been with them from the beginning but what Sam’s pointing a gun at isn’t Marley anymore.
“Jesus Christ, what are you doing?” Dean yells right in his ear, making another grab for the gun, but that’s when Marley goes for her own, strapped to her ankle and Bobby’s right there, right next to her and Sam had seen Bobby’s head explode like an overripe melon because Marley’s gun had bumped up flush against his temple before she’d pulled the trigger.
He didn’t want to see that twice.
Sam shoots and catches her in the shoulder. The shot spins her around and everyone is frozen for a horrified second before black smoke belches out of Marley’s mouth when she hits the ground. Sam drops the gun and then to his knees again and people are still frozen. Blood gushes from his nose and Sam reaches out blindly, towards Dean, towards his brother because it’s like breathing, an automatic reaction and he relaxes as soon as he feels a hand on the back of his neck and another gripping his shoulder.
Sam passes out with the knowledge that there’s maybe a fifty-fifty chance that these people might just shoot him dead like a rabid animal and be done with it.
He really hopes not.
o0o
Sam wakes to gentle fingers prodding at the bones just under his eyes and over his nose. There’s a cool cloth pressed over his eyes that feels wonderful. “Dean?” he croaks and the prodding fingers pause.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Dean huffs and the cloth is removed slowly, letting Sam’s eyes adjust to the brightness. He blinks a few times to clear his vision. “You feel like you’re gonna puke?”
“Nah,” Sam says but then has to hold still for a moment to make sure it isn’t true before he says, “Nah, man. I think I’m good.”
He’s not really. His head feels the special kind of mushy that is the aftermath of one of his vision headaches. It hurts to move, it hurts to breathe, hell it even hurts to blink and he slides his eyes closed again, only belatedly realizing that the hard pillow under his neck is Dean’s thigh and the fingers now making gentle tracks through his hair also belong to his not-brother. Sam opens his eyes again and sees Dean frown, concern etched deep in his face.
“How’s Marley?” Sam asks, suddenly remembering with crystal clarity what had happened just before he passed out.
“Oh yeah, she’s fine,” Dean says but the smile he puts on looks forced. “Doesn’t know whether to hug you for saving her or kick your ass for shooting her.”
Sam realizes belatedly that even though Dean is treating him with care, he’s also taut like a bowstring. He’s the tense he only gets when he’s scared and trying not to show it. “What?”
“People are nervous Sammy,” Dean says, chewing on his lower lip. “You’re… not one of them, not really… but you are, aren’t you?”
“One of who?”
“Face of an angel, heart of a demon. Human but in between,” Dean says slowly, sounding like he’s reciting something he’s committed to memory. “We haven’t seen them for years, not since the great slaughter but we tell the kids stories so they remember.”
“Remember what?”
“To be afraid.”
o0o
Sam gets the story in fits and starts from different sources. Strangely enough, it’s John who sits him down and sketches out what happened for him. Sam still gets the feeling that John is holding him at a distance but what Bobby said has filtered through some how and he knows it’s not the same kind of wariness he’d receive if he were evil. He’s seen this behavior in John Winchester before, now if only he could remember the context.
In any case, the psychic children, known as the Orphans to these people, leaderless and feeling abandoned started wreaking the kind of havoc that ripped a permanent scar in the world. Demons, the opportunistic sons of bitches they were, poured through the weaker places and took up residence. The only reason there were still humans left in the world was that this was no organized invasion but more like a party that had gotten out of control.
The demons were fighting with each other as much as they were preying on humans. More so if Sam’s patched together pieces of information were anything to go by. The demons were jockeying for position and trying to not get their asses slung back down into the pit at the same time. Even the demon that had hijacked Marely hadn’t had any real kind of plan, other than laying low.
“So we make do,” Dean says, the tip of his knife carving one of the sigils in the second circle of fences deeper. “We’ve dug in and we’re holding on and we hope that they decimate each other enough that we can clean up the rest.”
“This isn’t really living,” Sam says. He’s sitting on the ground with his back to the fence post that Dean is etching. Dean is leaning over him to work on the symbols and if Sam tilts his head he can see up Dean’s shirt to the line of his neck. He reaches up and scratches his fingers along Dean’s ribs and Dean dances back with a yelp.
“Hey, quit that!” Dean snaps, but he’s grinning and Sam grins back. It’s soothing, watching Dean do this kind of thing, familiar in a way he misses. When Dean leans down and forward Sam automatically tips his own head forward because he’s expecting Dean to push a hand through his hair but then Dean’s lips are on his and Sam squawks and falls sideways in surprise. “Now I know I’m a good kisser, but I don’t think I’ve ever knocked someone-”
“What the hell are you doing?” Sam demands in a high, hysterical-sounding voice and Dean blinks, something quick and more importantly hurt flashing across his face.
“Sorry,” he says, blushing all the way to the tips of his ears. “I thought maybe-”
“Dean, you’re my brother,” Sam says and he really wishes his voice would lose that hysterical edge.
“No,” Dean says and his voice sounds oddly flat. “No Sam, I’m really not.”
As Dean walks stiffly away and Sam’s left to roll onto his back and stare at the sky it suddenly becomes clear to him why John’s behavior had seemed so odd yet familiar.
Dean had been a real tomcat, girls only ever a passing fancy to him but Sam had always been different. If he found one he liked he usually stuck and most times the pulling up of stakes to leave town would be that much more horrendous when Sam had a girl. John had started getting that weird edginess about him every time Sam cared enough about someone to bring them home because, Sam only came to understand years later, he saw the hurt coming. Every stop they made Sam tried to pretend to himself was the last one and every stop they made, John knew it wasn’t.
John always saw the hurt coming.
o0o
Sam finds Dean back in the room that they share. Dean has a duffle out and is shoving clothes into it, looking half-hearted about it. Sam stills in the doorway. “Dean?”
“I just thought… y’know, space,” Dean says, waving a hand around himself and then vaguely in Sam’s direction before he resumes gathering his meager possessions into one bag. Sam realizes in a kind of offhand way that he knows exactly what Dean has.
Two pairs of jeans, three t-shirts, one with a rip in the collar that means he won’t be able to wear it much longer. Four pairs of socks and five pairs of undershorts and Dean didn't do enough washing to not be recycling.
“So I’ll pack my stuff then, I’m not taking your room.” Sam knows he and Dean are pretty lucky in this tiny community. Most people sleep in larger groups in smaller spaces. Dean had built this place with his own two hands just so he wouldn’t have to sleep in a dogpile with the others. “I’ll bunk in with the kids.”
Dean pauses and looks up. There’s something unreadable on his face that startles Sam a little. He knows every single one of his brother’s expressions but… he keeps having to remind himself that this isn’t his brother. If people are made up of experience as well as genetics then he really only knows a small portion of this Dean, if at all. “Sam…” Dean starts but then bites his lip and shakes his head.
“No, c’mon,” Sam dismisses, moving into the room and scooping up Dean’s bag. He upends it over Dean’s pallet and Dean just watches him do it. “We can draw a line separating the room or something, I’ll stay on my side I swear. Just don’t… leave.”
“I’m sorry I’m not him,” Dean says quietly.
“What?”
“I know you miss your brother but I’m not him,” Dean says, turning on Sam, wringing a pair of socks in his hands. “I didn’t walk you to school or wipe your nose or teach you to tie your shoelaces. I don’t know what you looked like when you were small or when you rode your first bike or anything like that. I know it’s probably weird for you because I have his face but I’m not him.”
Sam’s standing with his mouth slightly open and his hands balled into loose fists at his sides. Dean has got something almost imploring on his face and Sam starts to say, “You gotta understand-”
“Bullshit I gotta understand,” Dean snaps, advancing on Sam, backing him up into the corner two walls make. When Sam has nowhere else to go Dean leans up into his space, his eyes the kind of determined Sam associates with when Dean is really hurting but willing to fight through the pain. “Stop thinking about him for five seconds and think about me!”
“You don’t understand what it’s like for me,” Sam says. “I mean, you have his face!”
Dean snatches up one of Sam’s hands and presses Sam’s fingers to the scar that pulls his lip askew. “I have my face,” Dean insists. “Just… try seeing past it.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I can,” Sam says and Dean backs away as quickly as he advanced, expression closing down.
“Okay then,” Dean says, nodding to himself. “Okay,” he repeats as he goes back to the pile of his clothing. “You can bunk in with the kids.”
“Dean-,”
“I can’t be your brother-shaped safety blanket,” Dean snaps, back turned to Sam, shoulders a rigid angry line. “That’s not fair on either of us.”
“Right,” Sam grits out through clenched teeth. “Of course.” He gathers his own things but it doesn’t take long because he has even less than Dean. He’s only got the jeans he’s standing in, two other shirts and underwear he’d cajoled out of the others. Sam’s packed in moments and heading towards Bobby’s decrepit motor home.
He needs a drink so badly he’s willing to risk Bobby’s very special gut-rot moonshine.
o0o
This he can do.
This is familiar.
Sam has books spread out in front of himself, the quiet noises of Bobby fussing around in the background. Dean had never really understood Sam’s ability to focus on what he called the most pain-in-the-ass part of the job but Sam always found something meditative about research.
He likes puzzles, likes finding that one stubborn key knot that means the rest all tweeze apart easily under your fingers.
“Powerful magic, probably old too,” Bobby is musing aloud. Sam knows that he left any concerted attempts to find his way back home for too long.
“We know it was the Orphans who dragged me through,” Sam says and then grimaces. “Okay, pretty sure.”
“Don’t mean nothin’ that they took the credit,” Bobby is quick to interject and Sam waves a dismissive hand. He remembers it so clearly, falling through rotted floorboards when he and Dean were on a routine haunting. He’d fallen right through the floor and into another world, one where he had never existed. “Temporal fold of some kind.”
“That’s not really possible, is it?” Sam asks and Bobby raises both eyebrows and snorts.
“You’re sitting on your ass in an alternate universe kiddo. Want to revise your thinkin’ on what’s not possible?”
“Point taken,” Sam admits, scratching behind his ear with a worn-down pencil. “But even in theory it’s not exactly an exact science. You can’t just hop from place to place Quantum Leap style. It’s gotta be somewhere two places almost intersect.”
A banging at the door has Sam and Bobby both up. A small girl named Gina bursts through, hair in disarray and eyes wide. “Black storm,” she gasps and Sam looks in confusion as Bobby pales and then goes for weapons.
“What? What is it?” Sam demands, moving into the doorway just as Bobby is about to hurtle out of it.
“I’ll explain on the way, c’mon!” Bobby snaps, almost bodily shoving Sam out of the motor home.
o0o
Sam sees what Bobby is talking about before Bobby finishes explaining and the term Black Storm is scarily apt. Bobby tells him of groupings of demons, driven mad and bodiless while escaping hell that sort of snowball together, finally becoming a roiling, and pain-filled mass . They can sometimes blow straight through normal wards, pulled so out of true by their very continuing existence.
The sound is terrible as they get closer to the northern-most perimeter fence. It sounds like the worst kind of storm with a mix of howling and wailing thrown into the mix. Sam hugs his jacket to him as icy wind cuts through to his skin. The black mass is formless, almost looking like smoke but it’s moving with a purpose.
“It’s every exorcised, cast out and just plain nasty son of a bitch that slipped back on through and it will kill everything it touches!” Bobby screams into the deluge. He’s shoving a shotgun Sam had seen him load with rocksalt into Sam’s hands. Sam sees the black mass charge the fence-line and shudder backwards. “I seen settlements this type of thing has blown through, looks like everyone just fell down where they stood!”
Sam can see now that there are three women standing closer to the fence-line than anyone else. He recognizes the back of Mary and the others only by face but not by name. All three have books open and hands out and all three are screaming words that are being torn away before they can reach his own ears.
Sam doesn’t know how, he can only later say that perhaps he felt it but there’s a place where the fence line and the wards inscribed are weaker. It’s exactly the spot where Dean stands, pumping round after furious salt round into the mass. He doesn’t think about it, just moves forward to that spot, shoulder bumping up against Dean’s, Bobby calling his name.
Sam’s hand comes up and everything stops.
The silence is almost as deafening as the noise was, the absence leaving ears ringing. Sam feels blood gush out of his nose and probably more concerning his ears but he doesn’t stop. Instead he pictures in his mind’s eye a cage around the black mass, squeezing slowly smaller and smaller.
The voices start up in his head then, some pleading and some cajoling. Some are trying to tempt, some nothing but blank rage. All ask him just what it is he thinks he’s doing, this isn’t his place, his fight and Sam smiles, blood caked on his upper lip cracking as he replies, it is now.
Sam squeezes his hand into a fist and there’s a crack and then the black mass is gone, extinguished completely. There’s a brief moment where Sam’s able to keep his feet and he even almost gets all the way turned in Dean’s direction when he goes to his knees and hands. Sam’s pretty sure he’s torn something vital loose in his brain and the world goes dark.
o0o
“You gotta quit doin’ that to me,” Dean cajoles when Sam slowly blinks open his eyes. Sam spends a moment taking stock, but the pain he’s expecting isn’t present. There’s a kind of distant, floating sensation to the rest of his body and Sam recognizes it, he’d felt the same after he’d moved a cupboard with only his mind.
“Don’t make me sleep in with the kids,” Sam says and Dean lets out a surprised bark of laughter.
“How about you get some more sleep and we can discuss it later,” Dean says, all gentle eyes and hands and Sam nods slowly.
“Have some not-bacon standing by when I wake up,” Sam instructs and is tugged under by sleep to the gentle sound of Dean laughing again.
o0o
What probably terrifies him most about the whole thing is that he has thought about it.
Not about his brother, nothing like that had ever occurred to him, but with this Dean, the one at the end of his pallet reading a battered Jackie Collins novel because he thinks Sam is still asleep. He’s thought about it, maybe only idly before but definitely less than idly after Dean had gone for a kiss like it was the most normal thing to do.
Something deep down inside must recognize this isn’t his brother.
Sam’s hand bumps Dean’s knee and Dean almost falls off the bed with a startled yelp, flinging the book across the room. Dean flushes bright red to the tips of his ears and Sam smiles slowly, bringing the hand on Dean’s knee up to his face, running the pad of his thumb across Dean’s scar. He closes his eyes and it doesn’t feel like his Dean but this Dean and he wonders if anyone could ever understand the difference like he’s starting to.
Dean makes a small noise in the back of his throat but then is grasping Sam’s wrist, pulling free of his touch. “Don’t,” Dean says, sounding choked. “Not if you don’t mean it.”
“I mean it,” Sam says, getting his other hand up and wrapped around the back of Dean’s neck. He tugs Dean down next to him and even the smell is different. His brother always smelled of leather, gun oil and inexplicably, of cheeseburgers even if he hadn’t eaten any in days. This Dean, here now, smells of sun and earth and an underlying sweetness.
Dean slings a leg across Sam’s hips and an arm across his shoulders and Sam kind of grunts and squirms for a second. “Oh my god, if you’re a cuddler then I’ve changed my mind,” Sam protests.
“I’m comfortable enough in my masculinity to get away with anything,” Dean says, sounding smug.
“Aren’t you going to ask me about…” Sam raises a hand, fingers spread and kind of shakes it.
“I’m learning to just roll with the punches with you,” Dean says.
o0o
In the morning, with sunlight striping the freckled expanse of Dean’s back, Sam reaches out an experimental hand and runs fingertips down the length of Dean’s spine. He pauses just above the cleft of Dean’s ass, between the two identical dents on either side of his tailbone.
Dean makes a sleepy noise and rolls half-over, the scarred side of his face hidden by pillow.
Sam rubs his fingers down a little further and Dean instantly clenches but then relaxes, eyes going large and dark.
“Are you going to freak out?” Dean asks.
“No,” Sam says and he’s surprised to find that he means it. He brings his hand back up and around, scratching at the hair just under Dean’s navel before dipping lower, lip pulling up a little in a half-smile. “Were you expecting me to?”
“Um, no, n…n…not really,’ Dean says, voice going high and breathless and Sam takes a firm grip.
“I’m… different,” Sam points out and Dean rolls his eyes.
“Yes, but it’s not like you need to wear a helmet. It’s…good different.”
“I think I scare some people.”
“You don’t scare me.”
“I don’t?”
“There’s stuff that can happen that completely terrifies me that has a lot to do with you, but no, you yourself don’t scare me.”
o0o
John has hands in his pockets and a stern expression on his face when he eventually seeks Sam out. Sam for his part fights the urge to run screaming in the other direction because he kind of knows what this conversation will be about and he can’t imagine any topic more uncomfortable.
Sam’s frankly surprised John isn’t carrying a shotgun and a shovel for later.
“You…. he’s… just don’t… ah hell,” Is all John manages before rubbing an angry hand over the back of his neck and stalking away. Sam just stares after him for a moment but then looks across the field. Dean’s back on fences, mending whatever damage was done and even from so far away Sam can see Dean is smiling to himself.
Something knocks gently against his shoulder and Sam turns and accepts a cup Bobby offers him. “You gotta admit, he’s making progress,” Bobby says, tipping his cup in the direction of John’s retreating back.
“This stuff is going to give me a stomach ulcer,” Sam says, downing the home brew in one swallow and grimacing.
“I’m refining the recipe,” Bobby says and Sam laughs.
Author's Note: This story is for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deirdre_c who enables and cheerleads like no one else. This 'verse was first visited in and hell followed with him but I wanted this story to stand by itself.
Rating: Adult
Fandom: SPN
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Wordcount: 4,300 words.
Summary: You’re sitting on your ass in an alternate universe, kiddo. Want to revise your thinkin’ on what’s not possible?
Author's Notes: At the bottom.
Every now and again Sam wakes up groggy and disorientated. He gets halfway through bitching at Dean for turning up the heat in the motel room while he's sleeping, goddamit Dean, I hate when you… and then he remembers.
He’s not in Kansas anymore.
More often than not he doesn’t wake up alone. This morning little Elton Hidge is on his right side and Belle Andrews is lying prone over his legs. He raises his head enough to see Dean fussing around with his stuff on the other side of the makeshift room and groans.
“Why me?”
Dean just chuckles. “You’re better than a space heater man. Kids are survivalists, they know the best way to keep warm.”
Sam rolls his eyes and puts his head back down. It’s early, the first spikes of dawn only just edging the blanket they use as a curtain. By his reckoning, his best estimation without a calendar, Sam has been in this brave new world thirty-eight days. Dean, a but for the grace of god much more spectacularly scarred version of his brother who grew up with a mom and a dad but no Sam, frowns over his shoulder.
“You don’t shake a leg and we’ll miss out on the bacon.”
“And by bacon you mean…?”
“Okay, so it’s soy, but Mom cuts it just like bacon and deep fries it-”
“Yeah, alright,” Sam grumbles. “Help untangle me from the munchkin league here.”
Sam hasn’t really gotten used to the community feeling of the place yet. Everybody chows down as a groip on a couple of cobbled-together long tables. They say Grace, pass plates and bowls and treat the meager offerings like a feast every time. Dean had accused Sam of potentially eating them out of house and home when he first arrived and Sam guiltily takes a second serving of breakfast hash when Mary insists and gives him the mom-face.
His layers can’t quite cover up the fact that he starts losing weight if he eats like a normal human being rather than an organic garbage disposal.
“You gonna eat that?” Dean asks, cheeks already stuffed like a cartoon chipmunk as he makes a play for Sam’s extra before it even has time to settle on his plate. Mary parries his wandering fork like a pro. Dean raises his eyebrows. “Oh, so it’s like that is it?” he accuses but there’s laughter in his eyes.
John Winchester avoids him and Sam tries not to let it hurt his feelings. He admitted to himself through a lot of soul searching that he was probably always the one striving more for their father’s approval despite outward appearances indicating that it was Dean.
So far as Sam was concerned, Dean had already had John’s approval. He’d never had to work for it in his life.
This John Winchester is a stranger and still Sam finds himself inexplicably drawn, letting it really get to him whenever the man hastily vacates whatever space he’s occupying. John doesn’t trust him and Sam knows he should just resign himself to the fact that he probably never will.
“It’s nothing personal,” Bobby says dropping himself to seated on the low table Sam has rested his butt on. Bobby is still wearing a damn trucker cap and he’s so familiar that it almost physically hurts. “He’s just worried.”
“I’m not dangerous,” Sam sighs, scrubbing a hand over his eyes. “I’m… lost.”
Bobby chuckles low, a friendly sound that Sam likes a great deal. “He ain’t worried about you bein’ evil kiddo,” he says and Sam frowns at him in confusion but one thing both the Bobbys he’s known have in common is they can be infuriatingly cryptic when they want to be. Bobby slides off the table and hitches at his jeans. “C’mon, I’ve got some salvage you might be interested in.”
Sam wants to ask exactly what John is worried about with him but doesn’t get a chance. Bobby’s making his way towards a group that’s come in from the border and Sam stands to follow him when pain spikes through his temple, driving him to his knees. Distantly Sam hears his name being called but he can’t respond, too busy trying to keep his brain from exploding out through his forehead. Pictures flicker through his mind and then hands are on him, hauling him upright.
“Sam, hey! Sammy!” Dean sounds panicked and Sam blindly reaches out, snagging the battered revolver Dean keeps in his waistband. Dean makes to grab for the gun but Sam’s already got it up and pointed at Marley Stevens who has just come back in. She’s forty-two, tough as nails and been with them from the beginning but what Sam’s pointing a gun at isn’t Marley anymore.
“Jesus Christ, what are you doing?” Dean yells right in his ear, making another grab for the gun, but that’s when Marley goes for her own, strapped to her ankle and Bobby’s right there, right next to her and Sam had seen Bobby’s head explode like an overripe melon because Marley’s gun had bumped up flush against his temple before she’d pulled the trigger.
He didn’t want to see that twice.
Sam shoots and catches her in the shoulder. The shot spins her around and everyone is frozen for a horrified second before black smoke belches out of Marley’s mouth when she hits the ground. Sam drops the gun and then to his knees again and people are still frozen. Blood gushes from his nose and Sam reaches out blindly, towards Dean, towards his brother because it’s like breathing, an automatic reaction and he relaxes as soon as he feels a hand on the back of his neck and another gripping his shoulder.
Sam passes out with the knowledge that there’s maybe a fifty-fifty chance that these people might just shoot him dead like a rabid animal and be done with it.
He really hopes not.
Sam wakes to gentle fingers prodding at the bones just under his eyes and over his nose. There’s a cool cloth pressed over his eyes that feels wonderful. “Dean?” he croaks and the prodding fingers pause.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Dean huffs and the cloth is removed slowly, letting Sam’s eyes adjust to the brightness. He blinks a few times to clear his vision. “You feel like you’re gonna puke?”
“Nah,” Sam says but then has to hold still for a moment to make sure it isn’t true before he says, “Nah, man. I think I’m good.”
He’s not really. His head feels the special kind of mushy that is the aftermath of one of his vision headaches. It hurts to move, it hurts to breathe, hell it even hurts to blink and he slides his eyes closed again, only belatedly realizing that the hard pillow under his neck is Dean’s thigh and the fingers now making gentle tracks through his hair also belong to his not-brother. Sam opens his eyes again and sees Dean frown, concern etched deep in his face.
“How’s Marley?” Sam asks, suddenly remembering with crystal clarity what had happened just before he passed out.
“Oh yeah, she’s fine,” Dean says but the smile he puts on looks forced. “Doesn’t know whether to hug you for saving her or kick your ass for shooting her.”
Sam realizes belatedly that even though Dean is treating him with care, he’s also taut like a bowstring. He’s the tense he only gets when he’s scared and trying not to show it. “What?”
“People are nervous Sammy,” Dean says, chewing on his lower lip. “You’re… not one of them, not really… but you are, aren’t you?”
“One of who?”
“Face of an angel, heart of a demon. Human but in between,” Dean says slowly, sounding like he’s reciting something he’s committed to memory. “We haven’t seen them for years, not since the great slaughter but we tell the kids stories so they remember.”
“Remember what?”
“To be afraid.”
Sam gets the story in fits and starts from different sources. Strangely enough, it’s John who sits him down and sketches out what happened for him. Sam still gets the feeling that John is holding him at a distance but what Bobby said has filtered through some how and he knows it’s not the same kind of wariness he’d receive if he were evil. He’s seen this behavior in John Winchester before, now if only he could remember the context.
In any case, the psychic children, known as the Orphans to these people, leaderless and feeling abandoned started wreaking the kind of havoc that ripped a permanent scar in the world. Demons, the opportunistic sons of bitches they were, poured through the weaker places and took up residence. The only reason there were still humans left in the world was that this was no organized invasion but more like a party that had gotten out of control.
The demons were fighting with each other as much as they were preying on humans. More so if Sam’s patched together pieces of information were anything to go by. The demons were jockeying for position and trying to not get their asses slung back down into the pit at the same time. Even the demon that had hijacked Marely hadn’t had any real kind of plan, other than laying low.
“So we make do,” Dean says, the tip of his knife carving one of the sigils in the second circle of fences deeper. “We’ve dug in and we’re holding on and we hope that they decimate each other enough that we can clean up the rest.”
“This isn’t really living,” Sam says. He’s sitting on the ground with his back to the fence post that Dean is etching. Dean is leaning over him to work on the symbols and if Sam tilts his head he can see up Dean’s shirt to the line of his neck. He reaches up and scratches his fingers along Dean’s ribs and Dean dances back with a yelp.
“Hey, quit that!” Dean snaps, but he’s grinning and Sam grins back. It’s soothing, watching Dean do this kind of thing, familiar in a way he misses. When Dean leans down and forward Sam automatically tips his own head forward because he’s expecting Dean to push a hand through his hair but then Dean’s lips are on his and Sam squawks and falls sideways in surprise. “Now I know I’m a good kisser, but I don’t think I’ve ever knocked someone-”
“What the hell are you doing?” Sam demands in a high, hysterical-sounding voice and Dean blinks, something quick and more importantly hurt flashing across his face.
“Sorry,” he says, blushing all the way to the tips of his ears. “I thought maybe-”
“Dean, you’re my brother,” Sam says and he really wishes his voice would lose that hysterical edge.
“No,” Dean says and his voice sounds oddly flat. “No Sam, I’m really not.”
As Dean walks stiffly away and Sam’s left to roll onto his back and stare at the sky it suddenly becomes clear to him why John’s behavior had seemed so odd yet familiar.
Dean had been a real tomcat, girls only ever a passing fancy to him but Sam had always been different. If he found one he liked he usually stuck and most times the pulling up of stakes to leave town would be that much more horrendous when Sam had a girl. John had started getting that weird edginess about him every time Sam cared enough about someone to bring them home because, Sam only came to understand years later, he saw the hurt coming. Every stop they made Sam tried to pretend to himself was the last one and every stop they made, John knew it wasn’t.
John always saw the hurt coming.
Sam finds Dean back in the room that they share. Dean has a duffle out and is shoving clothes into it, looking half-hearted about it. Sam stills in the doorway. “Dean?”
“I just thought… y’know, space,” Dean says, waving a hand around himself and then vaguely in Sam’s direction before he resumes gathering his meager possessions into one bag. Sam realizes in a kind of offhand way that he knows exactly what Dean has.
Two pairs of jeans, three t-shirts, one with a rip in the collar that means he won’t be able to wear it much longer. Four pairs of socks and five pairs of undershorts and Dean didn't do enough washing to not be recycling.
“So I’ll pack my stuff then, I’m not taking your room.” Sam knows he and Dean are pretty lucky in this tiny community. Most people sleep in larger groups in smaller spaces. Dean had built this place with his own two hands just so he wouldn’t have to sleep in a dogpile with the others. “I’ll bunk in with the kids.”
Dean pauses and looks up. There’s something unreadable on his face that startles Sam a little. He knows every single one of his brother’s expressions but… he keeps having to remind himself that this isn’t his brother. If people are made up of experience as well as genetics then he really only knows a small portion of this Dean, if at all. “Sam…” Dean starts but then bites his lip and shakes his head.
“No, c’mon,” Sam dismisses, moving into the room and scooping up Dean’s bag. He upends it over Dean’s pallet and Dean just watches him do it. “We can draw a line separating the room or something, I’ll stay on my side I swear. Just don’t… leave.”
“I’m sorry I’m not him,” Dean says quietly.
“What?”
“I know you miss your brother but I’m not him,” Dean says, turning on Sam, wringing a pair of socks in his hands. “I didn’t walk you to school or wipe your nose or teach you to tie your shoelaces. I don’t know what you looked like when you were small or when you rode your first bike or anything like that. I know it’s probably weird for you because I have his face but I’m not him.”
Sam’s standing with his mouth slightly open and his hands balled into loose fists at his sides. Dean has got something almost imploring on his face and Sam starts to say, “You gotta understand-”
“Bullshit I gotta understand,” Dean snaps, advancing on Sam, backing him up into the corner two walls make. When Sam has nowhere else to go Dean leans up into his space, his eyes the kind of determined Sam associates with when Dean is really hurting but willing to fight through the pain. “Stop thinking about him for five seconds and think about me!”
“You don’t understand what it’s like for me,” Sam says. “I mean, you have his face!”
Dean snatches up one of Sam’s hands and presses Sam’s fingers to the scar that pulls his lip askew. “I have my face,” Dean insists. “Just… try seeing past it.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I can,” Sam says and Dean backs away as quickly as he advanced, expression closing down.
“Okay then,” Dean says, nodding to himself. “Okay,” he repeats as he goes back to the pile of his clothing. “You can bunk in with the kids.”
“Dean-,”
“I can’t be your brother-shaped safety blanket,” Dean snaps, back turned to Sam, shoulders a rigid angry line. “That’s not fair on either of us.”
“Right,” Sam grits out through clenched teeth. “Of course.” He gathers his own things but it doesn’t take long because he has even less than Dean. He’s only got the jeans he’s standing in, two other shirts and underwear he’d cajoled out of the others. Sam’s packed in moments and heading towards Bobby’s decrepit motor home.
He needs a drink so badly he’s willing to risk Bobby’s very special gut-rot moonshine.
This he can do.
This is familiar.
Sam has books spread out in front of himself, the quiet noises of Bobby fussing around in the background. Dean had never really understood Sam’s ability to focus on what he called the most pain-in-the-ass part of the job but Sam always found something meditative about research.
He likes puzzles, likes finding that one stubborn key knot that means the rest all tweeze apart easily under your fingers.
“Powerful magic, probably old too,” Bobby is musing aloud. Sam knows that he left any concerted attempts to find his way back home for too long.
“We know it was the Orphans who dragged me through,” Sam says and then grimaces. “Okay, pretty sure.”
“Don’t mean nothin’ that they took the credit,” Bobby is quick to interject and Sam waves a dismissive hand. He remembers it so clearly, falling through rotted floorboards when he and Dean were on a routine haunting. He’d fallen right through the floor and into another world, one where he had never existed. “Temporal fold of some kind.”
“That’s not really possible, is it?” Sam asks and Bobby raises both eyebrows and snorts.
“You’re sitting on your ass in an alternate universe kiddo. Want to revise your thinkin’ on what’s not possible?”
“Point taken,” Sam admits, scratching behind his ear with a worn-down pencil. “But even in theory it’s not exactly an exact science. You can’t just hop from place to place Quantum Leap style. It’s gotta be somewhere two places almost intersect.”
A banging at the door has Sam and Bobby both up. A small girl named Gina bursts through, hair in disarray and eyes wide. “Black storm,” she gasps and Sam looks in confusion as Bobby pales and then goes for weapons.
“What? What is it?” Sam demands, moving into the doorway just as Bobby is about to hurtle out of it.
“I’ll explain on the way, c’mon!” Bobby snaps, almost bodily shoving Sam out of the motor home.
Sam sees what Bobby is talking about before Bobby finishes explaining and the term Black Storm is scarily apt. Bobby tells him of groupings of demons, driven mad and bodiless while escaping hell that sort of snowball together, finally becoming a roiling, and pain-filled mass . They can sometimes blow straight through normal wards, pulled so out of true by their very continuing existence.
The sound is terrible as they get closer to the northern-most perimeter fence. It sounds like the worst kind of storm with a mix of howling and wailing thrown into the mix. Sam hugs his jacket to him as icy wind cuts through to his skin. The black mass is formless, almost looking like smoke but it’s moving with a purpose.
“It’s every exorcised, cast out and just plain nasty son of a bitch that slipped back on through and it will kill everything it touches!” Bobby screams into the deluge. He’s shoving a shotgun Sam had seen him load with rocksalt into Sam’s hands. Sam sees the black mass charge the fence-line and shudder backwards. “I seen settlements this type of thing has blown through, looks like everyone just fell down where they stood!”
Sam can see now that there are three women standing closer to the fence-line than anyone else. He recognizes the back of Mary and the others only by face but not by name. All three have books open and hands out and all three are screaming words that are being torn away before they can reach his own ears.
Sam doesn’t know how, he can only later say that perhaps he felt it but there’s a place where the fence line and the wards inscribed are weaker. It’s exactly the spot where Dean stands, pumping round after furious salt round into the mass. He doesn’t think about it, just moves forward to that spot, shoulder bumping up against Dean’s, Bobby calling his name.
Sam’s hand comes up and everything stops.
The silence is almost as deafening as the noise was, the absence leaving ears ringing. Sam feels blood gush out of his nose and probably more concerning his ears but he doesn’t stop. Instead he pictures in his mind’s eye a cage around the black mass, squeezing slowly smaller and smaller.
The voices start up in his head then, some pleading and some cajoling. Some are trying to tempt, some nothing but blank rage. All ask him just what it is he thinks he’s doing, this isn’t his place, his fight and Sam smiles, blood caked on his upper lip cracking as he replies, it is now.
Sam squeezes his hand into a fist and there’s a crack and then the black mass is gone, extinguished completely. There’s a brief moment where Sam’s able to keep his feet and he even almost gets all the way turned in Dean’s direction when he goes to his knees and hands. Sam’s pretty sure he’s torn something vital loose in his brain and the world goes dark.
“You gotta quit doin’ that to me,” Dean cajoles when Sam slowly blinks open his eyes. Sam spends a moment taking stock, but the pain he’s expecting isn’t present. There’s a kind of distant, floating sensation to the rest of his body and Sam recognizes it, he’d felt the same after he’d moved a cupboard with only his mind.
“Don’t make me sleep in with the kids,” Sam says and Dean lets out a surprised bark of laughter.
“How about you get some more sleep and we can discuss it later,” Dean says, all gentle eyes and hands and Sam nods slowly.
“Have some not-bacon standing by when I wake up,” Sam instructs and is tugged under by sleep to the gentle sound of Dean laughing again.
What probably terrifies him most about the whole thing is that he has thought about it.
Not about his brother, nothing like that had ever occurred to him, but with this Dean, the one at the end of his pallet reading a battered Jackie Collins novel because he thinks Sam is still asleep. He’s thought about it, maybe only idly before but definitely less than idly after Dean had gone for a kiss like it was the most normal thing to do.
Something deep down inside must recognize this isn’t his brother.
Sam’s hand bumps Dean’s knee and Dean almost falls off the bed with a startled yelp, flinging the book across the room. Dean flushes bright red to the tips of his ears and Sam smiles slowly, bringing the hand on Dean’s knee up to his face, running the pad of his thumb across Dean’s scar. He closes his eyes and it doesn’t feel like his Dean but this Dean and he wonders if anyone could ever understand the difference like he’s starting to.
Dean makes a small noise in the back of his throat but then is grasping Sam’s wrist, pulling free of his touch. “Don’t,” Dean says, sounding choked. “Not if you don’t mean it.”
“I mean it,” Sam says, getting his other hand up and wrapped around the back of Dean’s neck. He tugs Dean down next to him and even the smell is different. His brother always smelled of leather, gun oil and inexplicably, of cheeseburgers even if he hadn’t eaten any in days. This Dean, here now, smells of sun and earth and an underlying sweetness.
Dean slings a leg across Sam’s hips and an arm across his shoulders and Sam kind of grunts and squirms for a second. “Oh my god, if you’re a cuddler then I’ve changed my mind,” Sam protests.
“I’m comfortable enough in my masculinity to get away with anything,” Dean says, sounding smug.
“Aren’t you going to ask me about…” Sam raises a hand, fingers spread and kind of shakes it.
“I’m learning to just roll with the punches with you,” Dean says.
In the morning, with sunlight striping the freckled expanse of Dean’s back, Sam reaches out an experimental hand and runs fingertips down the length of Dean’s spine. He pauses just above the cleft of Dean’s ass, between the two identical dents on either side of his tailbone.
Dean makes a sleepy noise and rolls half-over, the scarred side of his face hidden by pillow.
Sam rubs his fingers down a little further and Dean instantly clenches but then relaxes, eyes going large and dark.
“Are you going to freak out?” Dean asks.
“No,” Sam says and he’s surprised to find that he means it. He brings his hand back up and around, scratching at the hair just under Dean’s navel before dipping lower, lip pulling up a little in a half-smile. “Were you expecting me to?”
“Um, no, n…n…not really,’ Dean says, voice going high and breathless and Sam takes a firm grip.
“I’m… different,” Sam points out and Dean rolls his eyes.
“Yes, but it’s not like you need to wear a helmet. It’s…good different.”
“I think I scare some people.”
“You don’t scare me.”
“I don’t?”
“There’s stuff that can happen that completely terrifies me that has a lot to do with you, but no, you yourself don’t scare me.”
John has hands in his pockets and a stern expression on his face when he eventually seeks Sam out. Sam for his part fights the urge to run screaming in the other direction because he kind of knows what this conversation will be about and he can’t imagine any topic more uncomfortable.
Sam’s frankly surprised John isn’t carrying a shotgun and a shovel for later.
“You…. he’s… just don’t… ah hell,” Is all John manages before rubbing an angry hand over the back of his neck and stalking away. Sam just stares after him for a moment but then looks across the field. Dean’s back on fences, mending whatever damage was done and even from so far away Sam can see Dean is smiling to himself.
Something knocks gently against his shoulder and Sam turns and accepts a cup Bobby offers him. “You gotta admit, he’s making progress,” Bobby says, tipping his cup in the direction of John’s retreating back.
“This stuff is going to give me a stomach ulcer,” Sam says, downing the home brew in one swallow and grimacing.
“I’m refining the recipe,” Bobby says and Sam laughs.
Author's Note: This story is for
deirdre_c who enables and cheerleads like no one else. This 'verse was first visited in and hell followed with him but I wanted this story to stand by itself.
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You're making them love each other. You're making Dean *happy*.
Damn youse.
Our Dean - Sam's Dean - is going insane trying to find his brother and if he gets him back than *this* Dean will be heartbroken and...you...
*flails*
I love this story but omg.